Day 24: Getting Stuff Done, Finally

As you probably have figured out, getting anything done here in India is an exceptional, labor-intensive, ordeal. Maybe it's about the people we work with; they aren't very motivated or pro-active, a word invented first by the Americans. They just do as they are told and don't go much beyond what they have understood. Their creativity has been either stifled at some point or misplaced or, well, never been there. There are exceptions, but because those are exceptions, I feel things don't move as much as I am used to. I am used to calendars, deadlines, timelines, memos, things that make sure things are being dealt with and information keeps flowing. So today I finally see things getting done, after two and a half weeks in this city. Here are some successes and some observations. We got our first Indian-made chai, pretty good, though, as expected, very sweet! On my way (and back) from getting some milk for the chai, I saw a water buffalo in front of a patio sort of area where his and other cows' dungs were neatly arranged, drying in the sun. I don't really know what they do with the stuff, besides using it as fuel (I can't wait to have chai made from dung fire!) We learned later today that the milk we get from the pasteurized milk truck should be boiled first! I wonder if we will wake up with high fevers on the brink of death, ushered by the grizzly viruses and bacteria in raw milk. But who knows, people here overreact a lot. Finally got the floors cleaned by the cook, who's also doubles as a maid, to clean the floors (she even washed one of them). The only one she refused to do is the bathroom floor. It has to do with caste, Jennifer said; only people from certain castes would touch bathrooms. So she wouldn't be expected to wash my underwear. Whoever thinks caste system is dead need to dig their heads out of the sand and come see how this caste system works. (More that later!) As you recall, to get that stupid mobile phone of ours we have to show proof of residence, and so we had to bother our landlord and have him come and get us the copy of the lease. Well, he was gracious enough to oblige, though he did come late. And when he did show up he didn't have the copies yet as stores weren't opened yet. So we offered to copy it for him and return it. For some reason he didn't want that so he drove me in his Hyndai (a huge deal here) to some copy-shop nearby. The interesting thing here is the following. Here in India people like to turn things off when not using, saving energy bills (not really the planet). Stories of driving in the dark without headlights on (that includes motorcycles) are common! Anyway, so he had to turn on his Xerox machine. You would just expect him to plug the machine in the socket and turn on the machine. Well, you probably didn't expect people to be unplugging their xerox machines when the off-button was enough. Anyway, so you would think he would just plug the thing in. No, no, that simple! His plug to the Xerox machine is just two exposed wires of different colors! That's right. No plug! So he sticks those two wires into a socket where a plug is expected. Then, clever man that he was, he stuck in another plug that is probably connected to nothing or nothing live, just so the live wires would stay in the socket. After that, I realized why all the sockets have a switch. I had thought it was a British legacy (the ultra-careful Brits have a switch AND a fuse in every single socket, and in their plugs there's another fuse! But this is not the time or place). But no, there must be so many electrical accidents here that you need all these safety nets. So I was quite amused. So we finally brought the copy of the lease over to the mobile phone store. This is our FOURTH visit! hWe were cautiously enthusiastic. One final little kink: photos. So we need also passport photos to attach to the forms. Yes, it's crazy. It doesn't make sense. They make us with an American passport go through all this so that India can keep terrorists from gaining Indian phones, but as I have mentioned, a lot of poverty-stricken people, like those in slums, have cell phones! These people don't even have an ID, let alone an address! And they look more like the Pakistani terrorists than any of us do! So for this last kink we had to go over by walking out of the store and crossing the street and walking through disgusting paan-spit covered side-walks to find this photo studio. The photos were expensive by India standards, but they were made carefully and professionally by this man who used a digital camera, flash umbrellas, and photoshop, as well as ink-jet printer and photo paper. While waiting for the printing to happen, the owner, who spoke flawless English, showed us proudly a hard-cover artbook of Lucknow whose photographs he had made. I got to see parts of Lucknow I had never seen before. It was not the paan laden dump with bad air, honking sounds, and incompetent people living by a terrorized government. It was full of history, a rich culture, and beautiful architecture. It made everything in this brief India life beautiful, not just interesting and exciting. From inside our hired car (again, with hired driver) I am reminded of all the ugliness of the city. I don't mean the bad air or the sewer stink or the walls stained with red paan spit. It's the suffering of the people, and their suffering is truly beyond words. From the car today I saw a man pushing his tricycle laden with metal canisters of unknown content. He was all hunched up, his face in pain but also full of determination. I also saw a very old man the other day, with white hair, gaunt like most of everyone else, and he was pulling huge boxes. I am told that there is no real social safety net in this country, and old people would still have to work if they don't have their own sons and daughters to take care of them. More than seeing suffering is feeling you're part of the machinery that perpetuates it. To get to the office, or the nearest "tempo" (see previous day's entry) stop, we need to take a rickshaw. And the poor guy has to pull us along with the rickshaw up to the road at some point. It is so steep that he can't cycle his way up, so he has to get off the rickshaw and pull the whole load. There's something wrong about this brown, gaunt, extremely poor, little man pulling us up with all the might in his malnourished muscles. I am sure it would be easier for him if we just get off, walk up the ramp with him and the rickshaw, and then get back on. But somehow we can't do that. There's some rule we don't understand, some protocol we can't break. It is not so clearly wrong like condoning mistreatment of women or slavery; there's just this strange, wrong feeling of being an unwilling part of the oppressor class in a system of oppression that isn't so clear. Coming out of the fancy mall called "Fun Republic", we were confronted by an old woman with thick glasses flanked by probably a grandson of hers. They repeat some mantra regarding hunger (bhookh) and food (khaana) or something, and although the mantra eventually becomes just noise, their faces haven't yet become just background annoyance to me. It's utterly depressing to see this old woman spending the tiny remainder of her years begging in this heat. At least she has glasses, yes, imagine she didn't, what hellish life she would have. Or rather, more hellish. She's all hunched over, following us, especially Jennifer (I am still quite invisible when walking next to her), very persistent. I had to go between them and Jennifer and the old woman called me son ("betha") in her mantra. We never give them anything, probably from principle, or pragmatism of not encouraging begging. But one leaves always with a bitter taste of regret and guilt. Visited another government building, and this one was not as nice as the other one. There was dried paan spit in avery corner of very wall except the entrance hall. But, high tech India is, the elevator floor indicators are digital (I've only seen this in fancy hotels and buildings in the US) and inside there's the fabled "elevator music." The official we met was very friendly, even more than the ones in the previous building. He gave Jennifer a treasure chest of data that changed everything in her plans to move forward with her data analysis. So that was a good moment in this trip. This building, at least, didn't have snakes either! Do you know what "Tiffens" are? It's a very cool way of carrying your lunch, like a lunch box except it's made of three or four bowls that are locked together with a simple metallic wire device, and the whole thing is put inside an insulated, cylindric container. Each little bowl (with a lid) has its own food so when you have your lunch you need not worried about food mixed up. After our visit to the government office we stopped by a hospital to visit the sister of one of our colleagues (whose name, by the way, is "Harsh", pretty harsh, huh? :-). She's just given birth in St. Joseph's Hospital where I saw the Christian cross for the first time here. And, there was a bible all in Hindi!! Wow! It's funny that the word for "Children's Ward" in Hindi is exactly that! I wonder why they even bother to teach Devanaagari used to spell "Children's Ward"! The hospital is pretty depressed looking just because there's not enough light (a recurring theme in India and other developing countries). People, why you love darkness? And the beds look sad looking, used and overused. No AC, just fans. But still, people I saw around the hospital seemed happy, at least in the maternity ward. There were a group of people surrounding the sister, who had just given birth to twins and was exhausted. I was told that Indians gather around anyone sick or just in the hospital so they wouldn't be alone. Although that can be annoying, overall I think human beings should be treated like that; no one should be left alone and have to feel alone in a hospital, a depressing place to be no matter what fancy country you're in. Dinner got even better! So simple and so much better than the junk from the restaurants. I had to do something else unpleasant. I had to kill a cockroach the size of the baby mouse in the office. This cockroach was in the bathroom. I found him crawling helplessly on the tiles of the bathroom wall. The killing was bad, and the disposal of the corpse was even harder (trying to pick it up without feeling it!). I haven't had to deal with roach of this size since I lived in China more than twenty years ago. My vastly diminished tolerance for critters reminded me how much I've Westernized, for better or worse.

Depression in Traffic Circle