Bombay to Burgh

Like my dad, I am a total gadget-head.  This becomes a liability when traveling in areas where toys are not easily replaced. 

Before I left for my Panchgani trip on Saturday morning, I opened my Swiss-Army brand flight bag ($49 at Target) to retrieve the beloved Leatherman multi-tool that I’d brought along just in case – again, there’s the ex-Boy Scout in me.  I had put in with my toiletries in the bag that I checked, and “secured” the whole bag with a TSA-approved lock – approved only because every single airport in the world has keys to open it.  Of course, my Leatherman was gone, most likely lifted by some no-good, born-insecure, rat soup-eatin’ baggage clerk either in the U.S. or here.  And I’m sure it wasn’t because they thought I was going to wreak some kind of havoc with a pair of pliers between Chhatripatri Shivaji Airport’s baggage claim and my cab. 

To put things in perspective, my luck could be worse: Bollywood (or as he prefers it, the Hindi film industry) titan Amitabh Bachchan, who is a national icon in India, seems to be getting the bum’s rush by airlines in the west on his current “Unforgettable” world tour.  Between the bumbling of British Airways and Air Canada, Big B is out half his baggage.  So I wonder if these ham-and-eggers in baggage claims realize that they are dealing with a guy who once caused a nation of nearly a billion to drop what they were doing and hold vigil while he recuperated from a near-fatal movie set accident.  Going from being all but revered in one context to being treated like Ravi Q. Public at the end of a 14-hour flight out of your hood must be a really odd sensation.   

In real news, Government of India is taking a trust vote today to see if the current United Progressive Alliance-led Lok Sabha (lower Parliament) will collapse in the wake of the left’s withdrawal of support over the Hyde Act nuclear deal.  Today Abhilash and I saw an anti-UPA billboard near office, with dramatic color photographs of opposition leaders captioned “Best of Luck UPA!”. 

Personal opinion, totally uninformed by hard economic fact and shot through with 7^th-grade idealism.  India’s focus should be on exploring renewable resources, as it should be in other parts of the power-hungry developing world.  Why create so much more poisonous waste in a region already beset with environmental challenges?  India has an opportunity to set an example for the rest of us in the “developed” world, both in terms of alternative energy and nuclear non-proliferation.  The newspapers here suggest that China, too, now has a small nuclear arsenal, which one can surmise is part of the reason why India wants its own M.A.D. safeguard.  Could this be the beginning of a sort of three-sided cold war in the seat of the world’s new economic empire?  Such exciting times for cub eschatologists. 

In sports news, my first cricket at-bat ended in a collision with a retaining wall made of sharp, volcanic stone in Panchgani.  So, I’ll be sitting out the forthcoming IPL season with an elbow :)  Today I registered for the Mumbai Marathon (the main reason being that a portion of the fee benefits CRY), which will be held in January, 2009.  I don’t think I’ll be here for that, but I may be able to arrange for a stand-in for the half-marathon - she knows who she is

Again, hats off to Wordpress for losing a saved post.  Take 2:

From the roiling streets of Bombay comes this tale of one goon who blew his stack over a traffic tie-up.  This in or around Vashi toll plaza, where we passed through Saturday morning en route out of the city.  Daily News and Analysis has the scoop:

VASHI: The police on Saturday arrested three men for the alleged murder of Rizwan Iyaatali Idrisi, who was stabbed and killed with a screwdriver in a fracas at the Vashi toll plaza on Friday afternoon.

Kharghar resident Rajkumar Namdev Patil, 30, and Belpada residents Vikas Yashwant Aaldar and Roshan Bhalchandra Mhatre, both 29, were picked up on Friday evening. “A fourth accused, Yogesh Ramdas Mhatre, 23, also a resident of Belpada, is still absconding,” ACP Purushottam Karad said on Saturday. The police could trace the accused because booth operators had noted down the car’s number.

Rizwan alias Raju, 25, and two of his friends, Anil Shinde and Nitin Suradkar, were going to Navi Mumbai in a taxi they had boarded at Ghatkopar on Friday. The three, who are billboard painters, got into a fight with the accused at the toll plaza. “The accused were in a Ford Ikon. When they tried to overtake Raju’s taxi at the plaza, he signalled to them to stop. This led to the quarrel,” police said.

The weapon that was used for the act has still not been recovered since it is with the accused Rajkumar Patil, the owner of the Ford Ikon, who is absconding. 

Raju, who was a daily wage-earner, is survived by his wife, two-year-old daughter and five-month-old son. 

To be fair, there’s not as much truly violent crime (at least not much that has been reported) as one would expect in a city of 18 million.  But occasional reminders that ya best protect ya neck can only help the rest of us just who are just trying to coexist peacefully.

Monsoon brings the critters out of the woodwork.  I’ve dealt with visitations from earthworms, dreaded mosquitoes, military-grade cockroaches, and the occasional freeloading lizard.  I like the lizards, though – they remind me of the color-changing pet anole named Jonny I kept as a kid.  He lasted some 5 years in captivity, and quite sadly died a bachelor.  Requiescat in pace.

Jonny was one badass reptile.  He would have torn the two-inch, coffee-colored Oriental cockroach I walked in on in the sitting room late Monday night limb from limb before cracking open its thorax with his jaws and feasting on it until morning.  India’s lizards have few fans.  When I tell Indian folks that I used to own a pet lizard, the reactions range from bewilderment to revulsion.  I don’t kill these bugs when I find them, though – in a way I am their guest, too.  I’ve seen many adverts for exterminator and pest control services throughout the city.  With 18 million human residents and probably billions more inhuman, I can’t see how these businesses could be at all effective.  But maybe that’s why they remain in business - the more you look for these varmints, the more you’ll find.

While ricking to work a couple weeks back, Abhilash told me an interesting about a famous Bombay snake-catcher named Salim.  If you find a snake in your home, you can SMS him on his mobile (!!!) and he’ll come right over to capture the snake.  When he has amassed enough snakes in storage, he takes the whole lot out to the forest and releases them.  He charges nothing for this service, but his reputation is such that the city supports him to some degree.

Moving lower on the food chain: fat, grey-brown rats scurry along the garbage-packed railbeds of Chinchpokli and Bandra stations, and in and out of the rain gutters in Powai.  They are both fascinating and horrifying to me.  Two years ago my roommate in Pittsburgh and I caught a pair of rats in our apartment after having sighted them and evidence of their extended nesting several times.  At the time, I likened the infestation to terrorism.  Here, it’s surprisingly easy to get used to seeing them darting around the street or station, though I wouldn’t want to come into contact with one.  We came close Wednesday night – Jeevan and I went to Pizza Hut (and yeah, I am aware of what cognitive dissonance this implies in light of my past commentary on the pervasiveness of the MNC, thanks in Harinandani Complex.  When we went to leave, a rat slightly larger than the ones that terrorized my apartment sat perched in her path to the driver’s side door of her little Maruti Alto, gnawing on what appeared to be a wad of styrofoam.  It wouldn’t even move until we got within about a foot of it.  Days ago, I was surprised by a guinea-pig sized specimen with salt-and-pepper fur that leaped out of a rain wash in front of Laxmi hotel and charged at me full-speed before veering away.  Strangely, I was more bemused than panicked.  Again, this past Tuesday, I stopped at the ticket window of Chinchpokli station near work in order to pick up the second-class pass that Abhilash had helped me to apply for my first day or so here.  I was having a tough time explaining to the clerk in gutter hindi/english that I was here to pick up my pass, and that he already had the photograph that he repeatedly asked me for.  Suddenly, in the window behind him appeared a rat, winding its tail lazily around the wrought iron bars.  Seeing this distracted me to the point where I trailed off and took a step backward.  At this point, an older, sari-clad lady walked past the window with a handful of documents, paying no more attention to the rat than if it were the office mascot.  Shaking my head in amazement, I validated my remaining railway coupons at the stamp machine and started back down the ramp to the platforms, resolving to try again tomorrow.

So expect the unexpected.  I find myself ever so gradually reverting back to an attitude I learned as a Boy Scout years ago: an acceptance of and respect for nature, though tempered with enough fear to stay clear of higher-vertebrate power trips.  It comes in handy during chance encounters with God’s creatures small and smaller.

My travel itinerary on behalf of CRY is just about set.  Looks like I’ll be heading eastward to Koraput District, in the state of Orissa.  Orissa is known for Odissi, a graceful and intricate classical dance form.  It’s also home to the Konark Sun Temple or “Black Pagoda”, an imposing monument dating back to 1278 A.D., though the racy carvings it is decorated with are pure medieval XXX.    

Unfortunately, as India’s poorest state with half its population below the poverty line, Orissa is also marked by slow development and a growing movement by Naxalites – Maoist insurgents who threaten to destabilize what government exists through armed action.  According to 2004 figures published in the East India Human Development report, 76% of men and 51% of women are literate, thought these means vary across districts.  The HDR calls Orissa “thinly populated, tribal-dominated, and one of the least-urbanized states.”  The national Public Distribution System (PDS), a government scheme contrived to provide food grains to below-poverty line (BPL) cardholders (kind of like welfare in the U.S.), is barely functioning here, with only about 5.2% usage.

And this is off the wall, but stay with me.  I had remembered something I’d read a while back about former Korn guitarist-cum-CCM artist Brian “Head” Welch having traveled to Orissa to start a Christian charity after he found salvation.  In this Rolling Stone interview, he makes the spurious claim that the Lodha, a tribe of cannibals, lives in the state.  Hmmm.

Perhaps if Sri “Head” had done some research past what the local authorites might have told him, he’d have found that this “cannibal” rap was likely fabricated by forces looking to further dehumanize an already marginalized tribal group.  This excerpt from a paper on eco-tourism in Orissa makes no mention of manhunting in its profile of the Lodha people:

LODHA: In Orissa, the Lodhas are concentrated in two areas, namely Morada and Suliapada in the Sadar subdivision of Mayurbhanj district. They are originally a Mundari speaking tribe. Their economy is subsistence oriented and depends upon the collection of minor forest produce, wage-earning and agricultural labour. The Lodha social organisation is characterised by patrilineal and totemistic clans, and most of the families are nuclear. Their marriages are usually post-pubescent and monogamous, although polygynous unions are not totally ruled out. Divorce and remarriage are socially permissible. In the socio-political domain, the Mukhia/Sardar plays the role of headman and the traditional village Panchayat is called Desh. The Lodhas are polytheists. Like other tribes, they have village deities, tutelary deities, ancestral cults, benevolent and malevolent spirits, and all of them constitute the supernatural constellation. The Lodhas observe a number of rituals and festivals throughout the year to gain the favour of spirits and the blessings of deities for their overall well-being.

Moreover, this JSTOR-hosted paper suggests definite villification of the Lodha tribals from a variety of actors, notably the British Administration, who in 1871 declared them to be a criminal tribes.  Hustlers, rustlers, violent criminals? Maybe, but it doesn’t look like they were cannibals.

Why take all the effort to refute these claims?  Because they impede understanding between people and cultures.  From one rock do-gooder to another: Get your facts straight before you go on the record.

(I should note that this latest post complements my good colleague Eric’s recent post on traffic in Addis Ababa!   Gora minds think alike, apparently

The autorickshaw I was riding in was moving along at a steady clip when we hit the guy who was crossing the street.  We had just passed the uber-modern Harinandani shopping complex, just after the rickshaw-wallah had extricated us from a traffic scrum near the main gate of India Institute of Technology.  The guy seemed unhurt, but I thought I was going to have a ringside seat to a stabbing.  He was frothing mad, hurling abuse at the exasperated wallah before stumbling away.

Violence, or the threat of it, is very real on these streets if you are not a sensibly assertive driver.  And it doesn’t seem to pay to be over-cautious, as you’d run just as much risk of causing an accident as you would being reckless.  Traveling by road much more on this trip has privied me to at least a half-dozen teeth-baring altercations between motorists, one overturned truck, a snarl on the eastern expressway caused by a rickshaw crash, and daredevil helmetless motorcyclists, who routinely cut and weave into the opposing lanes to avoid tie-ups.  No doubt I’ve inhaled untold amounts of toxins and particulate matter from the exhaust generated by the vehicles in these jams.  Someone here told me that breathing the air in Mumbai was comparable to smoking 10 cigarettes a day.  If only - you get all of the ill effects with none of the benefits out of that deal.  The sensation of lightheadedness I’ve experienced in the back of a gridlocked rick is not the pleasant, relaxing drift brought on by that first drag from a cig, or from any other illicit inhalant of choice for that matter.  And that’s saying nothing of the accompanying nausea.  I’m glad I quit smoking 3 years back – I need fully functioning cilia in order to deal with the air quality here.

Indian traffic queues up just like Indian folks do on foot, as when waiting in line for rail tickets.  That is to say, it clusters.  Monday (14 July) night driving home from Bandra past Powai Lake, seven disorderly lanes of traffic squeezed onto a road designed for barely four.  Cars literally scraped against one another to move onward, with drivers simply repositioning their bent mirrors and continuing on.

One of my favorite sights here are the women who ride mopeds or scooters, tearing through the streets right along with the guys, their mouths covered with scarves against the exhaust fumes and airborne dust and their colorful saris or salwars fluttering behind them.  The last time I was here I saw a group of 5 – 6 of them, which reminded me of a desi take on 70s girl-biker gang movies, like Jack Hill’s “Switchblade Sisters”.  The motorcycles here are strictly Hondas and Bajaj – no Harleys in sight, though Abhilash tells me that there are clubs of Harley Davison enthusiasts in India who ride the highways like cyclists in the U.S.  I have some Harley-riding friends in the states who had asked me both this time and last to try to get some photos of any hogs I come across, but I doubt if I’ll be able to oblige. 

Speaking of ‘shady movies’ – I am fascinated with the Hindi horror movie, “Saya”, which is advertised in some parts of town with the posters that flagrantly rip off “Evil Dead II” (see “Seven Churches…” entry).  There is no way that it’s on the same tier budget-wise as the Bollywood blockbusters like “Mehboob,” and “Love Story 2050” that have recently opened.  Hence, it’s probably right up my alley.  Asian horror movies are over-the-top as compared to American offerings, maybe second only to the golden age of Italian trash/horror (Ruggero Deodato, Lucio Fulci et al).  I’ve never seen an Indian horror movie, but the excellent “Zinda Laash”, a late-1960s Pakistani retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula hinted at great future direction for the South Asian horror genre.  Check the trailer here.  (Incidentally - I would recommend the DVD version of this film over just about anything else available.  This is not a shill - it’s the best overall produced, presented, and perhaps the most historically important horror release I’ve had the pleasure to rent from the now-defunct Incredibly Strange Video, where it remained in the must-see queue for a while.  The DVD includes a brilliant documentary on the South Asian horror movie industry, which produced some ultra-cheap masala gore flicks from the 80s until the early 1990s, when it collapsed under the weight of market oversaturation and studio mismanagement.)   Browsing some titles at an online video store based in Lahore, Pakistan, called the Hot Spot Online confirms just how wacked South Asian cinema can get.  Descriptions of Pashtun-language films like “Haseena A-Bomb” suggest a serious John Waters affectation.  Accha laga!  I asked Abhilash on the way to work the other morning where I could see this picture, and he chuckled, saying that there’s no way I should go to see such a movie by myself.  The theater, called ‘Dreamland’ according to the poster, is in a rough part of town, apparently.  He also said that even though it’s a horror film, the theaters routinely intersplice pornographic short subjects between features.  It sounds like New York City’s seedy cinema-stocked 42^nd street of the 1970s has shifted east.  It also sounds to me like all the fixins’ for a violent assault, so I think I may have to reconsider.  Another movie, “One Clever Woman” looks totally Russ Meyer. 

Jeevan rolled her eyes when I asked where that one was playing, so I am sure that it would place me in the company of a similarly anti-social element.  I’ll just have to wait for the VCD.

Forgive the closing masala: “Ek Chatur Naar” also sort of looks like one of those trashy 70s movies like “I Spit on Your Grave” (AKA “Day of the Woman”), which purported to show a story of a degraded woman taking violent revenge on her assailants.  Of course, the exploitation element far outstripped any kind of “socially responsible message” of female empowerment.  There is one real-life set of kickass ladies who made the news here recently.  Star 20/20 cricketer and Chennai Super Kings captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni has a crack team of heavily armed lady guards defending his skin during his offseason back home in Ranchi, Jharkhand, in eastern India.  Kalashnikov-tastic!

That’s actually from a few days back.

Meanwhile, Manmohan Singh will approach congress for a confidence vote in the wake of the lef’t’s withdrawal from the coalition government over the Hyde Act nuclear deal, Times of India launches its ‘Teach India’ campaign to reach out-of school children, and some doctor got picked up while hitchhiking, stabbed 20 times and robbed of Rs. 20,000.  It’s a happening town, and I haven’t even reached the sports page.

Between my two visits to Mumbai, I’ve been to malls on more occasions than in the past year at home.  Thursday evening I went out for coffee with Jeevan, to a small restaurant in a mall in Juhu.  There was a movie theater there where we were to meet Pooja again because she had wanted to see “Jaane Tu, Ya Jaane Na” as a treat for having nearly completed her first week of school.  So , it was the second time in a week I’d seen the picture but good practice for my Hindi comprehension, as Jeevan was able to explain some parts for me even further.  I’ll be able to write on this movie as others have written about “Heart of Darkness” :).  One scene I’d not noticed the first time around was one in which the characters go to see a movie.  The shots of the theater looked suspiciously familiar, and Jeevan confirmed for me that it was filmed right in the theater where we were at that moment.  Talk about breaking the “fourth wall” – Bollywood just demolished it.

Mumbai’s malls are modern, they are just as expensive as their western counterparts, and they are definite no-bargaining zones.  To talk in class about the mushrooming consumer class and burgeoning GDP is one thing, but to see the five-level glass-clad palaces that have cropped up in response to demand in such a short time is rather remarkable.  Though the air-conditioning provides a nice break in this heat, I experience something of a cringe every time I enter one of these places.  It’s often cited that in India, only a small percentage are seeing the fruits of the past decade’s economic growth – mainly those within urban centers.  Development economists have said that if these trends continue, the cities in India will resemble California while the rural areas will smack of sub-saharan Africa.  But consider the city itself, from an urban planning perspective.  Mumbai is clamoring to be a world-class urban center, but there are significant needs not necessarily related to poverty that don’t seem to be addressed.  Like a kid who wants dessert first, general infrastructure is left for want while developments like these are greenlighted.  As I walked past signs in the mall’s windows advertising Tommy Hilfiger, D&G and Gucci, I was assailed by a strong aroma of raw sewage, probably from a broken pipe or backed up drain – that’s what made me think of all of this.  I have no idea what kind of tax dollars these malls bring into the municipal corporation, but using them to fix the sewerage and streets might be a top priority.

Friday post-work saw us back at Infiniti Mall, home of the TGIF from few entries back.  Here I met some friends of Jeevan who run a dance company specializing in classical forms like Kathak and Odissi as well as popular and folk styles.  Arunima Roy, herself a young Bengali woman, is co-owner and choreographer of the outfit.  She told me that she’s planning a huge dance performance for a charitable cause, and she wanted some pointers that I might be able to offer as having planned events for CRY America in Pittsburgh.  The numbers she was talking were far beyond anything I’d been involved with, but the fundamentals of publicity and getting strong sponsorship from the outset are important just the same in either case.  Over our meeting I had my second encounter with tofu in the form of a soya dosa from a South Indian restaurant in the food court.  The dosa was unlike others I’ve had – it seemed to be made out of rice paper.  And I had a Snapple mango cooler, which I just bought because the label appeared to be written in Arabic. 

Days later, the empty bottle became an efficient and economical cockroach trap for my intermittent and uninvited bed companion.

Saturday, Abhilash and I ran some errands around town.  After I got an international calling card form the Vodafone store, I accompanied Abhilash to the open-air fish market where I saw the dreaded pomme fritte in its freshest form.

The flies that swarmed and crawled over all of the fish were a little unsettling, but once cooked properly all the germs are killed.  Tangled masses of prawn, live catfish, and even sharks were for sale here. 

I snapped some shots and walked along the road past vegetable stalls of every variety. 

I stopped by the butcher shop where I had seen goats being herded a few days before.  One of those goats, chopped and eviscerated, now hung behind a partition at the front of the shop, drawing flies.  The butcher gave me permission to get a few pictures of his handiwork.   Note the marked Hermann Nitsch influence. 

I’m mostly vegetarian (I eat tuna, salmon, and am learning to tolerate India’s catches of the day, little tiny bones and all), but I’m also practical – it was an interesting sight that one doesn’t see in the US, where the meat-eating public is insulated from the reality of your burger’s origin.  Few wish to really consider their meals as recent graduates of Bovine U.  To cap off the afternoon, I got my pants from last trip hemmed.  If I am in the mood to wear flares, I’m all clear.  On the way back, Abhilash pointed out the Shiv Sena and BSP reading rooms, which looked like little bus stops decorated with political slogans and used for discussions of same.  I recalled that the former of the two is an ultra-right wing political party that often gets mention in the US press for their beef with the observance of Valentine’s Day in India - card shops are routinely burned by these guys during the “decadent western” celebration yearly.

Later in the day, I had a great meeting with another of Jeevan’s acquaintances.  He heads Corporate Social Responsibility for a firm, and was too interested in finding out more about CRY.  While talking things over chai and samosa in their green marble-floored bungalow, I got an SMS from Steshia about the night’s plans.  We wound up going to – of all places – Poison in the northwest suburb of Bandra, which I blogged about last trip.  After meeting up with Jeevan’s family for a homemade dinner of fish curry and to distribute yet more Pittsburghcentric gifts among her parents, aunt, and cousins, her brother drove the lot of us past the club, dropping me outside.  I guess I am somewhat of a regular at this place now, because this time I came prepared - with earplugs!  I met up with Stesh and some of her cousins and friends outside, and we paid the Rs. 2000 cover as a couple.  That worked out to about $23 US apiece for admission to Bombay’s hottest nightclub.  It was still a bit steep for me considering that booze tickets were included with the charge, and I don’t drink.  My compadres were happy with my leftovers, though :)The place was only half-full as we filed in but by midnight it was packed to near suburban-coach capacity.  Hanging out with people from work was a lot of fun, though the club had some puzzling idiosyncrasies that I noticed this time.  The DJs left bits of dead time between tunes, during which they’d announce quite politely things like “this next track is a Poison exclusive,” or “we’re going to get some Bollywood up for you all shortly…”  They spun their own cuts for the majority of the night, only getting into filmsongs after over an hour.  Even then, most were heavily remixed to the point where early-80s classics like Janbaaz’ “Pyar To, Pyar Lo” were turned from disco into pounding house-styled numbers, only the vocal track left intact.  The crowd was different than what I’d expected.  Since we were right in the middle of the floor I got to see that there were a lot of people there who looked a little old to be hanging out at such a dance club.  Some guys looked to be in their 60s – I was struck by an older gentleman who was standing onstage lighting up a Sherlock Holmes-style pipe.  Of a few other white folks (goras) in attendance, there was a blond guy, looked kind of like Vivian from “The Young Ones” minus the punk affectations.  He was dancing so frenziedly that one of our party who shall remain nameless to protect a reputation as an otherwise mild-mannered soul, had to physically shove him out of our area.  I think most of the other goras were from Europe, though.  I’ve had mixed luck trying to communicate to other foreigners here (the locals often speak better English), so I didn’t approach any of them to try and find out over the war-zone concussion of the cub’s sound system.  I again became the center of attention in our group when some older Bollywood song about white people came up – Stesh’s friends knew all the steps from the film, too, while I just played ‘item guy’.  The evening ended abruptly, with security running down the metal stairs that led down to the basement club and telling the DJs to kill the music.  “OK everyone - I guess that’s it for tonight,” said the head DJ before cutting off the system and turning up the club lights completely.  I thought it was some kind of an alert, but it looked as if they just lost track of time.  Stesh said that that’s the way it’s done normally, otherwise nobody leaves.

We parted from the group and boarded a rick back home.  Abhilash heated Maggi noodles on the kerosene cooker, with toast and an egg with green chillies, as a late meal.  We turned in shortly after and I awoke this morning to the sound of hymns sung by the Pentecostal prayer group next door and the hammer and whine of power tools from the indistinct construction projects going on around here.  I started the day with one of the small South Indian bananas that I got from the vendor.  It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday in Bombay, no monsoon rain until nearly evening.  Abhilash made dhal and fish fried in garlic paste, which we ate before he ran out to a party for a friend’s newborn baby, leaving me to finish catching up on the writing.  Now the rain spatters and splashes from the gutter to the narrow walkway outside the front door as I get ready for a comfortable night’s rest in the cool that it brings.

Today my system began to reject India.  Or at least its climate.

My first Monday at work was busy, with a lot of follow-up due from replies to Friday’s e-mails.  The time difference and its effects on response time are going to take some getting used to.  I also continued with plans to get pitches to a few U.S. newspaper reporters based in Delhi and Mumbai.  Monday night I went for an otherwise very pleasant thai Monday dinner with Jeevan, her sister Niv – who is a really interesting kind of health professional: a homeopathic specialist and yoga instructor - and Pooja.  When I got back, I noticed a little bit of swelling in my lower legs and ankles.  By the time I went to bed, both sides were puffed up to about 1.5 times the normal size, the typically visible bones and tendons of my ankles totally obscured by God knew what – fluid buildup, inflamed tissues…my mind raced with near-panic.  It looked and felt disgusting, though there was no pain to speak of.  By next morning, there was a little bit of an improvement followed by a vast backslide once I got vertical.  By now I was looking like the late Joseph Merrick from the knees down, and the purplish blossoms of ruptured blood vessels were beginning to show just below the surface of my skin.  Abhilash seemed alarmed as well and said that I could ask to see a doctor, maybe a family doctor of Steshia or someone else at the office, to clear things up.

Tuesday morning I did what I always do when faced with a medical conundrum – check the Web.  So yeah, it’s not the most recommended action for a non-health pro, but I needed the peace of mind.  Heat edema matched my symptoms just about on the dot.  Swelling in the extremities as a reaction to a sudden change in climate (i.e. colder to warmer), further compounded by water retention associated with salt intake.  Around noon a guy in the office, Ganesh, lead me down the street to a doctor’s office located across the street from a small Hindu temple, Shri Santosh Mandir.  The open-fronted waiting room was half full with about 4 or 5 people, and Dr. Sanjay Joshi himself sat at the front desk to receive new patients.  He spoke English well, and after he examined my ankles told me that there was nothing to worry about in terms of tissue damage or disease.  In his opinion it was due to walking on uneven terrain, as over the crumbling streets in parts of Mumbai or the slum areas.  He prescribed me a diruetic, advising me that “the urination might be more” as my body expelled the excess fluid.  A man at a small window in the waiting room handed me the course of four pills, wrapped in a small packet made from a torn page.  The entire visit cost me a total of Rs. 60 – a little over $1.50 US.Once back in office, Steshia told me to stay home Wednesday to make sure I was over this.  Prior to my travel starting, I want to make sure I’m in fighting shape.  Getting acclimatized is going to be an essential part of this, so I agreed to take the day and left via train after wrapping things up for the day.

Tuesday night began a boring but necessary convalescence, as I fashioned a foot rest out of one of the plastic chairs in Abhilash’s front room to keep my legs elevated and (ugh) draining.  The sensation was really Cronenberg-esque – my calves seemed to take on the consistency of florist’s foam packed into a plastic bag.  My hands left indentations in the flesh when I’d try to massage some of the swelling out.  It subsided in a few hours, but that evening I elected to chill inside, passing on a birthday party across town for Jeevan’s sister in law.

On Thursday the office was abuzz with news of my condition – I fully expected this, though.  Everyday living in close quarters has left privacy at an absolute premium for Indians here, and I always interpret what initially sound like prying questions to my western-attuned ears as a basic show of concern.  More walk preparations followed, and I got a little more of an idea as to when my travels will start.  It looks like I’ll be away for 8 to 10 days at a stretch once the required personnel become available to accompany me to the field.  I also had a nice talk with the daughter of the lady I met at Jai Hind.  She told me about her journalist associate and the work she did with Pratham, which is funding an NGO that she is now starting.  The aim would be to link farmers and artisans in the rural areas with urban markets, kind of like a farmer’s market in the city, but on a much larger scale.  Lots of players in this game - exceeded perhaps only by the numbers of available takers.

As in “ketchup,” which is what I’m about to do - stay with me:

Saturday, April 5

I woke up early to meet Jeevan and her younger cousin Pooja at Churchgate station.  Pooja was starting school as a communication major at Jai Hind college, and today was her orientation.  It was an interesting parallel to my experience just before I left, when I helped Sohini from CRY’s Pittsburgh AC to move her daughter into Carnegie Mellon University for a summer governor’s school program.  The college was a few blocks from Marine Drive, where the ocean waves, brownish with silt and buoying clumps of litter crash against a sea wall right next to the road.  The impressive city skyline of another portion of Bombay was visible in the distance, though it was an incredibly hazy and humid day.  Jeevan and I hung around the school’s second floor, while Pooja made some friends and waited for the session to start.  The college must have been older – maybe at least 50 to 75 years, because the hallways had a worn-in institutional feel not unlike the lower floors of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning or Seton Hill University in my hometown of Greensburg, PA.  The school appeared to be housed in a single large building, within easy walking distance of the Churchgate station and some of the more chic shops near the Oberoi Hotel on Marine Drive itself.  In talking to a lady who I met where we waited in the hallway outside the lecture room, she told me that her daughter who works with Pratham knew a New York Tiems reporter based in India who writes on some NGO activity.  I didn’t recognize that reporter’s name from my media list work, and she was kind enough to provide her number as well as her daughter’s contact so that I could get in touch with the guy.  Despite the cheating and the fleecing that I’ve experience with decent regularity, I find that people here are exceptionally helpful.  It’s a little awkward at times because I tend to thank people profusely for their assistance; I think that the prevailing attitude here is that it’s one’s duty to help out a newcomer – no thanks expected or necessary.  That’s something that I really hope rubs off on me.Once the session started and Pooja was in with her new friends, Jeevan and I took a walk to Marine Drive.  She pointed out the Oberoi Hotel and the Air India building, noting that it resembled the United Nations somewhat – here’s a comparison.  The ocean spray from the sea wall got to the point where I kept absent-mindedly retreating to the other side of poor Jeevan as we walked to avoid being splashed. 

We then cut into the Oberoi itself so that I could use the restroom.  The interior was frosty as compared to the sweltering heat outside.  There were a number of shops along the hallway downstairs – Jeevan cautioned me that for me, the prices would be twice what she’d pay.  The out-of-towner discount again.   Luckily, I was not in the market for handbags or designer scarves.  On the way to exit back into the soupy afternoon air, we passed the first white folks I saw in public.  One of the three, a heavyset middle-aged woman, wore shorts in defiance of Lonely Planet’s tips for female travelers in India.  We walked back down the way to meet Pooja at Natural’s Ice Cream, which was purported to have delicious fruit flavors, especially pineapple, custard apple and mango.  For some reason I opted for chocolate, which also was pretty good.  Days later in Chembur, I would try the mango and decide that I was in err for not listening to my friend’s suggestion the first time :)  We ate a proper meal in a restaurant near Churchgate station just afterward.  On the way, I took some photos of huge, heavy, impossibly green breadfruit hanging in clumps from a tree near the college. 

Jeevan said that if one of these things fell from such a height it would be bad news for whomever it landed on.  I had bhindi masala again at the restaurant, and one of my favorite sweet lime sodas.  These are becoming an addiction/obsession, along with the incredible pineapple utthappams that I have been having for breakfast at the Laxmi hotel near Abhilash’s place.  Pooja told us about her recent internship with her cousin, who is a fashion designer.  While working on wardrobe for the Indian version of “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader,” she got to meet the Bollywood film stars Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan.  Pretty exciting stuff for a first internship – but it’s not uncommon to see these guys about town, evidently.  We made it back to the station where we parted ways; I boarded my train to Andheri, then autorickshawed back to Powai.  Saturday night I took a rick to meet Abhilash and our co-worker Shwetta in the Harinandini shopping complex near where we stay.  They were stocking up with some items for a party for Clem, who was leaving for France on Sunday.  Before we headed over to the party, I had to buy another shirt from some Woolworth’s-type store called D-Mart to replace the one that I had been wearing.  One thing I’ve learned here is to put on my shirt only a minute before you leave the house, in order to avoid spoiling it with perspiration.  In this case, I had worn a gray shirt that was soaked within a half hour of wear.  I replaced it with a smart striped shirt, cut in the style I see often here (no tails, straight across the bottom) that Abhilash helped me pick out form the rack.  The store was bustling in a way that Target or Costco might be on a weekend evening – during Christmas, even.  After working through the long queue and claiming my rainjacket form the check window, we were on our way in Shwetta’s little car to Preeta’s place, which was very nearby.  Preeta works in Resource Generation at CRY, which is on the ground floor.  I’m on the third floor with the Comm team, so I don’t get to see her very often during the work day.  But she’s always really nice and endlessly welcoming.  Clem along with Preeta’s dog Jiva greeted us at the door of Preeta and her husband’s flat, and Preeta took a break from preparing the food to serve some snacks.  Jeevan stopped by too, and as everyone from the office arrived, I got a chance to catch up with those I’d met last time (Irwin and Keith) and get to know some of the folks I’d just met.  Arun from Comm told be some particularly fascinating things about working with Oxfam – whose working papers and articles I relied on heavily over the past semester.  He’s also a self-taught filmmaker, who documented several of the projects that CRY supports.  I love to see what kinds of peripheral talents people in this line of work have, and how they can use them to enrich the whole of the work.  Shwetta tells me that she plays violin in the south Indian style.  She invited me over to her friend’s place to jam sometime, which I will definitely do while I am here.  Further on that note, my sitarist friend Jon back in the states just e-mailed me a few days back that he had just picked up a job with the University of North Carolina that will give him a chance to use his interest in Indian classical music in a really unique context.  I won’t say what for fear of spoiling his study topic!

The night went on, people got high (which is to say, tipsy – this is another shift in meaning from U.S. usage, I learned and invariably someone spilled the beans that I could sing a couple of Hindi songs.  Pressed, I will do this, though again it is no real incredible accomplishment.  I know a few lines from about five songs, but my ‘piece de resistance’ has to be Kumar Sanu’s “Tujhe Dekha To,” from “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge”, a hugely popular film that rocketed Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol into superstar fame about ten years back.  I do love the song, albeit on a schmaltz level somewhere close to Air Supply (who I also like, OK?).  That said, I can stumble phonetically through the first four lines, which always incites shock and awe from a desi audience.  Once everyone started dancing, well, it was time for me to learn some of the steps.  Vestigial jet lag or self-consciousness I will blame for the stiffness in my legs and hips as Shilpa from RG, collar turned up Bollywood hero-style on her white jacket, got me to mirror her doing some of Shah Rukh’s moves from “Don”.  Some other semi recent hits queued up in the laptop and nearly everyone hit the dining room-cum-dance floor, Preeta pulling out Jeevan and a few others to join in.

A word on film music here: Bollywood turns out twice as many films as Hollywood.  The most well-known of these are big-budget ‘masala’ (mix) stories incorporating elements of romance, violence, action, tragedy, etc., in a family friendly package contrived for maximum mass appeal.  Though in recent years, depicting the modern, western metro lifestyle is the trend, which tends to cut into the rural audiences of these films who can’t relate as well.  Onscreen kissing, increasingly skimpy outfits for both women and men, and implied premarital sex relations in some more recent movies illustrate this shift away from its innocent past.  To boot, each one of these includes a number of songs, somewhat like a musical.  Most of the pop music out of India comes from the soundtracks of these movies.  The popularity of music, singing and dancing is not confined to the movies.  It seems that everyone here loves these songs and most seem to be able to sing them from memory, with lyricists like Gulzar reaching nearly the popularity of the composers and performers themselves.   So, filmi sangeet, both old and new, is in fact a huge part of this culture.  Luckily, the bulk of it is ambitiously arranged and at times stunning gin the way that it combines eastern and western componentry into something consistently interesting, which is what got me into this music in the first place ears ago.  And anyway, it’s great Hindi practice to be hearing this music all the time.  Here’s my favorite piece of writing that I’ve done on the subject, a review for Dusted Magazine of the Rough Guide series’ Bollywood Gold compilation.

Dancing with my friends was fun (Shilpa is on payroll as my personal choreographer now), but after a while I got more and more tuckered out, again, probably because of some of the jet lag that I thought I was over.  Preeta let me take a nap in the back room – minutes after I hit the thin, firm mattress (the mattresses here are like sleeping on planks – this is actually great for my back) I was fast asleep.  Someone roused me at 4, when I thought we had planned to take a train back home.   Trains stop running at 1:40, though, and Shwetta planned to stay the night.  The lot of us wound up sleeping until 6 a.m., when everyone left via auto or car.  That Sunday was spent much like Sundays during college – all-day recovery from the night’s proceedings.  I think Abhilash made rice and dhal, which would have been pretty great.

And now, the elephant in the room. 

‘Lotah’ means a small cup.  You find these in most bathrooms (ghusalkannas) here, normally situated somewhere near a floor-level spigot.  This is how one performs post-bathroom use personal cleansing in India.  And it’s easy once you get the hang of it. 

Here’s how: Once finished, you fill the lotah with the spigot and pour the water carefully behind the back using the right hand, so as to target the offending area.  Then you use your left hand to clean your area, which should be under the flow of water.  Of course, then you wash your hand – thoroughly. 

Not everyone here uses the lotah.  The availability of western-style toilets - some with bidet-type sprayers - and TP rolls in the stall is increasing in direct proportion to things like the frequency of syndicated NBC programming on Indian TV, or the number of Domino’s Pizza and KFC locations throughout the country.  But it’s a sensible, practical way to eliminate paper waste otherwise flushed away to languish in septic systems or block already-overtaxed sewer lines.  And I would assume that it is easier on these things that people call “piles” over here. 

Those of you who recoil at the thought: Consider our “more civilized” Western alternative.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve happened across the work of some pig in a public bathroom who’s decided to overflow a commode with wad after wad of TP.  And how many crores of trees have been sacrificed so as not to inconvenience the squeamish* ?

I’m down with the lotah.  Only problem is this: How to dry off?  

* With apologies to my friend at Kimberly-Clark.

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