Happy 60th Birthday, India. What have you done with your freedom?

I've thought for a while about how to close this blog because this is my narrative of India and India does not get to choose how it ends, I do. The occasions of my departure from India and the Mataram's (motherland's) 60th birthday next week definitely call for tears, but should they come from pain or laughter? I don't even know. When things get so bleak we laugh uncontrollably, what kind of tears are those?

I don't blame anyone for feeling dissatisfaction that I can't answer the questions I have posed, but let me ask you, what am I supposed to do with a country that put the image of a man who died without any possesions on all its money? Then again, why should I ask you about India, you probably don't know much. You certainly shouldn't ask me. I'm a white kid who skulked around Delhi for a couple months, that makes me... ah yes, completely ignorant. Here's a better idea, let's ask India...

Mother India, when you are drenched in monsoon tears, why do you cry? Is it because of your hopeless poverty? Perhaps you cry because I counted hundreds of emaciated, partially clothed and naked people settling down to sleep tonight on a concrete highway divider in one of your wealthiest cities. Or, maybe you've abandoned these children of yours, Mother India. Instead you cry tears of exuberant laughter with the fashionably dressed youths zipping down this same highway, Bhangra blaring, in luxury SUVs. Mother India, do you find it easier to love these carefree and careless oligarchs to be?

The British can no longer tell you what future to make for yourself, mother India. You sent them packing 60 years ago. Although you shouted that the British oppressed you, you saw them off with a warm embrace. Did this parting hug tire your arms? Perhaps you have no strength left to shield your children. Is that why you cry, because you feel helpless to prevent the violent abuse of your Muslim and Sikh offspring? When your eyes' moisture breaks the banks of the Ganges as it is doing right now, is it because you find your minority groups increasingly ghettoized and marginalized? Or is actually because you cannot stop chuckling at how the Hindu nationalists have exposed the pretense of your secularism?

Mother India, what of the children you cast out in 1947? Have you filled the wells with your brackish sadness because your sons and daughters in Pakistan quake with fear of your nuclear weapons? Do you cry because the radiation from the Thar desert test sites burns you? Are you sobbing for the accident waiting to happen? Then again, maybe this atomic development makes you feel strong. Perhaps you cry because you laugh so triumphantly at the death you can bring to the children who abanoned you. Does the jolly thought of your new power induce these tears?

Mother India, I mean no disrespect, but you begin to look your age. Did you cry with anger as the chemicals suffocated your babies in Bhopal? Have the people-consuming factories poisoning your streams and the sputtering autos sullying your air driven you to tears? Mother India, when you seek shade in your once lush forests but find only dry stumps, do you weep then for your loss? Or are these yellow and brown clouds lined with silver and gold? Do you cry with delight as dollar bills flood your government vaults? Do you weep with relief at the sight of white faces returning to reap the harvest sown by your poorest children?

Mother India, what have you done with your freedom? Is your independence merely the freedom for a few of your favorite children to tread upon those you disdain? Is deliverance from oppression merely the means to oppress? Mother India, does your joy for the success of you sons blind you to the pain of your daughters? Mother India, do the mansions built by your wealthy children blot out the hovels of their poor siblings? Mother India, do the ringing vedas sung by your Hindu progeny drown out the fearful screams of your terrorized Muslims?

Mother India, what have you done with your freedom? How many more of your children eat better today than when the British sailed over the horizon? How many more of your daughters read today than the day mission schools started closing? How many more of your Tamils share power with their cousins from Uttar Pradesh? Some, yes, surely some, right? 60 years and a few more eat and a few more read and a few more decide. Is this the freedom for which you fought? Did Subash Chandra Bose lead his forces against the British just so you could rent Kashmir asunder? Did Tilak go into exile so Western firms could abuse the children of Bengal? Did Gandhi bleed to death so the SENSEX could set new records?

Mother India, what have you done with your freedom? Mother India, what are you doing to your children? Mother India, why do you cry? Has it all been a terrible mistake, mother India, or was this always the plan? Mother India, are you satisfied with your 60 years? Is there anything you would change Mother India? Mother India, what will you do now?

Two monstrous nuclear stockpiles: India and China

Hails, comrades. This is the first of my two concluding entries in this blog. The purpose is for this Slav to consider India holistically in light of both my education and my observations and, of course, to have the last word.

When I was born nearly 22 long years ago, my title could only have referred to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Times may have changed, but I've heard the more things change, the more they stay the same and though new missiles may sit in different silos and point in different directions, they're still capped with radioactive holocaust... a cheerful thought for a summer day.

I'm not really here to discuss that. If you want to hear about "grand strategies" and "geopolitical maneuvering" turn on CNN or Fox News. Every day these capitalist roaders inundate us with more useless garbage about the national competition between China and India and why Americans should fear both countries. Maybe I'm just terribly brave, but I don't really have time to fear the malnourished and the illiterate.

So, if I reject all this media hype, why do I want to compare India and China? First, they have the largest populations and both face similar problems as a result. Second, they have both experienced incredible economic growth lately (aka the rich have gotten richer and the poor, well, who cares anyway?) and may be developing American-style middle-classes. Third, I've now spent more time both places than most of the talking heads who make these dire predictions.

Despite the many similarities between the current developmental situations of China and India, the differences strike me as far more interesting, and I'm not just talking about what kind of sauce goes on one's rice. Being me, let's start with a bit of history. China has long had an unearned reputation in the West for being culturally monolithic. This is largely due to white people thinking all Chinese people look and sound the same. Early European sinologists had not the subtlety to recognize the intense regional variation across "China." In fact, many have argued that the idea of China as a single ethnicity or nation has no meaning until after the 16th century or later still, much later than many of us would think. Let us admit, however, that China has fewer major social cleavages (no major religious tensions and few large ethnic minorities), at least today, than India. India seems so fractious and fraught with religious and ethnic tensions that all Europeans often see is conflict. Once again, this intellectual extreme is inaccurate and ignores surprising unity across religious, ethnic, and caste lines as demonstrated by the diverse if corrupt Congress Party. Still, China, for a host of reasons many of which are connected to the common written language, has historically been far more unified than India.

This fact largely determined how European interaction first occurred. We often hear that China was never colonized, which is incredibly misleading. The Europeans and Japanese carved up China into various spheres of influence and controlled China's ports and shipping from the safety of their fortified from the early 19th century. The key, however, is that no single power could subjugate China. The British, French, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Italians, Dutch, Portuguese, and even good old Americans (all of whom usually fought each other) had to pool their resources just to lock down a few ports. Between them, they dismembered a relatively unified country.

In India, we see the exact opposite. The strong regional kingdoms which sprang up in the 18th century after the Mughal collapse (in the east: Bengal, northeast: Awadh, central: Hyderabad, and southwest: Mysore to name a few) had divided the old Empire. Their dominions took on more logical boundaries based around language groups. One cannot stress enough the primacy of India's regional cultures. To the extent one can speak of “Indian” culture at all, it is a development of the last 60 years. Even today, many "Indians" prefer to think of themselves first as Bengalis or Tamils or etc. Taking advantage of this disunity, the British picked off provinicial nawabs (governors) one by one. Some would argue the British did not simply unite India, they created it. No previous hegemon had ever gained control over the entire subcontinent. In China, shared language (at least written) and the civil service had been indigenous forces for unity. In India, the first shared language from north to south was and is English and the civil service was the one established by the British East India Company.

This distinction has been a crucial one in the 20th century. When faced with foreign invasion, the Chinese could rally behind what they at least imagined to be their shared past and culture. South Asians had to invent a new culture which embraced regions with few common features and also rejected the culture of their imperial overlords, a process which has yielded mixed results.

Now the question is what does all this mean today? Well, quite simply, China is wiping the floor with India by almost every quantitative measure from GDP to literacy rate. While China is far more regionally varied and locally controlled than most people realize, the chief ideology has almost always been determined at the center. Even in times of rebellion, the rebels usually just aped the “legitimate” dynasty. In 1949 when the Communist Party took power, it set about breaking a social system 5,000 years old, which it did with incredible success. I would argue this was a major step forward for the millions of Chinese peasants who had lived under the feudal yoke for a hundred generations, however, they had to replace Confucianism and the other traditions with something… a ha, Maoism or as it is more correctly known Mao Zedong Thought. We could bicker and argue about the virtues of this new code, but at least it was something. In 1980 Deng Xiaoping began sweeping Maoism away, but this time he offered no replacement. The Chinese had broken too many links to go back to pre-1949 ideologies, so they turned to the only avenue left, rampant capitalism. As the great socialist Deng said, “To get rich is glorious,” and I’ll be damned if that didn’t take off. That has given us modern China where nothing, not environmental disaster nor industrial calamity is allowed to slow the march of progress. For now, this has put China on top.

And while I joke about how much Indians love cricket and the extent to which the upper-classes emulate the British, India’s diversity (or disunity) has successfully resisted the more culturally Americanizing tendencies of global capitalism. Indian society still has its many religions to hold it together, not to mention huge kinship networks (such networks were dismantled by the landlord purges, land redistribution, and on-child policy in China). On the downside, India also has communal violence and vestiges of the caste system, but at least there are social forces at work outside the state. The British never really transformed Indian society, just a few specific segments of it.

At this point, China is hanging together by the will of the People’s Liberation Army. Most other social and cultural networks have dissolved completely. The fall, when it comes, will be ugly. In India, I often feel like not much would change tomorrow if the government disappeared. Sure, there would be problems (actually it would be interesting because the government doesn’t seem to do a whole hell of a lot now), but society would go on as it has, for better and for worse as I said before. Talking to people in China depressed me because of the obsession with money, and I’m not just talking about the poor in which case one could more readily understand. In India, people still have other goals and values and concerns. For me, that is the real difference between China and India today. Indians have identities in which the state and bank account play a minimal role, whereas that’s about all the Chinese have left.

Now playing: "The Internationale" - Tang Dynasty. Here is the symbolic last gasp of Chinese idealism. It basically fell in a bloody heap with the students fleeing Tiananmen Square. This is China's first "metal" band (I don't know if I'd call them metal, but they're sick anyway) singing the international workers' anthem in Berlin circa 1989.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rx7A3UYKXj4&mode=related&search=

Weight Room Racism

I suppose it’s high time I was on the receiving end of some bigotry, but I can’t say I welcome the change of pace. Most places in Delhi, white skin assures you get hassled, but mostly by people trying to (over)serve you. One can scarcely complain about that. At a few places, mostly official-type places like the archives or near government buildings, public guardians (moustachioed police and decrepit archivists) regard white people with a certain amount of suspicion, but still maintain polite formality. Although one could go on for hours about how historical perceptions shape such encounters, language is the most immediate issue. Most Delhites know some English, and many even know enough to communicate with limited success. The problem is that none of them speak English as well as they think they do. As Russell Peters would say, they speak English very fast… as if they know it. They quickly become annoyed when I ask them to repeat phrases which to them seem perfectly logical and grammatical. My responses compound the issue because most Indians are still more accustomed to hearing British English and mine sounds relatively informal and, to them, incomprehensible (and no, I don’t think a Winston Churchill impersonation would help).

Also, a lot of places people love Americans, like Poland, where the only country they love more than Poland is the U.S. India does not seem to be such a place. People are often interested, but there is always some caution, more so than in China. Whether this is because we are Pakistan’s chief military financier or simply because I have no caste, I cannot say. Things go better for me with Muslims because they generally assume I am Muslim too. The beard helps and I throw in enough asalaam alaykums, insha’allahs, and a few other Arabic phrases to cover.

Nevertheless, one quickly notices that much more Caucasian-staring occurs here than one might expect given that white people have been strutting around India for 250 years. In China they have fewer white folks, but more reservations about staring. In India, there seem to be many fewer qualms about fixating looks. I hear tell this is especially an issue for female expats, though white people always tend to think non-white people are looking at them funny. As a rule, the fairer (especially blonder) one is, the more attention one receives. Dressing the part helps, but marginally. I wear pants to the archives and usually on weekend excursions as well, though it’s beastly hot. Unfortunately, “Dark Funeral” shirts don’t mask me nearly so well.

In the neighborhood where I reside, however, I’ve become slightly more casual. I’ll wear shorts around at night and the upper-class folks who live around here have dealt with enough white people not to be too impressed either positively or negatively. That said, once a day, all bets are off and things become extremely uncomfortable for me.

(When the very late monsoon rains come, this will all be underwater and a few hundred people are going to have to find some new shelter.)

After I get back from the archives, I have to walk the half-kilometer gauntlet to the gym. This is wearing on me. Granted, t-shirts with cut-off sleeves and nylon shorts stand out, but these people see me go by every day, and 7 weeks later, they still can’t get enough. Everyday conversations stop, groups of old men all turn towards me and follow me with their heads until I turn a corner. Women walking kabab-sized dogs zoom to the other side of the street. Children whisper. It is bizarre. The walk probably takes 4 minutes, it feels like an hour.

The worst part is yet to come; the gym holds no relief. In fact, I think here I will go so far as to use the word racism, because my experience seems analogous to experiences I’ve heard of from black Americans in predominantly white environments (Note: in 7 weeks, I’ve seen one other white guy who has come to the gym a few times). The first time I went in, the trainers wouldn’t let me touch anything without their assistance. Fine, new place, first time, I understand. 7 weeks later I find it weird that they keep trying to punch in my treadmill settings, which you don’t know, but ok. The equipment in this gym is decently bootleg, so it breaks frequently. When I am using a piece of equipment that gives out, I am subject to a broken-English Inquisition about just what I was doing or which button I pressed. Things break for other people and the trainers chuckle and shrug. Hmm…

The middle-aged women, who shamelessly flirt with the trainers half their age, flee the area when they see me coming and if they want to use a machine, they grab one of the guys who works there and stand behind him while he asks me how much longer I’ll be. That’s another thing, I’m always receiving pressure to hurry up and let other people use whatever I’m using, even when I’ve just started. When I have been waiting patiently for someone to get off their fucking cell phone and finish bench-pressing, no one seems to notice (note: as bad as Americans are with their cellphones, Indians are worse, way worse. People will seriously sit in the leg press machine and talk for 5 minutes while I wait). Whenever I start a set, a bunch of the younger dudes begin the staring again and I’m fairly certain it’s not because they want my number. They’re gawking at me, and yet they’re the ones wearing khaki pants and sandals in a weight room… ok… whatever.

Still, one could dismiss these events. Even taken together, they hardly constitute proof of racism. Now we come to the part that really earns my ire. Unaccustomed as I am to this climate, I sweat more than most Indians. I admit it freely. That said, I’m not the sweatiest person in the gym by a long shot. The 100 kilo, 50 year-old women sweats buckets just standing around. There are others as well. I have never seen one person at this gym wipe down a machine when he or she is done. Yes, that is not hyperbole, I have seen this zero times. The gym doesn’t have towels, as one might have predicted considering it’s in India. Nobody brings them either. Fine, I think to myself, it’s the Indian way.

(Raj Ghat, where they cremated Gandhi)

A couple weeks ago, the trainers started coming over to me from time to time, handing me a disgusting rag, and asking me to clean something I was just using. Though the rag was gross, I would normally have had no problem, but then nobody there ever leaves things clean for me. I have never seen them ask anyone else to wipe up anything. Today, however, was the last straw. One of the trainers interrupts me and asks me to step outside with him. This is odd, but ok, stranger in strange land. He informs me that I need to start bringing my own towel to clean everything I use. Let me reiterate that I’ve seen this requirement placed on none of the other perspiring folks (all Indian) who make use of the facility. What am I to make of this? Is my Slavic perspiration some how different from the South Asian variety? Will a drop of my ritually impure sweat damage someone’s caste status? These are all good questions which I don’t feel like asking people who speak poor English and are hosting me in their country.

(This was some kind of sacred pit of rocks next to where they cremated Gandhi. This kid was amazing. He climbed right into the middle and started tossing rocks out. No one stopped him for five minutes.)

Has the experience scarred me? Did I need this lesson to teach me about the pain of racism? Am I victim? No times three. Of course not, for me it’s just a pain in the ass, and even a bit amusing, though it really is a pain. That’s because I’ll be going home soon. What really sucks is when this garbage happens to one in one’s own country.

Apologies for the delay on this entry. I found myself without a whole lot to say last week. Expect two more entries, maybe three if I’m really quick, before I come home on August 8^th and shut this thing down.

Now playing: "Withstand the Fall of Time" - IMMORTAL. I have a nasty habit of leaving the country when all the kvlt Norsk bands play. Unable to make Immortal's first U.S. shows in 5 years, I've had to appreciate them on the internet. That's about one step away from getting a "Second Life" account I fear.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=erS48SL7o50&mode=related&search=