After two international flights and one very long delayed national flight, I am home, well, I am in my mother's home. Buried in the ease and quiet of a small american western resort town, I try to regroup from my travels before returning to Oregon to work. I have depleted the majority of my funds, and TG is already discussing the next country. Oh boy! I better get back to the grind. Meanwhile, TG is still there, in that strange dust and spice infested world, finishing up his projects. He is finally breaking out of his solitude, and beginning to have interactions with the people around him. These are the stories he shares with me, in his own words:
As I was nearing the end of the epic "Shantaram" in the Parkstreet Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata, the characteristically rude staff told me to get out of their cafe. So I found a corner and was immediately approached by a young man with a lot of questions. He was a chemical engineer, had once worked on converting methane to hydrogen in a clean energy research program (I had worked on hydrogen transportation in my internship with U.S. Congress) so we talked about that for a bit. He said he liked to talk to strangers and treat people as his subjects. The store was closing but he was keen to continue the conversation, so we went and grabbed some chicken tikka in a restaurant shaped like a train.
He talked about his ambition to be famous so that he could show all the people who had disrespected and disregarded him that he was better than them. He spoke of hating India and Indians, and hating his job as well. He mentioned getting a lucrative scholarship in Europe but having to turn it down because his mother said no. He said that no one really understood him, that he had to act and pretend all the time, and that I was one of the only ones who had ever seemed to accept him. The next day he called, but I was too busy to meet. The memory of a neglected and similarly intense lonely boy, when I was young, prompted me to call back this Indian fellow to hang out on my last day in Kolkata. He told me that his mother ran the family and his father was rarely home. He had been instructed to be with his sister at all times. He shared her friends from an early age and her things and life. He almost died after a snake bite as a boy, which made him terrified of dying alone, and caused his mother to never let him go out without his sister till he went to college. His mannerisms were very feminine, and while in most U.S. universities, there would be a group of people ready to accept that kind of behavior, apparently Indian universities are still culturally dominated by machismo. Even in his working life, he couldn't connect with anybody in Kolkata any more than an effeminate man could connect with anyone in my redneck home town. Its time for the tyranny of machismo to die in popular culture. They need a Boy George (or a Michael Stipe) and a Patti Smith (or even a Wendy O).
On the other hand, in my first foray talking to foreigners in a long time, I ran into a Portlander volunteering in a hospice for the dying. He worked with a crew of tough mother fucking nuns helping impoverished Indian people die with some dignity. The hospitals here. I mean: people are lying and screaming in crowded rooms with no attendees and the hygiene could not possibly by good enough. People are taking their last breaths in the streets, coming in with terrible wounds and diseases that could have been cured if they had waited until way, way too late.
And there is me, in villages that are drinking straight out of a waste canal, floods throwing them from their homes 2-3 times per year, barely scraping a harvest together or always a few days away from completely broke. Fishing, craft markets, agriculture, all declining in a crisis state: and there are safety nets here in India: not always the best implemented safety nets, but the government does help hundreds of millions of people.
It seems like in such a state, a social revolution for equality would be secondary or thirdary to basic human needs. I'm not sure. Thats the way it worked in America, we got richer, then we got more tolerant fifty years later. But India needs to leapfrog the U.S. in development patterns in a lot of ways, and I've met so many women ready to change the way women are treated there and with the power and education to do so. One more generation of mothers, hopefully. Mothers that say, "go out and make a good impact on the world" instead of "stay here with me and never leave."
As I was nearing the end of the epic "Shantaram" in the Parkstreet Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata, the characteristically rude staff told me to get out of their cafe. So I found a corner and was immediately approached by a young man with a lot of questions. He was a chemical engineer, had once worked on converting methane to hydrogen in a clean energy research program (I had worked on hydrogen transportation in my internship with U.S. Congress) so we talked about that for a bit. He said he liked to talk to strangers and treat people as his subjects. The store was closing but he was keen to continue the conversation, so we went and grabbed some chicken tikka in a restaurant shaped like a train.
He talked about his ambition to be famous so that he could show all the people who had disrespected and disregarded him that he was better than them. He spoke of hating India and Indians, and hating his job as well. He mentioned getting a lucrative scholarship in Europe but having to turn it down because his mother said no. He said that no one really understood him, that he had to act and pretend all the time, and that I was one of the only ones who had ever seemed to accept him. The next day he called, but I was too busy to meet. The memory of a neglected and similarly intense lonely boy, when I was young, prompted me to call back this Indian fellow to hang out on my last day in Kolkata. He told me that his mother ran the family and his father was rarely home. He had been instructed to be with his sister at all times. He shared her friends from an early age and her things and life. He almost died after a snake bite as a boy, which made him terrified of dying alone, and caused his mother to never let him go out without his sister till he went to college. His mannerisms were very feminine, and while in most U.S. universities, there would be a group of people ready to accept that kind of behavior, apparently Indian universities are still culturally dominated by machismo. Even in his working life, he couldn't connect with anybody in Kolkata any more than an effeminate man could connect with anyone in my redneck home town. Its time for the tyranny of machismo to die in popular culture. They need a Boy George (or a Michael Stipe) and a Patti Smith (or even a Wendy O).
On the other hand, in my first foray talking to foreigners in a long time, I ran into a Portlander volunteering in a hospice for the dying. He worked with a crew of tough mother fucking nuns helping impoverished Indian people die with some dignity. The hospitals here. I mean: people are lying and screaming in crowded rooms with no attendees and the hygiene could not possibly by good enough. People are taking their last breaths in the streets, coming in with terrible wounds and diseases that could have been cured if they had waited until way, way too late.
And there is me, in villages that are drinking straight out of a waste canal, floods throwing them from their homes 2-3 times per year, barely scraping a harvest together or always a few days away from completely broke. Fishing, craft markets, agriculture, all declining in a crisis state: and there are safety nets here in India: not always the best implemented safety nets, but the government does help hundreds of millions of people.
It seems like in such a state, a social revolution for equality would be secondary or thirdary to basic human needs. I'm not sure. Thats the way it worked in America, we got richer, then we got more tolerant fifty years later. But India needs to leapfrog the U.S. in development patterns in a lot of ways, and I've met so many women ready to change the way women are treated there and with the power and education to do so. One more generation of mothers, hopefully. Mothers that say, "go out and make a good impact on the world" instead of "stay here with me and never leave."
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