It’s Now or Never

14Jun11

I figured it’s about time.

For about two weeks I’ve been thinking about my first blog post about my time in India. I thought about starting the conventional way, where I would give plenty of context and introduce my purpose for being here. I also thought about starting from the beginning, when I showed up at the airport in Mumbai at 2AM without a driver, almost got duped by the currency exchange guy, and almost hit a cow getting to my hotel at 4AM. I even thought about starting with a vignette, rich with the colorful flavors of curry, mangoes, and cold shot of creamy lassi (which I have almost on a daily basis).

But there is no way for me to “start” talking about India and feel that I’ve done justice to my experience here.

And so, as I pick up my pallet and splash a character, a phrase, and a figure here and there, I hope you will be able to have an abstract sense of what it’s been like for me.

To start off, I want you to imagine a green scooter with a yellow top, a broad body, and nice seat that can comfortably seat about 4 people. It doesn’t have any doors or seatbelts, and so you could easily stick your head out the side and enjoy the breeze. It gives off a modest little buzz as you ride it, and a cute little honk. Now, stuff 7 people of various sizes and colors into it with a couple folks hanging out the side and send it off at 30 miles per hour on a dirt road, honking incessantly at large trucks, lazy bikes, and stray animals, and voila—you have yourself an Indian Tuk Tuk.

Welcome, and please enjoy the ride.

It’s good news that these little surface transport vehicles don’t tend to be what we rely on to travel longer distances. For going into the city, we take Taxis—old English Ambassadors left over from the colonial era when India was still under the control of the British crown less than 70 years ago.

By “we”, I’m referring my roommates in Kolkata, India. First up, we have David, the white Jewish dude from Santa Barbra who is surprisingly knowledgeable and open about Asian culture. I spend a lot of time learning about American culture from him including stuff like music, fashion, movies, etc. Damn cool guy. Across from us lives two gals from England. One is a volunteer who is running her own charity (she’s only 20!), and the other gal (madam, to be a bit more accurate) is a veteran scrub nurse in her fifties. Both sport a wicked English accent that I sometimes have a difficult time understanding, but totally awesome people.

We also live with three butler/cook/waiter/houseboy/housekeeper guys who cook us breakfast and dinner every day. They take care of us and watch over the rooms we stay in, which rests in a huge gated community of over 10 twenty-story tall apartment complexes, all of which are 97% empty (still under construction). We are one of the few people living here. Around us, there are fields of grass with animal skulls and bones. The power goes out occasionally in our building. Did I mention we also only drink bottled water stored in the fridge? Sounds almost like living in post-apocalyptic ruins of a once prosperous civilization.

So what exactly are we doing here in a place like this?

David and I are part of a group of 6 UC Berkeley students who have been flown to India to work on a social entrepreneurship project hosted by the Tata Group at their local companies. For the next 6-7 weeks, David and I will be interning at the newly opened Tata Medical Center, which specializes in the diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of cancer patients. It earmarks 50% of its services for discounted or free treatment for people from lower income and underprivileged communities.

My job specifically is to help set-up the international volunteers program. I’ve spent about two weeks now doing research on the programs of local organizations. There’s really nothing big to complain about here—it feels just like a western corporate office setting with the exception that there’s “tea time” and lots of Indian people. The only source of angst is the hospital’s firewall, which blocks websites it deems to be social, political, or entertaining. It’s quite a stoic firewall, and as much as I’ve tried to run a VPN or take a different proxy to access Facebook, nothing has worked. To give you an idea of how dumb things can get, the firewall even blocked Mother Theresa’s “Missionaries of Charity” website that I was doing research on, branding it as “political”.

Anyways.

The weekends are usually when we put our tourist hats on and make a display of ourselves in the city as wealthy foreigners. We’ve visited shopping centers and markets, museums and memorials, temples and ashrams. Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve been a source of great interest, generating the curious gazes of mothers, greying grandfathers, and young children of all ages (babies and toddlers included). We’re as interesting to many locals as the tourist sites we’ve travelled to visit. By ‘we’, I’m mainly referring to David, whose whiteness tends to beat out my Asianness when it comes to attracting strangers who want to shake our hands or take pictures with us (again, with ‘us’ referring mainly to David).  I’ve tried to raise my interest factor by insisting that I’m from the US as well, but that never works. I see nods of approval only when I say my parents came from Asia.

There’s much more I can talk about, but I’m running out of gas. There’s much more I would like to show you, but I’m running out of paint. Just as I’ve found it hard to “start” talking about India, I guess there’s not really a way to “finish” talking about it either.

But I figured it’s about time I took a break.

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