Things I've Learned in India, in no particular order.

I've not learned so much in so short a time as I have this past week. Even thinking back to my one-week-ago self makes me feel like a stranger. I’m now happy to report that India still offers a chance at having a journey in the sense I've always yearned for; at any given moment while here, I had no idea what to expect. Even now, sitting in the Kolkata airport, exhausted and admittedly a little fogged from last night's good times, I’m halfway-unsure that I’ll be able to make it back to Colombo. The feeling of authentic life, or life without all the usual safeguards, has not yet been lost in this country, as I feel it has in most places I've lived and visited, and it’s a baffling delight to experience it.

Such is life in India. It’s abundantly clear that the dominant values here have nothing to do with what we in the West call “reason”, “logic”, or “sense”, and I've only learned to cope with this difference to a tiny extent. I’ve learned that this country is a cultural behemoth that is struggling fiercely to reconcile its values and history with a path of development that seems to always be just-out-of-reach. And I’ve learned that the fact that people here sometimes do things for absolutely no reason, like honking the horn of their car, and that while excessive noise is annoying, there is a wild freedom in their making it.

I've learned that it’s never quite worth it, under an analysis-of-risk and a desire-to-be-wearing-clean-underwear, to offer your tuk tuk driver an extra ten rupees to get you to your destination double-time. You will also have a cleaner conscience in general if you avoid being the unintentional cause of minor traffic accidents.

I’ve learned that travel and exploration are unquestionably more enjoyable and fruitful when you have company. And I’ve learned that it’s easier to make friends when you recognize both your own frailty and your strengths, and reach out in companionship to others who walk your path, even if only for a moment. I’ve learned that such friendships, as potentially brief as they may be, offer a quick view into that which makes life worth living.

Never before has my own social nature been so clear to me as now, flying solo in a doubly-foreign land. I’ve learned that most people are quite happy to join hands with strangers who are also trying to understand the world in order that they might do some good in it. And I now know that I really, really need to learn, for my own self-respect, a few more languages.

I’ve learned, or rather, emphatically re-learned, that it will never be possible, without the complete unraveling of the native cultures, to overlay the official idea of development onto this land. And I’ve learned that the countless attempts to do so are rather evil, despite their potentially good intentions, in their subversive ethnocentrism. I’ve seen the enormous potential for autochthonous, inside-out development here, and it pains me that this potential is largely neglected in favor of highways, dams, English literacy courses, and new markets for Coca-Cola and GlaxoSmithKline.

I am also delighted to have visited one medical clinic of the Institute for the Indian Mother and Child (IIMC), for there I saw a model of development I can truly cheer for. It gave me hope to see that the ideas of basic health, community empowerment (especially for women), self-sufficiency, and quality human-to-human interactions have not been completely lost in the ratrace flurry of Development (capital “D” intentional). It’s very easy to become disheartened when neither government nor non-governmental organizations seem to be doing the right things, and when the most you can hope for towards poverty alleviation, social justice, and environmental sanity are a few conferences and some full-gloss promotional pamphlets.

I’ve learned that there is such a thing as Ratatat withdrawal, only curable, of course, by a timely mixture of coffee and “Loud Pipes”. (Disregard the funny looks as you jam out. They would understand if they had had that one Indian pop song stuck in their heads for five days.)

I’ve learned that there is an enormous amount of energy in the resistance to the step-by-step, sequential, Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On attitude I and the rest of my culture seem to have evolved and internalized. There is a quiet sort of anarchism here, and it’s slippery as pickles and always will be. The harder the officials push to have everyone in their Rightful Places with Plenty of Work, the harder people will skip work, sleep wherever the hell they want to, buy and sell illegal things, and ignore the “Obey Traffic Laws” signs. I admire this, and hope my country can take a cue or two from India as it rises in power and precedence. “There are no rules to this thing,” said one wise man. Indeed.

I’ve learned that we in the West are caught in a sort of metaphysical crisis, which has been written about and analyzed in countless contexts and through various lenses. Unfortunately, more analyticity and cleverness will not solve the problems of analytically-induced despair and the boredom caused by being too clever all the time. I stop short of saying the East has all the answers, because they’re caught up in plenty of contradictions and crises of their own. But I will say that I’ve learned that it’s easier to take a breath and take it easy when you’re not shoestrung into cooperating with someone else’s view of what you ought to be doing, and the people of South Asia seem to understand that better than Americans. It’s hard to say what The Answers are, but I do believe that there needs to be a real reconciling between these two world-views, rather than the petty liberal “acceptance of others” we’ve been spoon-fed our whole lives. I’ve come to see “acceptance” as merely another excuse for keeping The Other at arm’s length, and I believe humanity must really begin to rectify the collective skeletons in its closets with the kind of lifeways that will be conducive to the continued survival of our species on this planet. It’s going to be difficult, and it will require a new sort of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship we’ve not yet seen. But I’m more hopeful now than in previous weeks that good people the world over will be able to choke up and do what needs to be done. I’ve seen enough wild beauty and committed people this summer to know that a livable, beautiful, crazily diverse future is possible. And that journey is worth taking.

On Bangladesh and Contentment

I’ve recently returned to Sri Lanka from a nine-day trip to Bangladesh where I observed a dizzying array of conferences and workshops. I’ll probably end up reporting on their content as part of my internship duties, so I won’t go over those details too much here. In a nutshell: The conferences were a mixture of positive and negative elements. Some were quite inspiring and productive, others less so. They were also not the predominant reason I traveled to Bangladesh.

I now find myself in a difficult spot: to recount the details of my nine days in Bangladesh would be difficult enough had two days of sickness and fever between now and then not obscured the crispness of my memories. In many ways, the trip was a path-determining experience, one that will undoubtedly shape my approach to life from now on. I have two regrets: first, that I contracted some sickness there, manifesting itself upon my return to Colombo, and second, that I didn’t make the time to travel to the slum village across the river from my inn.

If you are not expecting them, the crowdedness and overall debility of Dhaka may blindside you when you arrive. You will see urban poverty in so many dehumanizing ways, and it will unease you. You will see wrinkle-faced women shoved away from your group by gruff security guards because they were begging from you too aggressively, and you will be relieved to see them go, despite your conscience’s outcries. You will see diseased dogs nipping at equally-diseased centipedes amidst piles of discarded plastic and Styrofoam on the shores of a grey river. You will smell piss and shit at every depression in the sidewalk and you will wonder why the hell no one has taken care of any of these things. Then, you may be ushered to your air-conditioned room on the third floor of your inn (high enough above the level of the streets that you can avoid looking at them), where you can take refuge in cookies, tea, and at least eight minutes of hot shower.

If, however, you know that there are always too-many layers to every story for them to be fully told, you’ll try to take some steps towards unpacking a city like Dhaka. The culturally-shocking scenes will not so quickly distract you from what you would otherwise immediately begin to see: human life, living with dignity however it can, despite hardship and suffering, deliberate neglect and disregard. You will see the corruption of government in its manipulation of LDC status to line the pockets of a tiny elite. You will know that the local mafia somehow has a stranglehold on the lives of almost-every beggar you come across, and that if you give the beggar a taka, it will go straight to a criminal. You will notice that the simplest infrastructural upgrades could easily be handled with at-hand resources and the abundant labor, and you will see that there must be powers working against having usable sidewalks and public sanitation. And later on, outside the city, you will see hectares upon hectares of rice paddies, vegetable farms, and coconut plantations, and you will know that in a land with so much productivity, no one should be going hungry.

Something is wrong here.

To you, my reader, I will admit that I vacillated between the extremes of an exhausted, culture-shocked tourist who too refuge in coffee and hot water, and a critical observer who hopes to see an end of the misery of places like Bangladesh. So much of what I’d been shown and told about Bangladesh has been the story of disaster, poverty, and source-less deprivation. What is not shown in media, particularly in the US, is the story of the peoples’ resilience in the face of disaster and deprivation, as well as the real sources of these disasters and depravities: a climate spun into chaos by uncontrolled (Northern) greenhouse gas emissions as well as the double-punch follow-through of a malfunctioning development mechanism and a corrupt local governing elite. Ordinary Bangladeshis are, from what I could tell, tired of being labeled “Least-Developed”: in their view, as long as that label sticks, their state will not improve. Ordinary Bangladeshis are also, from what I saw, some of the most hospitable people I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. You don’t see on CNN just how brilliant their smiles can be.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I come from one of the most-contradictory cultures on the planet, the number of contrasts Bangladesh takes in stride is startling. Ultra-rich/ultra-poor. Urban “investment”/rural neglect. One of the highest concentrations of development organizations on the planet/LDC status. Tri-axle dump-trucks FULL of fruit barreling down the roads/inadequate calorie and nutrient intake in the hinterlands. What all of it seems to boil down to is an obscene maldistribution of wealth. But even more than wealth, per se, it is the (deliberate?) denial of necessities to those at the bottom of the hierarchy of capital. It is the domination of the poor and powerless by local and international elites, local and multinational industries and corporations, and an international development project that counterintuively benefits from never-quite-alleviating poverty.

What’s upsetting to a self-critical Western psyche like my own is that my complicity in such a system has heretofore implicated me as an accessory to these crimes. Investigations into Bangladeshi sweatshops for ready-made garments put a spotlight on the West’s guilty, greedy consumption habits a few years ago, and there the story seemed to end. We’ve not yet matured, it would seem, to being able to question the validity of the economic system wherein setting up sweatshops in Bangladesh to produce items for sale in the US makes fiscal sense. How much misery must be stitched into our clothes for us to demand a different way? Must we feel such misery ourselves?

My trip to Bangladesh was too short. I intent to rant about NGOs and their conferences a little while later, but I can excuse myself for a moment by saying that such conferences had my hands thoroughly tied for most of my ten days in that beautiful country. I was present enough to see, however, that there is something thoroughly offensive about building elevated highways above slums instead of building meaningful livelihoods for those who live in them.

I would like to end this short, disjointed post on a more moderate note. Most people I saw in Dhaka, Chittagong, and in-between were healthy-looking. They were also remarkably easygoing.

There was a quiet sort of friendliness that exposed itself as joy in the muddy, roadside game of football, in the explosion of laughter at some internal joke from the crowd of brilliantly-saree’d women returning to their bamboo-stilted village, and in the basic generosity of those few-dozen shopkeepers who saw the rain-drenched foreigners trying to keep themselves dry in a monsoon and offered plastic bags or the shelter of their awnings. Misery and contentment are surely at odds with one another. Now, I see just how important it is for us to seriously examine the systems that produce misery and rob people of happiness all over the world. This is the most important task my generation faces.