Take a twenty-something spoiled western girl (aka myself) and put her in the New India.
Here is a selection of posts, to read the actual blog click here.
M for Metro
Delhi Metro does not simply move in space, it moves in time.
You leave the semi-contemporary locations of New Delhi, and get underground. Everything is made of steel and glass, there are escalators and displays that announce when the next train will arrive. And they are on time. Very few things remind you of where you are: the instructions along the escalator to teach how not to get stuck in it (not that obvious if you have never seen and escalator before and you are wearing a saari), the advertising for a younger and healthier Delhi that advises to use the stairs, the ladies-only sits in the train cars.
In the Metro station you can also get a little brochure that explains to you how they built the train, how you should use it, and which rules you should respect. On the last page, it lists penalties for breaking those rules. For instance:
▪ Traveling on the roof: Imprisonment upto (spelt like this) 1 month or fine upto Rs. 50;
▪ Traveling without ticket: Fine of Rs. 50 plus the single fare of the distance or imprisonment upto 1 month;
▪ Misuse of alarm: Improsonment upto 1year or fine upto Rs. 1000;
▪ Walking on the Metro track: Imprisonment upto 6 months or fine upto Rs. 500.
It goes on like this, including serious crimes (sabotage: Life imprisonment or rigorous imprisonment for 10 years or death sentence), giving almost a conversion chart between money and lives: one month of your life, here, is worth between Rs. 50 and Rs. 170.
The metro in Delhi is clean, goes fast and you have good cellphone reception underground.
Welcome to the future.
So if you want to experience traveling in time, what you have to do is head North; and if you want to experience the ultimate time trip, what you have to do is get off at Chawri Bazaar, and exit the station by escalator.
Slowly, while you emerge, the past enshrouds you: your head, shoulder, legs and when it gets to our feet you are walking somewhere in the past, it could be fifty, it could be a hundred years ago. Cycle-rickshaws, crowd, cows, goats (yes, goats), smell of food, of pee, of animals, of human sweat, of chai, of spices, noises, voices, horns, bells, muezzins singing.
It’s India at the nth degree, India as it was, and as - so it seems - it always will be, hidden in the alleys of the Old Capital City. The Metro station, in the middle of it, just looks paradoxical: it is the only stain of a never-coming future.
J for Jugaar
Jugaar is a Hindi word that doesn’t translate. And it doesn’t need to, because it wouldn’t make sense in any place that I can think of. Instead, it makes all the possible sense in India, and I am lead to think that jugaar is what India is based on, what gives it its ultimate energy and its hopeless optimism.
Jugaar is the art of making things work.
Jugaar is keeping together a scooter engine with little iron pieces taken out from the old fence behind the mechanic shop. Jugaar is delivering a king size mattress with an auto rickshaw. Jugaar is using electronic devices where there is no plug, but only wires. Jugaar is turning three wrong-sized pieces of wood in one: not one that looks good, but one that is exactly the size you need. Jugaar is turning old things into other working things, to recycle without caring about the appearance. It is all functionality without any aesthetic.
Jugaar is the art of being creative and finding solutions. Always. With complimentary smile and bubble-head.
We have abracadabra, in the fairy tales. They have jugaar in every single day of their -oh, so real- life.
H for Hello?
At the age of eleven, following the adventures of the Dover-based Smith family in my English textbook, I learnt that when English-speaking people pick up the phone, they say “Hello”.
Almost fifteen years after, following my own personal Delhi-based adventures, I learnt that in India when people pick up the phone, they don’t simply say “Hello”.
They play the “Hello” game.
The “Hello” game is quite easy and provides a lot of fun or frustration, depending on which side of it you play. All the game needs is a telephone and two players on opposite sides of the phone line. The game begins as one calls the other needing some sort of service such as a cab, home delivery, shopping, or simply information. He composes the number and the recipient picks up and answers “Hello!”. To that the caller replies explaining which is he reason why he called, and when he has finished the person on the other side says “Hello?”. That is the most intense moment of the hello game, because at that point the person who called normally checks if the reception is working by trying: “Hello?”.
“Hello!”, the recipient would say, in a perfectly clear I-can-hear-you tone, and then the one who called repeats what he needs, now that the line is finally working.
But his problem is not the line, he is simply caught in the middle of the “Hello” game and he doesn’t know. At least not until the end of his second speech, which will be followed by a long silence and he’d have to ask “Hello?”, to check if anyone is still on the other side of the phone.
“Hello!”, yes, of course the person is there.
At that point two things can happen:
The first is that there can be a third, or even fourth, match of the game.
The second is that the doubt of being stuck in the “Hello” game rises in the caller’s mind.
“Do you speak English?”, he’d ask.
“Hello?”
“English?”
“No sir”.
Game over.
D for Dust
Before coming to live here, even when you came as a tourist, one thing about India you most likely have heard is that there’s a lot of dust.
What you don’t know unless you live here, try to have a house and keep it clean, is ho much dust is the lost of dust everyone speaks about. It’s only when you move here that you find out: India is the mother of Dust.
I really can’t understand why, what causes such an amount of dust to exist specifically in this place:they say it’s the near-by desert, it’s pollution… nothing really seems enough of a reason. It’s just the way it is.
You wipe your house in the morning and you can write on the dust that’s deposited on your furniture much before dinner time. This is a place where you have to clean your air conditioning filter every other day.
Dust is the first thing to welcome you once you land: you smell it in the air, you feel it under your nails, you see it while it gets sticked to your sweaty skin.
Dust stains. It stains your carpets, your pillows, your curtains: it stains them even before you buy them, when they still are in the shop. Dust makes it impossible for you to wear anything white and have it white ever again. Dust effects your sense of touch and your sensibility: everything is felt through a thin layer, no surface is pure.
So you notice it, it irritates you, you try to get rid of it, you clean it and clean it again, your cloths get constantly dirty and you get new ones, you get engaged in a never-ending fight of man against dust. Needless to say, dust always wins. You give up, you eventually tolerate it, but you never get used to it -and you know you never will-.
But dust’s power is much bigger than that. To fully understand it, you have assist to the terrific (both in a good and in a bad way) show of a dust storm. It begins with the sky: it was a sunny day, and all in a sudden everything gets dark. Then the birds fly around desperate, seeking refuge. After a while everything gets really quite, as if even the air was holding its breath. And then the wind arrives, strong. And the dust with it, even stronger. They shut the open windows and break them; they make the garbage fly and stuff falling off the rooftops; they destroy big trees as if they were little bushes.
Then the rains arrives with lightnings and thunders and the whole show goes on while you, inside (and scared), watch and wait until it’s over; when it is, the city is a mess of wrecked trees and broken streets but the air is fresh, and clean to breath.
You stop hating the dust, but only for a moment.
C for Cricket
Before coming here, cricket to me would always and only be the game that the Queen of Hearts would play in Alice in Wonderland.
But here cricket is a sport, and actually THE sport. Cricket is to India what soccer is to Italy: cricket players are rich and famous, they date actresses and cute girls from television, they set fashion trends and support charity campaigns.
Where I come from, kids grow up playing soccer in the streets; here they play cricket. And that is sufficient to make of cricket the second most popular game of the world. (After soccer, of course.)
Now, do you know how does cricket work? I know I didn’t.
To be honest I still don’t know, despite having watched several parts of cricket matches on tv.
There are, though, a few things I have observed about it.
To begin with, cricket is a long game, and by long I mean LONG. Long like one game could last for several days. Which - matching perfectly with the after some time philosophy - doesn’t make it surprising that it is India’s national sport.
Cricket is such a long game that New India’s national sport is not cricket anymore, but Twenty20 Cricket. It is basically a shortened version of the original game, of which I have only understood it is made of 20 something (inning? round? points?), to complete which it only takes about 4 hours.
Most Indians seem quite disappointed with this new thing, which is just a minor and less interesting version of the real game, nevertheless they do follow it with interest. In the evening, when the game is on tv, every screen would show it. And everyone who hasn’t access to a screen nor to the alert cricket sms would keep asking updates non-stop.
To my profane eyes, all that is understandable of cricket is that there’s one guy who throws a ball, a guy that should hit it with a wooden wicket and a guy behind him with a glove. I know there are some other players who run around. I know the players don’t have to be that young (they can play very well in their thirties). These elements all combined with the length of the game made me draw a connection between cricket and baseball (another game that I don’t understand, but that I don’t-understand less than cricket).
I happened to draw this connection - which still makes sort of sense to me - talking with an Indian guy. I shouldn’t have dared.
They’re two completely different things, he told me, baseball is just a long boring game.