scattered thoughts

The last few days in Delhi were on the intense side, and it felt odd to be leaving the little cocoon of security that was Chandiwala and the AIF staff and fellow fellows. I am not used to traveling or living abroad with American support around, but I got used to that luxury pretty quickly it seems. I arrived in Kolkata just about a half hour ago, and was greeted with the hospitality of Reach India. I will be living in their office guest room until September 20, when I will move to a flat about a five minute walk from the office.

But back to Delhi for a minute. The evening before I left for Kolkata on the night train we went on a site visit to a shelter for homeless people who have been living on the streets. Someone asked whether this was a place where the people living on the streets under plastic tents could go. Not so- if they had plastic tents then they had homes. This was a shelter for homeless people who slept on the pavement without any form of roof over their heads. They were primarily women and children who had run away from abusive homes. Two nursing women showed me their permanently broken limbs. I flew a paper airplane with a kid for most of the visit.

On the way home from the shelter we passed a nasty and lethal motorbike accident. I had forgotten how common this was in the developing world. I saw many horrendous scenes of bodies splattered on the street while living in Ecuador.

Before leaving Delhi yesterday we had a leftist/chomskyesque speaker in the morning who discussed people’s movements, the push for Kalistan, the Kashmir quagmire, and Zapatistas among others. It is so good to know that I am a fellow of such a lefty org. After the speaker, a filmmaker brought in the most disturbing documentary that I have ever viewed. It followed the story and aftermath of the brutal rape and murder (apparently she was shot through the vagina, as well as in 7 other areas of her body), in the midst of an ongoing state/guerilla conflict in Manipur- an Indian state that borders Burma and China. Subsequently local women took to the streets and showed up to the police headquarters naked and with a banner that read “We are Here to be Raped By the State.” They stood outside the police station gates and screamed for the men to come out and rape them. The scenes in the video were horrifying, and included shots of the dead woman. Mid doc I had to leave to catch my train, so I never saw the end. Lately, however, the issues experts who were coming to speak with us and the site visits were getting more and more intense and seemingly hopeless. (Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a relief to find that the tvs in our rooms had the cartoon network. I watched two episodes of Richie Rich and one Popeye in Hindi.) In the past two days we learned about Dalit rights (the word used to refer to all the untouchable castes), women’s issues (with a woman from SEWA bank- woohoo!- an org that partially propelled me to India), the myth of microfinance as the miracle solution to development problems, and we had a rural site visit which was ok but I found it difficult to concentrate on anything other than sweating, feeling hot, and finding shade. The key to rural site visits is finding the coolest room in the hood- the dung room. Hurrah for the dung room!

I think the process of getting to the station in Delhi will be a metaphor for my time here in Kolkata. The taxi was late getting to the station in Delhi so we sped along the roads for 45 minutes. Just as we turned into the station the car hit something and swerved to the left then right very suddenly, and was seemingly out of control. It then stopped. The driver got out of the car and saw that he had hit a large cement brick, which caused a flat and probably axel damage as well. I was only a few hundred feet from the entrance of the station and the crushing masses of people, yet it was understood that I would wait until he had fixed the car so I could get a ride to the front of the station. While I was in the car he jacked it up (actually it’s kind of cool to be in a jacked up car), which I find funny and absurd. I looked out of the back window of the car and watched an elephant walk by, with an intricately painted face and a man riding on top. Men were peering into the car to look at me, and other cars were honking at our jacked up car because we were blocking the entrance to the train station.. . .Anyway, somewhere in that story lies a metaphor, but I am not yet sure exactly what it is. But I think it’s a good one.