Children Left Behind

    Most days I pass slums and I don't feel much.

    Maybe that means I'm a terrible person, maybe I still haven't fully realized that those slums, streaming by my car window like a roll of a film, are in no documentary, that people like you and I are living in shacks of tarp and iron sheeting.  I hoped it wasn't just me, and I asked my host sister about her emotional responses to seeing Indian poverty.  "Nothing", she said, and shrugged.

    Perhaps many people, not just us, feel guilty of this lack of feeling and fill that cavity with donations to charities or mission trips.  Although I'd like to change those living conditions and I'm planning to in my life and career, it's impossible and antipragmatic to have an emotional response to the plight of billions of humans, especially when I grow accustomed to it--shabby tents blending in with the landscape.  ("One death is a tragedy", Stalin wrote. "One million deaths is a statistic").  It's still hard to admit that I'm not feeling the feelings I feel I should. 

    Now that I've come across as an ignorant white male upper-middle class American teenager, which I am, let me clarify.  Although the poverty might not always grab me (except when it does: a small child, clutching my wrist, asking for money, bursting my bubble of removal,) what angers me is instead the disparities in opportunity.  That means poverty, of course, but especially education.

    Working alongside tenth grade students at a government school has been one phenomenal privilege and heart-wrenching ordeal.  Each Friday for the past five weeks, we've worked in small groups on meaningless projects about American and Indian celebrities.  Yet when we left for the last time, there were tears.

    I suspect that the crying didn't come from the knowledge that we would never again see our partners again, though that was certainly a part.  The incredible, simple fact that my partner and I are Facebook friends delays that knowledge for me.  Nor did the tears (for the record, not mine) trickle from the discovery that the fun was over--I would be having plenty more dance parties and laughing fits back in America.  Instead, my sadness, at least, came from bitterness.  The realization that I had done absolutely nothing to deserve a comfortable life in America, a school and teachers that are first-class and taken for granted all the time, the ability to choose my own career without restraints.  And the cruel fact that these kids from lower class families had likewise done nothing to be crammed into classes of 40 in a Marathi-medium school (an immediate disadvantage in the competitive workforce in which those wealthy enough have attended English language education) and to have to struggle out of their parents' economic class.

   We were with our partners for just an hour and a half each week.  Yet the connection we made rivaled the bonds with our host families.  I'll remember them for a long time: Hemlata, the girl who didn't speak too much English but had a happier smile than anyone, whose family had moved all the way from Rajasthan in search of better education.  Prakash, with an impeccable moonwalk, who wants to become an engineer but told me he will never stop dancing. I want these kids to succeed, and I know they can.

    The truth is, however, I'm never going to see them again.  The twenty-first century has made incredible progress in facilitating worldwide connections--Prakash and I can now communicate with just two computers and a sprinkle of wifi--but I still might never know what happens to them.  And if they step out of the lower class and pursue their own passions, there will still be millions of others who can't. 

    Even those with parental guidance, the resources to continue education, and the smarts to succeed do not have the same liberties I've been given.  Unless every single kid I've met here (I can think of 7) has engineering in his or her veins, just one slice of the career option pie is being set before them.  With societal pressures and economic incentives behind that push, I imagine it would be difficult to refuse.  Perhaps I simply don't know (engineering is the only safe choice in this still developing, often less-than-structured nation,) but I vastly prefer the selection of jobs displayed to me like pieces of pie in a shop window that all cost the same.

    I've never felt that I have a duty to make everyone equal.  But I do strongly feel that everyone has the duty to ensure everyone has the same opportunities, for that's the only way democracy, capitalism, and the world work.  They just don't yet.

No Moped. So I Moped.

    "Look right, then left, then right again" was the advice I repeatedly received on crossing the street before coming here.

    That turned out to be largely irrelevant as scooters, cars, oxen, and buses are liable to drive/walk in the wrong lane, directly bombarding oncoming vehicles and innocent pedestrians.  In the United States, you cross the road when no one is coming.  In India, there's someone coming, so it's more of a rough calculation of incoming vehicle speed, your adrenaline level, and number of body parts you're willing to go without.  In other words, riding on a scooter as your host mother drives would be suicide.  And since it's against the NSLI-Y rules, obviously no one does it.  I certainly haven't.  

    The first time I was invited to pick up my host sister on a motorcycle I told my host mom that, no, I can't, yet there seemed to be some communication error between the rule setters and the host parents.  We were later told by our Resident Director that if she never found out, well, there wouldn't be any issues.  But I stood strong, never gave into temptation, and never got to have one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.  I knew that if I did, I would have to write about it on my blog, and if the State Department read my blog, I'd be in trouble.  So this my blog post about definitely not riding the motorcycle.

    I never get to feel wind speeding through my helmet-less hypothetical hair, nor monsoon rains splattering my face and shirt.  I never thought, "How are we going to fit a third person onto this scooter?" halfway through the trip, rather belatedly.  Nor could I learn by watching families, speeding past us, stacked like the groceries they carried  that there is always, always room for another person on a motorcycle.  I was unable to discover my place in the puzzle of Pune traffic, which has its own hidden, calm logic that supports the lawless chaos at the surface.  (On a separate occasion in a rickshaw, my driver snuck our fragile cart between two trucks with centimeters to spare.  Lanes, you ask?  Besides the point.)

    Motorcycles are a different medium through which you communicate with the city, a completely separate approach than car, foot, or balcony view.  In a way, you open yourself up to the pollution, the full 360 degree sights, the stares of strangers.  There's no glass to roll up as a middle-class shield from the 8 year old beggar (or older but stunted) with a painted on mustache, doing a dance that would be so, so hysterical if it wasn't so sad.  But you have your own privacy curtain: speed and mobility, which means no one can see that you don't belong as you clutch your host mother's shoulders to survive.

    At least that's what I imagine, because I obviously wouldn't know.

Darth Veda: Science Fiction, Religion, or Just Plain Science?

    I've noticed that in much of western world, adhering to science while taking religious doctrine at its word is viewed as not just contradictory, but impossible.  And for a reason: how can somebody believe in both creationism and evolution?  In miracles and the eternal, unchanging laws of physics?  In contrast, it seems to me that many Indians, at least my host family, are able to have faith in science while backing their religious beliefs with evidence.

    On the rooftop of my concrete apartment building one evening, a view of the Parvati temple on one side and the most respected school in Pune on the other, my host father, brother, and I had a fascinating conversation about Hinduism and India's ancient history that explained to me the paradoxical connections between the two forces.

    At the center of the small garden on the terrace was a single, shadowed stalk of corn that my host dad pointed out to me.  "Maharashtra's major food staple is corn, and so we worship it.  We worship what makes us strong."  He then asked why Hindus worship fire.  I didn't know, but I imagined it had some religious significance.  Instead, "because what was there before the Big Bang? Fire."  I didn't know Hinduism and the Big Bang could coexist in the same sentence, especially given my limited knowledge of gods, goddesses and monsters that seemed more to fall, for me, outside of my brain's nonfiction section.

    Yet the bridges between faith and logic continued to materialize throughout the conversations I've had.  NASA has ancient Sanskrit prayers written on its walls, according to my host dad.  A passage in the Mahabharata, one of India's two national epics, includes the exact distance from the earth to sun, proving that Hanuman, the Hindu god, was able to jump from the planet to the star as according to traditional legend.  The Veda we sing every morning at school has the highest energy level of all prayers.  Water should not be drunk cold because it extinguishes the fire in one's stomach as acids and alkalines dissolve food.

    A quick note: I haven't done enough research to say whether each of these facts are true, and since I'm not Hindu and I don't practice Ayurvedic medicine, I'm unknowledgeable about a lot of these concepts.  Instead my point is that Indians seem to feel more comfortable describing religious customs in scientific terms and vice versa than many others.

    Most of the world used to enjoy that link, the mutual reinforcement of religion and science.  Ancient Mayan priests developed incredibly accurate calendars to foresee future dates.  Egyptians built the pyramids to prepare for their afterlife, and in doing so accomplished ingenious feats of engineering.  The pagans of Britain built Stonehenge as a giant solar calendar to aid in their worship.  But in the more recent western world, science began to challenge religion, rather than contribute to it.  Galileo, after championning the heliocentric theory, was sentenced to house arrest for life by the Pope.  In more recent times, Ken Hamm of the Creationism Museum and Bill Nye the Science Guy fought a proxy war of this important debate.  Of course there are many who take pieces of both, merging them into a personal and balanced belief system.  But it still seems to me the divide is wider in the United States.

    If America could incorporate both spirituality and science as effortlessly and peacefully as in India, surely both opposing groups might benefit.  Otherwise we have little chance of facing today's moral and scientific challenges: of abortions, of stemming climate change, of preventing the rise of the oceans, the Noah's flood of the future.

Always Interraceting

    My kitchen balcony is so full of character it deserves its own blog post.  Fourth floor looking down, and the strolling people below are lit by the glow of small restaurants: an ice cream shop I long to visit to buy a Cad-B, an Indian chocolate milkshake, and the samosa place (word on the street says it's the best in the city) on the ground floor.  Through the gaps in the blossoming Shirish tree reaching almost to my balcony and stretching up to the fifth floor, I can see our neighbors, our friends my host mom calls out to in Marathi in the morning, preparing dinner.  Just a block away Dnyanprabodhini rises like a multistoried cake, topped with traditional architectural icing and sugared arches like the Taj Mahal.  It's 7 o'clock and the pavement is lined with scooters, the vehicles of the young men and women who patron my street, the food hub of Pune.

    Every so often as dusk falls, a single motorcycle goes weaving through people unnecessarily quickly, unabashedly  showing off.  From the ground he looks like he's going to injure a pedestrian but from up here, it's quaint.

    Exotic sights pass along from time to time.  Sounds send me running to the terrace--the steady beating of the drums carried by the young beggar women to announce their grand arrival, food plates balanced on heads.  They, like all, stop at the coffee shop for an afternoon refreshment.  Another day loud cracking noises are slapped from the ground outside.  It's the young man looking for money as he self-flagellates with a thick, 6 foot whip.  My host brother Tanmay points to his scarless back.  "It's a scam," he says.  "He's just whipping the ground".  He's right: from above, his tricks are obvious.

    But for all my love of the darkening street, the couples strolling and students chatting with Cad-B in hand, I belong looking down at the scene, not in it.  When I emerge from my van carrying my backpack each day, it's clear I don't belong.  Suddenly there's a string across two signs, seemingly meant to clothesline me.  A backhoe threatens me as it backs into the construction site adjacent to my building, where migrant workers set their toddlers to watch as they build, mainly by hand.  But most often, I get confused stares from the young customers, curious to see the American student.

    So I watch from the balcony, like a plaintive Juliette.  Oh romantic street, wherefore art though in India?  Deny my nationality and refuse my German last name, or if thou will not, at least give me a samosa.

    I come back into the kitchen and decide that samosas can wait, it's time for dinner.  After all, this is a romance of culture and taste, not a tragedy.

Of Cupcakes and Calamities

   On the front page of yesterday's online New York Times, two articles caught my attention.  The first, violence in the Middle East.  I don't remember what precisely.  The second, my favorite cupcake shop Crumbs closing all its stores.  I skipped the first and was emotionally distraught at the second, and I immediately texted my dad in America to buy some endangered desserts while he still could.  (They were gone already.)  But of course that's the kind of irrational, self-centered behavior that turns blind eyes to endless violence and poverty.   So what can you do to to make issues feel closer to home?  Make your home closer to issues, I guess.  And I did.

    A few days ago a small, low-intensity bomb went off in the parking lot of a police station just a short fifteen minute walk away from my house.  Thankfully only a few people got hurt, and don't worry, our safety isn't in jeopardy or anything like that.  But my point is that with proximity to catastrophe comes a sense of realism and awareness, the foreign becoming the domestic.  More pervasive than catastrophes are the less drastic things--frequent power cuts, a late monsoon causing drought.  We all have a bit of the "doesn't affect me" attitude until it does.

    I know I won't be the first or last to say that traveling has been an eye-opening experience, and I'm cautious of heaping cliches about how India has changed my life.  So I'll avoid platitudes and end with a piece of advice--even if you don't enjoy the food, even if you're terrified of insects, even if (especially if) you  don't want to see crushing poverty, go to India. Or Africa, or practically anywhere else.  You'll choke on chilies and squirm at the bugs and be begged at by the homeless, but you'll become a more worldly and understanding person.

    Only three more weeks--how is that even possible?

Does Ronald McDonald Feel Shame?

    While I watched the video of my host parents' wedding ceremony last night so that my cliche American desire of attending an Indian wedding might be at least partly fulfilled, my host dad told me about his German friend at the marriage who kept leaning over chairs to take pictures. Though he came across as ridiculous and stuck out like a sore foreign thumb, my host dad instead complimented him on his lack of embarrassment. I think we're all likewise accepting our foreignness as time passes, because frankly, what else can we do?  Although we get stares, I think I've gotten used to it and, if it's going to happen no matter what, might as well embrace it.

    Thus, if you happened to see fourteen loud and obnoxious American teenagers wearing matching red polo shirts entering a McDonald's on the Fourth of July, taking videos of each other doing poorly organized choreographed dances, know that there was no shame (fine, a little shame) in their actions.

    At the same time, we have the responsibility of representing our nation. The knowledge that we are the forefront of American grassroots diplomacy is a burden we're privileged and honored to carry at all times.  After all, we're probably the first Americans most of the kids here have ever met, and the briefest of rude gestures or unfriendliness can be the seeds of negative stereotypes.  And stereotypes here, in my brief experience, seem less discouraged than in the United States. On multiple occasions negative attitudes towards the British, Chinese, Muslims, and Africans have been blatantly expressed to me, so generalizing attitudes seem to stick around and spread here.  It's our duty to promote our own opinions, respect others', and show a positive face of America when a plurality of foreigners think of drone strikes and fast food before curious and respectful teenagers. For all the importance of language learning, I imagine this side of NSLI-Y is equally crucial. It's what the State Department is indirectly paying for, many years down the road.

    But in the meantime, we're having a good time.  When you're singing the national anthem to an assembly hall of Indian children on Independence Day before heading out for French fries and milkshakes, there's a lot of fun involved.  As I taught my host family (and they laughed for a full five minutes,) YOLO.

About Me and Food

    And now moving to my favorite topic of all.  "Food, glorious food", Oliver and friends once sang in whiny prepubescent urchin voices.  But instead of a destitute orphan boy in industrial London, I feel like the Maharaja of Maharashtra as I gorge myself through India without the shackles of parental constraint nor of self control.  While I can't stop and won't stop eating, I'll take a break now and explain what kind of nourishment is making fitting in my airplane seat a pressing concern.

    First, chapati. I thought of getting a shirt that says "chapati is life" when I come back. I mean this in a philosophical way as well as in a humorous one. As my host dad, brother, and I were on the roof one evening, my host dad indicated the lone stalk of corn that was growing as a garden centerpiece. What I had thought was an intriguing planting decision actually had a deeper meaning.  "We worship what makes us strong", he told me.  And since we have chapatis, corn tortillas one uses to scoop up sauce or vegetables or potatos, as an integral part of lunch and dinner every day, chapati indeed makes us strong.  It's made fresh in the kitchen twice a day by a cook, if that's the right term, and I'll never grow tired of it.

    Daal, or lentil soup, is the other staple of lunch and dinner.  Rice with spices and sauce, aloo (potato), gobi (a word for both cabbage and cauliflower), and chai tea (offered 3 times a day) are what I live on. Also, there's a samosa shop reputedly the best in town on the first floor of my apartment building, and the samosas, which are 17 rupees (20 cents), are phenomenal.  And then the mitthai, or sweets: laddu, pedha, orange and mango barfee the consistency of sweet fruity fudge, gulabjamun, and more I haven't yet tried.

    My friend on the program and I today proposed to our chapatis today.  This is my life.  We have an major work booklet from Hindi class called "About Me and Food". I  don't know how they pinpointed my interests so exactly.