First trip to the city outskirts

It's 6:45 in the morning and I'm sitting in the commons - this is the first morning I've woken up and felt like I'm in India. There's so much to talk about and it's all been so jumbled that I really have no idea where to begin. I guess I'll turn to chronology for now.

I began the morning by taking pictures of the old SIP house before walking over the the Folk Culture Studies building and beginning . We all received these hand-woven bags which essentially amount to Indian man-bags, filled with materials concerning our next several days of orientation and Hyderabad at large. Chai was served, and we rode over to see the newly constructed SIP house. It's more of a resort than a house and I can't help but feel embarrassed at receiving brand new housing when the money could be used for other purposes (i.e. not pampering American students), especially after seeing the slums behind it, where the builders have lived for the last several months.

I was discussing with some friends the extreme hospitality of Indians, which is both extremely generous and moderately uncomfortable when it seems like we're being treated or regarded as being somehow better or superior. Hyderabad, the city, really seems to capture the tension between traditional and modern, rich and poor, rural and urban which challenges India as a result of globalization.

As we traveled through the city in the afternoon we got our first taste of India outside the University bubble. Never have I seen so much vying for so little space. Temples, shops, slums, apartments, expensive new office buildings and massive billboards all fight for space and your attention, stumbling over each other in a sort of unintelligible jumble which just leaves you confused as to what exactly you're looking at and how it all fits together. So much modernity, from the shops selling western products, to the subway ads, to glass vaults for wealthy businesspeople is prevalent. Yet on the same streets, cows amble through slums as a ragged man squats in the street, smoking.

We left our bus and did a bit of shopping and I was overcome by just how massively different everything was. Indians stared at us as we wandered, doelike, into the shop. Within the store, the uncomfortable sense of being deferred to because of my skin color and implied nationality continued, as women seemed to avoid both my eyes and my path, adjusting themselves to my presence. I can't help but feel like a bit of a sham - there seems to be so much hope in their eyes when they meet mine, for the American Life so many Indians seem to aspire towards. While I hope that globalization has improved the lives of people here, I can't help but feel like I'm peddling defective wares when I smile and say hello; the smiles of the children in the slums demonstrate such a greater happiness than I think the pursuit of wealth could ever accomplish, and I wonder if India's loss of simplicity and Westernization is really all it's cracked up to be.

Going into the city was eye-opening, for certain. For all my hand-wringing, the welcoming smiles of most everyone I saw (well, the men anyways, societal propriety being what it is) really did warm my heart and I felt that incomparable Indian hospitality I've heard so much about. I guess I just hope it doesn't verge on deifying or...just massive resentment if this whole Westernization thing doesn't pan out. But I can certainly appreciate people wanting a better Standard of Living (rife with inherent subjectivity) and the freedom to pursue what they will - and towards that end, I hope they find their happiness. I am just so overcome by my ignorance of Indian life, history and culture to feel remotely qualified to begin identifying problems or solutions within this society or comment on where they're headed as a people and whether that's the Right (see Standarding of Living) way to go.

This is turning out to be a massively humbling experience. A passage I read in the Dao De Jing just before leaving comes to mind:

"Not-knowing is true knowledge.
Presuming to know is a disease.
First realize that you are sick;
then you can move toward health."

Baby steps.