We really shouldn't be able to do this, you know - practically teleport to the other side of the planet, go for a run, a shower and grab a cup of coffee. It's kind of unnerving to think about the countless individuals who dedicated their entire lives to making pilgrimages shorter than what I just flew in under sixteen hours. One normally wouldn't just trip their way into such a totally different, alien culture. Rather you'd meander your way into it, slowly and steadily, one culture at a time, each different from the other by a step or two or three but probably sharing the weather at least.
There's a reason this is called culture shock - like the sudden abrupt trauma of jumping into a cold lake. You were completely dry - now you're utterly wet, a half-second's breadth separating one from the other. It's shocking to be here, this place where people roll up their windows and turn on the AC when this is the coolest air I've felt in over a month, save a few evenings at SVYASA in Bangalore. There's a legitimate fear of creeping consumerism in India today; as KFCs and Pizza Huts crop up more and more, the typically tumbling horizon slowly slips into line, less colorful and bold, more orderly and corporate. But in these few days, all I can see is black and white: the utter comfort and ease with which everything always happens everywhere, the cleanliness of every street and every person, the obvious displays of wealth in cell phones, designer jeans, beer bellies and nice, new cars which no one even notices because it's everywhere all of the time.
More than anything it's what I don't notice that shocks me; it's negative space throwing me off kilter. Where are the beggars, haranguing me for money (because Christ, look at me, I must be loaded)? How the hell is everyone so fat and well-dressed? Where are the skinny, dirty, poking ribs, the tattered rags and desperate eyes? Where is the heat and how can these people walk around in the middle of the day like it's no big deal? Where the hell are all of the smells? Beedies and bananas, rickshaw exhaust, stinking stray dogs, wafting curries and the way everything anything smells baking under hot sun day-in day-out? Where are the masses of people, tumbling and tripping over one another into buses and out of movies, squatting over chai and ogling one another, grinning or serious, mustached every one? And the noise and the sounds - Hindi chatter, fighting dogs, arguing wallahs, fruit vendors, goddamned noisy autorickshaws, laughing children, "sir"-ing workers and pissed-off bosses - all of it, utterly silenced.
It's unnerving to say the least, especially with the jetlag and all. It's a different world and a different way of living. I don't care who you are - India's a tough place to travel and a tougher place to live, whatever your socioeconomic status. I'm grateful for the rampant opportunities I enjoy here - the experiences I've been able to have and the fruits my labor has been able to yield. I look at my similarly academia-bound friends in India who have to struggle through a whole hell of a lot more red tape than I do just to get the chance to work their asses off for a PhD. Who will be completing (and paying for) two master's degrees while I get paid to work at NIH and gain experience and connections which will lay the foundation for my career. I'm grateful as hell for the value our nation places on education and the resources at our disposal to creative opportunities for dreamers with a work ethic.
But I already miss the challenge of day-to-day living or more specifically, the gratification of overcoming small, everyday adversities. There's a color, a spice to life in India which isn't for everyone but will shake you out of your complacency if you ever find yourself growing soft or stagnant. It's easy to forget that our American lifestyle is totally bizarre: daily living has never
been this easy. Getting a meal and taking a nap used to be matters of life and death. Sometimes it seems like life reduces to a matter of picking one luxury over another, constantly evaluating a situation to pick out the easiest option and I think it's a lot of what contributes to the general depression and listlessness of your any given American. When life is a struggle, there's a constant opportunity to overcome adversity. Sometimes you lose of course, but even disappointment and failure are consequences of living at least.
I don't mean to glamorize or romanticize life outside wealthy, Western nations. In fact, I think this idea that life was so much better and more real when we had to fight mastadons and die from measles is utter bullshit and nothing irritates me more than an idealistic anarchist. But non-new world civilizations do have something we don't. Greater difficulty in doing virtually anything for one; it certainly seems to me that life is *generally* more of a struggle outside our nation's borders than within. But there's something about adversity which unifies people: as we collectively identify that which needs change, we come together and do something about it. Individual I's melt into a collective We and suddenly you belong, you become a part of something, connected and inseparable.
Life without a struggle is hardly living at all and a dismembered limb is a bleeding, dying thing. For all the goods our society enjoys (e.g. the wealth and means to educate ourselves, protect ourselves from countless imminent threats, and make some sense of the world around us), I feel our society sometimes disconnects us, leaves us so satisfied we're stranded, not sure what to do. Post-modern life is just plain weird: when survival becomes irrelevant, it's easy to lose direction. You (or I) can become so comfortable that we forget about life outside our bubble, about the billions of people who live without clean water or sufficient food. And when you forget about the struggle so many face, when you fall for the fallacy that the world around you is the world around everyone, it's hard to find the meaning. Being here, satisfying your desires, one after the other becomes repetitive and senseless, an ever-skipping CD that never goes anywhere but only repeats those first four tracks.
In a way, we need the world's problems. We need the struggles that exist because they simply give us something to do. I'm waxing philosophical but I can't help but observe that the nation with the most time to sit around and think about itself has the most people saying "fuck it, I want out." I think this is part of why traveling matters so much to people in our lot: it reminds us that some people have real problems, pops that bubble and gives us something meaningful to do. Maybe one day we'll solve every problem and will finally collectively have to figure out what to do when there's no injustice left to resolve. I sometimes wonder what we'll do, if we ever get there.
