Ahmedabad Again (5-13)

My arrival in Ahmedabad was much later than expected, if you two hour late start, the heavy traffic, and the general incompetence of a number of people, including police officers. The scheduled 9 AM arrival time became 2 PM, and then they didn’t take us anywhere near the main bus stand. Fortunately another guy was going my way, and we split the 100 rupee fare. Thanks to my own sense of direction and determination, I found the exact street of my earlier departure to Bombay, and after some shopping around I managed to pay too much for an AC sleeper bus, which was the only thing available for tonight (apparently it’s wedding season—again). I spent the afternoon at a nearby mall which included a Big Bazaar and—thank Krishna—a MacDonald’s and movie theater. They didn’t have milkshakes today, and the bathroom is almost too small to even walk into (I am, after all, still in India), but I managed to secure my second meal in as many days. In the past three days I have consumed as much fast food as I usually do over the course of several months, treating myself to MacDonald’s and even KFC. I will be glad to be back home where fast food chains aren’t the healthiest and most reliable food around. Movies, being in air- -conditioned theaters and lasting for several hours, are a really comfortable way to spend the hottest part of the day. Even if they are in Hindi.

Irony in Advertising (5-12)

I cannot help but wonder what these advertisements are doing to people. As a privileged westerner, it is not completely unrealistic (or at least not utterly ridiculous) for me to entertain the possibility of looking as cool as that the hipster on the billboard, or of buying the house in the brochure. But for the majority of people who pass by the ads every day, these are someone else’s dreams.

As I watch the old woman sort the garbage she collected from the streets yesterday, so she can earn a few rupees per kilo from the middleman who will deliver her haul to the recycling center, I think to myself that it is probably better that she can’t read English. Even so, the irony of the old sign on the wall behind her, an advertisement from the State Bank of India saying “Buy what you want!” is difficult to escape.

Alone on the Streets of Pune (5-11)

Having never been homeless, and having always had someone to look after me, I never really understood the importance of space. However, in India, I have spent entire days with literally nowhere to be. I wander down the street from intersection to intersection. But there is not even a hospitable place to sit and rest, for everything is so utterly dirty. My status as a foreigner, which carries with it the expectation that I come bearing cash, makes this situation significantly less dire and permanent than it would otherwise be. For I can walk into any coffee shop or air-conditioned store with no questions asked—if one happens to be open or within a kilometer or two of where I am at the moment.

When my train arrived in Pune at 4 AM, neither of these conditions was particularly easy to satisfy. I didn’t want to leave the train station until the sun came up, but I also didn’t want to stay in the train station either, because it is dirty, crowded, and loud. On the platform, there is nowhere to sit except on the ground among hundreds of other fellow passengers-to-be and homeless people, but as soon as I leave the platform I am hounded by a dozen rickshaw drivers asking me which hotel I want to go to. I appreciate it. I really do. But I don’t want to go to a hotel. Please leave me alone.

Even the one little train station coffee shop with a few clean chairs to sit in closes between 5 and 6 AM for cleaning, so I cannot stay here. As busy as the streets will be in a few hours, right now they are almost completely desolate. Except for the dogs, of course. There is nowhere for me to go, and the malls don’t open for another few hours. The streets fill up at the day gets started, but I remain alone.

As demoralizing as is experience can be for me, I can literally only imagine how many times worse it would be if I did not possess the relatively immense power that I do. Even when things are at their worst, I could spend 30 bucks to check into a nice hotel and have them provide everything for me. In this way my effort to experience life as other people do is doomed to fail. I will never have so few choices at them. I will never be trapped to the extent that they are, and so the helplessness a project on to me will forever be but a shadow of what they really feel.

The Bhai Sahib Tax (5-7)

As I have mentioned before, there is a huge problem in India with customer service. One manifestation of this deficit is what I call the “bhai sahib tax,” which I estimate to comprise about 10% of all of my expenditures while in India. This “tax,” probably applied largely to foreigners, is a result of the fact that in any discrepancy or transaction error, the customer always loses. Perhaps your Internet provider credits your balance to the wrong account and won’t fix it even though the mistake was obviously his. Or maybe the vendor doesn’t have exact change, so you pay a few rupees more for your Coke. As you can imagine, this all adds up.

But there are other manifestations. One is: “As you like, sir,” followed immediately by “tap that is not possible, sir.” On what has become almost a daily basis, restaurants do not have the food I select from the menu, even on my second or third attempt. Or some other advertised service is not available, such as Internet, buses, or rooms at a guesthouse.

Many people also appear to have no capacity to balance short and long-term costs and benefits. There is a travel agency next door to the clutch of huts where I’m staying. I happened to notice one day that there was a WiFi signal coming from their general direction, so I stopped by one night to ask if I might have the password. “Of course, as you like!” For the cost of 100 rupees. He was adamant—or perhaps I should say, hyper paranoid and repetitive—that I not share the password with anyone else. He also assured me that if I did, he would be able to tell. Because, you know, it’s very important not to cheat people.

I think you know what’s coming.

In the morning, the signal remained strong but for some reason I could not connect to the Internet. So I wandered back over to travel agency and asked if he might reset the router for me.

“Oh no, sir. Nothing is wrong with the router. I reset the password every morning at 10 AM.” News to me. “So,” I asked, “how was I supposed to know that? And don’t you think it’s a little ridiculous for you to charge me 100 rupees for the couple of hours of Internet I used last night?”

I assumed that at the very least the password should have been good for 24 hours. And obviously, the terms should be made clear in advance. But he thought I already knew that the password was reset every morning! So there was no need to tell me. That would have been a complete waste of time. “Oh, my mistake,” and he goes back to playing solitaire.

I had been planning to buy my bus or train ticket to Pune from that travel company, but, oh well. His mistake. Some friends I met on the beach the next day also wanted to know where to spend a few hours on the Internet. Rather than recommending this place, which was by far the closest, I explained my boycott and took them to another place down the beach. I estimate that “his mistake” cost him at least 2500 rupees in additional revenue. His mistake indeed.

Palolem (5-6)

Even at the beautiful and picturesque Palolem beach of Goa, India is never far away. For a time it might be possible to forget the extreme poverty of so many of the country’s inhabitants, but only for a time. Poor villages, with their dilapidated huts and herds of goats, hover just out of sight, and their inhabitants patrol the beaches all day hawking trinkets to tourists.

They shouldn’t waste their time with me. I won’t even let them show me anything, because I’m not going to buy it, and they would be better off spending their time making their pitch to someone else.

Snapshots of Mumbai, Pt. 2 (5-3)

Tragically, in a crowded city like this there is not enough space to grow food if you can’t afford to buy it. Unless you live on the right-of-way beside the train tracks. They are growing vegetables and flowers in the rubbish and (probably carcinogenic) sludge in the few meters between the track and the wall that holds out the city.

Speaking of the local trains, they don’t check your ticket. I suppose this means you can get a free ride, but if you aren’t sure which way to go or which train to get on, the consequences…well, let’s just say you might get to see more of the city than you expected. You might think that you could show your ticket to some educated-looking person and ask them where to go. In a few hours, you might not think that anymore.

It really isn’t quite as surprising as it is emotionally jarring, but the beggars yell at and hit each other in between trying to look both cute and sad for their potential benefactors.

Despite the change in name from Bombay to Mumbai, many people still call the city by its old name. Apparently the reason for the name change has a lot to do with racial politics and linguistic bigotry, so I am inclined to use the name “Bombay,” which originated when Portuguese and English sailors tried to say “good harbor” in the local dialect. Or something like that. Different names are used for the city, even by the same person, depending on the circumstances. For example, someone might call the main train station “Mumbai Central,” but still call the southern end of the peninsula “South Bombay.”

Speaking of South Bombay, the Rough Guide said there was a lighthouse at the very tip of the peninsula. I never did find the lighthouse, but I did have a rather amusing experience with taxi drivers who did not know what a lighthouse was, and thought I wanted to go to a hotel, or perhaps a power plant.

Snapshots of Mumbai (5-2)

The old men deep in the slum beside the Tata Institute for Social Studies did not want me to go any further. They angrily shook their heads and pointed in the other direction. Perhaps there was something they didn’t want me to see. Or maybe they thought I was lost. It was getting dark and I was heading the wrong direction. Maybe, in their own way, they were trying to protect me.

The chickens spend their lives in cages that are too small, practically devouring each other, before they are slaughtered on the side of the road and devoured by the small percentage of Indians who aren’t Hindu vegetarians. Free range farming and other “animal rights” are apparently luxuries people can only afford when the next meal is not in question.

While waiting for a bus, I saw a man bend over to pick up a partially drunk bottle of Coke from the gutter. He shook the sludge off of it, took a brief look at it, and kept walking.

I couldn’t find a place to eat. And after I found some food at the “Reliance Super” (basically a big grocery store), I couldn’t find a place to eat. The outside windowsill of a nice clothing store down the street from the Reliance seemed to be free of gutter sludge, spittle, and garbage. While I sat there eating my loaf of bread and drinking my lemon juice, I watched the traffic roll by. Among the buses, taxis (in South Bombay the actual taxis, not just rickshaws), and Land Rovers, there was a cart being pulled by an ox. I am still, after all, India. I wasn’t able to ponder any of this for long, because one of the clerks from the clothing store wouldn’t let me sit there any more. Apparently my dirty clothes didn’t mark me as a potential customer.