Pictures

I've uploaded some of the non-phone pictures from the trip in a Picasa album. Hope that you like them.

Pleeze stop

Yet another demonstration of the US's ability to export terrible advertising, preferably with some anti-didactic elements.

We and the village

We went, my brother and I, cycling on a narrow half-dirt road past the small grouped settlements that I guess you would call villages, here. We'd gotten our bikes at the gate of the resort, a pair of large wooden doors set in concrete walls that generally kept us in and the villages out during our stay, now coming to a close. The resort was something else, and I can't describe it without sounding admiring, which I'm not, or ungrateful, which I hope not to be. But for now it might do to think about countless staff in gleaming white shirts (so white, nothing in India is so white) serving Indians in real-not-knock-off-Gucci and Germans on yoga holiday. And me, of course, and my family.

I'd often wondered what people meant by villages in India. My only reference point was the small rural idyll terrorized by bandits in the movie Sholay, itself based on Sergio Leone's westerns, so that the place looked more Dakotaish than Desi. In Westchester, where I mostly grew up, there are towns and there are villages, though the distinction between the two seems partly size and partly real estate marketing. Mostly the latter.

In India the people I know who come from the villages are drivers and cooks, and I can't say, unfortunately, that I know them well.

We passed through the villages just before noon on a Sunday, when the children were out in their yards and many people were walking on the narrow road with nowhere, it seemed, to be. Some carried things hither and yon, women with large bundles on their heads. Children yelled in English as we passed, "Good morning, what is your name?" and repeated my reply, and told me theirs when I asked. There was washing by a small creek.

The houses were not all of one type, but ran from the ramshackle thin-walled tin-roofed through to sturdy multi-story and solidly middle class. I took no pictures of them. Already the cultural imperialism of the voyeurism of the expedition bothered me.

I did photograph this small place to gather and pray, though. The population of Kerala is about 20% Christian, tracing back to 52AD when Thomas the Apostle is held to have come a-calling. The churches I have seen here are beautifully colored, blue and yellow cropping up in the deep green jungle. This building, not a church, but a strange little site to show and sustain devotion, stands against the lake, which perhaps you can see. To me it seems (and this is strange, go figure) like a ruin-in-waiting, for anthropologists of the future to photograph, study, analyze and puzzle over after we are gone.

The state motto for Kerala, omnipresent as you drive through downtown Kochi, is "God's own country."

Where in the world

This is what I see, right now. Somewhere in here is a rumination on the nature of being always connected, even here, blissfully in the middle of nowhere. But I should probably put away my phone right now.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Aamar Bhalo Lagche

This transliterated Hindi, so far as I could glimpse, was on a billboard I saw this morning on the way to the airport. Roughly translated, this is "[Something] leaves me feeling good", which may be as close to "I'm lovin' it" as you can get in Hindi.

I saw one McDonald's in Calcutta, in the Park Street neighborhood, which is old and fashionable and largely populated with ancient restaurants where the waiters wear funny hats (different from the funny hats they wear in McD's). I don't know what it replaced, but it was pretty big, two stories I think, and it was down the street from KFC, and both were reasonably busy, but not swamped.

I'm interested in two things about this ad, which I'll ask you to picture as, in addition to the quoted phrase, the golden arches writ large on a field of red.

1. The direct translation of the US slogan. I guess there are a couple of reasons I can imagine for this. One is that McD is lazy and somewhat time-constrained and so they were not about to test into an India-specific slogan. After all, in the States this one covers a pretty wide demographic swath. Second possibility is that the strategy for the India entry is, either in whole or in part, to use Indians who have spent some time in the US as a wedge for market entry, and hence they've used a recognizable slogan.

Problem with this theory - these customers would obviously know English, so why bother with the translation?

Possible reason - Desi pride?

2. The transliteration to roman script, rather than writing in Devanagari, which, let's face it, looks cooler (but in fairness rarely can look playful). There may be an entirely practical reason for this - few and fewer people can read proper Devanagari. I've got no data on this (when do I ever have data?), but I do know that when Hindi is taught in schools, it is partly to instruct people in how to read and write. Hindi is obviously a 'live' language, and Bollywood films alone will make sure it stays vibrant as a spoken language for the foreseeable. But I wonder, to put on my alarmist hat for a second, whether transliteration may ever become the norm, so that the cherished bar-bar loopy text that even I, in my deep ignorance of Indian culture, know and love, vanishes.

Intellectually, the interesting thing about this is that, as you would expect, there are some characters in Devanagari that have no equal in English. They get transliterated with various N's and H's in awkward places. If the alphabet is somehow replaced, what happens to these sounds? Are they slowly rounded into oblivion?

Any precedents out there?

Comment on comments

Hey, I turned on comment moderation because I was getting some spam messages and couldn't seem to selectively remove them post facto (strange, I may be missing something, but the screen is small and the connection slow so I didn't conduct an exhaustive review of the blogger site).

Options seemed to be:

1. Allow spammy comments to appear, which is probably the most practical option but which tickles the small part of me that cares about aesthetics. This part of me does not like to be tickled. Seriously. Stop it. I'm not kidding.
2. Ban comments altogether, which would offend my insatiable desire for positive reinforcement, or, I guess, the possibility of positive reinforcement. Even in its absence. Perhaps this should be reconsidered.
3. Use that 'captcha' system where you have to copy some loopy numbers and letters into a box to prove you're human if you want to make a comment, which, that just sucks.
4. This, where I approve all comments. Feel free to insult me, viciously and unrelentingly, to test how censorious I am.

Hopefully a temporary fix, and I'll try to approve all comments promptly. That said, I may be dropping off the grid for a few days, starting today (hence up at 3am). I'll keep you posted. Or rather, I won't post anything, and you can figure it out.

Second Effort

Apparently my first attempt to report on the exciting conclusion to the pee-compost debate was stymied by my bberry's small screen and, okay, my own laziness. My apologies. Please see above.

Concrete castles in the sky

India was officially a Third World country during the Cold War, unaligned with either the US or USSR.

[Aside - did everyone know about this definition of Third World? Wikipedia has a pretty good article on it, but the last paragraph is a bit...off.]

[Aside from aside - did everyone read the Wikipedia entry on the Third World? That stuff about the Bandung Conference? It conjures for me a late middle-schoolish scene: the nerds getting together in science lab to decide how to respond to the emerging conflict between the jocks and the freaks. Nehru emerges as nerd-in-chief, articulating a principled and defiant stand that stirs the hearts (and, of course, the minds) of the nerd contingent. Quickly he is acclaimed as King of the Nerds, the nerds' best hope to make name for themselves in this tumultuous world. Almost as quickly he realizes what a beat-down he'd be in for as the most prominent nerd in the whole school. And he demurs, quietly.

It is not easy being a nerd.

Also, that last paragraph in the Wikipedia entry is off, right?]

Anyway, in practice this meant that India played both sides, a bit, but broke for the Soviets in some key respects - the air force had some indigenous planes but was, and somewhat still is, reliant on MiGs and other Russian aircraft, which were pitted against Pakistan's US - supplied F-86s in the 1970s.

From my stay in Delhi, it became apparent that this influence extended to architecture as well. Amongst the various multi-story buildings that dot the city, you see a lot of severe looking concrete buildings with blocky terraces and few windows.

Not that I really know about any of this stuff, but let's pretend I do.

The building pictured was a notable exception - concrete all right but really playful with its overhang and bulbous floors, looking like someone's first attempt at Tetris. I don't know what it is, I would guess apartments.

The controversy continues

Addendum, 18 November: Aww,man, that's not the right picture at all! This post makes no sense. Why didn't anybody say anything?

Ummm. Anybody?

Oh, alright.

Cars

Here's what I know about cars in India:

My grandmother, when she was alive, was driven around in a white Hindustan Motors Ambassador, which wikipedia reveals has not undergone any significant revisions since the late 1950's. These cars are still very much made and sold today, though not as ubiquitous in Calcutta as they once were.

They have seatbelts, now.

When I was younger, they were part of the miracle of India, for me. They looked nothing like the boxy, angular station wagons of the 80s nor the sleek sedans that came later, and they suggested to me (for good reason, it turns out) the rounded, full-bodied elegance of old grey British motoring. Subsequently I began to see in them something closer to Cuba's crazy time capsule.

Little did I know what lay beyond West Bengal.

My mother's father, who worked in Delhi for the most part, had a little Fiat that my mom would drive. In my mind's eye he is a thin, elegant, bespectacled government official of forty-some-odd who managed to look comfortable in the 1970s, somehow, and she has owl glassed and long, long hair. And their Fiat is bulbous, with an over-sized windshield and a light-green paint job.

Spending time in Delhi this trip, for the first time since I was little, all of a sudden there were many, many cars. The Chevy, in the picture above, for instance, was unexpected, as were the occasional BMW and Mercedes, and, most elegant of all, a Volvo with flags streaming at the windows. I saw two Fords, just about. Mostly it was Japanese cars - Suzuki is a mainstay here, having gotten in early as a joint-venture with Maruti, an Indian firm with a funny name. Toyota and Honda are catching up, though, Sonatas and the occasional Civic. A CRV looked huge, trundling down the street.

Back in Calcutta, which lacks Delhi's power and Mumbai's commerce, the streets are still filled with Ambassadors. The plant where they are made is in-state, and maybe that has something to do with it as well. But even here they are giving way.

Inquiring minds want to know

From today's Calcutta edition of the Telegraph, in the "Your Voice" feature: "Question: Should the idea of peeing on compost heaps be implemented in India?"

Text your response to 56569.

I am not sure what "implementation" of this idea would look like. Would the government get involved? Public Service Announcements? Pee rationing?

The Telegraph, incidentally, has turned into a horrible, terrible newspaper, but was my Grandmother's favorite.

Ceci n'est pas un blog entry

Sometime during my last year of college a movie came out, maybe a heist movie, maybe the last of those copycat heist movies following Ocean's 11, notably including Ocean's 12 and Ocean's 13, this movie came out with the tagline "It's not about the money. It's about the money."

I was puzzled and a bit troubled that my pricey liberal arts education, which, at the least, should have made me really good at cocktail chatter, could have failed to prepare me to interpret the metanarrative which was surely lurking in those two incongruous bits of ad copy.

Eventually I realized that some advertisers are just dumb.

I was reminded of this ad, and of my subsequent realization, upon spotting Volkswagen's full page wrap-around advert in the Times of India yesterday, which is pictured above.

The ad copy doesn't get much better in the smaller type below. Specifically, the statement 'back in the 30s, we started out producing cars for the people," seems a little disingenuous in eliding the context of producing the people's car in Germany as the Nazi Party was consolidating power.

In any case, the upshot is that VW is joining the large pool of car manufacturers plying their trade in India. Of which more, soon.

City at night

A few more notes from my late night arrival.

In Delhi you take prepaid cabs from the airport, as a security measure - mine boasted some connection with the Delhi police, ever vigilant, but I couldn't say how. The issue is that if you get into a cab with just anyone, they are liable to drive you out to some corner of the sprawl and rob you or otherwise do you harm. Here, you prepay to receive a voucher, which the cab driver must countersign and submit when he drives you away. If anything untoward happens, up to and including your disappearance, somebody knows who you were with, at least.

Delhi is a sprawl, by the way. I forget how my perception of urban landscapes has been shaped by three of the few cities - New York, London, Calcutta - that are primarily build up. I can't speak too informedly here, but in my limited experiences today Delhi's highrises appeared as lonesome buoys in a sea of smaller buildings, and a surprising amount of green.

Much of the ride to the hotel was along an eight-lane highway, still moderately trafficked at 1am. Along with colorfully painted trucks and businessmen in compact Japanese cars, I saw some late night cyclists and at least one man on horseback. He was four lanes across by the side of the road, and I couldn't quite make out, but he appeared to be dressed as Mughal courtier, complete with small white turban and well-trimmed mustache. He made no sense, but sometimes these things don't.

I also saw a man straddling two lanes in his minivan, talking on his cell phone. Just one example of the fruits of India's rapid development.

Last observation about the process of getting settled: I need to properly learn Hindi. This is just getting ridiculous.

Arrival

In all the trips I remember from childhood, we arrive in India late at night. I suppose that's how it works from the East Coast - you take a night flight to cross the Atlantic, layover somewhere like any other where in Europe, and fly through the day, losing time to midnight when you finally touch down. Consequently my first breath of Indian air is inevitably the petrol-inflected, thick, humid but noticeably cooling draft of late nights on the tarmac, waiting for the bus to take us to the terminal, looking out over jets that look like sharks in the murky soup of diffracted hazy light. You feel underwater, a bit, and I feel somewhat at home.

Journey=Destination

Not really true anymore, journeying being relatively straightforward, a routine prescribed and enacted pretty routinely by all and sundry. Still, these trips to India offer more potential for event than the many hops to Midwest and West West and even East-West to London that are sometimes called for as consultants ply their trade. Maybe also it is a different mindset, traveling for pleasure, or at least in anticipation of pleasure. Sometimes business trips feel like extended rides on the subway, keeping eyes low or high, avoiding persons and personalities and any complications.

There were some personalities on the flight over the Atlantic, some complications, but none that a thumb-typed message will support.

So let me instead entertain you with images from the Brussels Duty Free Shop. Hopefully these speak for themselves. I have no idea how to add captions from my mobile phone.

Two observations:

1. They take beer very seriously here.
2. The Coke folks have some strange ideas about what might make a person thirsty.