Put 'em in a tree museum...

I took this picture outside of my office towards the end of October. My sole interest, at the time, was the white cloth in the foreground. I didn’t know what it was at first, but it seemed like an odd contraption to find hanging from the branch of a roadside tree. At first glance (this picture was taken later), it looked like there was something inside the cloth, weighing it down. In India, I’ve come to expect almost anything to appear almost anywhere, but I wasn’t expecting this: A baby, cradled in the cloth, hanging from the tree.

The next question was obvious: Why is there a baby cradled in a cloth, hanging from the tree?

The story is straightforward. The people you see in the background are construction workers. Construction on this street means heaving platefuls of rock and sand into the concrete mixer (seen just behind the tree), and heaving concrete from the mixer into the roadside ditch. They do this six days a week as part of the city’s road expansion project.

So the cloth, in essence, was serving as tree-supported daycare for a woman at the construction site. By the time I came back with my camera, she had taken the child, was holding him tight, and had tied up the cloth.

I’m posting this now because the picture hints at another, more complex story that’s been unfolding outside my door over the past two months - a puzzle a bit beyond my grasp. That is, what else happens when the city decides to expand a road?

For one thing, the landscape outside my office has changed drastically since late October. When I look at this photo now, I look as much at the workers, the tree, and the house to the left of the gravel pile, as I do at the empty white cloth. The tree was recently chopped down. The house, too, was demolished. There are huge ditches on either side of the road.

The workers, meanwhile, are still out on the street, earning money over long hours, doing by hand what heavy machinery could accomplish in a matter of minutes. From a simple economics perspective, their jobs would probably have become obsolete if labor weren’t so cheap. I also can’t help but wonder about the woman who left the baby in the cloth. What sort of life does she live? What’s it like, that she feels compelled to return to work so soon after giving birth (and bring her baby with her)?

From what I can tell, anyway, the expansion of the road causes the following: The environment suffers, some people get displaced, and some people get employed (to say nothing else of the socioeconomic situations of those employees). But why widen the road in the first place?

Presumably, they are doing it to accommodate an increase in automobile traffic. According to the local paper (this still requires some fact-checking), India’s automobile fleet is predicted to expand nearly 10-fold in by 2030. I wrote in my last entry about the thick and sooty air around here. It’s bad enough right now with the number of vehicles currently out there. Breathing might not be such a pleasant experience with close to ten times as many vehicles on the road.

Besides, why this particular road? From what I can tell, I don’t live on a major road, much less one that needs to be widened. It’s a mile long at most, and it’s on the outskirts of town. To the north, it forms a T-intersection with a major thoroughfare. What’s more, to the south it bottlenecks and becomes a one-lane bridge across a canal.

Unless the city aims to simply increase the volume of vehicles that can be present on the road at any given time, it’s unclear to me how widening a road that funnels into a single-lane bridge is going to accommodate increased traffic, whatsoever. It’s rather like trying to increase the speed at which water pours from a 1 liter bottle by expanding the bottle to accommodate 2 liters, rather than widening the opening at the top.

So who benefits from this? Do the bicycles, motorbikes, and rickshaws that primarily populate the road need that much extra space? Doesn’t anyone mind if more trees get chopped down to make way for more cars? Are the people doing the work getting a fair deal? What does it say about a city’s development priorities when people are evicted to make space for vehicles?

Unfortunately, that last question is not so black and white. I’m told the occupants of the now-demolished house had on that land illegally. If true, that complicates any argument about their eviction (but to complicate the situation further, there’s this: Fronts of buildings all along the road have been lopped off by the city– which, I’m told, is because the city allowed building owners to build out to a certain point along the road, and then recently said, in effect, ‘Oops. We let you go too far. We’ll have that back now’).

But what I do know is this. Most people in this area don’t drive large vehicles. In fact, it’s more common to see a personal vehicle like a motorbike or bicycle overloaded with people. I’ve even seen a family of five riding on a motorbike (granted – the three children were small). It’s hard to tell who exactly benefits, at least in the present moment, from all this construction. On the other hand, could the city be showing some forward thinking, adequately planning for a systemic shift from scooters to passenger cars, as cars inevitably drop in price and income levels of (some) people in this country rise?

Thomas Friedman makes a good case for why that’s not exactly forward thinking.

Back to the picture. In the end, perhaps the cloth in the foreground is still the main story. Perhaps the story is not so complicated after all. I tend to over-analyze things, yet I have to wonder: As all this development work steadily takes place in the background, as trees fall, people are displaced (rightfully or otherwise), and the landscape changes – who is thinking of the little guy in the white cloth, hanging from the tree?

A Stroll

Waiting for the bus, I stuck a finger in my nose and removed a crusty flake of blackened snot. I examined it as best I could in the dark. The usual suspects, probably. Diesel fumes, suffocating plumes of dirt, and tire grime. It’s a reasonable price to pay to escape the white walled box that is now both my bedroom and office. Which is exactly what I had done. I’d taken a walk, ten minutes down to the main road, my nose hairs incidentally accumulating the aforementioned pleasantries along the way. Now I was waiting.

I’d chosen a trip to the grocery store as my social release for the evening. My excuse was toilet paper, which is in fact hard to find, but more pressingly I needed to be lost in a crowd, though that too is an admittedly difficult task when you stand out from the crowd like a marshmallow from a s’more. Cars and trucks kicked the dirt up off the road. The singsong horns from the Tata trucks and the belching basses from the buses stung my ears and rattled my chest.

I used to take the bus religiously in New York. I remember standing on the corner of 86th street watching the digital display of the double-bodied the M15 snake its way south through yellow cabs and deliveries, gliding gracefully towards the curb, coming to an effortless and dramatic pause. Perfect. The hydraulics would hiss and sigh and the bus would kneel down to scoop up the men and women who minutes before were looking at their watches, cursing. The front door would open, and depending on the time of year, a cool gust or a warm radiance would tumble out onto the street. I’d have my card already in my hand, feed it into the machine, grab it back, and maneuver to the back of the bus to stand or sometimes sit. With a deep inhalation, the bus would stand back up and barrel off down the avenue.

Indian buses don’t always stop. Not completely. In the chance that one does, it’s brief, and probably because of traffic ahead. I hadn’t ridden the bus alone before, and when I asked at the office, ‘which one goes to Modern Market?’ the answer was ‘all of them’.

A hulking red bus, rusted and tired, slouched towards the side of the road and slowed to a near halt. Men jumped from the back door, running as their feet hit the dirt. Women carefully exited from the front, as the bus was now caught in traffic. The thing was comically full, and I could have sworn I saw torsos sticking out the windows. Two petite men with briefcases leaned from out the back door, leaving just enough room for me to slide onto the first step, bump into another man who was trying to exit, and climb up into the body of the bus. Alas.

Two rupees, ten minutes, one soft elbow to the eye socket, and an accidental backhand slap-to-the-jaw later, I jumped out the back of the bus, dodged an oncoming rickshaw, and snuck off to the side of the road onto what one might call a ‘sidewalk.’ I brushed my hands down the front of my shirt, turned around, and there I was, standing smack in front of the market.

Some 25 minutes later, at 6:45 pm, I was finished. I was in no rush to get home. I looked across the road to a densely crowded part of the street that could have been a bus stand, or just India, and thought to take a walk and look for a fresh ground Café Coffee Day bean wholesaler I remembered spotting once from the window of the car.

I got to walking and felt a strange sense of familiarity – a bag of groceries in my hand, no car, going on an errand. Walking. Jesus, I thought, I do this everywhere else I live – why had it taken me two months, a daylong bout of self-pitying semi-depression, and a rather spontaneous decision to chase after coffee, to get me walking and exploring?

The thought came to mind that perhaps I’ve simply been intimidated. I talk a big game about my isolation, the confinement of living and working in the same building (the same room! Short commute, at least…), the lack of any appreciable resources in my part of town. But what a crock of shit! In two months, I’d walked ten minutes in either direction, declared ‘there’s nothing here,’ and settled then for rickshaw explorations into other parts of town. I felt a bit ashamed of myself, because instantly, when I started walking, I felt a sort of perky awareness, a fascination with the city of fire.

I found the coffee bean wholesaler. Heaven! I asked the man – who didn’t understand my words but surely felt my excitement – if I could smell the beans. He brought me a handful, and I ordered half a Kg, which I naively thought was, well, not as much as it turned out to be. I left instead with ¼ Kg, which is, I don’t know, maybe a pound of fresh ground coffee, and continued on my way.

I passed another coffee bean wholesaler on my left, then another on my right! Where had these been? Where had I been? I started to feel the pulse of the street. Only unwritten social rules separate the pedestrian ‘sidewalks’ from the chaotic hustle of overstuffed automobiles. As I walked, I stayed what you could call a ‘safe’ distance from traffic, depending on your definition of safe.

I looked all around me all at once. There were food wallas selling deep-fried green chilies. I saw numerous advertisements for whiskey, and clusters of chitchatting students from local colleges. Stores were selling textbooks about Hydraulics. There was a beautiful artisan shop with slick wicker porch chairs suspended from trees in the night, and a dusty, yellow-lit workshop, rustic looking, where men were carving details into wood furniture. John Kenneth Galbraith called India a ‘functioning anarchy.’

Back a bit from the road, a woman – wasted thin – held an infant in her arms as she squatted by a small fire, stirring something in a steel pot. Cars, buses, people passed by without noticing, just as I had many times before. I kept walking. I saw a sign for a gym. The words were written in cursive over the image of a white man’s cartoonishly large back muscles. ‘Flat 104,’ the sign said. Hours for men were posted on the left side. Hours for women were on the right. I glanced quickly, but not long enough to tell how much the hours overlapped. I went so far as walking up the stairs – more out of curiosity than an actual desire to join – but couldn’t find the entrance to Flat 104. I turned back, still looking up at the second-floor sign, when suddenly, for no good reason, my eyes returned to the road in front of me. There I was, two short steps short of falling four feet into an open street-side gutter of sulfuric-smelling sewage.

I continued on, with gusts of air from the wake of passing buses and rickshaws and motorcycles pressing against the back of my long-sleeved shirt. A hand tapped me on the shoulder, and a teenage boy with a tucked-in polo and a backpack approached my right side, the traffic side, and started speaking fast in Telegu. When he saw that I wasn’t catching any of it, he switched to broken English. This went on. We kept walking.

We parted, and I stopped to recharge my phone (add more pre-paid minutes). This is done by walking into any store with your carrier’s name out front (they’re all over the place, often in the most unsuspecting spots), telling an employee your number and how many minutes you want (or, rather, choosing from the confusing options they offer), forking over the necessary cash, double checking that he wrote the right number, and waiting a matter of seconds for a text to arrive on your phone saying RE-CHARGE SUCCESSFUL. I was double-checking my number when I heard the sharp crack of a bicycle being thrown to the pavement. I looked up quick to see a yellow Tata truck stopped in the intersection, some men leaning out the windows high above, and a man down below sitting gingerly on the road next to his bike. He got up and walked off. Nothing else happened.

Finally, I turned up the road towards my office. My home. Moments later I heard a man call my name. I stopped, slipped on some rocks, kept my balance, and saw a co-worker waving a hand at me. I went to say hello and he bought me a delicious egg mixture with onions, cilantro, fried noodles like you get with Chinese delivery, and spices, all served on a banana leaf and eaten with some sort of durable natural scoop. Bark from a tree. Sugarcane. I don’t really know. The whole thing cost six rupees.

When I walked into my room, the time was 7:45pm.

New Photos

With my computer back and mostly working, I've posted some new photos at the bottom of the page. Mostly pictures of children. I've caught some of them being 'awwwe cute', and others being downright goofy (or as Vani put it when I inquired about the kids on the way to training: They're not kids, they're thunderstorms). One picture makes me laugh out loud - can you guess which?

As the slideshow moves along, you can click a photo to read the caption. Some captions are too long to fit the page, and for that you can thank my partial-understanding of how this technology works. Speaking of which, more writing is on the way as soon as I can navigate my new hard drive's 30-day trial version of MS Office, which, inexplicably, is all in Italian.

Dance Off!

Last week I spent three days at a child support group training session. The location was a rather idyllic perch, tucked between fields of banana trees on the banks of the mammoth river Krishna, right at the point where the river bends back towards Vijayawada and evenly splits two sloping granite hills on its way to the Bay of Bengal.

Roughly 100 street children have been taken to live at this 'resort' full time. They're given food, an education, a home - and by default - a peer group. One boy, Ganesh, sat on my lap the first evening as we watched the movie Lagaan. Like all the other residents, he's an orphan and I knew that. I tried not to bring it up, but he wasn't shy. He asked about my family - Mom? Dad? Brothers? Sisters?. I gave him minimal details, and thinking where I could go from there, chanced it that perhaps he had a sibling. Nope. Then he offered this with a hesitant smile: "Mother no. Father no. You my father." I put my arm around him. It seems cliche but when you're there, it hurts.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, there were 40 other children who had travelled various distances to attend this training session - which ran the gammut from communication skills to art to child rights. One of the highlights was the nightly 'cultural activities' session. The video below pretty much says it all. The first boy you see is Koti. You have to say it with a hard TEE, or else it means monkey in Telegu. The second boy is one of the street kids who wouldn't leave us alone. He seemed to be born for the stage. He was HILARIOUS. Check it out...

Slouching Towards Bangalore

Sizing up its Indian surroundings and thinking, perhaps - What better place than here? What better time than now? - my sleek white macbook took a last look towards Bangalore, froze up, went black, and crashed.

I tried computer first aid (I’m not making this up) as detailed in the Everything Mac handbook, page 42. But it was too late. By the time my (local) call reached the Apple Support Center, she was a goner.

And in between bouts of panic, denial, and reminders that only a day before I’d met a women’s disaster-relief task force whose members frequently have their entire livelihoods ripped from them by the winds and rain of a cyclone. So came a touch of liberation and an ounce of excitement, even, at the thought of reading on paper and writing by hand.

So until I cart it up to Hyderbad on the overnight train, leave it, return six hours to Vijayawada, wait 7-10 business days, take another six-hour sleeper to Hyd., pick it up, return back, plug it in, sift through the ashes of my previous hard drive, and try to reverse upload the pictures that (by no conscious precaution of my own) automatically synced to my iPod, I won’t be posting anymore photos, or using Skype, or making the girl who brings us afternoon tea laugh (or cringe) by turning on the iSight’s ‘twist’ feature and letting her see herself through the perspective of a mirror-cum-soft-serve-swirl.

There’s Celebrex on my desk-bed (it’s both) that I bought when I thought I might be having a hernia relapse. I didn’t take it after I read that a potential side-effect is internal bleeding. Was it Robin Williams who says – that’s not a side effect; that’s an effect. Sort of like that effect that’s rumored to rarely come (though the doctor never told me this) from the Japanese Encephalitis vaccine –anaphylactic shock. So it goes. There are plenty of other ways to get sick here – the food, the water, the air pollution, fecal-oral, oral-oral, feline-oral, lightning, the gods; the list just keeps going and going. And I sleep under a bed-net in an air-conditioned room with white marble floors, with a plug-in mosquito repellent, a permerthrin-dipped wardrobe, and facilities to take a hot bucket-shower twice a day. I have boiled drinking water, cyclone-resistant walls, malaria pills, multi-vitamins, a change of clothes, and freedom from the various and oft-warranted fears for safety & discrimination, harassment or abuse – both latent and real – that I’d face were I not who I am, but rather, a woman, living as I do.

Why the stream-of-conscious rant? Maybe it’s a question of perspective, fear, loss, and appreciation. Sorting out what matters from what doesn’t; what can be changed from what cannot; what’s in my control, what’s not. Who, where, and how I am – and how to share, conceal, question, express it – experience it. Just the other day I meant to write a post explaining how things just ain’t all that different ‘round here than they is back home. But hell, by the time I started describing how I prepare coffee – using milk from the water buffalo that live outside the kitchen door – I realized the post was doomed.

The street I walk outside the compound – while dusty to the point it appears foggy, and heavy with the smell of sulfur - brings the most curious glances and delightful moments of joy. Such as the schoolkids who yell at once, in groups of eight or more, in English, What is YOUR name? and I smile and I tell them even though I know I’ll never hear, much less remember, theirs. I ask and they shout back all at once. So I go on and return and suddenly a critical mass has formed in the schools along the street and it’s as if their high excitable voices harmonize from balconies, cricket fields, or passing bicycles along the road, and I hear them when I’m jogging or walking back from buying vitamins, and with a hand waving and white teeth that deserve a cleaner school uniform, they’ll shout or smile or whisper nervously one at a time from behind a tree or looking up from the roadside whenever they see me: ADAM!

23 mattresses and one voice

The huge population of sandals outside the door meant the fisher folk had stayed the night.

I’d seen them in the conference room the previous evening. 23 coastal villagers, each with a dignified, quiet presence, sitting cross-legged on the floor. There were adults and elders. Men and women. Each person was invariably thin. One older woman was missing an eye. They dressed well. They were clean**. They looked like people on the cusp, for the first time, of gaining objective self-confidence.

They are called the Yanadhi tribe. Their livelihood is in crab picking, shrimp, and small fish farming. Most of them will own two, maybe three outfits over the course of their lives. Their living conditions, Sivaji (co-founder of this NGO) tells me, are minimal and extremely poor. They came by bus to discuss their rights and participate in a workshop about Community Based Organizations and self-empowerment, one of many in which they had participated over the past three years. They stayed the night in the thatched roof building that I had recently vacated.

On what did they sleep? I doubt this place has 23 teacups – let alone 23 mattresses.

Nonetheless, the morning came and they were still here. Their meeting commenced around 8am, so they were up early. A few of the men were seen brushing their teeth in the hallway sink at 6am outside Karen’s door.

Karen is a short-term AJWS volunteer serving here for two months. Today is her birthday. There was talk around the office about getting her a cake, and people were getting pretty excited. I walked past a colleague’s computer and saw that he had Googled birthday card images. Seems he hadn’t yet heard of eCard...on his screen was a solitary purple rectangle with a white cake, candles, and fireworks. It read Happy Birthday Gino.

Around 11am word came that we were to meet downstairs for cake. I put down my laptop and stepped out into the conference room. Except for an evenly spaced semi-circle of notebooks and personal items, the room was empty. What happened to all the villagers? I asked. I turned to Joseph. Oh downstairs they went to cut the cake, he replied.

Sure enough, all meetings and workshops had been put on hold, and everyone in the office – including the 23 Yanadhi villagers – sat on the floor awaiting Karen’s arrival. The men sat in the front left. The women sat in the middle back. The NGO staff sat on the right. Karen joined the group and sat front middle, accompanied by a shy younger woman in a purple saree who had agreed – nervously – to sing a traditional song. She began, and soon the rest of the tribe joined in. It was moving, but also it was remarkable. Remarkable that in the course of three years, a people’s confidence could swing from a low point - where historically they would not even reach out to neighboring communities for fear of harassment - to such a high, wherein they represent themselves at a workshop, and share their traditions with foreign visitors.

**I asked Vani (NGO co-founder) how one would tell that these people came from a “scheduled” caste (meaning the most neglected – poor, illiterate, forgotten). She said that a lot has to do with their physical presentation and the quality of their clothing. Three years ago, she said, when outreach to this tribe began, the people were literally unclean and they smelled awful. Upon arriving here, they would report that passengers on the bus had refused to sit beside them, or would stand up and change seats. Vani explained it to them in simple, fair terms: Before issues of discrimination could be addressed, they had to respect peoples’ right to protect their own health. The tribe made the change accordingly. So when I say they were clean and well-dressed, I point this out as a mark of advancement and a step towards overcoming actual systemic causes of discrimination.

New Photos @ the bottom of this page

Scroll down to the very bottom of this page to have a look at some recent photos from Mussoorie, the train ride south, and my NGO. To see a description of the photo, simply click on it during the slide show.

Vijayawada

I’ve arrived in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh – my home for the next 9 months. Hello Mudda…Hello Fawdda…Here I am in…Vijayawada. After 48 hours of traveling – one taxi, three trains, two ‘official’ changes in language – the train pulled around a slight bend to reveal modest homes painted in rich colors: Pinks, oranges, yellows, and sherbert greens, set against the backdrop of a slouching mountain. Palm trees, thatched-roof huts, and a creek. Albeit a creek with toxic looking foam around the edges – but a creek nonetheless. Besides, there were children playing in the toxic looking foam. If the children play in the toxic looking foam, the water mustn't be so bad. Right?

That last detail aside, the nickname for Vijayawada “city of fire”, and the belly laughter with which some north Indians responded when I told them where I’d be living, had evoked, say, a harsher image in my mind.

So I’m here. I’m settled. Well, sort of.

Over the past five weeks I’ve seen my fair share of sub-par living conditions. Dirt floors. Concrete pillows. Children romping through sludge-bubbling water. Blue tarp tents, rural, trackside. You know?

Actually, I read a great passage on the train ride down from Arundhati Roy’s book of political essays, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, (thanks Sam) a passage which I’ll post in full later on, saying something to the effect of: Of course India is a microcosm of the rest of the world…wealth and poverty existing side by side. The difference is that in India, your face is smashed right up against it.

So anyway, I’m very happy where I am, and am very fond of the NGO where I'll be staying. It’s certainly a matter of perspective, when it comes to living conditions, and I’ve seen far, far, far, far worse. That said, I had to vacate my initial room here, on account of my own discomfort/paranoia. I need to be healthy to work – and the five bug bites I received the first night, after preparing for bed in a room with only bars and wooden shutters for windows, made me worry, perhaps excessively, that I was on the fast track to acquiring Malaria, Dengue, Japanese Encephalitis, “Chick”, or one of the other gifts the local mosquitoes have to offer.

The people here have been more than accommodating – kind and concerned – and though it sounds worse than it is, for the last two nights I’ve slept in the conference of the NGO (it’s right next door to the founders' house – nearly attached). Tonight I’ll be moving into said house. I’m flexible, for what it’s worth.

On another note, I now have a phone. Here’s the number: +91 990 860 9590. If you use Skype, it's something like 15c per minute to call my mobile. Would love to hear from you.

I’ll post the story about actually getting that number next time…

Not Yet South

The air in Delhi is heavy, hard and thick. Breathing is a chore. Sweat pours from the forehead, forming salty-clean streams through a layer of tire grime and road sludge. I took to wearing a bandana on my right wrist to wipe the shit from my face. Unfortunately, something resembling a boil has emerged on my forehead – I’m not sure why, but if I had to guess – it’s from inadvertently drying my face with Delhi-dirt. I’ve been told the air is not nearly as bad as it was three years ago, before the dirty city busses were replaced with a cleaner alternative.

* * *

I spend a lot of time wondering about normality and adjustment. How long can a new place instill awe? You might see a mother and her malnourished children slumming in dirt and trash beneath a bridge; a dozen times in a ten minute rickshaw ride. Does this eventually blend into the background, like familiar architecture?

* * *

In the back of a rickshaw with two other Fellows, I’m soaked with sweat, breathing fumes, waiting for the light to change. Two filthy-ragged children, too thin, approach my side. A boy and a girl. The girl wears a makeshift drum, string-slung across her chest. It looks like she’s done this many times before. Her eyes convey mechanical resignation. Her hands daintily tap each side of the drum. I see it but I hear nothing. She looks directly into my eye and does not blink. The boy now has sat down on the hot asphalt and has pressed his knees to his chest. In his hand is a small metal hoop, a foot in diameter at the most. I watch as he squeezes it over his shoulders, around his arms, and down past his hips. He does it again. Again. Again. If there was a right response or appropriate action to be taken there, I could not, did not, think of it.

* * *

There are 16 Fellows with me in India. Six of us will work in southern India. The rest will be placed in various cities throughout the north. Last week, we were supposed to split along these lines, the southerners traveling to Hyderbad for Telegu lessons (the language of Andhra Pradesh), the northerners returning to the mountains for coursework in Hindi. The eve of our departure, two bombs exploded simultaneously in the Hyderbad. 40 were killed in two separate parts of town. We were scheduled to board a train for this city in less than 24 hours.

The television images were far more graphic than what we see it home. What I saw was sickening, and naturally, I couldn’t help but think what could have been, had we left a day earlier. Later in the week, six of us crammed into a one-bedroom apartment, we learned that 19 additional bombs had been found; had failed to detonate. I’m under no illusions that I’m totally safe in India, but the threat of terrorism hadn’t crossed my mind.

We never went south, staying instead for four days in the small apartment, in a situation that could aptly be called the Real World Partners Fellowship. See what happens when people stop being polite…

So the five girls and I rejoined the rest of the group up north at an idyllic language school. We’re learning Hindi, which will serve no purpose in the south, but will surely pay off as India continues its rise to prominence in the coming years.

* * *

First Post

Quick correction - turns out we're nine and a half hours ahead. Oops.

In a world of spoilers, from The Sopranos to Harry Potter, there’s a general feeling that knowing what’s to come somehow takes away from the experience itself. I hadn’t thought to draw the parallel before I came to India, even though everyone who had been here would heap upon me descriptions of what it would smell, taste, feel, and look like to be here. Not only that, but all advice was premised or suffixed with the comment, “but you can’t even know till you get there.” Save for that last piece of advice, I had every reason to believe that the feeling of newness upon arriving would be, well, spoiled.

Not true. Not even close. India swallows your pen. Shows up on the scene and boisterously steals your lunch money. Nods her head knowingly and suggests, amateur writer, that you crawl before you walk; speak images before impressions, observations before conclusions, conclusions never.

The airport smells of gasoline and sweat. Green Parrots circle above and disappear into the crevices of a large stonewall. I watch, exhausted, from the backseat of our parked taxi as our driver steps onto the hood of the car and walks up the windshield to hoist our luggage to the roof, the soles of his shoes expanding on the glass like silly rubber faces. When finished, he walks back down and hops in the car. The five Americans in the car exchange looks, but the driver never so much as acknowledges us. What was remarkable about this and much else that day was how the maneuver seemed wholeheartedly un-self-conscious. It seems as though there are too many people, 1.1 billion in space 2/3 the size of the USA, for anyone to care or judge. There’s a problem? Luggage needs hoisting? Driver climbs the windshield. Why not? No sweat.

Driving, as I’ve witnessed it thus far, looks like a lawless and utterly absurd fire drill. That traffic actually moves means there must be some underlying order which I am not able to understand. A handsome bull stands along the road. Well-dressed men with brief cases dart through throbs of highway traffic. Bulging trunks are snugly suspendered by bungee chords. Busses look like overstuffed charters from a prison work yard. They’re full, mostly of men. Pedestrians use the sides of the highway as if it were a sidewalk. It’s all a massive game of chicken between people, rickshaws, cattle, cars, busses, monkeys, and toddlers. I saw a young child carrying a naked infant through moving traffic. I had to do a double take when I thought I saw a smile on the older boy’s face.

It begins

6am. First thought? Duct tape. Family. Passport Photos. Family. More sleep. Short Sleep. 8am. Wal-Mart. Eckerd. Wegmans. Family. Bed Bath & Beyond. Wegmans again. How do I still have errands to do? Why am I feeling emotional about Wal-Mart? Why did they slim down the NYTimes? I will. I promise. I love you. Check weather. Check mail. Check in. I've never been happier just to sit at home and be with my family.

So it begins, tomorrow being the two year anniversary of my return from Costa Rica. 5pm flight out of State College. 9pm flight out of Philly. I'll have good company. London to Delhi sometime thereafter. When do I brush my teeth? I'll be in Delhi Monday morning 6am local time. Eight and a half hours ahead of the east coast.

We're heading north to Mussoorie for orientation, and I may not have access to email for 10 days, but you'll hear from me soon after. I'll miss you all.

I'm ready.

Minor League

As young athletes, we are taught to focus on what we can control, nothing more, nothing less. This is the essence of mental discipline. An elite athlete cannot afford to be distracted by extraneous circumstances, but when he is, it can be helpful to choose a focal point somewhere in the field of play - a place he can look, and with a deep breath, release extraneous stresses and regain much needed control.

For the unfortunate members of the single-A Lowell Spinners baseball team, who, tonight, chose a focal point on or near the multi-million dollar scoreboard at Lubrano Park here in State College, PA, their efforts were met with the laser eyed, furrowed-brow stare of pure, uninhibited animal intimidation.

As any one of the 1,000 or so fans who braved the once-a-decade local tornado warning to support minor league baseball and/or have a chance at the dizzy bat contest can attest, the marketing division of The State College Spikes let loose a legendary intimidation tactic in the cartoon form of Pennsylvania's most notorious predator: The deer.

That's right. Seen during the second inning in heavy black font, flashing one at a time across the piercing round eyes and fluffy, almost-pettable face of this notorious herbivore, were these words: FEAR THE DEER.

And boy, the effect was devastating. Surely it was fear of the deer ("Spikes" apparently referring to a deer's antlers) that caused Lowell's starting pitcher to give up a 420 foot second inning blast which sailed into the foggy darkness between the fence and Mount Nittany. How any athlete, or fan for that matter, could have remained focused under this type of Tom Ridge style fear mongering is beyond my comprehension.

Without a doubt, FEAR THE DEER accounted for the 5-0 lead the Spikes had amounted by the time the fam and I left for ice cream in the 4th inning. There's a chance, of course, that it was all just a cute little rhyme to make the 750 children in attendance stand and cheer. Really, who am I to say? I may have only been paying partial attention anyway, as I found myself continually glancing up, past the minor league action, through the mist, and into the hypnotizing white lights darting toward me from seemingly every direction.

The Devil Came on Horseback

Last night I saw a superb documentary called The Devil Came on Horseback. To see it is to witness genocide, and to be a witness is to bear responsibility. In one particularly emotional scene, a Darfuri man in an IDP camp tells Brian (the subject of the film, who was also there in the theater last night) how thankful he is that American people pressure government organizations to send food, water, and shelter, and also, that we have demanded the Sudanese government stop systematically exterminating people. His basic survival depends on those who can speak up, who can pressure elected officials, whose voices can be heard, deciding to do so.

The American people. That's me. That's you. There's nothing abstract about it. He's speaking to us.

In New York, it's so easy to be dissonant - to see a film, to read a Nick Kristof article, to attend a rally - and then to feel that I've done my part. But what impact has it had if I go see a film and then keep it to myself? What impact does it have for the people on the ground? It's easy to forget, or ignore, the fact that the bystander who can do something, yet doesn't, is guilty as well.

So without knowing where to start, I started by writing a letter this morning to Senator Clinton. I'll copy it below if you want to use it and write one yourself. If you can see the movie, do so. If you can write a letter, do so. I know if I was living in Darfur, I would want someone whose voice could possibly save my life, to use it.

It's a heavy blog post, I know, but the subject deserves nothing less.

***

Dear Senator Clinton,

As one of your voting constituents - one about to embark on a year of volunteer service overseas with the American Jewish World Service - I would like to see you demand the following actions immediately to stop the GENOCIDE in DARFUR:

1) Immediate UN Intervention in Darfur
2) Unrestricted access for Humanitarian Aid
3) No-fly zone and economic & military sanctions

I voted for you for Senator, but need to hear you take a strong stance on this issue before I will consider doing so again in your run for President.

Sincerely,

Donations to AJWS

Thank you GREATLY to everyone who has already helped me work towards my fundraising goal of $1,000. If you'd like to donate to AJWS, you can do so here.

Use the following guidelines:

Donation in Honor of: Adam Yukelson
Occasion for Gift: World Partners Fellowship
Donation Designation: AJWS General Fund

I'll be posting updates on progress towards the One Grand Benchmark here periodically.

Regards,
Adam

Sea of People

Thanks to Kelly Loudenberg at Gothamist for putting this video together!

Some Direction

Please pick up a copy of Plan B 2.0, by Lester Brown. I cannot read it quickly enough, and I cannot stress how important it is to be aware of the Environmental and Economic issues he illuminates. His focused writing, along with the simultaneous reading of Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler has inspired this unpolished rant:

A reader may want to know; given the environmental problems the world is facing, can we make it work? That is, can we avoid economic decline and civilizational collapse?

We have moved into this new world so rapidly that we have not yet fully grasped the meaning of what is happening. Of course, by sitting here writing this, I'm attempting to indicate to my audience that I in fact have begun to fully grasp what is happening, and that I would like my audience to begin fully grasping at it as well. Amazingly it was less than a century ago that thinkers and artists were observing that time, in fact was relative. With the advent of the railroad and subsequent thinkers like Einstein sitting in patent offices playing with clocks, people could move fast enough to confuse previous notions of what time was and wasn’t, while other people could ponder over the theoretical physics of it. And here we are now, in 2006, scarcely a century since these thoughts were exploding, and we are still (of course!) living under the comforting illusion that time is a relative, bendable, infinite. A disposable tool. Mindsets do not shift so drastically, so quickly. Not in such a divergent, non-contextual, compartmentalized, distorted reality. Postmodernism. It takes a massive tragedy to shift the general mindset, and yet, it will take a shift in mindset to avoid the most massive tragedy we could ever bring upon ourselves. Our own destruction by way of neglect. By way of powerful people making short term oriented decisions. Apocalyptic? Naaahh. Check this out:

At the outset of the 20th Century, 10% of the population lived in cities. In 2000, around 50% of the world population lived in cities. In 2025, the number of city-dwellers could reach 5 billion individuals (two thirds of them in poor countries). Megalopolises. A megalopolis is not a dinosaur. It is a city with more than 8 million people (good start to an essay right there). In 1950 only NYC and London had more than 8 million people. Today there are 22 such cities. In 2015, there may be 33, and 27 are predicted to be in the world’s least developed countries.

The transformation is quiet to some of us, but it is happening so fast!

And try this on, as a sort of teaser for why you should look at Lester Brown’s book:

“The western economic model is not going to work for China. If China’s economy continues to expand at 8% per year, by 2031…it would use 99 million barrels of oil per day –well above current world production of 84 million barrels. And in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain, and mineral resources, the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either…Closely related to China’s expanding resource consumption is the world’s fast-changing oil outlook and the new issues it generates. For example, we have long been concerned about the effect of rising oil prices on food production costs, but of even more concern is the effect on the demand for food commodities. Since virtually everything we eat can be converted into automotive fuel either in ethanol distilleries or biodiesel refineries, high oil prices are opening a vast new market for farm products. Those buying commodities for fuel producers are competing directly with food processors for supplies of wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and other foodstuffs. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same commodities.”

And so…by way of subsidizing destructive habits, or not not subsidizing because we simply lack the cohesive community forum in which to spread a common message. So we still go about our daily business knowing that time speeds up when we are entertained, and slows when we are bored. Aroused, subdued, up, down, that’s how we go. – and yet, and yet…here are all these environmentalists, scientists, authors, companies, NGO’s, governments, who are pointing out that Hey! We’re on the clock, and this time it’s real. Time is real. Not because we say it’s so. Because Nature, the great equalizer, is out of balance and cannot remain so if we hope to coexist with it.

So here I am, marveling at how time appears to be relative, and money appears to be useless while stagnant, and these two things somehow being related, when, in the grander scope of things taking place around me, nature is silently but sublimely demanding our greater attention, reminding us that we can call it relative all we want but there will always be a point of no return, a respect threshold that once crossed cannot be reversed – and any time we speak of willing something to be reversed, as it was, not as it is – we are implying that inevitably the concept of time is real and stable, being tracked somehow in nature, and currently being pressed and raped as we ignore it.

Well done keeping to my promises. Rather than writing once a week, minimum, I've managed (unintentionally) to bookend the month of February.

This is an excerpt from my own mind. It is translated into the third person, to make it sound much more dramatic than it otherwise would:

He's thinking that when he walks alone through the city, and he does walk alone often, mostly to work and back from work, that he sees everything through a lens of whipping-cream-thick irony. He doesn't know this (how can we ever be certain!) but he suspects it. The awe of midtown which aroused him last year in some terrific way feels dull. Midtown, slim and tall in a black gown. Her hulking scyscrapers, the motion of everything, the appearance that everyone is dressed up to conduct important business, doesn't strike him like it did when he came up for the day from the little place with the quaint brick buildings, as he did, to ride elevators to way up high floors and sit in rooms with big windows listening to people talk fast and preparing to recite rehearsed and hopefully impressive white lies. Who taught him to think that way? Who changed his context, mid-stride?

To be continued when I don't have to run and eat Cookie Cake for Eric's birthday!!...

Blogging Again

It has been a shamefully long time since I posted my thoughts on this page.

I'm back, with a commitment to post at least once a week. That said, I have no plan. The only thought I can't shake is one that is not even mine, it belongs to Auden. He said, or maybe he sang, or perhaps for fun he chanted: "How do I know what I think till I read what I wrote?" In fact, it's possible those words are not Auden's at all. I haven't the first idea what truth is today, the phrase I quoted may not be the quotation at all and I'm too lazy to look it up (I take the elevator lately, I sleep 10 minutes later lately, I look for shortcuts and I excuse it by calling it efficiency) but I can tell you that it's how I remember it when I heard it from Kieron in Oxford and that's how it stuck so it's truth as I need it to be.

I was standing on the subway this afternoon. I was leaning against the door with rebellious disregard to the signs suggesting the dangers inherent in doing so. Actually, I was reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and I don't like to read when I'm standing stiff and upright. Somehow, the risk of a fall out and onto the electric third rail in exchange for comfort seems worth it by the end of the work day. Anyway, the train suddenly decreased its velocity, and the guy standing across from me (near the front of the car) fell into an exaggerated tumble. Not only did his back knee buckle, but his entire center of gravity swung downward from his chest to his right hip. This violence sent him crashing into an ambiguous looking silver door that seemed to be guarding a small room. The door's silver latches and weathered exterior were no match for the tumbler's moderate weight. The door hurled open and light from the car, along with my fellow commuter, poured awkwardly into an empty conductor closet. The physical comedy was too much, and I burst into a fit of laughter which I attempted unsuccessfully to dillute. With all the weirdos in this city, there aren't enough people who laugh when they see something funny. Sadly, I'm the former and not the latter most of my daylight hours.

I thought the State of the Union was Ironic last night. George W. Bush telling the citizens of the United States that we are "addicted to oil" is like Eminem proclaiming that the problem with America's youth is its addiction to "rap music." It's also a bit like this commercial I saw or overheard the other day - Phillip Morris offering money or some other sort of assistance to people who want to quit smoking. It's also a bit like ten thousand spoons, when all you need is a knife. Or meeting the man of your dreams, then meeting his beautiful wife.

Physical Space and the construction of it continues to be hugely influential in my moods. This summer I felt free and capable, and this summer I was living on the top of a mountain and when the clouds didn't enclose me entirely, I could see for endless distances. There was so much depth and with depth mystery and with mystery potential and with potential possibility though they're one and the same but whatever way your stare at it my mind could wander and float and explore.

Now, I live in an apartment with windows only on the ends. It's long and narrow and the kitchen doesn't allow in any daylight. When I look out my window I see streets or alleys but my vision is always cramped by perpendiculars. My office is so small and I'm in a tiny box in a tiny cube which I became paranoid of, I recall, back in my imagination as I was floating or falling out of a raft into level 4 rapids through the jungle and I know it it was then I thought to myself what sacrfices am I willing to make? Won't I feel like I'm not alive? And yet. And yet. New York.

I know it now because it seems to have come out of me in writing. I'm paranoid and needy when I get in small spaces. To compensate for my cramped imagination I need constant praise and reinforcement and people telling me it will be OK and it WILL be ok but I can't see it when I can't see out and yes that's why I call out for help so patience it's only who I am when I'm trapped and I swear the only thing I have against boats while we're on the subject is the limited options for movement. It's a legit thing, this need for movement. It explains why I take the 4 or 5 as opposed to the 6, when scientific studies that I myself have conducted prove beyond a shade of a doubt that the 6 takes just as little time if not less on occasion to traverse the tunnels from Grand Central 42nd Street up to 86th, and yet, and yet, I take the 4 or the 5 DEVOUTLY and the reason must be because of there is less stagnance and more movement. It's going going constantly! stopping only once for a quick breath and a release and then it's back and it's moving and it's leaping! and it's gaining speed and flying through the underground quicker and quicker and faster and faster till the light comes exploding through the windows and with a sudden burst it's here! and it's gone.

He Sings: I've got no time that I've got to give for where I don't need to be, well...

The best stuff I write now goes onto a private page because I'm afraid to share it or it gushes out into emails which find their way to that same page. This is not what I had in mind, not at all. It's hard enough trying to manage one life, yet now I've taken on two of my own.

What a self-fulfilling prophecy, what a harbinger this page has become. I wonder if I wrote about this entry back in May?

the start of many entries about marathons

I felt so good today as I watched the 37,000 runners, walkers, and rollers of today's New York Marathon traverse 5 boroughs and 26 miles in too-good-to-be-true weather.

Standing on 88th and 1st, I was at mile marker 17. When you see one of these athletes, and you are standing 17 miles into their course, you know that their arrival at this point is due to much more than the superior mental toughness or gifted physical capacity that can lead one to call a particular occurence a "fluke." No no. I know this, because yesterday I tried to run my own New York mini-Marathon. I wanted a taste of the energy, a bite of the big boys' cake, so I set off in the afternoon to run the entire 6-mile inner loop in Central Park. This from a guy who has been reduced to running once a week, 20 minutes a pop. Mostly I wanted a taste of the energy that was mounting in Central Park. Isn't it crazy how the moments leading up to a spectacular gathering of people, or in the hours after a heroic performance, a place can give off such an intense energy that the ordinary suddenly feels mystical?

Anyway, I ran 6 miles and was beat. I knew that there was nothing flukish about making it 17 miles. If someone passed before my eyes today, I was seeing so much more than who they were in that present moment. I saw all the way back to the moment they told themselves "I'm going to do this!" I saw that first day of training, I saw the days when they were close to quitting, I saw the family and friends swooping in and refusing to let them back down, I saw it all packed into one fantastic image of a man, or a woman, an American or an Italian, a human, gliding down first avenue - or more likely - surging and straining and forging ahead. I saw goals manifested into reality, and honestly, when else do you ever get to see something like that happen? This goes for the elite runners, as well as the everyday men and women who one day said to themselves, "I'm going to force my legs to go forward nonstop for 26 miles, and I'm going to do this all within the time it would take to watch 1/3 of the Lord of the Rings trilogy." This is where the real awesomeness is at. These people are the reason I couldn't stop grinning all day.

The race was a joyous event at so many levels. As a spectator, it hit me that every one of the 37,000 people who ran by me today had different motivations, circumstances, fears, goals, challenges, and obstacles that led up to this day. Every runner had a unique story. If I could simply ask each and every one of them, "Why are you doing this today?", I don't think I would ever be lonely again.

At one point early in the morning, I saw something that I would see repeated over and over throughout the day. Amidst a pack of swift moving, sweaty men, 3 individuals in red shirts moved at a moderate pace down the middle of 1st ave. On the left and right, two middle aged and decently conditioned folks jogged rather slowly. In the middle, a man in his mid 20's fought his way down the avenue on one leg, the name "Eric" pinned to the back of his shirt. He was aided by four crutches - two metal, and the two aforementioned friends. As he moved along briskly, his huge smile preceeded him. As he passed by me, a fellow runner jogged up beside him and jubilantly began to clap and cheer with the utmost sincerity "C'mon Eric! That-a-boy! You're doing Great, keep it up!" He raised his arms high and clapped some more, as he passed on by and continued on down the road.

This happened every few minutes, as far as I could tell. Being there, it struck me as the only reason I really care to be alive. Think of all the levels of inspiration in that one moment. I'm watching this guy pass the 17 mile marker, and I'm thinking, Wow! he obviously must be struggling. This must mean so much to him, to be here right now. And yet, what does this man do? As he is running, sweating, and probably cramping, he turns to a fellow athlete - an amputee who has also made it 17 miles (but on crutches!!) - and says "Hey man, I'm here for you! We're all here for you. I see your effort, and it's amazing!"

I went back to Central Park around 4:30pm cause I have a thing about places that have recently received an influx of human energy. I was surprised to find the runners and walkers were still steadily flowing in! I cruised down the sidewalk on my bike, past milemarker 24, up towards marker 25. There was a curly headed girls standing on the edge of the curb with a shopping bag at her side, and she was cheering with genuine emotion. "This is the last hill! You're doing great! Good Job Ian! Alright Italia!." She perhaps was Jesus, or at least she must have seemed that way to the weary runners. "C'mon, start runnin' will ya!?" she jabbed ironically. "Having fun? she asked with a bit of a smile to a middle age woman who passed by at a walking pace. "Oh yeah...", came the response, "but I think I've had just about enough fun for today." So there she was, no obvious relation to any of the passing runners, these absolutely dedicated troopers, these fiercely comptetitive middle agers, out of shapers, do-it-at-all-costers who were still going even if they had to walk, because goddamnit, they entered a marathon and if it takes 6 hours and 28 minutes to get to milemarker 25 than you better be damned sure I'm making it!...and she was just giving every bit of honest moral support she had and pouring it on to these tired travellers.

I fell in love with that girl briefly, and with every other person standing in Central Park cheering as the sun went down. Those few who stuck around and cheered for people they'd never met, but whose actions had garnered their complete respect. The spectators didn't need to know anything individual about the runners, nor did the runners need to know a thing about the spectators. The fact that each was present at that moment spoke volumes more than words ever could about the character of the other. That alone was enough motivation. Who knows what sort of strength those last few runners may have gathered from the loving strangers on the curb.

It was real, it happened today. I saw the greatest side of humanity. I saw people feeding off each others' energy. I saw people motivating people, actions motivating actions, respecting fostering love refueling determination.