5+ Years in India: Why I Came, and Why I'm Going

A few days ago I read a story in BBC Capital which quoted an amazing figure: between 2011 and 2015, an estimated 300,000 ethnic Indians will come to India to work.

When I first arrived in India 5.5 years ago, I thought I'd stay for 2 years. I didn't know why I'd come, or at least, I couldn't put the reason into words (which is unlike me) and so over the years I developed several inadequate answers to the question "why are you in Delhi?" I was surprised sometimes at the vehemence of this question, particularly when it was asked by other Indians, who seemed astonished that anyone would be in Delhi if they had the option to live elsewhere.

I tried to talk about India's burgeoning opportunity, or the chance to engage with a journalistic market that offers novel opportunities for engagement and depth. I talked about meeting and working with people who are on the forefront, in terms of defining media for a generation of users who will come of age with the Internet. I talked about the personal aspects of finding myself in a foreign country: about learning how to make friends in a city where I had no social history, about learning to rely on myself in circumstances that were alien and often dangerous.

Over the past 5 years, like any journalist, I've assembled many, many stories: about the science correspondents who first took me under their wing in New Delhi, about interviewing Indian policymakers and experiencing the policy process, about seeing stories that I'd written carried on the front page and (in one memorable instance) inspiring questions in Parliament. About the children in a slum school who adopted my iPad (once they realized it wasn't a phone). About jumping out the window when one of my apartment buildings suffered a summer electrical fire. About performing - for the first and last time - in a professional bellydance show. About chasing down reluctant editors and/or developers to form a news/tech community. About late-night picnics around embassy pools. About attending candlelight vigils and street protests for the rights of young people. And of course, about the minor and mundane facts of daily life.

After a while, the question "why did you come to Delhi" evolved. I arrived in Delhi with a standard story. I wanted to be a newspaper correspondent and write long, brilliant stories. As a student at Medill, I learned about the joys of this kind of "real" journalism. When I graduated, I witnessed print journalism's sudden and catastrophic decline. To that extent, I was searching for an opportunity that seemed scare at home. Yes, I could have found writing work in the United States. But the kind of stories I would have been able to write were so, so much less compelling to me than the joys and strangenesses of an entirely new country. Every day that I discovered something or succeeded at something, I felt as if I'd created something new.

But then things changed. I took a job in digital journalism, an evolving field. It had been two years. And people started asking me - or maybe I started asking myself - why am I still here?

A childhood friend sent me a Facebook message that said, "it looks like you're having a lot of fun in Delhi." I bristled at his comment, because to an extent his observation was true. I joined Business Today in 2011. I went from being a struggling newspaper journalist to a far more comfortable magazine editor. In 2011, after 1.5 years, I also started meeting some of the people who would become my regular friends. For the first time, I began to feel like I had a social circle. I went to book launches and gallery openings and parties in nice clubs. I felt confident and free in a way I never had before, perhaps because I was young, single and earning money, and living in a big city.

I'm no longer offended by his comment. Yes, I've had a lot of fun, and because of that, I feel profoundly lucky. If you know Delhi like I do, you'll understand that having fun in it can be an occasionally Herculean labor, not unlike slaying a multi-headed serpent. It's messy, chaotic, violent and often dangerous. But having fun can also be deceptively, delightfully easy. That last bit has nothing to do with location.

Physically, Delhi has undergone an enormous transformation in just a few short years.  I recently moved to GK2, a South Delhi neighborhood, and when a local coffee shop shut down, a United Colors of Benetton opened up in the same space just a week later. Then a Starbucks came in. Everywhere I looked, I saw young girls in tank tops and shorts. The stodginess of Delhi, its age, are being worn away by an energetic and vibrant new force. There are dangerous elements to this force, and an unthinking nature to its occasional rapaciousness, but it is exciting all the same.

And then the Delhi gang rape occurred. I wrote about the Delhi gang rape, because I felt like it fundamentally changed my experience of living in Delhi. I don't think I was the only one who felt that way.

But I still didn't leave. Living the millennial's rootless dream, I switched jobs again, this time to start an organization of my own. I went door to door and met editors and journalists. I started hanging out with entrepreneurs and developers. I found direction, uniqueness and focus. And then, through the people I'd met, I got another fantastic opportunity: this time to build a citizen journalism outlet on behalf of a major media house. There are only a few dedicated projects like this in the world.

Professionally, this project put me at the forefront of a global discussion around the future of journalism. I began to meet editors, journalists and activists from SE Asia, from Europe, from Africa, who were concerned about the communities we create on the Internet, and how those communities thrive. We wanted to know how to bring these communities into the journalistic process, and how to build tools that would enable trust and collaboration. We talked about user-generated content, about online activism, about net neutrality, about verification.  It was exciting to be part of these conversations, and I swiftly realized that the Indian voice would be essential to the evolution of this global dialogue. I looked at the young people around me and the ways they were interacting online, and I looked at global demographic trends, and I realized that the online voice of young India will be the online voice of the future world. I began to speak at conferences and workshops, and to write about the things I'd observed.

Back in the US, everyone seemed to be waking up to India. John Oliver and Jon Stewart were doing segments on the Indian elections, and BuzzFeed and Quartz set up India-specific sites.  Hacks/Hackers New Delhi threw an event focusing on interesting startups in news - yes, they exist, even here. Especially here.

So here's the final question - why am I leaving now?

I love New Delhi, but I know that to an extent, what I've loved about it has been the unparalleled experience I've had while I've been here. Sometime last year, I began to feel like the time was coming for me to go. I couldn't explain it, but the same inexorable force that drew me to Delhi was drawing me back to the US. I began to think about the future, and when I found out in April that I'd been accepted into grad school at MIT (to study the intersection of media + technology!) I felt as if my past experience and my future hopes were coming seamlessly together. I can't wait to study, to make new friends, to experience a new city, and to start work in my lab.

And: I can't wait to be in the same time zone as my parents and sister, to buy great wine at cheap prices, and to go biking in the great national parks on the East Coast (especially when autumn comes). I think about Washington DC, about the National Mall (where I spent hours as a kid, and where I would go running in the early mornings as an adult) and I feel a hunger so acute that it has a taste of its own.

The question "why did you come to New Delhi" suggests that our decisions have a single point of origin, or that one neat impulse can power a varied experience. The truth is, nothing in our lives is neat, and our journeys are never simple. I never expected that I would found Hacks/Hackers New Delhi, because when I moved here in early 2009, Hacks/Hackers (globally) did not exist. I never expected that I would help build a user-generated content portal, because when I moved here, Twitter had no official presence in the country. I never expected I would get to know my grandparents as more than fuzzy voices on the far end of a telephone line. I never, ever expected such affection, kindness, and generosity. But most of all: I never expected I would be so happy here, because I never had been before, not anywhere.

The Danger of a Single Story: Vulture Reviews the Mindy Project

Every few months, when one of my favorite TV shows finishes, I go looking for a replacement. The decision to commit to a new show relies on an undefinable chemistry between me and the show. And once the commitment is made, it's irrevocable, barring really egregious decisions by the writers (for example, Downton Abbey - it's gone so steadily downhill, and yet I refuse to stop watching.)

I recently found The Mindy Project, although I didn't expect to. I followed Mindy Kaling on Twitter a few months ago because I expected her Twitter feed to be a barrel of laughs. It was more a barrel of convoluted inside jokes between her and a lot of people who weren't me. She's clearly intelligent, capable, and driven, but there's something about her general demeanor that suggested the sorority sister whom I avoided in college because she was constantly getting obsessed with things I didn't relate to: china patterns, frilled clothing, Kardashian love lives.

But I enjoyed The Mindy Project. And then I went and read a review of it on Vulture.  And the critic said this:

"There’s something quietly revolutionary about those images of a young brown-skinned Indian girl re-watching Hollywood rom-coms and memorizing the dialogue. We’re not just seeing pop culture cannibalize itself in these scenes. They’re also a statement on the messy emotional realities of assimilation — on how men and women who, for whatever reason, should naturally identify as outsiders in the American mainstream want to be in the middle of it."

This paragraph stuck in my craw. It just...bothered me, like when a fly gets stuck in a room and won't stop buzzing. But I couldn't figure out why I was annoyed. And then I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story," and I figured it out.

Adichie is one of my favorite authors. Several years ago, the New Yorker ran her short story "Birdsong" (paywall), the story of a young Nigerian woman who has an affair with an older, married, man. It's a beautiful story. But in her TED talk, Adichie talks about how she was once told that her stories weren't "authentically African," because she focused on educated, middle-class people. These critics - none of them Africans - urged Adichie to write stories that conformed to the African narrative they found familiar.

"The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete," she says in her talk.

And that's what bothers me about the critic's comment. Because there is nothing revolutionary about The Mindy Project. Of course Indian-American girls watch Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry met Sally, just like white and black girls do. Why wouldn't they? How could they not?  Does Matt Seitz believe that TV waves discriminate based upon skin color? That they sense the presence of a non-white face, and go scurrying back into the TV set?

There is another moment that Adichie talks about, and that is the moment when she first realized that the British stories she read growing up (about blue-eyed children frolicking in the snow) were all about white people from the UK. And that she was not a white person from the UK. In a strange demographic twist, most of us are minorities in some way.  And many have this moment of realization at some point. We look at the heroes of sitcoms, the heroes of history, and we realize, "wait a minute - these people are all white." Or "Hey, they're all men!" No matter how much you love the stories you grew up with, you can't go back from this realization. Because you also realize that although you have spent years seeing yourself as part of a community, that community sees you as an outsider.

We, the brown girls of the world (and by extension, the curly-haired girls, the Arab girls, the girls with big noses and unfashionable teeth, the brown boys, etc), have no trouble seeing ourselves in all the stories and culture we grew up with. It's people like Seitz - an adult man, who really has no excuse - who cannot see us there, because we are "brown-skinned." Just because something is revolutionary for him doesn't mean it is a revolution in any actual sense. (And that leaves aside the troubling phrase "should naturally identify as outsiders" - what does that mean? That there is some separate but equal cultural sidestream for non-white people, where they belong? That Indian-Americans should watch Bollywood, and Hispanic-Americans should watch Telemundo?)

Single narratives, Adichie says, are the result of power. Those in power have the luxury of choosing their narrative, or creating alternatives. Until recently, there was a single Indian-American narrative. It prompted much of Jhumpa Lahiri's success - her stories rely on a vision of assimilation that conforms to what people expect (that doesn't make them bad). If we have more Indian-American narratives today, it's because we have people like Mindy Kaling, whose show (whatever its other weaknesses) conforms to none of these types. But again - just because a show challenges one man's race-based perceptions, doesn't mean it is actually breaking ground. That is his narrative: a man who one day woke up and realized minority girls watch the same movies as everyone else. But it certainly isn't mine. I hope it isn't most people's.

As I prepare to move back to the United States after 5.5 years in India, I'm acutely aware that in the eyes of many Americans, India is a single narrative. I realize this every time I'm in a conversation and someone asks, "Gosh, how do you live in Delhi as a woman?" I wonder what to say. "Just like everyone else?"  Because this isn't just a narrative about Delhi. It's a narrative about Indian women, as well, a narrative that assumes all Indian women lead subpar and unequal lives. That we live under the constant looming threat of assault. Maybe this last bit is true. But so do women all over the world.

I don't know how to reconcile the hard and global truths about "being a woman in India" with the lived reality of my past 5.5 years, which has intersected with those truths but also superseded them.  I wonder what stereotypes I will encounter about India in the US - I'm sure there will be many - and whether I'll explain their incompleteness, or just give up, and stop trying to explain it at all. In some ways, I have new respect for my parents, who have navigated this journey every day of their lives. (The US, because of its cultural power, is not a single narrative country in this way, or at least, not to the same extent.)

A Few Women Essayists Whom I Love

If we've known each other for any length of time, and you've ever suggested an interest in writing (or literature), then I've probably pulled you into some dark corner of a bar at some point to talk about the virtues of "essays by women writers."

"Essays by women writers" is a recent theme for me.  I read almost no essays while growing up. In college, I read love letters by James Joyce, Will Faulkner and Franz Kafka, mainly because these letters were obscene. But reading obscene letters didn't get me anywhere when it comes to understanding writing, although it told me a lot (possibly more than I wanted to know) about the kind of people who become writers.

After that, I started reading memoirs, and didn't fare much better.  If you're an American adult today, you've probably read a memoir somewhere, even if it's only NYT's "Modern Love."  I spent a few hours trying to crack "Eat, Pray, Love" - and then, totally bored and unimpressed, I went off to find examples that could redeem the genre.  It was the best and worst of times for memoirs, the post James Frey era, but for some reason I went retro and found "Burning the Days," and "The Great Railway Bazaar." And these were interesting. "Burning the Days" is good fun just like all of Salter is fun, and "Bazaar" was enjoyable, to the extent that you can enjoy someone like Paul Theroux in the world after Edward Said.

But the essays I'm talking about moved me more deeply, and it began with Siri Hustvedt. I was working my way through Siri Hustvedt's novels and had just polished off "What I Loved."  I walked away from that novel with an abiding sense that here was an author whom I wanted to get to know. I wanted to understand how her novels moved so smoothly between intellect and passion, and whether she'd figured out a way to make that work in real life.  So I bought a "A Plea for Eros," in which she talks about growing up, about feminine identity, about authors she's loved. I remember one piece, in particular, in which she describes how she met and fell in love with her husband (the novelist Paul Auster). Hustvedt captures perfectly the beauty, hope (and often despair!) of meeting someone whom you profoundly desire.  Her essays exposed a journey - mental, personal - that in many ways I wanted to be on.

Is it odd to turn to fiction writers for advice on how to live?

There is a streak of self-indulgence in Hustvedt's essays. And there's more than a streak of grandiosity in the writings of the other two women who make my list: Ayn Rand and Anais Nin. I've written about Rand's essays before, so I won't revisit them (and to be honest, Rand is an odd addition to this list because she's not a feminist, although she might be if she had lived in a different time or had a more forgiving past). Anais Nin's essays are passionate about the world of ideas, without neglecting the world of flesh and blood. In her writing, she lays out her vision for the "new woman", a woman who is sensitive and smart, aware of the power of both her emotions and her intellect. Nin also profiles several talented women whom history hasn't paid much attention to, often because they were overshadowed by the more famous men in their lives: Louis Andreas-Salome, Caitlin Thomas, Suzanne Valadon, Zelda Fitzgerald. Nin's essays are a conversation not just with herself, but with many women whose ideas have informed her. Of all the three women I've mentioned, she's the only one who deliberately makes a point of citing other women as examples and role models. It's amazing how many people can talk about feminism without ever naming a single female writer who has had an influence on their thoughts. You have to wonder what kind of feminism they actually aspire to.

Today's talented women novelists (Chimamanda, Jhumpa, Zadie, Jane Smiley, Jennifer Egan, Antonya Nelson) seem more able to reconcile their female identity with their drive for work than Jane Austen, the Brontes, or Emily Dickinson (although not a novelist) ever were. Being an intellectual or ambitious woman was in the past a lonely road, and these essays demonstrate an awareness of that fact. But they also illustrate to me ways in which women can reconcile - or at least try to reconcile - the challenges of ambition with the challenges of life. There is no shame in not being men, they say. That doesn't make us - as thinkers, anyway - any less significant.

The Doniger Debate - A Personal Reflection

In the debate over Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus," a friend recently shared this link, an interview with the author from 2009.

In college, I wrote a personal essay about Diwali for the school newspaper, which concluded with "The legends don't say [Ram] returned home to a populace that wasn't segregated by class, or to a kingdom that wasn't paralyzed by dissent. They don't promise that he went without reservations or uncertainty. Only that he went."

The Ramayana is one of my favorite stories, and Sita is one of my favorite characters.  (Ayn Rand once said - I'm paraphrasing - that most people's moral compromises take the form of tiny acts of daily cowardice, rather than the form of grand battles. And she's right. Ram went into the forest for 14 years, which somehow made my 22-year-old self feel better about my inadequate ways of coping with homesickness.)

But like a lot of women I know, I was ambivalent about the story, especially the bit at the end when Ram rejects Sita in favor of his crown. I found this decision unacceptable and deeply unfair. I wasn't the only one. From my conversations with other women, I know that many of us gravitated towards Sita's story, and towards that moment of abandonment. We all felt that it was the low point of Ram's trajectory (we rejected entirely the idea that he did the right thing by leaving her).

In the introduction to"In Search of Sita," one of the editors writes about how young women have trouble relating to Sita's ideals and life. I'd always seen Sita as a woman who made her own decisions, although she was let down by a man.

In her interview, Doniger addresses Ram's repudiation of Sita thus: "But even so, [Ram] is afraid that people who noticed Dasaratha’s love for Ram will say that like his father, he too is keeping a woman he should not because he’s so crazy about her. So he fears public opinion will connect him with his father."

I don't know enough Sanskrit to quibble with Doniger's interpretation (other people do), but I understand what propels her question. Sita's situation seems quintessentially female, not in the sense that it embodies any archetype of ideal womanhood, but in the sense that she grapples with the same problems and dilemmas that women still face when it comes to the people they love. Understanding women's place in scripture and tradition doesn't mean drawing a straight line between a woman and the words themselves. It means asking about the motivations and behaviors and attitudes that shaped women's stories, and by extension, actual women's lives.

In their obsession with excising sex from the scriptures, puritans of all stripes have decided to remove women, as well. The debate is neither new nor restricted to Hinduism - massive controversy has arisen over the idea of Gnostic Gospels, or the theory that Jesus might have been married. I mean no disrespect to anyone's tradition, but isn't it hurtful that the worst thing you can say about a man is that he loved a woman? Or that the road to being a perfect man involves leaving women by the wayside?

The idea that sex is bad has often meant, in the existing tradition, that women are bad as well. Doniger's critics have accused her of being a "woman hungry for sex." Certainly, she's hungry for fame and perhaps willing to tolerate notoriety. But it's disingenuous to suggest that her critics are concerned only with the nature of her Vedic translations - they are deeply concerned about sex as well.

Consider this quote, from the petition against Doniger's book "The Hindus": "Pg 112 - The author alleges that in Rigveda 10.62, it is implied that a woman may find her own brother in her bed! COMMENT: The hymn has no such suggestion. It is offensive to suggest that the sacred text of Hindus has kinky sex in it." Indeed, much of the petition's complaints fall under "Derogatory, Defamatory and Offensive Statements." The petition itself opens with the word "scandalous" in all caps.

The debate is not about the translation or interpretation of a seminal book from India's past, or about the quality of Doniger's scholarship. It's about the structure of the future society we build here, who will be represented within it, and what information children will be permitted to access. It is about what those children will learn - whether they will feel they have the right to judge or condemn their peers for non-mainstream sexual or life choices - or whether they will value tolerance and inclusion instead. (Consider: the Indian Supreme Court recently upheld a faded provision criminalizing certain consensual sex acts.)  The petitioners who filed the report against Doniger's book (led by a former school principal) are fighting for their future society. And in this case, they won.  The real loss isn't "The Hindus," but the book that comes after it that will now never be released in India at all. And the conversations about Sita, about Hinduism, and about our tradition that will, in this context, be even harder to have.

The Sunday Blog Post: Love What You Do

The other day, I read an essay in "Slate" in which the author dissects and dismisses the idea that we should love what we do.  In fact, Miya Tokumitsu argues that the "love what you do" mantra (meme?) has become pernicious - it glosses over differences in class that determine the lovability of work, and it allows employers to squeeze workers for more while offering little financial reward. She uses the phrase "elite", which is what we stamp these days on anything undesirable, never mind that much of America's population would probably fall into the broad global definition of elite.

There are certain arguments she makes that are very worth hearing. She cites the patron saint of DWYL (a truly obnoxious but nonetheless convenient acronym) culture, Steve Jobs. In his famous Stanford speech (watch it, read it) he said, "You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

To be fair, I don't think his is bad advice. To the extent that it encourages people to take professional risks on possibilities they feel strongly about, it's fantastic advice. Not that it matters. Almost everyone is capable of love, but not everyone has a very high appetite for risk. A few heartfelt words in a college auditorium aren't going to change anyone's fundamental character, and that's really what Jobs is talking about.

There is a dark side to Jobs' vision, however, and Tokomitsu makes her strongest point when she says that Apple would never have become a global behemoth unless it relied upon the labor of hundreds of thousands of factory workers all over the world. Most of them probably don't love what they do. Much has been made and said of the consumer electronics boom, and how it has empowered a particular upper class of world society. 

When most of us talk about loving our work, we rely upon a set of prejudiced and privileged assumptions, namely:

1) We will earn good money for our work - and we will earn more money for our work, relatively, than most of the human population. (For an excellent case study in what I'm talking about, read Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, in which her main protagonist works 12 hours a day as a garbage sorter for truly meager wages. Very few books so handily explode the myth of the meritocratic universe.)

2) Our hard work will be rewarded with greater responsibility (being the boss is, in fact, a less stressful way of life.)

3) Our work will be rewarded with prestige. Or will even start out prestigious.

The notion of loving what you do is built upon the assumption (not faulty, but not universal) that in exchange for hard labor we will receive appreciation, admiration, and reward. For most people, that is simply not the case. And it is impossible to separate DWYL from this assumption.

More disturbingly (and perhaps obviously) Tokumitsu suggests that this notion - that people should labor for love - allows modern-day corporations to exploit their workers' labor. She cites three industries: fashion, media and the arts.  These industries are prestigious, people enter them for love, and they earn zilch. Without citing any particular example, I'll apply her observations about media to the journalism industry. I went to a solid journalism school and have worked media industry jobs ever since. Along the way, more than half of the people who graduated with me have shifted focus and moved into other careers. As one of the people left in the field, I am aware that by and large, our industry pays far, far less than almost any other industry does for the same amount of work. The mental, emotional and sometimes physical challenges of journalism are enormous; but the job pays in prestige, not so much in cash. (This is not a universal truth, but an overall observation. News is 24 hours, journalists rarely take breaks. Other high-level jobs that demand such total dedication - medicine, law, finance - pay much more.)

As a college junior, I found myself choosing between four possible summer internships. One was in banking, one in technology, one in advertising, one in journalism. I took the journalism job. It paid the least, but it came with less tangible rewards  (And yes, I was lucky to find paid journalism jobs - I wrote about my decision not to work unpaid internships in another post.)  I was very happy, but emerging research suggests that if I were richer, I would have been happier yet (although, admittedly, this research is in its initial stages). Intertwined with the notion of DWYL is the idea that you are not working for money. At least not immediately. And there's nothing wrong with that, unless you're working for an organization that will keep whatever value there is in your labor that you leave on the table.  (Tokumitsu cites academia as the most exploitative profession of all.)

The argument becomes more nuanced in the world of the arts - where, the idea is, people often labor for public gain. Being willing to suffer total penury seems to be one of the requirements of any great artist. And maybe it is. But I also know that there are tons of museums (not to mention design shops) that rely on the unpaid labor of (mainly) young women. A friend of mine who works with the intern program at a well-known museum told me that they knowingly pay rock-bottom wages, and as a result their employees are mainly women whose husbands/boyfriends have more lucrative jobs that pay the rent (this is in an expensive city) or who come from large family fortunes. Think about the number of women in the world who have the option of marrying rich (Fewer than 5% of American men earn over $100k a year). Think of the number who inherit serious money. Now consider the question of diversity and representation in the arts, in media, and in fashion.

Which brings me to my next point: even within the rarefied world of the US elite, the notion of DWYL has devalued the idea of working for personal profit. The world is separated, according to many, into those who do what they love and accept that their labor - the production of ideas, goodness, art - carries little reward, and those who do machinistic jobs that they hate in exchange for a frightening amount of money. There's the idea of "selling your soul," whatever the hell that means. (We're all selling something, if not our souls, but some of us are getting a better price than others.)  Mixed in with the idea that you should DWYL is the idea that if you're working for money, you've somehow given up.

The notion of loving what you do has also justified - or perhaps permitted - the expansion of work to a point where it has become, for many of us, the most defining feature of our lives and selves.  Certainly, our parents worked, but they didn't work like us.  Back then, there was the notion of "job" and the notion of "life." Now the two have fused as we work more than we did before.  I don't know if DWYL permitted this phenomenon or merely evolved after it, like some kind of necessary adaptation. John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would be working three-hour workdays. Instead, we've gone in the opposite direction. The Sheryl Sandbergs of the world exhort us to lean in; they never suggest that the corporations we work for should lean out. (And why should she? Remember that Sandberg is more frequently to be found on the interviewer's side of the desk. If more women lean in, it benefits her.)

Certainly, there is no glory in doing a job you hate just for money (and frankly, not much long-term success, either. Not to be trite, but that's as true for your lovers as it is for your job.). There is value in exploring ideas, possibilities, the world. There is value in doing these things while appreciating that being able to do them at all is an extraordinary luxury.  There is truth to the fact that working to expand such opportunity to others less fortunate is not only a favor but a requirement. There is truth to the notion that the empires of people like Steve Jobs were built upon many, many individuals, not all of whom will ever be asked what they love.  And there is value in acknowledging that you labor for love, yes, but you also labor to keep the lights on when it gets dark.

New Year's Eve, and Change

It's been two months since I wrote here! It's a new year, which suggests that something must have changed, but not that I can tell. New Year's Eve, every year, is a ritual I go through in the hopes it'll live up to its impossible symbolism.  I keep thinking that one of these years I'll have the New Year's Eve to end all the years, after which I can say, that's it, I've done this right, now I'll throw in the towel and stay home every year like a normal person.  But it hasn't happened.

I've been in Delhi for five New Year's, and when I tell people this, I start to feel a little uncomfortable, like I have to justify getting swept along for so long by fate.  The landscape of Delhi in winter lends itself to reminisces and possibly Gothic novels, with spooky white fog rising everywhere like steam off a pot of boiling water. Driving through the streets is largely a silent and isolated adventure, and every moment I expect some Hound of the Baskervilles to come up behind, or Heathcliff to entreat from an intersection. Instead, we barely avoid sideswiping other people who are jumping red lights.

Recently, I've been trying to address my anxiety about symbolic events by embracing them.  If New Year's disappoints, please imagine the many years I've spent hiding from the prospect of that other obnoxious annual event, the birthday. Who doesn't feel anxious about their birthday? I would like to meet that person. I think it was 2010 that I celebrated my first birthday in Delhi. I invited nobody, intending to suffer it stoically and then pretend it had never happened. But late in the evening some friends came over anyway. I blew out the candles on the tiny but delicious cake.  My power had gone out, and so we ate cake and told stories by the white light coming from someone else's living room across the street. The couches in my apartment were so close together that our knees touched the plastic table.

When I think about that, I think about the many ways my life has changed, but also, the many ways it has stayed the same. The other day, I read some post on Facebook that asked, "what would you tell your younger self if you could?" I don't know if I'm at the age where my younger self - any of my younger selves - would really want my advice, but the first thing I thought was, things change a whole lot less than you would expect. The locations and circumstances of life may have altered, but the thing I am most struck by, of late, is how seamlessly each phase of life has led to the next.  I don't think anyone who knew me at age 13 would be surprised at what or where I am now, and to be honest, that's probably true of most of us.

This realization doesn't coincide very neatly with the political situation in Delhi, or possibly in India as a whole.  Everywhere I go, I see slogans and Facebook groups promoting change. I've rarely seen so many people so whole-heartedly advocate a total break with the status quo.  And some of them, in daily and minor ways, manage it. If life accrues, then so does its alteration. Nothing changes overnight, but rather by a process almost chemical in its exactness, until years later the final object is nothing like what it was. Unlike in the case of two chemicals, we have no way of knowing how we will interact and react when faced with the things that change us.

A friend told me the other day that I'm a romantic; she said it with surprise. Someone else recently told me that many people spend a lot of time denying what they feel. And maybe that relates to the idea of romanticism, of holding what you love at the core of your life. I suspect that people who do that, also change less. Or surprise us less by the changes.

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I wrote about living in Delhi, globalization, and women's changing place in the world in an essay for the Common. Read it here.

Why I Started Cooking

I know that some people are born cooks - or at least, born with an affinity for cooking. People like my sister, who by age 20, despite the vagaries and fits of college apartment kitchens, was hosting gourmet dinner parties for groups of ten.

But for me, like for many people I know, the revelation came much later. For most of my 20s (a terrifying phrase, in that I have to now admit that "most of my 20s" are over), the only constant in my life was transience. I went to college 700 miles from home, spent summers and autumns in various apartments and hotels in Italy and New York, and then made the most astonishing leap of all: to New Delhi, where, at last count, I have now managed to occupy six different houses. I've moved more than most people I know, and these moves haven't just crossed physical distances - they've been prompted by necessity and desire, sometimes by catastrophes, often by aspirations.

And despite all this, for many, many years, it never really occurred to me to cook. I rejected cooking as banal and ordinary, a surrender to the domesticity that I had spent so many years of my life trying to abjure.

My first independent kitchen - the first one that counts - was in my college apartment.  I bought pre-packaged hamburgers from the Whole Foods downstairs and ate them with lettuce and tomato but no bun. I learned how to make omelettes by accident, on a trip to New York. I was visiting a friend in Queens, and one evening we found ourselves at home with nothing to eat but eggs. I bravely volunteered to take a turn at the skillet, and was surprised by how delicious the results turned out. It was an experiment, not that I told her that.  And then I made pasta, but this too involved an element of quest. I became convinced, in senior year, that it was possible to make a pasta that fused perfectly the flavors of East and West. I ground cardamom into linguine, dusted noodles in turmeric, sliced ginger over lasagna. It was all perfectly repugnant, and I ended up tossing a lot of it in the trash.

Beneath these attempts there lingered an abstruse reverse competitiveness; the awareness of a fraternal separation of powers between my sister and myself.  She lived in nice apartments, matched her sofas to her drapes, scouted for castoff tables on Craigslist, reinvented her decor with mosaic tiles and embroidery. She owned multiple can openers. As for me, I was too busy for all of that - I was going places.

But where exactly was that? My second independent kitchen was in Neeti Bagh, in a tiny studio apartment above the house of a Bengali doctor and his wife. They treated me like their daughter, although this generosity didn't extend to the table. My counter was a narrow green granite slab, and my range was a single burner with a tiny gas cylinder attached to it by a pipe. I had seven or eight pots and pans, many of them - I'm now embarrassed to admit - gifts from my mother, who packed them in my suitcase when she learned just how ill-equipped I was for any semblance of adult life.

So I started cooking again out of a sense of nostalgia, perhaps. I'd trek to the tiny grocery store in Neeti Bagh, poring over $10 jars of imported olives and pasta sauce. As for cheese, I smuggled it from the US, in enormous Costco bricks that I laid in the bottom of my suitcase like ballast.  In Delhi, surrounded by Indian spices, I still managed an approximation of American food.  Pasta alfredo. Egg salad.  Omelettes. The only difference was the substitution of the occasional Indian cookware. For a while, I managed all my cooking in a single aluminum topiah, hoisting it on and off the burner with a pair of tongs. This arrangement will make sense to Delhi-ites, everyone else will find it literally unimaginable.

And I stuck to the recipes of my hazy past. It didn't occur to me to consult a cookbook, to explore new vegetables or flavors or herbs or whatnot. People would ask me why I didn't learn more Indian dishes; my answer was a thoughtless shrug.  I had come to India expecting that I would learn the dishes my mother made - her spinach rice, her dahi bhalla, her rajma. I don't know how or why I expected that after years of standing senselessly at her elbow, I would magically sprout this talent in her absence.

For a while, I surrendered to Delhi custom and hired a cook. This was no easy task. It's never easy to surrender control of your personal space, and with Shatrugan ("just like the actor, madam") I had more struggles than most. I wanted only Indian food ("but I cook for all foreign peoples") and quantities of oil that he found microscopic. Towards the end, I would wake up in the early morning and perch myself on the living room sofa, watching him out of the corners of my eyes to see exactly how much oil he was adding to our food.  This insane behavior quieted neither of us, and eventually the arrangement ended.

I don't know what I did in Green Park, where I lived for over a year. I did add one dish to my repertoire: after an enlightening dinner at a friend's house, I learned to make Thai curry. (It's not as complex as it sounds.)  I invited friends over for dinner once and made pasta, with a chicken that turned out disturbingly dry.

And then I moved to GK 2, and something changed. I don't know if it was the proverbial page being turned, or the fact that I was tired of eating nothing but pasta and eggs. It might have been this simple: one day, I went down to the vegetable vendor's cart to buy tomato and onions, and I realized - in a blinding flash! - that he had so much more available than that. Suddenly I was looking up recipes for beetroot and sweet kerala, for pumpkin and paneer. I realized - for the first time in 4 years - how much I could do. I realized that it was fun to cook for myself.

Or perhaps it was more complex. Sometime in the past, and without my really thinking about it, my vision of my future life had changed, or perhaps it had merely developed. I met friends at restaurants, at bars, in parks. We ate out, we still do. But I began to imagine a time in my future when I would want to make food for others - when I would want my home to be a refuge in the truest sense.  I remembered how my parents had hosted so many of my high school play rehearsals, and how my mother had cooked for us. I remembered her setting out a banquet at my high school graduation party, while I flitted around in a flowered white dress.

Suddenly cooking didn't seem like a chore, or even a skill, but a part of that complex process by which we create our homes and ourselves. And yet, it was also - like everything - an assertion of the individual self. They say that you cook like your mother did, but I almost never do. If you come to my house, chances are, you will not eat anything that I had growing up. Partly, this has to do with what's available. But mostly, it has to do with the ways I've used cooking as yet another destination on a journey that has taken me further and further into the world - into Thai food, Keralite food, meat (I grew up in a largely vegetarian house).  And perhaps these differences reflect the differences of my mother's life, as well - I grew up eating chicken, fajitas, stir fries. I doubt my grandmother, who has spent the past forty years of her life in roughly the same part of Mumbai, has ever made any of these things.

I don't know at what point a journey becomes a departure, and at what point we can say we have started to come back.

What Not to Wear...to a South Delhi Club

A friend of mine recently posted a woeful column on FB about how he has been refused entry at so-called "fashionable establishments" because he showed up in Indian wear.  Now, I have a few male friends who really rock Indian clothes.  And when I say Indian clothes, I mean the full white kurta-pajama set.  And yes, upon occasion, I have mocked them for looking slightly neta-esque. (Particularly once wintertime arrives and those delightful wool vests emerge.)  Interestingly, many of them at one point secretly aspired to neta-hood; that's probably why we're friends, and probably also why I like that look.  It suggests a latent and septuagenarian type of political power, much like an ill-fitting Brooks Brothers suit once did in the secret corridors beneath the US Capitol.

However, the real Indian-wear prize for men probably goes to a former colleague of mine, who used to wear slightly rumpled kurtas with the careless finesse of a Frenchman tossing a scarf over his shoulder (do Frenchmen do this? Probably not. Sorry, France).  My colleague was very thin, very young, very well-read, and a real Jacobin. I hope my fondness for his whole aura derives from genuine liking, and not (despite the many long hours that I, like any well-meaning post-colonial PIO, logged with the collected works of Ed Said) some holdover Orientalist fetish. I should add, for those who need any further explanation, that he gradated from JNU.

When it comes to ethnic-wear, the decision "To wear or not to wear" is fraught, and if I were to be honest, I am no stranger to this internal debate. Growing up, I wore Indian clothes to my very American but very post-racial middle and high schools, on every Diwali.  Some people dislike the attention of being a cultural ambassador, my philosophy was to run with it.  All day long people would come up to me and ask me what I was wearing and why I was wearing it, and I would regale them with stories of how special I was. I probably enjoyed the pomp more than the circumstance.  I also enjoyed the pseudo-political implications of wearing Indian clothes in white men's country, although keep in mind that the tiny, overeducated oddity that is Montgomery County is officially 15% Asian and unofficially 18% Jewish. So really, it was more of a gesture.

In Delhi, I've opted for Westerns, but somewhat grudgingly.  I am no stranger to the Orientalist allure. The pages of Indian Vogue abound with photos of tall, styled, bronzed women wearing blouse-less gossamer and gold saris, looking like they just got up from a tryst with James Bond's Mediterranean avatar. (The reality is less "tryst with James Bond" and more "screaming match with the driver" but anyway.) Seeing these pictures, I aspired to the notion of an effortless and seemingly unattainable beauty, and the lifestyle that beauty implied.  Effortless beauty, of course, is one of the Grand Myths mixed into young women's breakfast cereal, along with milk and guilt. Unattainable beauty, meanwhile, is an enormous commercial reality, the peddling of which brings in billions and billions of dollars a year around the world.  I wore a formal sari on one occasion and was surprised to note that unlike the saris of my personal myth, this sari had heft and weight.  The blouse kept gapping oddly, the pleats threatened to diverge.  I felt less like the lovely swan and more like the unfortunate cygnet.

When I wore a lighter and less formal sari to an event in South Delhi, people kept coming up to me and asking if I was one of the organizers.  Never one to decline a position of authority, I replied in the affirmative. My co-workers, meanwhile, displayed all the rapturous wonder of Americans hearing Armstrong's first words from the moon.  The attention I got for my sari is sad and perhaps instructive, because let's be honest - every ragpicker woman in this country manages to put on her sari in the morning and gets no thanks for it.  Meanwhile, the auto drivers kept calling me "didi," which is almost the female version of neta.  I can't pretend I didn't like it.

I could go on and tell you the stories of Delhi's many tailors, who in their spare time - and they have much of it - double as guardians of public morality.  One time, I copied a "daring" blouse pattern from one of my magazines and took it to a neighborhood tailor.  Used to the white pajama suits and high-necked blouses of this particular retirement community, he raised his eyebrows when I told him how low I wanted the scoop in the back.  When I arrived to pick up the garment, I found that he had tailored something entirely different - sort of like a T-shirt.  When called upon for explanation, he smiled gravely at my mother and replied, "our girls don't dress like that."

The "posh" tailors of South Delhi, meanwhile, are terrifyingly libertine. One afternoon, sandwiched between gold ruching and padded bra cups at Eve's, near my house, I had a tailor sketch me a pattern.  I picked it up and squinted.  In the end, I couldn't see any difference between wearing his design and wearing two halves of a coconut.  If I were effortlessly beautiful, I told myself then, I would have airily waved my hand and told him to go ahead with it.  But I was not - and at the end of the day, the goal of any flattering garment is to overwhelm nature with more intelligent design.

But the point my friend was making - and that can't be denied - is not about Indian-ness as a fun experiment to be engaged in once a year or even at the occasional society party.  He was talking about the reality of Indian-ness, and the ways in which, through sartorial bans, Indian-ness is sidelined or seen as somehow less, particularly in the working world.  And I can't pretend I disagree with him.  If, as a girl, the goal of my dressing was to reclaim and display Indian-ness as a source of pride (and it was) then the disparagement of an Indian ensemble is no laughing matter.  Nor is it a uniquely Indian phenomenon.  In the United States, ethnic-wear of any type is not seen as "professional" - regardless of tailoring or cleanliness.  Our preferences are so deeply ingrained that they are seen as unquestionable.  Just look at stories of women who are asked to leave their jobs because their natural hair is curly, or male business students who are told in college that in order to succeed, they have to mimic a slicked-back ideal.  I have a lovely and beautiful Jewish friend with wildly curly hair who would spend hours straightening it; she once confessed that it's because she just sees straight hair as "more professional."

Clean, tidy hair is professional.  But straight?  Why don't we just put a sign out front, "White Christians Only"?  There was great uproar over this a while back in the US, and several fashion magazines went out of their way to showcase women with natural hair.  But at the end of the day, things probably went back to what they were before - and there are a million more prejudices that we never question.

The moment we see a particular attire as more "professional," it's because we associate that attire with access to opportunity.  There is no denying that in India, Westernization is seen as that access.  And this perception holds true across all levels of society, from the young guy who signs up for an English class to get a better job to the rich woman who returns from abroad with an inexplicable and pointless foreign twang.  If we are being honest with ourselves - which, despite being Delhi-ites, we sometimes should be - these choices have little to do with comfort or familiarity.  There is a glamour, youth and edginess attributed to western clothes.  It is a matter of branding.  Much like sexual objectification, there are things that on an individual level may not be bad, but when elevated to a normative social standard (ie, practiced unthinkingly by many people in a particular demographic) can have harmful implications.

I remember an American friend who once told me that her office in DC included saris on its list of forbidden clothing, and the reason cited was that a bare midriff was immodest.  Which would be one thing, except that sleeveless tops and knee-length skirts showcase the exact same square acreage of skin. And even in a sari, a bare midriff is not a guarantee, merely one of many styling options.

At the end of the day, professional advancement has always been a game in which a privileged few attempt - as best they can - to exclude others, often for spurious reasons.  Saying an afro is unprofessional is the same thing as saying that women are too risk-averse for certain jobs.  I know plenty of women who, as a professional prerequisite, reject their own femininity - they have to choose between being "women" (whatever that means) and being "professionals."  I have felt this pressure myself - we associate womanhood with emotion, with sexiness, with maternal desire, with fluffy and un-mathematical thinking - with everything except for professional success.

The United States has evolved its prejudices over years, and to an extent is aware of them and attempts to provide legal redress (useless, in the main, but at least the option is there.)  It's sad that we in India are still in so much denial about mindlessly imbibing the prejudices of others.  (And before you start, I'll add that those who most vociferously protest the denial of Indian-ness are the same ones who would hesitate to wear Indian clothes to work, and then give all kinds of half-baked reasons as to why.)

Choosing Optimism

The other day, a friend of mine posted the following question on her FB: "activists and social change-driven people: do you use negative personal experiences and anger and channel these to make change? how?"

In answering her question, I realized something incredibly important: being optimistic is very hard, but it's also very important.

In my life, pessimism manifests in many forms, but the most insidious is the subtle and self-serving belief that people are bad, and that they cannot change.  I first adopted this belief in elementary school, and throughout adolescence I wore it like a shield. If someone disappointed me, they were out of the club.  Fini. Kaput. Etc. I was an island, happy being alone.

Except that I wasn't.  And the older I get, the less I can maintain that illusion to myself or anyone else.

When you believe that people are bad, you certainly save yourself some heartache. You save yourself the incredibly humiliating experience of rejection, of asking for more and being denied. But you miss a great deal more.

The same is true of general optimism.  In the face of a world that is disappointing and unfair, it is easy to say: Forget it. This will never change.  Let me do what I can for myself and forget about everyone else.

But negativity, anger, and hurt are not emotions that change the world for the better.  They are isolating, and in my experience, people who indulge them too much end up lonely, angry and scared.  On the other hand, when I tell myself that people are good - that examples of goodness and courage also exist around me - I find that I want to reach out and improve the world.  Every positively impactful action I've ever taken - whether it's starting a nonprofit or teaching in a slum school - has been an act of faith and an act of optimism.  A belief that things can improve, and that one person's bad decisions - or even a thousand people's bad decisions - are not a global destiny.

Part of this philosophy means surrounding myself with optimistic and positive people - those who open themselves up to change, who take risks, who embrace opportunity, and who treat others with dignity.  People like that are rare, and frankly, possibly a bit demented.  The history of the world is one of extreme injustice and continuing disparity, and fighting that tide is a noble and exhausting endeavor.  But these are also people who have courage, empathy and energy.

Increasingly, I find myself at personal crossroads: moments when I can choose not my destiny, but the way I choose to view the world.  Choosing optimism is scary because it means accepting that your life can be better - but that you have to take responsibility for getting there.  And getting there will probably suck really hard.  It will not be easy.

The same is true of the world.  It is hard to be optimistic about the future because it means that suddenly we bear responsibility for getting there.  But I believe - and I think evidence supports - the contention that people who change the world for the better (and whom we remember) are people who choose optimism, and who choose not to live in fear.

The Subtle Sexism of "Understanding Huma"

There's this thinky little essay-let out in "The New Yorker" titled "Understanding Huma Abedin," in which author Emily Greenhouse attempts to place the Anthony Weiner/Huma Abedin drama in the context of the great political tradition of "marriages of convenience."  From Eleanor Roosevelt - whose husband was in love with her secretary - through Hill, plenty of intelligent women have chosen to stand by their men for reasons that may have been more real politik than real love.  According to Emily, we should accept these marriages as absolutely fine.

On the surface, I don't disagree.  Everyone is entitled to their own expectations.  What bothers me, however, is holding up Abedin's marriage as an example of necessary or even desirable compromise, when in fact we have no evidence to support that theory.  In making her point about political marriages, Greenhouse cites a historical tradition in which women, pretty much universally, enjoyed less power than men when it came to setting terms in their relationships.  Even today, among equally successful men and women, it quickly becomes apparent that men still have more leeway, and women - particularly those who are ambitious and who want to be involved with equally ambitious mates - have more trouble.

"What would be so wrong with addressing the possibility of different kinds of marriage, and different sexual mores?," asks author Emily Greenhouse.  There's nothing wrong with that!  Plenty of couples might have marriages where one or the other sexts randoms on the Internet, and no one really cares.  (On a sliding scale of the great sexual behaviors of history, with 1 being Paul Newman's absolute fidelity and 10 being Catherine the Great & her horse, Anthony Weiner's inability to sort his DMs from his Tweets, or to download Snapchat, is barely a tepid 2.)

But the weakness in Greenhouse's argument - and its inherent (and possibly unintended) sexist implications appear in her chief example: Eleanor and FDR.  Greenhouse writes that when confronted with her husband's infidelity with her social secretary, Eleanor was shattered but she made the best of it.

This is not a couple navigating new sexual mores - it is a couple in which one and/or both partners did not feel empowered enough to end the marriage (indeed, Eleanor considered divorce but FDR convinced her otherwise).  In Eleanor's case, she chose to stay married - but what were her options? Divorce would have ended her husband's career, but would it really have had a less stigmatizing effect on hers?  She told FDR that their physical relationship was over and became an activist.  Her marriage sounds less like a happy decision and more like a very constrained optimization.

Even in the case of modern women like Hillary and Huma - do they prefer marriages in which their husbands embarrass them with these infidelities? Or do they accept the infidelities because they want to "marry a politician...a partner whose livelihood depends on courtship"?  In every one of the couples Greenhouse mentions, the woman is the one who accepts her husband's extramarital affairs.  He never accepts hers (although this reverse situation happens plenty in real life, esp among couples who are actually "addressing the possibility of different kinds of marriage.")  In these political marriages, women suffer the constraints, but men enjoy the optimization.

At the end of the day, unless Huma is willing to speak up about her open marriage, I find Greenhouse's  parallel self-serving and unconvincing.  Accepting infidelity in powerful men - and politicians - as part of the "deal" only reinforces the idea that men and women can be held to different standards of behavior.  Arguing that men like Weiner must be unfaithful because their careers "depend on courtship" may address a sad pattern of behavior, but from a normative perspective, it's a bit of a dodge.

Accepting a man's infidelities, covering up his lies, defending him in print and on the road, and giving a weak and tragic press conference about your "family" are justifiably hard sells as acts of feminism, and seem much more like the same raw deal that the wives of (flawed, but) powerful men have accepted since time immemorial.  If this is the marriage that Huma wants, she has every right to it.  I wish her a long life.  But let's not hold up this couple as an example of new "sexual mores" - especially when they themselves have offered no such defense.

A Note to Women Considering Delhi

I have heard it said that we take good people for granted.  And that's true - a lot of times, we completely underestimate how hard it is to do the right thing.

Recently, there has been yet more bad news out of India where women's rights are concerned.  A young journalist was brutally and horrifyingly gang-raped in Mumbai.  Even worse, she may not have been the attackers' first victim.  Even before the rape occurred, an exchange student published a story on CNN's iReport, talking about how the constant and public sexual harassment she faced in India brought on a mental breakdown.

And recently, in the midst of this incredibly horrific news, I found myself in a very impassioned debate on Facebook with a friend who finally admitted that although he doesn't want to apologize for India's problems, he struggles with the trashing.  And his comment reminded me of a very wise quote I once read: "when you think something goes without saying, it usually doesn't."

So let me offer my perspective, and in doing so, attempt to give people the credit they deserve for doing the right thing (which in my experience is at least 100x harder than doing the wrong thing.)

I have been living in India for nearly 5 years, and almost every one of those days has been a blessing.  I don't know if India is home for me, but certainly, my corner of Delhi is.  People have opened their minds and their hearts to me.  They've invited me to their houses, introduced me their friends and parents, and in a million ways made a very difficult and foreign environment feel like home.  Professionally, I have been given an incredible amount of opportunity.  For every person who has doubted me because I don't know India's soils or its smells or its languages (fluently), there has been another one who has said, "Hey, it doesn't hurt to look at the world through someone else's eyes."  Sometimes, people have made assumptions about my character or background, because I'm American.  And many times, they have been willing to change their minds.

I have known so many, many young men who are deeply passionate about changing this country, and they are a global inspiration.  A friend recently forwarded me a video of Nitin Gupta doing a comedy tour in which he talks about Delhi's rape crisis. When he said "the length of a woman's clothes is not the measure of her character" - I had to write it down.  And when I saw how enthusiastically the young men and women in his audience were applauding, I cannot lie to you, I almost cried.  I know men who have founded organizations dedicated to fighting street harassment.  I know men who are mapping India's safest and most dangerous cities.  I have been in conversations when men have stood up for equality between men and women, and yet, with an incredible amount of grace and chivalry, gone hours out of their way to make sure their female friends get dropped home safely at night.  I have had men - without being asked - interpose their bodies between me and a potential harasser on a public bus.

I'm a journalist, and I've had editors adopt and promote my stories.  I've had bosses give me difficult or out-of-town assignments, without worrying, as some idiots do, about "taking responsibility for a woman's safety."  Some of my friends are male journalists who have written brave, impassioned and frequent articles advocating for women's rights.

I know guys who don't just preach feminism, but who practice it daily.  They treat their mothers, sisters and wives with dignity, equality, openness and respect.  And they do it deliberately, even when they grew up with the examples of fathers and uncles who didn't behave the same way.  They do it because they have chosen to live differently.  And yes, I know a few spoiled, selfish Delhi boys who are too obtuse to question their own privilege - but let's be honest - those guys are a global scourge.

Perhaps because we in India are so deeply aware of India's problems and flaws, we strive to define ourselves in opposition. I don't want to get into cross-country comparisons.  But I do know that there are people who are constantly fighting for their ideals, as well as living them, in this country.

I know what you're thinking.  "But Anika, what about men who aren't, say, on Twitter?"

Well, all I can say is that I interact with hundreds of such men in a year.  From my watchman to grocery delivery boys to garbage pickers.  Not one of them has raped me.  In fact, some of them are as far from home as I am, and have still gone out of their way to be helpful.  Lechery, while it occurs, is really not my dominant impression of India at all.

Now, do some men commit assault? Do they rape their wives?  That is a serious possibility.  Their wives have no legal protection.

Because the biggest problems in Indian society, when it comes to women's rights and safety, don't affect foreign women, or even photojournalists living in Mumbai or Delhi.  Our Parliamentarians are too craven to criminalize marital rape.  Although child marriage is illegal, it is widespread, and so under current laws it is legal to rape a child, provided that child is over fifteen years old and your wife.  One of our so-called leaders, in a now-infamous remark, conflated romance with stalking. Surveys have suggested that marital rape is endemic in India - and occurs at higher rates than in other developing countries. The men who attacked the photojournalist may have raped four rag-pickers in the same spot previously - and if they had gone on raping destitute, ignorant women forever, they might never have been caught.  The rapes in Mumbai, like the one in Delhi, occurred in well-known, public parts of the city.  The police were absent, doing God-knows-what.  In Sonia Faleiro's "Beautiful Thing," most of the bar dancers she profiles - poor, stigmatized women - have been raped and gang-raped repeatedly and brutally, and have no recourse.  When, after the Delhi rape case, the investigative magazine "Tehelka" interviewed dozens of rural and urban men about rape, they found that some men consider it their right to rape ethnic minorities, villagers and tribal women.  Some reports suggest that in the Indian state of Kashmir, rape is regularly used as a weapon of war.

In a society that regularly fails to protect its weakest citizens, women and children suffer the most.

So.  In sum.  We in India have a serious problem and it requires an urgent solution.  We cannot keep neglecting half the population and still move forward as a society.  We cannot continue to effectively ignore the poor and the marginalized, and expect to reap growth eternally (growth, at least, appears as distant as a fever-dream right now).

When I decided to move to India five years ago, my mother warned me about the gropers.  She sighed and said (almost dismissively) that every Indian girl had at some point been groped, grabbed and/or attacked.  A female relative who was present at the time agreed.  And honestly - I refused to believe them, and I'm glad I did.  Because that, while hideous, is not the only reality. And although she told me about the many brilliant, amazing and compassionate men she'd met in India, she didn't tell me about those who are speaking out against sexism, racism and assault.  Daily.  It is a difficult task.  It is a mission we could all support far more vocally - men and women alike.

To foreign women planning to visit Delhi - be prepared for the fact that anything might happen. Assault is not by any measure a guarantee, but it is a possibility.  If you live in a major American city, you're probably already prepared for this reality.  For men, the world is an oyster.  For women, too often a warzone.  But it is wrong of me not to point out that for all of its ills, there are people - many of them men - who are willing to sacrifice their time, effort and comfort in the selfless hope of a better world for their mothers, friends and daughters. Those kinds of men exist everywhere, and Delhi is no exception to that rule, either.  You can have a beautiful time here, and it can be home to you also.

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This post was republished in the September 6, 2013 edition of "India Abroad" magazine.

The Joy of Writing (or, the Tragedy of Learning to Write in America)

Very few subjects have suffered as much at the hands of the American educational system as writing.  With the possible exception of math, writing is probably our generation's greatest intellectual sorrow.

Reading, writing and arithmetic.  As dreary in their rhythm as one footfall after another.  Learning these subjects is a necessary slog, a long-suffering trudge.  A lot has been done to reclaim the joy of reading.  But the thing I bemoan, the thing I regret, is that we have completely lost - if we ever found - the joy of writing.

As a child, cycled like recycled air through one magnet and IB program after another, I learned a great many things about writing: that is is purposeful, that it is possibly a superpower, that those who practice it effectively are geniuses and savants, that it must be learned, that most people are bad at it.  I learned that we should be "functional" writers, and our highest aspiration as writers is to construct essays that were likened by our teachers to hamburgers - five paragraphs exactly - essays that were about as exciting as the white sesame buns they were metaphorically constructed upon.

I learned a great deal about logic and argument from the five-paragraph essay.  But I didn't learn a damn thing about writing.

In a letter printed in the Washington Post, a high school Government teacher from Maryland (my home state) writes: "My students did well...because we practiced bad writing."  She goes a step further than I would.  I wouldn't say that the basic, barely leavened prose of the five paragraph essay is bad writing.  But it isn't good. It isn't nourishment.  And there's nothing joyful about producing or consuming it.

The most powerful writers in history disturb, arouse, inform and disarm their readers -  all without touching them, all without speaking aloud.  And most of these writers would have failed the average high school functional writing test.  (Can you imagine the way a grader, rubric in hand, would behave if a student responded to "What were the primary disadvantages of life in the 1960s?" with "Rabbit, Run"?  The grader would savage it.  Perhaps not deliberately - their hideous rubric, insensate yet all-powerful - would leave them no choice.  Or perhaps the grader would call Child Protective Services.  Either way, not the desired outcome.)

Writers - great writers - were able to do what they did because they embraced the joy of writing.  They embraced writing at its most creative, cathartic, lovely and insensible.  They knew that sometimes a sentence is an ordered march, but sometimes it is a trackless wilderness.  That writing is a place to explore, to be surprised, and to be forgotten.  It is Narnia and Middle Earth at once.

I have a friend who was dyslexic as a kid. Like a lot of dyslexic kids do, she embraced photography and painting to express herself in images.  But one day when I read one of the poems she'd written - one of the few, I'm sorry to say - I saw something I still haven't forgotten.  I saw how she'd combined words in ways I could not have imagined, into pictures as beautiful as those created with paint and lens.  And this is someone who has spent her entire academic life thinking of writing as her greatest weakness.

There is a time and place for functional writing.  Powerpoints. Inventories. Memos.  But writing doesn't live in memos, even if memos are what we are taught about writing.  (We are not taught to love writing, because honestly, how could we, under those circumstances?)  The worst disservice we do to writing is reduce it to rote, and then pretend that rote is all there is to it.

One of the highest compliments I can ever pay a written work is that it inspires me to write.  Not because I think I can do better than the author, but because I want to start trying.  Because I see how vast the power of words, and their perfect ability to say what is in fact inexpressible.  There is no right way to say what can't be said, and there, in that acknowledgment, you have the joy of writing.  The joy arises from trying, as Anais Nin famously said, "to taste life" (once, twice, or an infinite number of times.)

I shudder to think what most students would produce nowadays if allowed to roam free in their writing.  If I saw the word "Lolz" in an essay I might not consider it art, I might consider it blasphemy. But that's my right as a reader.  The right of a writer is to create.  And sometimes, more often than now, it would be nice if students in American public schools were encouraged to taste that pleasure.  And if the results of those efforts were treated as important and valid, rather than as some kind of concession.

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Note that I'm not talking about individual teachers, but rather about a system that devalues any writing that falls outside the scope of the mundane and conventional.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, & The Morality of Corruption

At first read, and perhaps on second, there's not a great deal that distinguishes Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" from "Slumdog Millionaire."  Both are stories of individual strife and optimism, set among people so poor they warrant no notice from their wider society.  That Boo's book is nonfiction makes her story a masterclass in investigative reporting.  That it became wildly successful isn't much of a surprise: not only is it rivetingly told, but there is a tendency among well-read audiences in the West to reward books that present poverty as a problem belonging to other countries.

Boo, who has logged years in the trenches covering poor American communities, isn't part of that audience. She is deeply aware that poverty belongs to all of us; we create it almost at the same time that we create opportunity.  Success may be a good thing, but suffering is a powerful (and too often silent) externality.  

But that's not why I read "Forevers" - if anything, the fact that it was set in a slum made me wary. Recently, I find myself as tired of "Occupy Wall Street" as I am of Wall Street.  Tired of the clueless libertarians who insist that the school system would do just fine with no government oversight, tired of the socialists who claim that the highest goal of society is to finance everything for everybody (especially in election years). Tired of people who claim that the poor deserve their fate, tired of those who deny the doctrine of individual responsibility.  But mostly, I am tired of everyone everywhere scrambling for some sort of constant high ground in the moral debate over emerging global capitalism.  From what I can tell, there is no great divide between the high ground and the low ground; it's more an unmarked territory that most of us are traversing without even knowing exactly where we are in it.  

But from the moment I first opened it, "Forevers" sank its fierce narrative hooks into me, and I read it out of the oldest impulse there is - I wanted to know how it ended.  There were moments along the way when I marveled at Boo's craft - her ability to turn a perfect sentence, her talent at translating obscene Hindi into an English that still retained the cadence of the original (allowing me to reverse-engineer a few choice profanities), the way she seamlessly introduced news and numbers into her story, her gift for illustrating broad realities through a single painstaking example.

But mostly, I just wanted to know - would Asha become a slumlord? Would Manju ever graduate college? Would Meena's parents stop beating her? Would Abdul ever catch a break, poor guy?  (Abdul, a teenaged garbage sorter, is the book's almost-hero, and the outlines of his character could have been lifted straight out of Dickens.)

There are definitely some fictions that the book explodes, among them the notion that unceasing individual enterprise leads to prosperity.  Money doesn't change the reality of work, just the nature of it, the toll it takes on the mind and the body.  Abdul works without respite in a dirty profession, living in an unregulated slum so filthy that it is literally killing its residents one by one.  All the characters in the slum hunger for a "better" life - which to them means more money.  But Abdul is one of the few who still hungers for a better self.  His minor protests against Mumbai's rampant corruption include a steadfast honesty, a refusal to pick fights, a willingness to forgo the profit that comes from buying stolen goods.  But these small acts of morality make no dent at all in the broad scheme of things.  Abdul is taken into custody when he is falsely accused of a crime by a jealous and unhappy neighbor.  What should have been an open-and-shut case drags on for years and beggars his family in bribes.

All these are stories about slums, about poverty, about corruption and about Mumbai that we have heard before.  Residents of Delhi and Mumbai - the more fortunate ones, anyway - will read this book and say "yes of course, that's how it is."  Nothing at all will surprise.

But in a too-brief author's note at the end, Boo makes the point that stood out to me most strongly.  She writes, "The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility, but of our moral universe."  I've alluded to this before, but for me, the past 4.5 years in Delhi have been marked by constant and daily compromises.  There are many times, trying to decide what is "right" and whether another person has behaved "wrongly" - that the rules I've learned in the US just don't apply.  People under-perform in a million ways and then offer careless and infuriating excuses - but who is right when the system is so skewed? Is my taxi driver at fault for being late, or his company for assigning him a fare he would never be able to take on time, or the Indian govt for permitting our roads to exist in such a pathetic and worthless state that we have become a country of latecomers?  I am often angry, but it's an anger that struggles to find a clear target.  When I complain about a broken system, the blame always finds a convenient scapegoat, never the person who is actually guilty.

These compromises are easily made, easily forgotten, but they can have a corrosive effect on the moral spirit when they accumulate over time.  Delhi excels in changing us, not always positively.  One of the little-celebrated facts of Delhi expat life is that most people, in this country, assume a persona very different from the one they put on back home.  It is rarely a nicer one.  And it's not restricted to expats (who are privileged in India merely by virtue of being foreign).  Even among the most well-meaning privileged elites of Delhi society - people who might once have aspired to fix this country's problems - too many seem to have decided that it's better to just go with the flow.  In a corrupt system, the absence of privilege is an affliction, but so is the surfeit of it.  To an extent, these conditions hold true in the US as well, but less strongly, and there's a lot more space in the middle where people can make choices that are broadly moral and that have predictable moral consequences.

At the end of her author's note, Boo asks, "If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?"  It may sound melodramatic, but she's not far off.  When justice is an ephemeral and unrealistic concept, impossible to determine, it becomes too easy to do what's easy, for everyone.

On Reading Ayn Rand

I recently finished reading Ayn Rand's "The Romantic Manifesto."  It was my first encounter with Rand's writing, and I would recommend it to everyone.

I always distantly admired her as an impassioned thinker, a fierce debater, and a self-made immigrant. Years ago my Mom told me that Ayn Rand was one of the reasons she left India for the United States, which only made me fonder of her.

When I got to college I learned that Ayn Rand is, in America, a political writer, and one who has been squarely claimed by the Republican party (never mind whether they align with her views or not).

I'm not about to defend and/or excoriate her philosophy (particularly her ethical or political philosophy, in which she seems to take her ideas to illogical and extreme conclusions) because I haven't read enough of her writing, but I suspect that some of the disdain heaped on Rand's writing comes from people who either deliberately misunderstand her work, or who are looking for a talking point.  Also, people often judge Ayn by her adherents, and being admired by a confused oatmeal-y non-entity like Paul Ryan can't be good for anyone.

For what it's worth, the generations of spoiled rich boys on Ivy League campuses who have adopted Rand as their mascot (although they would never have, say, dated her) are people for whom I suspect Ayn - who idolized the unique and individual mind as much as she did individual behavior - would not have had much admiration.

"The Romantic Manifesto" isn't a fully-defined aesthetic philosophy, but it makes for a fascinating read on the role and purpose of art in life.

Quotes:

Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal (10).
A sense of life...sets the nature of a man's emotional responses and the essence of his character. (14).
A man whose mind and emotions are in harmony, whose sense of life matches his conscious convictions [describing the rational man]. (19)
When love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then - and only then - it is the greatest reward of man's life. (22)

Eventually, Ayn realizes that no ideal man exists and she'll have to invent one entirely, from her imagination, much like Pygmalion invented his ideal lover (in Ovid, of course, Pygmalion comes off as the worst kind of misogynist, but that's not really relevant).  Ayn suggests that the purpose of art should be to create and celebrate the ideal.

The concept I liked most was that of a "sense of life" - our normative outlook on existence, on what is worth striving for and on how life should be lived.  She suggests that the profound and almost spiritual sense of identification that a viewer feels with certain artwork - artwork which might seem on the surface to be no different from its peers - arises when the viewer and the artist share a similar sense of life.  (I wonder to what extent this notion - so irrevocably true in art - applies to real life.  In my experience, unfortunately, it's a mixed bag)  Also, and perhaps controversially, I agree with Ayn that there is a right way to live, and that right way includes an almost-obsessive dedication to principles that might always remain slightly out of reach.  I agree with her that to compromise our ideals is to become tragic.

Of all these essays, "Art and Moral Treason" is the one that spoke to me most powerfully.  It's an essay that links together art and life, and lives up to the title "manifesto." If I could, I would nail it to a church door (or, in our more modern age, share it on Facebook?).

"Art and Moral Treason" hooked me from the get go.  It opens with the story of a spiritually bankrupt (but otherwise successful) man whom Ayn meets when he's 26.  She describes him as being "paralyzed by so extreme a state of indecision that any sort of choice filled him with anxiety - even the question of moving out of an inconvenient apartment."

Because this is an Ayn Rand essay (and not life) there is eventual redemption at the end of Mr. X's sad rainbow.  He manages to beat his purposelessness, and how!  The description of Mr. X's recovery is hopeful, passionate, unmistakable.  She says,  "Ultimately, what saved Mr. X was his commitment to reason; he held reason as an absolute, even if he did not know its full meaning and application; an absolute that survived through the hardest periods he had to endure in his struggle to regain his psychological health-to remark and release the soul he had spent his life negating... Today - after quitting his job and taking many calculated risks - he is a brilliant success, in a career he loves, and on his way up to an ever-increasing range of achievement."

Even though this was an essay, I followed Mr. X's narrative arc with bated breath.  Sadly, I'm pretty sure that he doesn't exist.  I have met a few Mr. X's.  Generally, in my experience, most don't recover - many never even realize that they're sick.  There are people who live their whole lives apologizing for and degrading their own ideals.

In "Basic Principles of Literature," Ayn presents a spirited deconstruction and defense of the ideological novel.  She understands how successful novels work, and she offers what almost amounts to a class in constructing characters and sourcing themes.  For those who write, this essay is invaluable.

If there's one thing about Ayn's essays that stands out, it is her unwavering conviction to this idea that we can overcome ourselves, but only if we struggle.  (I remember a famous line from that apex of romantic tearjerkers, The Way We Were, in which Barbra Streisand says to Robert Redford, "people are their principles."  She's the striving heroine and he's the golden boy next door, and needless to say their romance has an expiration date stamped all over it precisely because - although he enjoys paying lip service to her energy and ideals - deep down he kind of likes the world the way it is.)

I emailed my mother with some of my favorite Rand quotes, to see what she would think.  She's read most of Ayn's work but not this collection, and I suspect (based on some of the vitriol that I see coming Ayn's way) that Ayn's opinions on art may be better than her opinions on other subjects.

My mother wrote:

"Trouble is:  the moment you tell someone you like Ayn Rand, they ‘peg’ you to something, and from there on, it's aloofness and respect and sometimes anger, but never warmth or tenderness. I guess people find her cold because she doesn’t agree with many emotions we have come to think of as warm and human  (not agreeing, merely stating) – generosity, forgiveness, charity, compassion.  They forget she also means passion, fairness, cherishment, faithfulness.  It's almost as if love has to be unearned to be called love in our society."

And this gets to the heart of the debate over Ayn Rand.  I've had plenty of well-read friends tell me that they find her "cold" or "uncaring" - a description that I cannot reconcile with the impassioned rhetoric of these essays.  People's passions can be accessed through different channels, but that doesn't mean that they are lacking.  Intensity and drive are hardly cold or unfeeling conditions, although much of the world may view them that way.  (In one of these essays, Ayn defends our emotional reaction to art, suggesting that this reaction is an important guiding force in our moral development.)

"The Romantic Manifesto" is less a philosophy of art than it is a manifesto on life itself.  Art, after all, was probably what Ayn held dearest to her heart - she was a writer who expressed her ideologies in fiction, and whose ideals were (from a young age) almost certainly informed by the written word.  She suggests that there is little difference between what inspires a man in art and what inspires him in life - but most of us are afraid to admit it.

Sadly, many think Ayn isn't a great fiction writer - and that seems to be a fair critique.  There's a short story at the end of "The Romantic Manifesto" in which the hero - a 'noncommercial' writer - struggles to reconcile his vision of the ideal novel with the types of novels that sell.  Interestingly, the conflict that drives this short story directly contradicts one of Rand's earlier essays,  in which she derides society (convincingly) for looking down on commercially successful art.  The entire short story is a stream-of-consciousness semi-rant, and by the end I remain unconvinced that it has any compelling central thesis.  If her novels are anything like this short story, I would dislike them too.  The main character seems utterly whiny, untalented and self-righteous, and not exactly a standard-bearer for idealism in art or in life.

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In other news, I reviewed L. Annette Binder's "Rise" for the Iowa Review. Read and enjoy!