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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

The Never Ending Dosa, and Other Mumbai Delights

Last week work sent me to Mumbai.  In general I've been lucky in my business trips - I was dispatched by the Hindustan Times to cover the first and only TED India years ago, on the Vegas-esque Infosys campus in Mysore; a few months later the paper sent me on a tour of small green-tech towns on the Austrian border - and while Mumbai may have a bit less "foreign" attraction, it is still always a place worth visiting.

Although India has many cities, the world really only knows Mumbai.  It's one of those cities - like Paris, like New York - that's come to mean something in the world lexicon of notable places. When I first moved to India, I wanted to stay in Mumbai.  Delhi seemed as likely as Sri Lanka.

To prepare for Mumbai, I steeped myself in the literature of bygone Bombay, as rich in places as the city itself.  I read "Maximum City" and learned about Sainiks and gangsters, bar girls and Irani bakeries.  The heyday of many of these things is past; Mumbai's most notorious gangsters have all moved abroad, where - who knows? - they might live respectable diaspora lives and send their children to fancy American colleges.  Bar girls - imagine a time, not too long ago, when the Indian equivalent of strippers wore saris on the job - are likewise a thing of the past.  Of Sainiks, the less said the better, considering recent events, and Irani bakeries, I hear, are now few and far between.  If India began as an idea in the minds of the British, then Mumbai is a collective imagining, a sort of wiki-city to which multiple people, parties and ethnic groups have contributed some notion of identity.  Unlike New York City, which despite its fabled diversity remains strongly segregated, in Mumbai it is impossible to avoid rubbing shoulders with almost all types of humanity.  And sometimes more than shoulders, depending on how crowded the train is.

A friend of mine once compared Delhi and Mumbai by saying the following: "Mumbai, unlike Delhi, is a city where positive-sum games are the norm."  Another once told me, "In Mumbai, no one cares who your father is, all they care about is if you've made money."  Democracy =/= meritocracy, and Mumbai boasts kleptocrats galore, but it also has its share of self-made men and women, which is an ideal that seems to have eluded Delhi.  The problem with Mumbai's self-made men and women, however, is a collective dissociation from civic concerns.  Mumbai is one city for them and another for its other millions of inhabitants.  Everyone knows this.  Under a series of ineffective municipal governments, Mumbai has strained, burst and now disintegrated at the seams.  Public transport groans beneath human weight, the streets are all but impassable, and public spaces are dirty and barely maintained.  Whatever industry blooms in Mumbai does so against a backdrop of civic inadequacy.

And yet it's inescapably glamorous.  The taxis of Mumbai are muggy and grimed, their foam seats deflated by hundreds of sweating bodies, but when the tide is turning, you can sometimes smell the ocean.  It's a reminder, even in the midst of the most commercial bustle, that nearby there is water, openness, and a broad horizon.  And the shopping!  I took a taxi through Juhu and gaped like a villager at the shiny glass storefronts,  at distant Juhu beach under its patina of sun.  Perhaps that's the thing that makes Mumbai lovely to me, its sunlight, which falls down endlessly and covers everything with a glow as bright as lacquer.

I was visiting our Mumbai office, and for lunch I went to an Udipi restaurant where I sat alone with a thin, crispy dosa as long as my table.  Regarding the fabulous claim that Mumbai has less lechery; well, I can't verify it.  Maybe I was just naive, but I have fond memories of sitting alone in busy restaurants in Manhattan, eating lunch and looking out the window at people who never noticed me.  It was dispiriting, sometimes, to feel so transparent.  I read stories of girls who got hit on in bookstores and on trains and found it all a bit surprising.  In Mumbai, as in Delhi, being a woman alone in a restaurant is a tacit invitation. Even the waiters - especially them! - seem suddenly interested in providing company, if not actual service.  There are times when I'm annoyed, but also times when I feel bad for them.  That said, there is a difference between occasional lechery and institutional sexism.  This difference, tangible, might be what people are talking about.

I couldn't finish my dosa and the waiter asked me three times if I wanted to take the leftovers home with me, as if he couldn't believe that I was about to engage in such flagrant waste.

The next day I tried a Chinese restaurant, where I read all through the meal and nobody disturbed me.  There was a quiet peace involved in stepping out of my office and into these tiny restaurants a few doors down.  In Delhi, I work in a dusty, undeveloped satellite town known as Film City, sequestered miles from Delhi in another state altogether.  When I step outside of that office, there's little to see and nowhere to go.  Noida feels less like a city than it does like an afterthought.

On the drive back to my relatives' house in Mumbai, I passed through Dharavi, a slum first introduced to me in "Shantaram."  The main character spends several years there as a fugitive, impersonating a doctor.  It's a wild, poorly-written but brilliantly-conceived adventure story, and it introduced me to a grittier type of expat life than the one my friends and I - many of us diplomats and foreign correspondents - could ever dream of living.  "Shantaram" also harkens to a Mumbai long gone, to a time when foreign exchange was strictly controlled and had to be purchased on the black market and hoarded.

In a job interview four years ago, a newspaper editor asked me what qualified me, an American, to write about India.  We were sitting in her office in Mahim, and she said, "what about if we assigned you to write a story on Dharavi?" And I said something about the many small businesses headquartered there.  As answers go, it was not terrible, but she was determined not to be impressed.  "Well," she said with a sniff, "everyone in Mumbai knows that Dharavi is a hub of industry."

Industries were on wide display as I drove down the main street.  "This is the famous slum," the driver told me.  "It looks like any other business district from here," I said.  And indeed, the line between slum and luxury is one of geography but also one of altitude. Apartments on higher floors cost more money, and pay higher property taxes (although there is an ongoing dispute over how much that tax should be.)

I reached the house and took up the lift up.  At the end of the day, there are a million things that make a place feel like home.  If I felt that in Mumbai, the credit belongs only partly to the sunshine and the storefronts.  It is good to be around people whom you enjoy seeing, in as uncomplicated a fashion as possible, and that is what a family at its best can be.  (And if I seem more luke than warm regarding Delhi, well, we all sometimes need a change of scene.)

Three (Not Quite) Arabian Nights

One of my ambitions, ever since I arrived in Delhi three years ago, has been to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival (tagline, "the largest literary show on Earth.")

My fascination with JLF dates back to a conversation I had with a former colleague when I first arrived in India. Naively, I said, "I hear some of the panelists are really good."  She raised weary brows at me and replied, "I really just go for the parties."  Friends who went last year confirmed my ex-colleague's thesis: sure, JLF may play host to hundreds of famous authors, but what began as a minor and nerdy exercise has somehow turned into a "scene," complete with Bollywood spectacle and socialites from every minor town in north India.  (JLF is not the only intellectual event to get this treatment, remember TED India?)

My determination to attend was further fueled by a recent essay that described JLF in the following golden terms, "JLF is the Ibiza of literature. The intellectual equivalent of a weekend of mad clubbing."  That was Anuvab Pal writing in Newslaundry, a site I learned about at a party from a dude I was briefly and disastrously infatuated with.  So all the precedents looked very good.

I secured a freelance magazine assignment, to alleviate my guilt at spending money on what might turn out to be no more than a bacchanal, albeit set amid historic forts in a once-princely desert. My media cred meant that in addition to being an attendee, I would also be a "pressperson," a privilege accorded, this year, to a mere 750 people (!).  

There are several ways to get from Delhi to Jaipur, but the most popular are car and train.  I took a car, which wound down the Delhi-Jaipur highway at a truly kingly pace.  I'm still not sure how, on a fully paved road, we managed to take seven hours to cover 150 miles. In the United States, we could have gone and come back in that time.  Twice.

I arrived in the nick of time for a session and collected my press pass from a lethargic gentleman sitting outside a white tent.  "Are you arranging author interviews?" I asked.  He merely shrugged, as if earthly worries were beneath his concern.  Last year, the organizers of JLF unleashed a controversy by inviting Salman Rushdie as a keynote guest, this year they went in the opposite direction and brought in the Dalai Lama.  Apparently Buddhism was one of the themes of this year's festival, but the only time I really witnessed it was in the indifference of the people responsible for managing the media, an indifference so profound it was practically enlightened.

I learned that my press pass came with a few perks: I would get to eat meals in the delegate tent, and also have access to the one bathroom on premises that was regularly stocked with toilet paper.

There are a couple of interesting things worth mentioning about JLF.  The first and most remarkable is that the event is entirely free.  This democratic pricing strategy is both the blessing and the curse of the festival.  On the one hand, ideologically, I approve of making great ideas and writing free of charge.  On the other hand, festival attendance has ballooned over the past seven years from 100 people to 100,000.  On Saturday and Sunday, the venue steams with human presence.

That said, it's beautiful.  This year, at least, the grounds of the heritage hotel were covered in colorful signs and bright fabric streamers.  Teamwork Productions, the company that manages the event, deserves some kind of prize merely for preventing disaster. Between the bright afternoon sunshine of Jaipur and the colorful tents, I truly felt like I was at some kind of circus, albeit of the mental variety.

I had expected the sessions to be highly literary - organized around themes like "organic metaphors in post-revolutionary Latin literature", etc.  This expectation persisted even after I'd looked at the program, where the titles of the sessions ranged from the cryptic to the excessive, for example, "The Novel of the Future."  At any time there are five to six sessions running concurrently, so choosing the right one to attend is a mix of luck and research.  I doubt anyone will recognize every one of the hundreds of authors speaking.

I spent the first 24 hours in a mad dash to get my author interview.  After stalking him all over the festival - and giving my number to many, many volunteers - I finally cornered him after a book signing and proceeded to lay waste to all comers by grilling him about India's current account.  Or at least, that's how I remember it.  Anyway, after securing some answers, I felt significantly more free to enjoy the rest of the sessions.

If one thing surprised me, it was how political the festival became, and how many of the discussions seemed ripped from this year's news headlines.  A session by Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, titled "The Public Philosopher," became a discussion of the moral equivalence between rape and other forms of extreme violence.  One discussion, between Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi and lyricist Prasoon Joshi, nearly became a brawl when an audience member suggested that women who become mothers are entrusted by God with a responsibility that rightly supersedes women's individuality.  Since this year's festival took place over January 26, India's Republic Day, many panelists addressed the decline of the India growth story, pegged to the drop in Indian GDP growth to 6 per cent from 9 per cent earlier.  (A friend who's been attending for years told me that JLF often has a current affairs flavor.)

There were the predictably odd audience questions.  In a session on Kipling, an audience member asked if India would have been better off if the British had never left.  In another session, on 9/11 literature, an audience member asked why only Muslims become terrorists.  At moments like this, I had to hand it to the session moderators, who had to front all the difficult questions.

There were, of course, sessions more literary.  Howard Jacobson, in a panel on the Jewish novel, made a remark about how Jewish humor was marked by an awareness that the grandest joke of all is God's, an observation that recast the notion of Annunciation in a dark and satiric light.  Meanwhile, in a session on his novel "Persian Fire," Tom Holland held forth on the Greco-Persian wars, although he lost some of my favor when he referred to the Battle of Thermopylae as "not a very girly story."

And then there were the parties.  The goal of many a festival-goer is to score an exclusive invite to one of these shin-digs.  Earlier a friend had confided to me that the real secret to getting in is to "dress well and show up."  At this point, I'd heard comparisons between JLF and the Playboy mansion, and it was getting pretty heady.  I was ready for anything.

These high expectations turned out to be...entirely baseless.  Nora Ephron once referred to writing as a great career for people who prefer to be the wallflowers at the orgy, so imagine (if you can!) an orgy of wallflowers and you'll get a sense for it.  Also, the first two days of JLF were dry (no liquor sold in Jaipur on those days, because of religious and political festivals) so there was that damper, too. I do remember one guy sidling up to me at one event and instructing me to meet someone "outside the men's loo, he has something" - which felt delightfully like Prohibition, especially because "something" turned out to mean "illicit liquor" and not "disease."  At another point, a well-intentioned friend introduced me to several different men as "the last attractive single woman in Delhi" - which, ordinarily, would be my cue to leave any gathering.

But that may just be me, I may have missed something.   Anyway, the parties were fun, if not exactly Ibiza.

I did hear some hot remnants of gossip regarding famous authors seen emerging from bushes with various young men/women, as well as the underwear preferences of one young writer who'd recently been nominated for a well-known prize, but temper all this, dear reader, with the awareness that these were the kids who were shut in with their Shakespeares during their teenage years, so really.

And then, in four days, the adventure was over.  I grabbed a final glass of wine in the delegate tent and then we were back in the car to New Delhi.  Would I recommend JLF?  Absolutely.  Just don't expect the Playboy mansion.  The sessions were still, for me, the highlights.

I wrote about Pico Iyer's "Global Soul" session for the Iowa Review blog!  Check it out here.

Snapshots from the New Delhi anti-rape protests

Yesterday, in a barely premeditated way, I decided to attend the candlelight vigil for the girl who was raped to death in New Delhi a week ago.  Protests have been going on all week, and Indian authorities have responded with their customary heartfelt insincerity, promising a host of judicial and security reforms that seem unlikely ever to see the light of day.

New Delhi in December is a foggy, difficult place to travel.  I found an auto driver who was willing to take me, but halfway we found that the road had been barricaded by a cadre of frustrated- and tired-looking policemen, who were getting aggressive with a man who was demanding to either be let through or arrested. The auto driver told me we were close to the destination and drove off.

I went up to the gate and asked the policemen if I could go through.  They told me that I'd have to find an auto or a bus and go all the way around the city.  The police, fearing the sporadic violence that had already occurred on previous days of the protest, had closed down most of central Delhi.

I found another auto and took a tour of Delhi that on any other day might have been considered scenic. We arrived at last at Jantar Mantar, where I followed an agitated group of three or four students to the scene of the protests.  It was just starting to get dark. Past a set of police barricades, the street had been cordoned off.  Like any protest, the atmosphere was a mix of activism and fairground.  Street vendors were out in force, peddling tea and sweet-potato-chaat.  Clusters of protestors spoke into TV cameras, which loomed so thoroughly over the scene that they lent it an aura of theatre.  On earlier days, protestors had set government cars on fire.  Police had responded with water cannons and tear gas.  But the atmosphere last night was calm, peaceful and uncrowded.  As with many public gatherings in Delhi, there were far more men than women.  Many of them carried signs with slogans like "Rape isn't cool."  As it got dark, people lit candles and prepared to march.

The organizers - a group of students - led the crowd on a quiet 20-minute shuffle to Parliament street and back.  At one point, they asked all women to come to the front of the group. This common measure - separating men and women to prevent harassment - struck me as especially poignant at an anti-harassment protest. 

To outside observers, it may seem surprising that this particular rape case - despite its gruesome and horrendous nature - has drawn so much fury and emotion.  It's true that the circumstances were particularly atrocious, but as many people have said, women are assaulted in Delhi all the time and nobody seems to care.  When I talked on the phone with relatives in Mumbai and DC, many said things like 'The atmosphere in Delhi is bad right now,' as if the constant assault on the rights and persons of women is limited to a particular city in India.

Friends with young daughters talked openly about leaving the country.  The word "castration" came up a lot.

One of the girls marching with me mentioned that at a previous protest, at India Gate, people had started talking about cases of rape within their own friends and family circle.  Much like the anti-corruption protests that swept India a while ago, this case has opened a gate on a conversation that people need to have.  In India, "rape" remains a dirty word, a mark of shame.  Meanwhile, rape is endemic, and not just of college-going girls in the nation's capital.  The role of women as silent, suffering, nurturing - so long enshrined in Indian culture and accepted unquestioningly - has to evolve, albeit painfully.

And while it might be easy to dismiss these yearnings - after all, who is pro-rape? pro-corruption? - to do so would be to dismiss the courage it always takes to defy convention and tradition.  Politicians loot, women accept.  These are realities of Indian life, and to question them is to provoke deep censure, to ask questions that make people deeply uncomfortable, and to defy the Indian obsession with the appearance of peace (even if that peace is superficial and preserving its appearance comes at a cost.)

Personally, I have an uncomfortable relationship with the notion of protest.  I've been to several, with good intentions.  Societies - particularly those in the developing world - seem to require these moments of collective emotional catharsis.  There is a similar theory, maybe, about forest fires.  If protest in the United States has become highly stylized and ineffective, protest in India does seem to create more of an impression.  Certainly, the protests this week will have some effect - but what?  Will they do much more than create a talking point for the next election cycle?  I believe - like many do - that some of the reforms being requested are absolutely essential for India's future. But I don't know to what extent protests can achieve and sustain such reforms.

When I was in college, I went to several "Take Back the Night" marches.  Every year, the announcement of this annual rally provoked a series of articles in the newspaper making fun of the principle.  "Who wants the night? You can have it," was the general theme.  People were uncomfortable, then as now, there as here, with sexual crimes.  With their completeness, their gravity and their difficulty.  What I remember, more than any substantive reform (although those were necessary) was putting my arm around a friend of mine who had just told the story of being raped by two men she met at a bar, a story she'd never told anybody.  I remember accepting, unhappily, that these things don't happen to other people - they happen to us.  That last is a realization I prefer to keep at bay.  I think we all do.

Occasionally, events occur that shock people out of their studied apathy and safe indifference.  Being shocked is necessary and good, and allows people to have conversations about themselves and the society they live in that perhaps they ordinarily wouldn't know how to start.  Ideally, we can reach a point where a girl does not have to be tortured and murdered for us to recognize that people have a right to live in safety, to be treated with dignity by the police, and to have claims processed efficiently in court.

The trouble with ideals, as was pointed out in a recent essay I read, is that they are like flashlights, "they both illuminate a way forward and leave in greater darkness those holding the light or following behind." The Delhi rape case has illuminated, horribly, how far we are from the world we would like to live in, what a vast and seemingly un-crossable distance lies between us and the ideal society. That acknowledgment is good, but it is not, by itself, enough.

Paris by Night

...or, Charles de Gaulle airport at the cadaverous hour of 6 am.

Paul Theroux famously saw the world by train, I will apparently see the world's most magnificent cities through airports.  I arrived in France at 5:50 in the morning clutching a half-empty suitcase and a sheaf of outdated and romantic notions.  Paris, I've heard, is the city of love; its airport, however, is more love's antechamber, or perhaps, love's waiting room, last decorated in the eighties and in need of an update.

I speak exactly six phrases of French, all of which I learned from a perverse French roommate who might have lifted them straight out of the best-selling "Cinquante Nuances de Grey," long before it was published.  Most charmingly, I was at the tail end of a terrible cold, which meant that my voice was about as suave as that of Frankenstein's monster.

Hemingway spent years wandering the bylanes and cafes of Paris, I spent hours wheeling my suitcase between identical duty free shops, staring sadly through the closed grilles at the racks of tax-free liquor and chocolate.  I observed an ingenious French water fountain from which, unfortunately, no water actually emerged.

Traversing the entire length of the gates took me about thirty minutes; I did many, many rounds.  I eventually stopped in a bookstore to read the back cover of the French translation of "Fifty Shades of Grey."  This is when I was accosted by a tall, dark and handsome stranger.

"Excuse me, is that coffee?" he asked, looking longingly at the styrofoam cup in my hand, as I tried to hide my choice of literature.

"Yes," I said.  And then, to further the plot, "I got it from the coffee shop at the far end."

"Thank God," he said, and trundled away in the direction I'd indicated.  There were only three or four people in the airport but he didn't return.  

I settled myself in a dingy gray seat, next to a guy in headphones.  A girl nearby was skype-ing on her iPad, and I felt unreasonably jealous that I was sitting alone and unloved and iPad-less in an airport, instead of off on vacation in the city of light, trendy technology firmly in hand.

By this point the sun had started to come up, yielding an uninspired view of airplanes and runways.  Most of the airport stores were open, offering such uniquely French things as the UK editions of American magazines.  I considered buying the single French magazine on display, but the model on the cover had the protruding cheekbones and unhappy look of a refugee or a socialite, which put me off.

"Hello," said the guy sitting next to me, removing his headphones. 

"Hello," I said.

Then he unleashed a string of phrases in French.  I decided not to reply with one of my choice obscenities - guaranteed by my former roommate to make me a hit in any restaurant in Paris - and instead shrugged sadly.

"No French," I said.

"Oh," he said, and put his headphones back in.  

I may have slept, or at least gone into some kind of unseeing reverie, by the time I woke up hours had passed and yet nothing had changed.  I began to feel that I was, in fact, in a French film - but of the more arthouse variety, the kind where all dialogue is conducted via gesture and the actors are made up to look like they just fought on the losing side of a noble and doomed revolution.

To stem the rising tide of self-pity, I went to the (now open) duty free shop and bought several bottles of French wine, which I then tried to arrange unobtrusively in my suitcase so that the guards at the gate wouldn't think I was fleeing to the US to open a basement winery.

Eventually the gate opened and I was admitted, to pass into the aircraft and onto the United States.  Perhaps, someday, I'll have the vacation I've always dreamed of in Paris, but in the meantime I will have to settle for this.

The Time I (Almost) Got Recruited Into A Ponzi Scheme

Between the landlady who tried to sleep in my bed, the married dude who invited me to "spend an evening together", the old man who impersonated his own son on Facebook and various others, I thought I'd witnessed some of the darker stuff that human nature might have to offer.

Until a friend tried to recruit me into a Ponzi scheme.

I have now thought about this encounter for several days, and I've come to the sad conclusion that a pyramid from any other angle is still a pyramid.   You can argue with semantics, but not geometry.

I'm torn between two reactions right now: 1) the urge to laugh uncontrollably and 2) deep, deep offense that someone who knew me actually thought I'd be an easy target.  I mean hello!  I know I'm a journalist with a college degree in a "social science," but seriously...

Anyway, this all began nearly a month ago, when a girl whom I'll call Mandy (because that is not her name) befriended me at a class we were both attending. She seemed really sweet, and when we all exchanged numbers at the end of the class I got hers and she got mine.

We became Facebook friends. Her profile contained nothing weird or overly alarming.  She called me once or twice to hang out and both times I was busy, but we agreed to meet up at an indefinite later date.  It wasn't until the third or fourth time we'd met that she mentioned to me that in addition to being a project manager, she'd recently started her own business.

That's cool!  I thought.  Lots of my friends in Delhi have recently started businesses.

Then a few days ago, she called me again with an unusual request:

"Listen," she said.  "Remember that business I told you about?  We're looking to take on one or two other partners...why don't you come hear about it?"

She said that a senior partner was in town from Malaysia and the three of us could meet for coffee and talk about it.  I had doubts, but she was a friend and there was an outside chance that the idea might be interesting.  I asked her what her partner's name was and the name of the company, and this is when things got weird: she asked me why I wanted to know.  "So I can look them up online," I said.  "First let's see if we're a good fit," she answered.  "You don't need to know all this other stuff yet."  And then, as an explanation, "we looking for partners for our global expansion."

Cagey Delhi entrepreneurs with would-be ideas for world domination are a rupee a dozen, unfortunately.  At this point I regretted agreeing to lunch, which I already realized would involve some amount of swindling.  I figured maybe they were a disorganized and ill-informed outfit looking to recruit some gullible American into financing what would turn out to be a badly prepared business plan, if there was a business plan at all.

I arrived at the coffee shop early, she came in a few minutes later.

"So the senior partner is busy with a meeting, but his wife will join us," she said.  "She also has twelve years of corporate experience, but she recently left her job and has had big success in this business."  Again, there were no details forthcoming about the wife's "corporate experience."

We'd been in the coffee shop for about fifteen minutes when the wife walked in with another woman. Both were well-dressed and had nice hair; they looked nothing like fugitives.

We ordered drinks.

The women introduced themselves. They all had engineering backgrounds, they told me. One of them claimed to have an MBA.  The wife, it soon became clear, was the ringleader.  Despite the vagueness of her described "corporate experience" she soon filled me in on her professional and personal details, most of which, I'm entirely sure, were fabricated.

As of yet, nothing had been said about the nature of their business, which, when alluded to at all, was referenced only as "the project."

She veered for a while into the meaning of her existence.  She asked me about what I wanted to do next with my life, and I outlined my interest in new media businesses.  In the back of my mind, I was already thinking about how this might work out as a story, if not for a newspaper then at least for a cocktail party.

At one point, sipping the whipped cream off my latte (I know I lost some of you at that, oh well) I asked her what her project actually was, since we had yet to discuss it.

"Ok, so first I have to ask about some of your qualifications," she said.  I nodded.

"First off, do you object to working in a different industry?  Like ecommerce?  See, no company can afford to ignore ecommerce these days..."

"Of course not," I said, savoring my latte foam.

"Second off, you have to put in an initial investment, something that makes sense for you, but around $4000 to $10,000.  So are you ok with the money part of it?"

She seemed particularly keen on this point, pausing and waiting for my answer. Up until then I'd had my doubts about their enterprise, but it wasn't until she asked about the money that I was finally sure what was happening.

"I guess so," I said.  "But first you have to tell me about your 'project'."

She went into another long ramble about how Bill Gates had started Microsoft, and now it was "self-sustaining," and it would continue to yield income until he died.  The fact that Bill Gates had put years of his life into his company didn't come up, nor did Microsoft's thousands of employees.  She said that her company was an e-commerce portal, the third-largest in the world behind Ebay and Amazon.

"We're a multinational conglomerate," she said.  "We're into insurance, banking, travel, lifestyle goods."

At this point, it ocurred to me to ask why a multinational conglomerate needed my $10,000 to fund its so-called "global expansion", but I knew there would be no answer. She explained a few of their products: luxury Swiss watches, vacation timeshares, international roaming services for phones.

"I want to have money, and I want time," she told me.  "This offers me the chance to get both.  Basically you have to buy a product - that's the initial investment - and then you sign up a friend.  Every time you sign up your friend, you get 12% of their purchase.  And every time they sign up a friend, you get 12% more."

No matter how many hundreds of people were involved in the referral chain, my 12% would remain unchanged on every transaction, she claimed, as if completely unaware of the mathematical impossibility of what she was suggesting.

Throughout this exchange, the other two people - my friend, and the MBA - had remained silent.  The MBA watched the proceedings with an amused and distant stare.  My friend, to her credit, had begun to sweat a bit.

I excused myself briefly to use the washroom.  I took my purse, since I didn't put it past this trio of crooks to run off with it.

When I came back, more stories of fabulous wealth were in store.

"The company caps your potential income at Rs. 9 lakh a week," she said.  Now, for those unfamiliar with Indian currency, an Indian engineering student who graduates in the top 5% of his class from a solid institution and gets signed up by a major company like Wipro would be thrilled to make Rs. 9 lakh in a year.  It works out to about $18,000.

And this wasn't all!

"I've left my job behind in order to do this full time," she said.  "I can provide for my son and do whatever else I please...and the best part is, we also have a nonprofit that works for underprivileged children."

At this point, research be damned, I was getting tired.  I told them I had to leave.  My friend said she'd pay for the coffee, and I split.

Wikipedia, that great storehouse of world knowledge, describes a Ponzi scheme as follows: "a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation."

After getting home, I looked up their conglomerate online, and found a few sad postings on Yahoo forums from people who'd put $4000 into the scheme and had yet to receive any products.  The company had a website and a grainy YouTube video that sounded like it had been voiced by an out-of-work ringmaster.  A contact address included neither phone number nor email address.

The nonprofit, meanwhile, had a more vigorous and networked webpage, which talked extensively of the importance of educating children.  A link to some of their initiatives did mention a Rs. 5 lakh donation to an orphanage, which seemed like pretty chump change considering the outsize returns they were promising to attract their victims sellers.

Just for kicks, I made up an email address and wrote to the nonprofit about the possibility of volunteering with their India team, making sure to mention that I came from Canada (ergo, had deep pockets).  Oddly enough, they have not replied...

***

For those who care, I reviewed "Recipes for Sad Women" over on Bookslut!  Read the review here.

The Joys of Travel, or In Transit Again

Alas, on this trip to the United States I flew in directly, which means I skipped the dubious joys of sitting in the Brussels airport, reading metaphysical literature, and eating bizarrely tiny little sausages made entirely of salt.  What a shame.

I first stepped onto US soil at Newark Airport, a place I've written about before.  In terms of tourist attractions, Newark Airport has all the charm and texture of a year-old chicken nugget.  A change in the entry procedures has transformed the arrival process into one long journey down a narrow gray hallway.  Random signs blink meaningless letters and numbers.  A suburban gas station would be more scenic, but perhaps not more existential.

In the lounge, waiting to transit to BWI, I engaged in the ageless pastimes of airport travelers on layover: ogling strangers, and buying overpriced things I would immediately regret.  I went to a coffee shop and ordered a "small" latte.  I received a cup the size of my head.  The woman next to me, who'd ordered a medium, got a cup at least as tall as my arm.  Nobody dared to order a large, perhaps fearing it would have to be delivered by truck.  The strangers in the airport were neither attractive nor freakish enough to be interesting.  I did notice that in the absence of economic growth, Americans seem to have resorted to procreation, or at least, there were a lot more children around than I'm used to.

American advertising, judging by airport sloganeering, has lost all touch with reality.  One billboard asked, "If someone said they had cancer, would you tell them to just get over it?" Meanwhile, a tearout page in my magazine guessed, "My intern is the only one following me on Twitter" and advised me to "fill the void"...with shopping.

The process of immigration racks me with inexplicable nervousness, mainly on the Indian side.  I'm not afraid of being denied entry to the United States - I still have enough faith in the structures of citizenship - but I'm terrified of being stranded in India, tossed into some notorious prison and left to fend for myself among hardened criminals and the types of people who might one day write "Shantaram."   I think I have my mother to blame for this irrational obsession - once, years ago, we drove to Tijuana on a lark and she spent the entire time mulling over what life would be like inside a Mexican jail.  We had forgotten our passports.  These were less cautious days and the border authorities laughed and waved us back through, but not before she'd painted a surprisingly vivid picture.

I also used this recent layover to question whether or not I should waste the eight hours or so it'll take to read "Fifty Shades of Grey", shuddering to notice that the book has now spawned an entire display case in Hudson Booksellers, including themed sex guides.  Dear God. 

Instead, I absorbed myself in Siri Hustvedt's "A Plea for Eros," a collection of essays that are among the best I've ever read and cement Hustvedt's status as one of my fantasy dinner party guests.  The title essay neatly dissects some of the fundamental incongruities of political feminism and personal desire; meanwhile, the last essay - "Extracts from a story of the wounded self" seemed utterly relatable.  I don't know if I necessarily agree with Hustvedt's notion of an overpowering "wound," but she was a dreamy, somewhat off-kilter child, and I get that.  The Guardian review, linked above, refers to Hustvedt's view of her childhood as "over-romanticised," to which I reply 1) oh well and 2) ouch.  Interestingly, the literary essays - which the critic liked - were not my favorites.

I finished the book and lurked briefly around the terminal's Jamba Juice stall, mainly enjoying the whiff of freshly-squeezed orange that wafts from every Jamba Juice outlet I've ever come across.  Years of living in India, it turns out, have turned me into some sort of financial exile: neither dollars nor rupees strike me as entirely real, and no matter how much I spend on something, I'm never sure if I got a good deal or not.  This, along with my recent latte, turned me off actually buying a smoothie, and after a few minutes of exchanging glances with the clerk - who no doubt found me a bit creepy - I wandered back to my cripplingly uncomfortable leather seat to wait for the airline to open my flight.

Perhaps because they are places of limbo and boredom, airports have always inspired the weirdest waking dreams in me.  Mostly my airport fantasies are the usual banal stuff, but sometimes they're graphic and vaguely interesting.  This time, I had a vision in which I lost my passport and had to live in the airport for days.  I spent several minutes plotting when and in which order I'd hit all the food stalls in the terminal, and how I'd explain myself once I was caught.

When I got bored with that, I imagined what would happen if all of the passengers were stranded in the airport and had to agitate collectively for our rights to eat the airport food free of charge.  I'd already planned a stump speech for this imaginary constituency when, anti-climatically, they began to board my flight to Baltimore.

Do not hit on me when...

I promised a friend a post dedicated to "the fine men of Delhi." I opted for mockery masquering as advice.

Men in India seem to believe, mistakenly, that the West is some Elysian sexual paradise where dudes never get shot down.  Unfortunately, that's just not the case - Darwin's theories are, it turns out, not bound by geography.  Still, whether it's lecherous policemen, clueless colleagues, smirking clubgoers or overhelpful shopkeepers, (many, not all!) men in this country simply do not seem to know when to quit.

This post is for them.
Do NOT hit on me when...

1.  You are the policeman assigned to make a case report on a possible burglary at my place of residence.

2.  I board your bus and ask if you stop at the Ring Road.  You do now?  That's great. Keep your eyes on the road.

3.  I'm in the hospital, waiting at the bedside of someone I love who is seriously, seriously ill.

4.  I'm in the hospital.

5.  Your wife and children are standing mere yards away.

6.  You have a live-in girlfriend of several years whom you'd rather not talk about because "it isn't that serious" and "she's really just a roommate, anyway."

7. You're wearing a leopard-print turban and we've all had a few too many drinks at the Taj.  I can adjust my nametag myself, thanks.

8.  You're an elephant handler.  This isn't a circus.

9.  You've just finished taking a piss by the side of the road.

10. You've just tried to sell my friend some possibly illegal item in an alley, then brushed off your jacket and proclaimed, "Even the police can't touch me."

11.  There's one of me, six of you and your friends, and it's late at night on a deserted South Delhi road.

12.  We happen to be staying at the same hotel, and the doors don't lock properly.

13.  The cost of your car could feed a village for a year.  All I see is four wheels and a whole lot of nerve.

14.  I got into your auto.  (And you didn't even go by the meter.  Seriously.)

15.  ...you think I know who your father is.

16.  ...you feel the need to tell me who your father is.  He owns a hotel in Karol Bagh?  I thought so.

17.  The bar has just shut down, my friends look lost and you "know where the real party is."

18.  You don't know the difference between "your" and "ur."

19.  You understand what the hell this emoticon means: ({})

20.  You're not wearing pants. Seriously, dude, those aren't pants.

21.  You've just charged me Rs. 1000 when the sign says Rs. 100.  I may have an American accent, but that doesn't mean I can't read.

22. You've just stolen my friend's purse.

23.You've just tried hitting on my friend, and failed.  Love isn't like Wheel of Fortune; sometimes, you only get one spin.

24.  Your opening line is "so, your name sounds like it could be the name of a stripper."

25.  Your opening line is, "wait, let me guess your cup size."

26.  You're engaged, and everyone knows it.

27.  You're engaged, and no one knows it.

28.  You think drunk driving is only a crime if someone gets caught.

29.  There's multicolored embroidery on the back pockets of your pants.

30.  Your Facebook profile picture is a Bollywood movie star.

31.  You think a wild night out is Thursday cocktails at the Delhi Gymkhana.

32.  Your opening line is, "I really want a six-pack, but so far I've only got four..."  Also, "gymming" is not actually a verb.

33.  Your opening line is, "Want to go back to my house?  I've got full power backup."

34.  Your shaadi.com profile says, "I prefer a woman who doesn't look bored in bed."

35.  Your shaadi.com profile.  Full stop.

36.   I'm friends with your daughter. No thanks, Uncle.

37.  You refer to yourself as the "King of Twitter."

38.  "So what do you do?" "I'm an entrepreneur."  "What does your company do?"  "It's really too complex to explain to someone who isn't an expert in the field."

39.  "So what do you do?"  "I'm an entrepreneur."  "What does your company do?"  "[Five hour long monologue.]"

Excuse me, sir, how much does this cost?

The other day, a foreign friend of mine complained: "Auto drivers just look at me and charge me a ludicrous price."

"Why does that bother you?" I asked.  He gaped like I'd just questioned the value of human life itself.

"It's discrimination," he sputtered.

"Yes," I said gleefully.  "Price discrimination. First degree."

Once I got over my (nerdy, short-lived) joy at being able to semi-accurately cite microeconomic theory in casual conversation, I really began to think about this in greater depth.

One of the (dubious) joys of informal economies is informal pricing for goods and services.  In New Delhi, millions of people work in the informal sector, meaning their wages are dependent on a complex process of negotiation and determination that involves everything from the weather forecast to their employers' mood.  The government, except as an institution whose members demand bribes, remains largely aloof from this process.

For someone raised in America,  "fixed price" is practically a moral precept (although in actuality prices are not as fixed as most people might think).  The idea of haggling with the coffee vendor over the cost of a morning Starbucks is heinous, likewise the idea of negotiating exactly how many quarters are required to operate a machine in a laundromat.  In India, where these services are provided through informal networks, that haggling is a daily reality, with interesting results.

Recently, I read a pretty spirited back and forth over email between several expats who wanted to know the "fair wage" to pay a Delhi driver.  The use of the word "fair" ignited an online flame war.

The broader question of whether or not the rich should pay excess rents for services in order to address income inequality in society aside (answer: maybe?), life in New Delhi offers endless opportunities to reflect on what the word "fair" really means.

Here are some representative wages.  In these cases, the word "average" has no meaning.

A maid who does daily sweeping and mopping, depending on the area of Delhi in which she works and the profile of her employers, can make anywhere from Rs. 500 a month to Rs. 5000.

The young Indian girls who stand around in short skirts at promotional events usually earn around Rs. 1000 per night.  (At the events they attend, that's about the price of a single drink.) But at some events, the prices can go as high as Rs. 1000 per hour.

An unregistered office worker in a print shop in a South Delhi market might make Rs. 7,000.  If he does skilled work - uses software, equipment - that can go up to Rs. 12,000.

But these are wages.  Back to the idea of short-term pricing:

The auto driver who over-charges me might not be thinking beyond his next meal or his next rent payment, but he's also operating on the same principle of "fairness."  According to some philosophers, he'll get a lot more out of an extra Rupee than I will.  I don't know whether that means he deserves it.  Certainly, if I knew (which I don't) that my extra Rupee would go to his child's education, I'd be far more willing to pay it than I would if I knew it went towards his next beer. 
(Which reflects my priorities, not his.)

Of course, considering the frivolous things on which I spend the majority of my disposible income, it's probably a safe bet that he won't make worse use of that extra Rupee than I will.  (If we're curious what better and worse means, I guess I'd put "education" ahead of "beer" in terms of things that improve and enhance the level of happiness and productivity in society.  Some economists argue with that, but then economists argue about everything. It's unfortunately true that most people seem to love beer more than they love reading.)

My grand point here is that - regardless of how you feel about it - I do subscribe somewhat to the notion that if an auto driver overcharges me, and I agree to pay the price he charges, that transaction has probably brought both of us closer to efficiency.  He has, in academic terms, captured my surplus willingness to pay.  Good for him.

But it also means that for the average foreigner negotiating India's inexplicable pricing, the best response to a price quote isn't to feign outrage or to point to a passing Indian and demand, "how much would you charge her?"  Sadly, that question isn't relevant.  The more relevant question is, "Am I willing to walk to the nearest Metro station?"  The answer, I'm willing to bet, will almost always be no.

Of course, I could always give less money to auto drivers and more money to charity.  Hopefully my extra Rupees would go towards a poor child's education rather than, you know, an aid worker's next beer.

Why I Love Cities

When I think hard about the reasons why I've liked living in India, another one (besides the ability to speak two languages on a daily basis) comes immediately to mind: I really like cities.  The more "city" they are, the better.  And both Mumbai and Delhi (the only two places in India that I've lived) are absolute cities.

Before I moved to Mumbai, I read three books to prepare myself for the trip.  The first was Vikram Seth's epic "A Suitable Boy" which, at least in hardcover, should be sold by weight, like vegetables.  The second was the fun, occasionally irritating "Shantaram," and the third was the Pulitzer-nominated "Maximum City."

The last, by Suketu Mehta, is meant to be a peek into Mumbai's many hidden universes, but it's also an excellent primer in what makes cities unique.  People, I've noticed, tend to divide pretty neatly based upon how much "city" they crave.  Here's what characterizes a city (based on my observations):

1.  Constant human presence.  The streets of (most of) Manhattan, Mumbai and New Delhi are rarely empty.  In Mumbai, solitude is as theoretical as snow.  I find the background chaos of India's mega-city streets both comforting and protective.  Nothing bad will happen to me, I figure, so long as someone (or multiple someones) are watching.  I've believed this ever since I was a small and over-imaginative kid, convinced that every bedroom shadow hid an axe-murderer who was just waiting to catch me alone.

On a practical level, the constant presence of people manifests itself in noise, trash and odor.  Walking down a Mumbai street is an overwhelming and synesthetic experience, and people who enjoy cities are usually also people who can filter out or ignore excess sensory stimuli.

2.  Rapid physical change.  Neither Stonehenge nor the Grand Canyon have changed perceptibly over the past 100 years.  The same can't be said for the face of any modern city.  Modern cities adapt rapidly to new inhabitants, new economic trends, new tastes.  A city's personality is constantly in flux.

People who crave the security of a familiar landscape might find a place like New Delhi - which changes its appearance daily - almost schizophrenic.

3.  Frenetic-ness.  The word "frenetic" means "frantic, frenzied" and comes, apparently, from a Greek word that also means "inflammation of the brain."  Practically, what I mean is that you're more likely to be at a dinner surrounded by people who can't stop checking their phones in a place like New Delhi than in, say, suburban Iowa.  People move and adapt very fast.  Partly this is choice, but partly it's necessity (see #6).

4.  Superficiality.  Sorry, but it must be said - historically, bright young people have always moved to cities to "make their fortune."  As the costs of travel decline, I've noticed the emergence of a new class of "urban dweller", people who jet easily between New York City, London and Shanghai, with occasional pit stops in Rio or Hong Kong.  The result, unfortunately, is that first impressions are often last impressions.  Residence is transient, and relationships often skin-deep.

Are there exceptions?  Yes.  But again, people in NYC are more likely to judge you by what car you drive or what company appears on your business card than, say, people in suburban Iowa. (Of course, these kinds of judgmental people are often attracted to the idea of living in cities in the first place).  This is what happens when you meet people devoid of context.  But it might also be because of...

5.   Diversity.  Most modern mega-cities contain a wider variety of people than villages, small towns or suburbs do.  There are amazing benefits to this, and I'm not just talking about the variety of ethnic food you get in Manhattan.  When I was 20, I stepped off a bus into the streets of NYC and felt like I'd been transplated into a universe where anything was possible.  It was the first time I'd felt like I had the freedom to construct my context.  People didn't look at me and see a woman, or even an Indian-American.  I was only myself.

The inescapable downside of diversity is inequality.  Yes, bright young people move to cities to make their fortune, but many of them fail, or succeed much more slowly than they hoped.  And others succeed beyond their wildest dreams.  Modern mega-cities groan under the weight of urban income inequality.  The picture that epitomizes Mumbai is the view from any balcony: exclusive high-rises set amid sprawling slums.  Life isn't fair, and living in a city allows no one to lose sight of that fact, no matter how high they build their towers.

6.  Hyper-competitive-ness.  A lot has been written about how cities can serve as economic engines.  In an article that I can no longer find online, the Economist's Ryan Avent argues that cities are hotbeds of economic activity because the constant presence of people allows ideas to spread more rapidly.  The constant influx of new people, the fast pace at which change occurs and an openness to new ideas make NYC a thrilling place to live.

But as a result, everything in a city - from scoring a table at a restaurant on Friday night to dating to starting a company - is insanely competitive, whether or not it should be.  People face near-infinite options. Those who are prone to distractions and obsessed with novelty (and city-seekers are, usually, of this type) can get lost in variety and lose touch with happiness.

--

Of course, city-dwellers tend to separate into three groups.  1)  Those who really would rather not be in a city, but have no immediate choice.  2)  Those who don't really care and 3) Those who love and crave the unique stimuli that cities offer.

Interestingly, a Psychology Today definition of "extroversion" reads as follows: "Extroverts make up about three-quarters of the American population, and as such come in all stripes. They zip through the world in search of novel experiences, social connections and leadership opportunities. Extroversion is a core factor of personality and is difficult to modify. But generally speaking, the only people bothered by extroverts' volubility and drive are the introverted members of their circle."

I would posit that people who are drawn to cities are often extroverts.  Extroverts are also prone to the problematic traits of the type: impatience, gregariousness, self-centeredness, a tendency to get distracted by shiny things, an obsession with appearances and social standing. 

The only bare tip I have for surviving the challenges of fast-paced urban life (and extroversion) is to channel an introvert and do some deep thinking: know exactly what you want and never compare yourself to others and (maybe cliche but still important) don't underinvest in the people who matter.  Good luck with that, really.  (Or, if you really want to do some deep thinking about the meaning of your life, read this all the way through.  It's worth it.)