Going Home

The association was strongest with dust and poverty. I had often ventured to disagree, but most had told me that I would see it when I visited. After all, if one lives in an environment, one tends to get desensitized to one's surroundings. Filth, like beauty, can only be appreciated through a degree of unfamiliarity. And that unfamiliarity, they said, would come from my time in America, and whenever I would visit, I was told, I would be overcome by the sights and smells than I never gave second thought to.

So this time when I flew Air India, I was already convinced that I was in for a raw deal. That belief was strengthened by the surprise that my flight, which I purchased as 'not stop', had a 90 minute stopover at Heathrow. This was so typical India, I told myself, you never know what you're in for. And when I discovered that my audio system didn't work because the audio jacks and the headphone jacks were not compatible, and that I wasn't the only one with this problem, I began to foresee a trip home that was full of small and irritating inconveniences that could be best attributed to apathy, an Indian attitude that I was already fairly familiar with.

Indira Gandhi International Airport was the next entry in the list of ills; broken and disorganized with a prevailing pervasive smell of urine. While waiting at the carousels for our bags to arrive, I couldn't help but compare the leaky ceiling and chipped walls to those that I had seen at airports in other countries. India, I was learning, was about indifference. When there was a thirty minute hiatus in the unloading of bags from the plane and onto the carousels because the workers changed shifts, India, I learned further, was about incompetence.

But on the drive back, I couldn't help but notice that the roads in Delhi, when one can actually see the roads without the heavy traffic, might compare to the roads in America. The roads were good, the signage was acceptable and it seemed that enough time, effort and money had been spent to ensure that traffic flow as smoothly as possible. On a later day, however, when I revisited Delhi in peak traffic, I could see why, despite the good roads, traffic was slow and disconcerting. Mixed traffic was one reason, and impatience was the other. Two wheeled automobiles paid scant regard to the marked lanes on the road, and frequently one would see them using the lane demarcation as a taxiway centerline. At red lights, too, one could see that cars and other vehicles, whether automated or manual, would try to fill every conceivable gap on the road, following some kind of a thermodynamical law, and getting out of that lattice seemed like a rearrangement puzzle. The traffic in Lucknow was worse, primarily, because of the blustery attitude of the politically muscled.

Haridwar, geographically a small town, and politically very important, was the beginning of my realization that India was neither all about bad traffic, urine, broken walls and political bullying, nor about the swanky malls that I would visit later and the talk of economic upturn that seemed ubiquitous across the journalistic spectrum, figuring, alike, in gossip columns and financial news. Haridwar was once a part of Uttar Pradesh, the state now in competition with Bihar for generating the most inhospitable conditions for its residents. Uttaranchal, the state Haridwar is in now, broke away from Uttar Pradesh in 2001 after complaining of decades of neglect from the government in Lucknow. Within six years, its capital city, Dehra Dun, was transformed from a small, quaint town, to a center of commercial activity which, while not chichi, serves well as a model of inclusive economics. "There are jobs here for everyone", I was told, "and those who want very highly paying jobs don't stay here anyway." It appears that now, in Dehra Dun, one can find a job, with great ease, which enables one to earn about five thousand to ten thousand rupees a month. Given that livable apartments cost about two thousand rupees and a day's three meals, if cooked and eaten at home, cost about fifty rupees, most people in Dehra Dun are able to actually save money.

Haridwar is little different. Being from Uttar Pradesh, I was astounded at the luminescence of Haridwar. It was hard to believe that I was in a country that continually complained about how short on energy it was. I stayed in a recently built hotel there, and I must admit, that apart from the slight unwillingness of the staff to be helpful, that hotel could have compared to some of my experiences with hotels in the more "advanced" parts of the world. I then shifted hotels to be closer to the river Ganga, and while my new hotel wasn't as ritzy, it gave me nothing to complain of. In the evenings I would walk around taking pictures, and some, when I showed them to my mother, elicited the response, "This looks a little like some of the pictures you sent us" (of places in America).

While I was on my tour of Haridwar, Benazir Bhutto was murdered. I spent an evening watching commentaries and projections. I even heard Zardari speak on TV, and watched as Bilawal sat through his father announcing an addition to his name. My mind went back, perhaps ten years, when Delhi and Islamabad habitually blamed each other for anything, major or otherwise, that occurred in their countries. But today, no one, either in the Pakistani media, or in the international one, was bothering to implicate India in Pakistan's turmoil. After sharing a history of many thousand years, and fighting four wars in just sixty odd years, India had managed to extricate itself from Pakistan. So while analysts predicted a nuclear doom if Pakistan's arsenal fell into even more dangerous hands, analysts in India spoke about the increase in congestion that JRD Tata's dream car would bring about in the Indian roads. India, it seemed, was not worried by Pakistan's instability. India, it seemed, was learning to "ignore", a quality hitherto associated with the powerful.

Shortly after my return from Haridwar, the election results in Gujarat came out. I am not aware of how many political parties have an interest in Gujarat, but I knew that the ruling party, the BJP, was written off by the media as being communally inclined. Incidentally, "communal" is a word that is often uttered by the Left and by everyone in Uttar Pradesh. The Left uses it as an alternative to "not in the favor of the country" just to make it seem that they don't have the same view on every subject, and the politicians in Uttar Pradesh use it to mask their not having any reasonable political opinions at all; excepting that, "communal" was driven to cliché by its constant reference to Gujarat's elections. In what surprised all political pundits in India, Narendra Modi, the man marketed by the media as a demon, came back into power with a clear majority. Overnight, stories changed, and it now appeared that Gujarat was no longer going to polls with issues such as caste and religion: they had mellowed to the more real issue of development. Statistics were published which indicated that Gujaratis were, on average, better educated, had more electricity, cleaner water and a better sex ratio than most of India. Narendra Modi coming back to power was thus seen as an affirmation that Gujarat was growing politically mature and some pundits, the very same who had written Modi off, began to uphold Gujarat as a model of India's democratic process.

On my way back to Houston, I met a Nepali fellow, and while I was talking to him about the perception the Nepalese bear of India, he said, "We're stuck between two phenomena," referring to India and China, "but we're too far behind." Later in the conversation, when I mentioned that India was suffering tremendously from corruption and quoted the a former prime minister saying that, "Of every rupee spent, only 17 paise reach the common man", he asked, with wonder, "Then how has India managed to get ahead?"

This is a question I am sure most Indians ask themselves frequently. On many fronts the government is apathetic. On most fronts, the populace does not bear a sense of ownership over their country. The corrupt bureaucracy is entrenched inextricably into the system. And yet, there is a sense of economic empowerment within the people. Behind the realization that the individual is powerless in front of the state is the new belief that an individual can make a difference, however small. This manifests in the simultaneous expression of fatalism and entrepreneurship. The Indian no longer associates with the reality that is India, he associates more with the India of his wants. He pees by the roadside, then fishes out his mobile phone and places an order for thirty computers. The dirt and urine coexist in a queasy stasis with a desire for "upward mobility" fueled by the hope for a better tomorrow. And what has changed is that the people are developing a tenacity in their search for their better tomorrow.

Whether India manages to lay a rightful claim as a "developed" nation by 2020 is an issue that I'll let the pundits debate. I'll just marvel at the confusion and contradictions that chaperon change.