India is like a pill with many side effects.. As my experience here forces me to reconsider a lot of Western ways of thinking, it also puts significant physical and mental strain on me. And I can only handle so much.
Also, a lot has happened in the last week that it twists my sense of temporality.
Delhi has been sheer craziness, by far the most chaotic urban landscape I have ever encountered. After leaving the SEEDS office Friday night, I was not actually ready to embrace all the disarming events to come. I checked in the wrong hotel and thus picked the “deluxe double” instead of the “luxury suit” (wanted to save SEEDS some money); the deluxe turns out to imply a windowless room with a broken TV, unwashed bed covers, cold water and an about-to-fall-apart AC. I took it all in, more so because of the anticipation to see Delhi in the evening. Along with Veronica, Jackie and Veda (the two other interns and a local SEEDS employee from Northeast India- She looked more Chinese than Indian to me), I went to Delhi Gate and toured around a bit, ending up in a fancy bar called Lizard Lounge. Nice place, good food – yet it got awkward around 9.30 when the place decided to become a nightclub – with not more than 15 people in it, mostly dining. And some local Indian boys flexing at the bar.. This broke our conversation, and soon after, we left the place. I was exhausted anyway.. Then, India started testing my stamina. I got onto a rickshaw to go back to the hotel, and the tire popped up. Then the driver got mad at me, because I was spacey and did not help him as much as he wanted to (!), the whole tipping-the-rickshaw-changing-the-tire-repairing-the-engine-running-out-of-gas-pushing-the-rickshaw-filling-gas-and-more operation lasted ~45 minutes, and finally I was able to make it to my room.
Over the weekend, I got to see some nice touristy places with Veronica. Red Fort, which was recently nominated as a World Heritage Site, was beautiful, calm and relaxing. Built by Moghuls, it was designed to be paradise on Earth. If not so, it was certainly a paradise in Delhi, because soon after, we found ourselves in the craze of Meera Bazaar, with sellers attacking us, local Muslims giving us dirty looks, and beggars pulling us down from our pants, literally. Or naked small babies mying in dirt, flies hovering over them, no exaggeration. I have pictures that I will upload towards the end of the trip, they will cover the visual part of the story. Whatever entails culture shock, that was it… Eye-opening does have some side-effects, it seems. Also, I have been wondering recently about what it means to be a tourist. After all, tourists want to get to know the local culture, but the boundary is not always easy to draw. Touristy places do have a buffer zone which makes them more safe and predictable, and locals’ places offer a genuine experience at the cost of.. who knows. I felt when we were in a rickshaw crossing the shanty-town in Delhi, us being one of the very few tourists, that anything could have happened. We were lucky that we got nothing other than stark gazes and a few warnings about Veronica’s dress…
Sunday night, we took the bus from Delhi to Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh. A 520 km, 12 hour ride, it seemed just like a badly designed rollercoaster. Horns are commonplace in India to use; it is like: dogs bark, cars use horns. At every occasion. Yet the bus driver exaggerated this feat and used horns at every excessive maneuver he made, and there were a lot of them. So every horn could be the last sound one could hear. I feel lucky to be alive. Couldn’t get a bit of sleep, yet it was nice to sip some Chai six in the morning at the skirts of Himalayas.
There is so much to say about the Himalayas.. Well, they are partly the reason Hinduism decided to invent millions of Gods, along with local animistic iconography. They do consider them as the “home of Gods” and it is an assertion to consider when one sees them. But I imagined them as barren, rough and unapproachable mountains. Instead, what we have here in Dharamsala is lush green scenery with stepped rice plantations, so many trees, so many valleys. It is a place that I have not even seen in the movies, which is exciting, to say the least.
Our arrival to Dharamsala has been a little troublesome (because even the simplest task in India takes a long time, a lot of coordination, and patience – basically taking it all in). It started pouring and we were waiting for Rishi –the local SEEDS officer and our habitually late driver- under a small tin roof. Then we got to our hotel; as if I didn’t take my lesson in Delhi, they asked again whether I would mind staying in the cheap one of the rooms. I wanted to be easy-going, and I really could not conceive how bad it could be, but as we entered the room, I realized that I had made a mistake, once again. The girls spoke up before me, and we were transferred to the “deluxe rooms,” which were definitely acceptable by all standards. One more thing, rooms in hotels in India have weird spatial proportions, they are generally too large without much furniture in them, just barred spaces with bathroom-like tiles, which feels very odd.
Rishi is the accounts person in SEEDS, a local of Dharamsala, a very friendly, solemn and genuine person. He recently became a devoted Muslim as his wife claimed dawri (which means that he bought the wife from the parents) and he didn’t think it was fair, but the court has made him suffer for the last three years and he decided to find the solace in God. He fasts Monday and Fridays, but also drinks beer occasionally, which does not help his mood or driving at all.
Religion in India is perhaps the most complicated subject matter, since nothing seems to have a secular face around here, and there are so many nuances, and a conflict among most of the groups. The whole social structure is even more complicated by the caste system, which are mainly divided into four, but in its bifurcations, millions of caste exist in India and they matter a lot.
Going back to our daily schedule, one interesting visit we made since we came is to go to Little Tibet, Mcleodganj, which is 9 km far from our home, but also 500 m up! It is a quaint little tourist town, which was so nice to see, because one does miss being a tourist among tourists sometime.. This is where yoga, medidation, and Buddhist philosophy is practiced as the fundamentals of daily life, and Dalai Lama has been living here for the last 48 years as well!! Intertwined Buddhist and Hindu temples, maroon-wrapped Tibetan on-exile monks, Americans in full-fledged Hippi dresses, rather meditative shopkeepers and safer food are all welcome.. We enjoyed it the first time on Monday evening, and will definitely frequent the place as often as possible. Further down the road, there is even a spectacular waterfall carving through the mountains, along with nodes of Tibetan prayer sites (basically a colorful flag on a stone, placed after the occurrence of a significant event at that spot)
One huge hassle was moving in to our new house. In a rather rural neighborhood, we are definitely dependent on a car. So we brought all our stuff in our microscopic Suzuki Maruti, and realized soon how dirty the house was. It took four people five hours to clean a small house, so you imagine the details. The we went to buy stuff for the house, and I would describe our current interior design as “ascetic” to begin with. But soon we will get a table and some other necessities, hopefully.
I don’t want to sound all bitter about what I have seen so far, but there has just been an immense change in my living spaces that it takes some time to digest it all. I have tried to be as easy-going and flexible as I can, and it is interesting to see how humans have adapted themselves to such diverse environments (kids bathe in green river water, people walk barefoot on damp rice fields, old man pet monkeys, etc). I am sure that after a month, things that strike me here minute by minute will go unnoticed, but until then, bear with me..
Talking about digestion, Indian food did come with side effects as well: Severe Traveller’s Diarrhea with Fever and all. Fortunately, I got over it after a few not-too-great days, with a visit to a seedy hospital yet a surprisingly helpful doctor. According to Mihir, “one of the biggest problems of India is that they always treat the foreigners much better than locals and consider them more superior.” Seems accurate so far, yet not too different from Turkish mentality either.
Finally, regarding work – things run slowly here. I feel very unproductive especially after Stanford pace. Even the smallest task takes forever – no one is on time, there is a lot of overhead, and people just go with the flow. We also do not have a very strict gameplan yet, which chips away from motivation. In any case, we were able to visit a government official, Kangra Fort and a Shiva Temple so far. In the temple, four of us spent long hours studying the structure and the site, sketching and taking pictures, which was very interesting. We do have to come up with a consistent methodology as the time passes though – and also to set all our deliverables straight. And to get fast Internet access… We’ll see; I think there is a lot of potential, but we as interns definitely have to push the process because the local SEEDS people don’t seem to “pull” us in the next few weeks…