Sparing the details, I finished gathering my research from the hinterlands of Karnataka State yesterday, and to my relief, am now happily in an upscale district of Bangalore. Aaah the good life. The process of being by myself, bouncing from town to town on state and local busses was grueling. A lone whitey in a crowd of brown. The people I worked with all sort of understood what I was trying to do, but since I was working with 5 different teams of guys in all, I fear that the data is so variable and error-ridden that it may not be quite thesis material. The whole process was strikingly un-scientific.
I have decided that if I am going to undertake independent research in the future, I am going to draw up exact, unbreakable, ten-commandments-style, tablet and tabernacle protocols. I will resist heat and confusion. I will bring mosquito nets and hire drivers. I will get a grant and come with real money, and pay people who know what they are doing to handle the work I need done. The contacts have been made, mistakes recognized, and preliminary plans ruminating in my many stomachs of passive thought. In the words of a General at Luzon: "I shall return..." I add to this, "...and not get my butt spanked next time"
So the next phase is transcribing and translating my focus group tapes, doing the data entry required of 90 surveys, and look at whatever correlations exist in that sea of numbers, however stormy they be. After that, I will forget all about the academic purposes that brought me here and try to see some of the wonders (and beaches) of South India.
To prepare myself for this, I have been reading The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. It's all about the marriage of a Portuguese Cochin spice trader's daughter with a Cochin Jew-- from a community that is dwindling after its founding shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in 72 AD. In case you haven't noticed, his leprechaun-style prose is rubbing off a bit. anyway, it's a good read, and as most of his stuff tends to do, summarizes all the facts, fictions, and emotions of this complicated, intensely zany place. He adds subtlety to a place that is not known for delicate flavors, or spartan religious rites. Maybe I'm just missing the subtleties here.
Anyway, trepidation over my research aside, things here are good. I now feel as acclimated as I should feel. My room, which once looked like a bare cell now seems like the Hilton. Flush toilets, hot showers on command, showers at all? Wow, that's paradise. The streets, whose autos flowed with the randomness of red blood cells while at the same time reducing my haemoglobin levels with their Carbon Monoxide emmissions, now seem just like streets. It shows that you can get used to anything.
I have seen some incredible and some horrible things in my travels. I've been places that white people only go to if they're filming for National Geographic. I've seen malnourished children, remote temples of beauty, a man dying on the street in convulsions, and vermillion sunsets over rugged, parched landscapes. So many people here live in a sort of illiterate, austere beauty. But I do not envy them their lives. Squatting over ditches in loin cloths, dragging crops in from dry fields, building fires on primus stoves under cover of corrugated metal donated by the World Bank. These are the peasants that we all descended from. Their lives are squalorous, tough and short. But you can get used to anything.
The work I'm getting into is all about eliminating the scourages of peasant life, in a sense, to create the literate proliteriat that Lenin and Marx envisioned. But their essential problem is the same today, socialist or capitalist. In a country of a bllion people and change, everyone needs a job. If we bring in modern, mechanized agriculture, what do all those people in the fields do? The steel mills and call centers are full-up. Besides, it's hard to get a service job in a loin cloth. There is an essential paradox to the mission of eliminating poverty. When the communists tried it, they created massive food shortages and gulags. We need these people at the bottom of the pyramid to stay busy, to keep making our food. Even if machines start to do it for them, they will be unemployed, uneducated, at the margins, slipping below subsistence into famine and death. This paradox drives me nuts. We need a value-added pyramid for goods, that is, raw materials refined into cars and microchips and sold at 1000s of times their material value. The same is true for labor. For every doctor and lawyer we need ten janitors. For every call centre wallah, we need one hundred laborers to build the place, supply the food, and clean their modest suburban homes. How does this ever change? I have no idea, but, like India,
"hey, I'm working on it."
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