January 2006

It's been almost 6 months since leaving India and I feel pretty lousy for not adding any updates, or going any further than my last half-assed posting. I came back to the States and within two months I had bought my first house; in another two I was married to my longtime sweetheart, Katie. Within two minutes of getting back to America, I had disengaged from the mindset of the lone traveler. I was a perspective home-buyer, a fiancee, a future son-in-law. There were so many new roles to take on that I had managed to shunt off to the side by leaving the country for a few months.

Traveling always seems to happen in the gaps between eras of life; between lovers, semesters and degrees, jobs, after retirement and before death. For all the talk of traveling's effect on the traveler, the confounding effect of when people choose to travel shouldn't be ignored. This particular gap was a vast one for me.

For obvious reasons, this blog will probably evolve away from 'travelogue' to 'soapbox and journal' now. This transition, like many others, deserves a segue. So here it is.

What India can learn from America, and what can Americans can learn from Indians?

India/America:

When Indians look towards the States, they see an enormously wealthy, powerful nation composed of all kinds of people. Its lack of history, openness and optimism makes it seem like a shallow, safe place to do business and to be oneself. Beyond the money, America offers little to the Indian mindset. It promises cold winters and the sterility that all people from dirty places feel when they go somewhere clean. (I get that from Toronto). For the average Indian, America is a place where the odds of being rewarded for hard work are far greater than they'd be back home. For India, this isn't enough. As a nation, India places plenty of emphasis on hard work. Millions of students compete for a few thousand spots in the nation's top schools of engineering or medicine. It is a subcontinent of intelligent workhorses ready to do the bidding of anyone with power.

This unquestioning deference is frustrating to Westerners who work in India. It is too often that people will say "yes" to a request they cannot fulfill or do not understand. Yes is the only answer in a place with so much competition. There are no second chances, no "I'll get back to you on that". This "yes" tension springs from the need for powerless people to please the powerful. It's not that westerners want to hear "no" all the time, they want to see curiosity, a sense of problem-solving, arriving at solutions independent from someone else's orders. In a professional setting, there is simply too much willingness to take commands from higher-ups, and not enough initiative or creative thinking. There is just too much heirarchy.

Example: India's railway system holds the title of largest bureaucratic entity in the world. Bigger than the Red Army circa 1982, bigger than Walmart toay. The amazing thing is that it works-- it's easily as on-time as Amtrak, and you pay for what you get every time. The sort of typically screwed-up thing is how it barely works. Nothing changes. Trash builds up in the track beds, dogs wander through the stations. The same vendors sell the same things, and the trains run through a persistent patina of low-grade filth. No one is in charge, but every individual does his or her job with competence and a narrow focus. It is such a task-oriented way of working that the overall product of train service suffers. Entrepreneurship is dissent, it inevitably goes against existing order. In India this is seldom rewarded and little respected. It is the peasant mindset that we left behind when we boarded ships to the New World, and feels alien to me, a 4th generation American descendent of such people.

America/India:

I've written plenty about the American in India. Most of the conventional wisdom of a loud, smelly, crowded place is largely true. The sense of constant humanity left me with the damp cosiness you'd expect from napping in a curry-scented armpit. It is more of a continent than it is a nation. There are more languages spoken there today than modern Europe, and people look as much the same between its borders as they do between Portugal, Norway and Bulgaria. And there are three times more of them than there are of us Yankees, but there is something they all seem to have that is acutely missing here in America.

In America, the refrains of culture wars, family values, and crisis of virtue are long-standing traditions. There is something to this. People here really don't call their mothers enough. When it comes down to it, we place our careers above families in 90 percent of decisions we make. For someone to hate their kids is simply unimaginable in India. For most Indians, sex and marriage are closely related acts, while in America they're practically polar opposites. We love ourselves more than anyone else. In India, there is really a sense of social order, chastity and belonging in a family or a community that is generally missing here in the States. For all of us, liberal and conservative, we all have the sense that something is missing, some moral code is not innately understood as it is in other places, or as it was in other times. Our diverse backgrounds and subsequent beliefs make for fractious, bitter arguments over social issues, so much so that there is little we can agree upon.

You've probably noticed how these excesses and deficiencies dovetail. These are differences between self and community. There is nothing more valuable to me than experiencing and attempting to understand these differences, and how they make us who we are.