As I write this, I am happily esconced in our apartment, listening to the family next door singing Eid songs to mark the end of Ramzan and the rain pattering down outside. It's definitely a cozy feeling and it's moments like this when I have to pinch myself. For every challenge that India presents and for every time I want to throw my hands up in the air and say enough, it throws two beautiful things right back in my face. Today I took my first ride on the back of a scooter through the hectic city traffic and it definitely helped put things in perspective. Day to day life here is so much more interactive and teeming with activity than back home that I figured it is about time I share that with you by describing some of the sights I have seen here in the last month and a half, be it from an auto, the back of a scooter, or just standing still and letting life happen around you.
Morning here is a strange sight to see. Most stores are boarded up and won't open until ten in the morning, yet the sidewalk is full of movable street food carts, and a mix of school children in uniforms holding hands as they maneuver through the breakfast diners, business professionals in suits on their way to work, and beggars roaming from autorickshaw to autorickshaw, hoping for a few rupees from groggy morning commuters. If it has rained, the smell is damp. Damp humanity, dripping plants, soaked garbage. Otherwise, the exhaust can be overwhelming as you sit idling at an impossibly complicated intersection, wedged in between other scooters, motorcycles, buses, and autorickshaws, and waiting for the traffic officer to signal your lane. Traffic lights here do little good in rush hour.
As you leave this more "western" area of town, you head down narrower streets, potholed and windy. More women here wear burkas and more men are dressed in traditional white kurtas. You can catch snatches of music from the shops, wildly energetic Bollywood numbers or more meloncholic Urdu songs. Weaving in and out of traffic, you see a woman brushing her teeth outside of her small home, children yell and wave at you. In front of you a wallet falls out of an auto, and immediately, three people on motorcycles nearby stop and snatch it... and speed ahead to return it to the owner.
Down the next street is a shop where men sit threading brightly colored flowers onto string, while across the road is a meat shop, proudly displaying the skinned hump and hoofed foot of a camel. A man missing his legs sits on a cart pulled by an oxen while a BMW passes you on the right. Then you hear drums, from far away at first, then closer. While the music sounds joyful and rythmic, you realize it's a funeral procession, with the deceased being carried down the road by a group of men, the body covered in flowers.
Next you turn a corner and color explodes in your face. Shop after shop on both sides of you brim with Ganesh idols, some ten feet tall, others small enough to fit in your pocket, all in various stages of being painted. You must stop to let saree-clad women expertly balancing buckets of wash on their heads pass before continuing on. And the smell of spicy food, paint, cigarettes and exhaust is overwhelming. At the end of this road dedicated to the Hindu god, lies a massive green and white mosque, echoing the call to prayer over loudspeakers strategically positioned around the massive dome. And before you know it, you are on your way home, leaving the multi-colored shrines behind you, exchanging carts filled to the brim with ripe pomegranates and bananas for a McDonalds and Subway newly constructed, turning your back on impossibly old monuments for a mega-mall complete with a 3-D movie theater and a Hard Rock Cafe.
But no matter where you go, you are reminded that this is India. Life, for all its similarities, is incredibly different. And it is impossible to describe the diversity and the intensity of each day. Instead, you do what you can to occupy your own niche, observing with a foreigners eyes while trying to understand what is culture, what is globalization and where you fit in. In the end, sometimes all you need to do is stike up a conversation at the corner dhosa shop, and then things don't seem quite so complicated anymore.
nice
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