I’ve been posting my notes from India, scribbled and scrawled all around the country last summer, while I get things up and running around here. Now that things are humming nicely, I’m spending less time fixing things, leaving me more time to post tasty content. But although I’m not quite so desperate for filler anymore, some of you actually seem to like these, so I’ll keep posting them sporadically until they’re all up. If you like, you can keep track of them on a brand spanking new dispatches page.
Thanks for reading!
-mark
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10:14am Wednesday, Aug 1
First, a news report - not sure if you’ve been following the headlines but 100 million people in India and Bangladesh and another 100 million in China have been affected by some of the worst flooding anyone here has ever seen. Fifty per cent of Bangladesh is submerged, as are huge chunks of the Indian states of Assam and Bihar, which incidentally is just a few kilometres away from here. The BBC says that Bihar in particular is said to resemble “an inland sea.” I’m in Varanasi, and so far in this state (Uttar Pradesh) there haven’t been any problems - just the usual monsoon rains and associated blackouts, phone problems… I didn’t even hear about this except on the BBC - crazy that we live in a time when I can get a job via e-mail from 12,000 km away (woo hoo!), but I need a British TV network to tell me about the cataclysmic flooding in my backyard.
The state of Bihar is home to the city of Bodhgaya — where the Buddha is sais to have been enlightened and where I would have been right now, if I’d stuck to my schedule. Good thing I fell in love with Varanasi. It’s chaotic, desperately poor, and often overwhelming, but it isn’t underwater.
Not sure how much time has passed since my last post — the hours and days just melt together here, and were it not for my shiny new cell phone I’d have about a 1 in 7 chance of guessing the day of the week.
I tag along for Mally’s errands, to get a look around the city from a local perspective. We head to a flower market, as she’s looking for a bouquet of 63 roses to mark the 63rd birthday of her yogi’s wife. We end up buying them from a merchant she knows well, but this doesn’t stop him from upping the price from 300 rupees to 400 after the goods are wrapped up and ready to go. She’s busy feigning surprise and settling for 375, when I look down and realize that the floor is crawling with ants the likes of which I’ve only ever seen in India. The biggest are almost an inch long. The Jains in India emphasize the preservation of all life, however insignificant it may seem, and carry small brooms for sweeping insects out from underfoot. But Hindus, Muslims, Christians and all the rest of us go about our merry business, and in this shop at least, we squish lots of big fat ones with every step.
In another lifetime, when I was a 14-year-old air cadet, we practiced our shooting skills with antiquated Lee Enfield No. 7’s — bolt-action rifles that had seen action in WWII. But those weapons look like plutonium-powered laser guns when compared with the rifles that the police in this city lug around, huge heavy contraptions two steps above the blunderbuss that seem as likely to blow up in the officers’ hands as they are to hit their targets.
Also, I popped into a “dollar store” here, for some reason finding it hysterically funny that I should see one in India. Turns out everything in the shop is 99 rupees — about three dollars — and they stock most of the same junk as the dollar stores back home.
Another thing: the buildings here seem built with the monsoon in mind - every room has a drain in the floor, and the bathrooms are brilliant in their bare-bones efficiency. In every bathroom I’ve seen, the shower is not enclosed but rather just a tap and showerhead on the wall, the floors made of marble or some other tile, and the whole bathroom is the shower. Yes, the toilet paper might get a little damp, but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than building a plastic stand-up shower booth for every home, and makes use of the drain already on the floor — a drain, incidentally, that also has a hose running to it from the bottom of the sink. Fortunately the toilet has its own drainage system. One thing I don’t get though is why every bathroom door I’ve seen has a big solid steel sliding bolt lock on the outside of the door. Meaning that it’s really easy to lock your friends in the bathroom. I resist the urge.
Yesterday I went to the chemist’s shop to pick up some more oral rehydration salts — a dubious-tasting powder that restores the electrolytes lost through diarrhea. They’re a big part of the reason I’m my normal self again (thanks again Sumi!). Anyhoo, I’m in line behind an Indian woman — tiny, but probably 40 years old — and she’s buying birth control pills. Thing is, she only buys four, and I can only assume that she’s planning to come back when she has money for more… This country has 1,100,000,000 people. People are everywhere in the streets, huddled under stairways, sleeping in rickshaws and shops and vegetable carts. Already too few of these people have enough to eat, enough clean water to drink or a roof over their heads — at least one that’s made of something other than plastic bags. I’m resisting the urge to say the pill should be free or at least subsidized — resisting because, if this were possible, the money might be better spent fighting the leprosy, cholera, polio, dysentery, typhoid, leptospirosis and tuberculosis that are ravaging this country. Diseases unheard of in the West. Sumi and Zaheer told me that in their medical college in Manipal, authorities actually discovered a case of the plague. As in the BUBONIC plague. As in the Black Death that wiped out a third of Europe and the Middle East and up to two thirds of China. THAT plague. Scary.
And it isn’t as though the money isn’t there… Everywhere I go in this country, North and South, urban and rural, locals paint the same picture of government corruption, mismanagement and waste. And I don’t just mean the Tibetan monks whose monasteries actually set aside part of their budgets each year as a bribery fund for bullying cops and other officials. I mean systematic, endemic corruption throughout the entire bureaucracy that turns what should be one of the world’s richest nations into one of the poorest. I wonder how much it cost to develop India’s nuclear weapons — and how many lepers could have been treated instead, how many of their fingers and toes and other body parts wouldn’t have fallen off in the street. Or how many slum children could have been educated, instead of earning their livings by begging or stealing what they need to survive. It’s easy to criticize America and the UK for their nuclear arsenals, but at least — at the very least — their streets don’t look like these. At least their poor are not this kind of poor…
This note was long, so I’ve cut it up into bits. I’ll post the next one soon.
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