The Whitest Kids You Know in Bombay: Marauding monkeys maliciously mugged me of my MANGO

20 June 2011: Marauding monkeys, and Mumbai life

SHIRA:

Sorry folks for taking so long to update!

So much has happened in these past two weeks. Last week, Jordan and two of our workmates traveled to a nearby Indian nuclear plant in Tarapur and spoke to some people about how the nuclear plant has affected them. It sounds like a fascinating trip and I’m a little bummed that I didn’t get to go, although instead I had lunch with a new friend, Neha, which was really nice. We work 6 days a week and have been trying to take day trips on the Sundays. Last week I had planned on us going to Matheran, but Jordan got sick in Tarapur with a fever and general bad feelings, so instead we slept in and generally took it easy. It also may have been Sunday that we discovered a French-style bakery that offers real coffee and half-off baked goods after 9pm. The real coffee is significant because most restaurants only have a heavily milked and sugared variety.

On the apartment front, we’ve all but given up. Several people at work have asked around for us, but what we’re asking seems simply not to be offered. Luckily, we’ve settled into a pretty nice hotel that doesn’t have a problem with long term stays. It’s not a terrific situation, and we’re not going to have a kitchen in India like I’d hoped (or even a private bathroom!) – but it feels safe and it’s close to where we work. [Jordan: the thing that seems the biggest dealbreaker for us is being a couple. Numerous folks who know us personally have asked us why we don’t just live in different places, because they don’t get the culture of live-in-relationships (more on that later). We try to explain that it’s not a cultural option for us to travel halfway around the world together and go home different places. They don't get us; we don't get them. C'est la vie.]

Last week we presented the prisoner / lockup questionnaire that we drafted to a group of 20-some interns as part of their training. (The interns will eventually administer the questionnaire to actual inmates and police officers). It’s strange, I think, for both of us to have been given so much responsibility within the organization so quickly, but it’s also really nice.

After the training, we went to the fruit market with one of the lawyers from HRLN. He had been offering since we first arrived to get us the best mangoes at the best price. Well. We went to the market which was quite a sight to see! It was so hectic and the smells were quite strong. The lawyer, went ahead of us to ask for the real price as opposed to the “white person price.” He came back about five minutes later and informed us that the smallest quantity of mangoes that we could buy was two dozen and the price was 260 INR (about $6). We got inside, let our friend handle the transaction and AfterTheFact found out that the price was jacked anyway to more than double what we thought we were going to pay. This is really annoying and not something we’ll miss about India.

Today we brought in some of the mangoes that we bought (there’s small chance that the two of us can finish 24 mangoes before they all go bad). This started an office conversation in which it was impressed upon us that we bought way too many mangoes for way too high a price. Oh well. At least the mangoes are every bit as delicious as they’re supposed to be.

The Indian train (everything here is covered in fans)

Last thing before I hand this off to Jordan. Yesterday we went to Matheran which is a hill station near to Mumbai. We woke up early and took the 7 o’clock train which was pleasant enough and not too crowded. From the train station, there’s supposed to be a connecting toy train that brings you to the top of the mountain / hill where the hill station is but (probably because of the monsoons) it was not running. Instead we took the most cramped taxi ride of my life. We shared with three other people and Jordan and I sat in the front seat with the driver. Every time the driver shifted gears he had to reach in between Jordan’s legs. People keep on bringing up this idea of Americans needing “elbow room” in a way that other nationalities don’t, but this seemed a bit excessive…

THIS MONKEY STOLE OUR MANGO

Matheran was very beautiful. We spent all day wandering the foot paths and taking pictures of the really stunning views. At some point we took out a mango to eat and out of nowhere a monkey comes ambling out of the forest and runs directly up to us. I was a little freaked out and instinctually threw away the mango. I learned later that monkeys are aggressive pests, but highly unlikely to actually attack. Later in the day we saw a monkey snatch a bag of chips away from a snacking couple. It’s pretty cool to see so many monkeys!

From the lion and tiger "safari" -- really more like a bus ride through the zoo

JORDAN:

A few tidbits about Mumbai:

JAITAPUR: Jaitapur is a little coastal region with a half dozen villages nearby, where people are poor, agriculture and fishing is the only economy, and earthquakes are frequent (India’s geologic service put them in Zone 4 for “High Earthquake Risk” on a five Zone scale). India has entered into a multinational agreement with the US and France to drastically increase its nuclear power production. They’ve picked Jaitapur to become the site of the largest nuclear reactor in the world. There has been no legitimate scientific study of the earthquake vulnerability of the site, or the effect of the plant on the fisheries and agriculture, and there will not be, if all goes according to plan. The cooling water from the reactors is expected to warm the sea enough to kill the fish. There is no plan in place for how to deal with the waste. And on top of it all, Jaitapur is considered an ecological hotspot – the kind of place where new species are discovered whenever scientists drop by.

The villagers have been persistently protesting the plant for years. All five local village governments have passed unanimous resolutions against the plants, but the government has blithely credited their resistance to “foreigners with powerpoints” coming in and misleading them about the project. There have been hundreds of preventative arrests and the police have fired on protestors on at least one occasion, killing one. I met some of these guys a few days ago at the office. They pointed out one of their compatriots who was shot in the head by police and survived.

This kinda shit don’t happen in America (okay, maybe Appalachia).

I went to Tarapur, site of India’s first nuclear power plant, a couple weeks ago for a comparative study. Here, radiation has been leaking persistently for years. The cooling water used in the reactors has warmed the sea so much that it has killed the local fishing industry. The water of the neighboring villages passes through the exclusion zone, and on occasion, it has killed cattle en masse. After years of no waste plan, they’re now trying to bury the accumulating waste right next to the site, directly beneath the villages.

So this is one of our projects.

DRIVING: is a whole different animal. People walk in and out of lanes of traffic – at some intersections, stepping between and in front of oncoming cars is the only way to cross – and cars do not follow traffic laws with any consistency. On my trip to Tarapur, we got caught in a bad stretch of highway traffic – so to speed things up, our side of the road chose to thump over the meridian and begin driving in the oncoming lane of traffic. So here we go, weaving between oncoming cars, until somebody a couple miles down the road in the opposite lane gets peeved and parks his truck across the lanes we’re in and pulls out a whistle and begins waving us back over the meridian, but meanwhile, hundreds of cars are driving on the wrong side of the road and have to get rerouted. Nayantara, a friend of ours, tells us that India has the highest rate of accidents per vehicle on the road, and that seems about right.

POVERTY: is everywhere and it’s everything to this city. You can’t live here for too long before you begin to feel shell-shocked by it, and then you start to think, and then you’re overwhelmed by the depth of privilege you have enjoyed since before you were old enough to understand it. Two blocks from city center, where there is a half second of lovely statues, court houses and offices, there is a family of seven that sleep on slabs of styrofoam beneath the awning, half-dressed or naked children and all. Because of the monsoons, most buildings are built with covered passageways outside them. Most of these passageways are strewn with folks sleeping on strips of cardboard. So are the waiting areas in all the train terminals.

We don’t live very near a slum, but as soon as you take the trains north, they’re everywhere. Everywhere. You look outside the train and you see naked kids playing stickball along the tracks, and roosters waddling in and out of the street, and folks sleeping beneath strips of aluminum, and people whose houses abut more wealthy establishments using the barbed wire for clothesline, and they’re rows and rows deep. Do you know that shot from “Slumdog Millionaire” where they back the camera up to get the really wide shot of the slums? I couldn’t tell you which part of town it was shot in, but I could wager at least a few would work. A half block out the door of our hotel is a family that sleeps under a makeshift little thing that you can’t even call a shanty – just a few sticks holding up tarp high enough for folks to crawl under and sleep on something mattress-like. There’s one street a few blocks away from us that just one family sleeping under tarps after another. The people who run the roadside food stands don’t pack up their shacks at night – they keep a plastic bag of essentials tied to a tree branch and then bring it down at night while they sleep on the sidewalk in front of their spot.

ECONOMICS: The guidebook says that the average salary in Mumbai is $1000, or three times the national average. That’s $3 a day. And even then, almost all of that money has to be concentrated at the top. There are pockets of insane wealth here. We went by a 27-floor, 400 servant mansion built for one family to live in. There’s a “resort hospital” by the sea that lights up like Disneyland at night. There’s a first world populace here that lives in first world comfort, and they have the money to match it.

See, if you want a first world experience, you’re going to pay first world prices. Or close. Subway makes a $4 footlong, for example. Apartments are so pricey we can’t afford one – or we could afford the cheap ones if it was worth people’s bother to talk folks out of their cultural hang-up against foreigner and couples. The thing is that the poor 95% of the populace lives in that first-world price structure, and so they simply create a marketplace of such inferior goods that they can afford it. So you have restaurants where everyone tells you don’t eat the sauce or drink the water. You have the slums.

Now here’s my problem with Mumbai and its efforts to become first world: they’re never going to do it while there’s this persistent, overwhelming underclass here. In one of my conversations with friends, I was told that the government used to put out public trash receptacles and have trash collection, but the poor folks simply stole them all, so that was the end of that. Now, outside of your beautiful, first world style restaurant, you have piles of burning garbage. Doesn’t quite hold up against the West, does it?

To compete with the first world, these folks either have to solve their inequality problem, or they have to gentrify the hell out of this place. My bet is that the latter will happen before the former. My bet is, unfortunately, that they’ll simply cure the poverty out of this city by forcing them out.

WOMEN AND ROMANCE AIN’T THE SAME: At the orientation that we conducted with other law students about administering a prison survey, there was a portion of the program dedicated to talking about India’s domestic violence bill. India’s DVB protects against all the usual things, like rape and beatings. But it’s also alarmingly broad. Apparently, it’s a crime to divorce your wife and thereafter ever not completely financially support her (in most cases where the wife doesn’t have a career, which is almost always). It’s also a crime to have a child out of wedlock and not thereafter keep them both under your roof.

Now, first this is a little troubling, because it basically treats women as children. But before you get hung up on that, you have to get your head around how necessary this is, because women who are divorced or who have children out of wedlock more often than not have nothing – no career options, no other romantic options, they either are cared for by a man or they….well, what? Fall on relatives? Starve? You figure it out. That’s the policy decision India’s government had to solve.

Now, here’s the shocker. The domestic violence portion of this program with the government interns is followed by a group discussion, wherein most of the men complain that they need a domestic violence bill to protect them, and that women will abuse the existing DVB, and then they justify their points by arguing things like, hey, women in live-in relationships deserve to get beaten sometimes because they asked for it by getting into a relationship without the sanctity of marriage. Seriously. [Shira's note: this was shocking to us both. One man's exact words were "Well, sometimes the man needs to beat his wife to get things done..." and this was a Lawyer for the StateHUMAN.RIGHTS.Commission. Jordan is about to write this, but it bears repeating]. And these aren’t poor backwards farmers – these are wealthy, comparatively well cultured law students who decided to volunteer at a human rights organization (not ours, thankfully – we were doing the teach-in for a government office’s interns). We are left only to imagine how prevalent this view is in the country.

ARE WE HAVING FUN?: This is a tough question. Ask yourself if you’d rather live in the first world or the third. Because there’s plenty of the third here. Ask yourself if you’d rather be able to drink the water. Ask yourself if you’d rather live where women aren’t chattel, the majority of marriages are still arranged by caste and dowries haven’t died out.

Are we glad to be here and having this experience, coming to understand how the vast majority of the world lives, and be exposed to at least most of the world’s cultural problems, and have our sense of our place in the world changed? Yes. Yeah, we’re extremely grateful for that. Is there going to be some relief and more than a few “luxuries” we’re looking forward to? Yeah, that too. So here we are. I think we’re getting more out of this than either of us anticipated. I think we’re having spectacular fun in short bursts when we can plan it on a Sunday. And then we go home and feel strange for it while walking by the family sleeping on the styrofoam slabs.