India Always Wins: The End of the Wastrel

Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked of Americans: “We go to Europe to be Americanized.” Perhaps this was true during his time, and perhaps it is yet so for some among us. Europe still possesses an undeniable romantic allure—that of antiquity and refinement, sensibility, liberality, and voluptuousness. But most Americans don’t require Americanizing these days—we have no need for consecration of our worldview and values and lifestyle in the crucible of another culture. We take for granted the notion that we are the greatest nation on earth—any feelings of inferiority that may have prevailed in Emerson’s day have long since been dispelled and replaced with an unassailable national chauvinism. Why go elsewhere when we’re already at home in the only country that matters? The vast majority of us don’t even have passports.

Yet there are some Americans who do buzz with curiosity for the wide world. We are anxious for at least a glimpse of the strange, the new, the different, the other. For some a single glimpse is enough to forever sate their curiosity, to settle any inchoate cosmopolitan stirrings. Others leave home and never return—finding something in the outside world that won’t let them come back, they become expatriates.

The mind of the expatriate, I confess, is a difficult one for me to plumb, at least that of the sort who emigrates from the First to Third World (to use an outdated formulation). How does one turn one’s back on home, on the soil from which one grew, without a compelling economic or political or social reason? It strikes me that this sort of émigré—the First to Third Worlder without the exigency of circumstance to propel him—must either be running from something or else nursing a profound grievance with his native culture. Perhaps this betrays a lack imagination on my part, or a deeply rooted, deeply disguised parochialism—perhaps the decision to renounce one’s homeland falls well within a continuum of orthodox behavior.

In any event, I never feared, upon departing for India last September, that I might be embarking upon a course of permanent expatriation—that I might, as some joked with me before I left, “never come back.” There was hardly any danger of that. Neither was I expecting, under the duress of estrangement, to surrender myself to a fond and nostalgic patriotism. During two previous stints in Africa—both comparatively brief, although significant enough to merit mention—I found myself missing specifics—people, places, foods—but nothing so abstract as the idea of America and of all of the ponderous values and conceits it is obliged to support. If I missed generalities I missed those things that make America appear so vulgar to everyone else—the excess, the convenience, the endless distraction—those things that most inspire my guilt when I contemplate the American lifestyle in relation to the rest of the world. And guilt, after all, is a decidedly poor foundation for love.

My time in India has been focused foremost on work, on furthering my “professional” experience; it has only secondarily been a voyage of discovery, although I don’t claim that landing here, of all of destinations on earth, was the result of any coincidence. I’ve felt India’s call since reading Midnight’s Children in May of 2002; it was quite natural that when I started casting about for passage to the developing world, I began and ended my search here. Still, my cardinal motive for coming has been utilitarian; I’ve never sought or expected transformation from my time here, as I’m afraid so many Westerners do. In general, I don’t believe that people are transformed by a single event or experience, severe emotional or physical trauma excepted. True transformation comes about through the accretion of innumerable incidents, accidents, and experiences, great and small, spanning many years, each intertwining and acting on every other with unpredictable results and consequences. Transformation is a gestalt whose strands are nearly impossible to disentangle. It is only our need to impose a rational order on all things—a need to account for all phenomena—that causes us, in retrospect, to assign to transformation a single source or cause. India alone, I knew, didn’t have the power to transform me, and, more to the point, I didn’t want it to.

Yet aside from my primary purpose of learning and doing things that I hoped would help to improve the lives of others (on whatever modest scale) both in the immediate term in India and in the longer term of a useful life, I’ve also hoped that my time here would serve to broaden my sympathies, my appreciation and understanding of the world. Perhaps this seems no less lofty a desire than personal transformation, but I think it is, at least, a change more easily and clearly effected. Change, though, isn’t the right word; it isn’t change I’ve hoped for, only growth, an increase, an expansion of thinking and feeling. I hoped that India would make me a bigger person.

But after eight months, it seems that I’ve only come here, after all, to be made smaller. Although I’ve gone a good deal farther than Europe, Emerson’s Atlantic hopping contemporaries would no doubt recognize what’s become of me—I’ve been Americanized. India has defeated my internationalist pretensions; it has made me willing, in my darkest moments, to surrender my passport. For the time being, I desire nothing more than to return home and to lead a blameless American existence. I want familiarity and comfort; I want to crawl into the cap of an acorn and to forget that a world exists beyond its curling edge. I’ve no particular ambition to propel me now. Doubtless the effect is temporary, but I can’t deny that India has laid me low. I couldn’t even say how, exactly, it has won—with a million swift and subtle jabs, I suppose. It must have vanquished me by attrition, for I never felt the stunning, conclusive crash of a landed haymaker.

Upon my arrival in India, I was met at the airport by Jason Fults, an American Fulbright scholar living in Delhi. We had been in contact through e-mail for several months, and he had kindly offered to let me crash in his bed for a few nights while he and a friend, who happened to be on the same flight over from Newark, put up in a hotel. After making our way into the city and discharging our bags at our respective quarters, we all walked to a South Indian restaurant close to Jason’s flat for dinner. While we enjoyed our meal and chatted, Jason offered intermittent advice on getting along in India. He had recently been sick for the first time, he said; it was almost inevitable that one got sick here. One couldn’t really escape it. He repeated something a friend had recently told him: “India always wins.”

At that moment, having only arrived in the country two hours before, the words stuck me as a portent. Somehow I knew that, sooner or later, they would return to me—like every aphorism, they carried the predictive force of the absolutely general—and I would tremble before their truth. And now I find them lapidary, fit to be chiseled into a headstone. I concede: India has won. For the time being, it has won. I will not yet admit final defeat; I’m not done with India. Some day, I shall return. But until then, the wastrel will put away his pen. There are yet many stories that could be told of my time here, but how could I possibly hope to recreate a creature so various and strange as India at any remove from its pulsing heart? I can only write with this country’s overwarm and pungent breath filling my nostrils, its harsh and importunate voice resounding in my ears. I only want to be honest as possible. I can't risk slander; even India, which has handled me so roughly, deserves the truth be told of it.

A Picture of Health, Part 2

I can’t remember when I last had a fever, but I haven’t forgotten what it does to one’s brain—it thoroughly muddles it. I was fortunate—mine only lasted for three hours—but for the time that it raged, my body was consumed in a fierce battle. I lay in bed for the fever's duration and shook and tried in vain to stop my mind from running away from me. In the beginning, I was occupied by a black and white, Rashomon-like forest scene in feudal Japan. A loose confederation of noblemen in belted kimonos were upholding an esoteric code of honor in the forest; soon they surrendered themselves to perfidy and duplicity, forging alliances with, and then murdering, their oldest friends. The scene underwent a shift in context: the Japanese noblemen became Indian tribals engaged in chicanery in the same vein—backstabbing, mob violence, and the like.

I had spent most of that day at work reading a book about conflict resolution in community-based Natural Resource Management, primarily among tribal communities in western India (don’t ask); soon I imagined that I was among a group of NGO workers in a village betrayed and held captive by those same treacherous tribals, our erstwhile partners in community development. They wanted to kill us: I had a terrible, overarching feeling that we were entirely powerless, that we had no control over our fates. We couldn’t run, we couldn’t reason with them, and they were deaf to appeals for mercy. They had turned on us without cause or provocation. Either they were going to kill us or they weren’t, but we couldn’t affect that decision in the least.

I wasn’t dreaming; I was more or less conscious that my thoughts didn’t represent reality in any manner, and yet they were hardly less upsetting for the fact; what’s worse, I was utterly incapable of stopping them. The entire experience was disturbing; if one must come down with a fever, he should at least have the good fortune of not being haunted by visions of human malevolence and turpitude while within its clutches. But, after all, the fever soon lifted, and relief, both physical and mental, was palpable. An hour later I ate four oranges, which seemed moderately appetizing as few things at that point did; within minutes I was hunkered down in the toilet with diarrhea and would spend a significant portion of the next two-and-a-half hours in precisely that spot. Blood was quickly in evidence; as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t ignore it. I resolved to see the doctor the next day.

After 9:30 I tried to sleep and occasionally found success during the night in one or two hour intervals sandwiched between extended visits to the toilet. I found it necessary to make mental note of the time elapsed between these visits: I had to calculate when I would be safe to make for a doctor. Finally, at 1:30 the following afternoon, I purchased a Coke, hailed an auto-rickshaw, and headed to GBH-American Hospital.

GBH-American is an inviting, disarming space—at least as much as any hospital can be. Suffice it to say, I’ve never been to a hospital in the States less prone to inducing squeamishness and anxiety in me. It’s either fortunate or else explains much that I’ve been blessed with such exemplary health to this point in life—my general distaste for hospitals and other institutions for the physically unsound—nursing homes, hospices—is pronounced. Yet I didn’t once contemplate this innate aversion after arriving at the hospital Sunday. I knew the place well enough—my brother-in-law had spent two nights there after suffering food poisoning in December—and thus knew its charms: a new and attractive building, airy and full of natural light; cleanliness and tranquility; and a competent and professional staff.

Upon arrival, I was examined immediately in Emergency. Blood and stool samples were given; I took a single pill, received an injection and a prescription for three drugs, and was sent on my way with instructions to return the following afternoon for the results of the tests. The entire visit lasted less than two hours.

I’d like to diverge from the main narrative for just a moment in order to mention one aspect of the experience that made it especially unpleasant. It wasn’t until I arrived at the hospital and sat on a public toilet that I fully realized how much more uncomfortable things had been made by the fact that I don’t have a “Western” toilet in my guest house. Squatting on one’s haunches for minutes on end is exhausting, particularly when one is weak from dehydration, hunger, and fatigue. As my visits to the toilet mounted, I took to improvising new positions in order to relieve the discomfort (some worked better than others), or else supported myself by leaning on an overturned bucket or grasping hold of the doorframe with both hands. It helped very little; however, I never succumbed to cramps or teetered at an inopportune moment, and for that, at least, I can be thankful.

Sunday evening I began a course of antibiotics and felt well enough on Monday to eat a substantial breakfast and three grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. In the afternoon I returned to the hospital, where I learned that my stool test had revealed evidence of the E. histolytica amoeba—I had come down with amoebic dysentery. As a result, my antibiotic course was extended from five to seven days—in reality, it can take 2-3 weeks to kill every last amoeba in one’s intestines. By Tuesday morning I felt invincible again; I had effected a full recovery from amoebic dysentery in less than seventy-two hours. What can I say? I am, after all, a very healthy man.

A Picture of Health, Part 1

I am a healthy man. I don’t mean in regard to lifestyle in particular, although as far as that goes, I’m reasonably healthy, notwithstanding a general failure to meet minimum established standards of physical activity (although, given that the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office now considers “Washing and waxing a car for 45-60 minutes” and “Gardening for 30-45 minutes” to be "moderate amounts of physical activity" sufficient to meet minimum human requirements, I may very well consider myself in the bloom of physical fitness through regular adherence to a regimen of “Blogging for 120 minutes” and “Food preparation for 45 minutes”). When I say that I am a healthy man, I mean that my immune system is a formidable force of nature; it deals swiftly and savagely with all manner of hostile interlopers. I really don’t get sick. I’ve never, to the best of my memory, missed a day of work in life due to illness (some of my bosses may demur on this, but that is simply due to their enduring, and much appreciated, belief in my unstinting honesty). I don’t even really get colds; I receive their overtures—a tenderness in the throat, a thickening in the sinuses, maybe the intimation of a cough—and my immune system gives them the bum’s rush.

It’s also been a little more than ten years since I’ve come down with anything resembling the flu. In fact, if it weren’t for the occasional night of improvident drinking, and a single incident, while a freshman in college, of a large dinner followed a little too closely by baseball conditioning, I would have a vomit streak rivaling Jerry Seinfeld’s before he met his match in the black-and-white cookie—I haven’t vomited due to any pathological stimulus since, I think, December of 1991, when I was twelve (please family and friends, if you can cite evidence to the contrary, please do—I’m going entirely from personal memory here and not trying to exaggerate the facts). I managed three months in Côte d’Ivoire without so much as a clenching of the bowels and two months in Kenya with only a single mild case of diarrhea to show for it—more of an inconvenience than anything else.

India is a world leader in many things: IT, Hindus, moustaches, consumption of fireworks, public urination—and also, germs. It’s almost unfair to foreign tourists who come here—their bodies and immune systems, so cosseted in their sanitary, salubrious Western habitats, can’t be expected to bear up under the weight of the giant bacterial culture that is the Indian nation. Lonely Planet offers that 30-70% of tourists fall ill with “traveller’s diarrhoea” within the first two weeks of their visit (a range that I think somehow doesn’t satisfy the standards of peer-reviewed statistical analysis). I can tell you that five of the seven visitors I have hosted (that’s 71.4% for the stat geeks) contracted traveler’s diarrhea or worse during their visits (all of two weeks or less); among foreign volunteers at Seva Mandir, I would suggest that around half or slightly less have been similarly afflicted during the given timeframe. Maybe if it weren’t for the regular influx of visitors to India, the populations of bacteria and parasites and viruses here would plummet—we’re like the aged and infirm of the herd, easy prey—we get them through the lean times.

The country, then, should have a doubled over white person on its flag—and yet in more than seven months I’ve entirely avoided even the suggestion of illness. My immune system, I tell you, is a marvel; my stomach, too, I revere for its puissance—I eat whatever I want, wherever I want, and, like a proper Southern Baptist bride, it never breathes a word of opposition or complaint. I chalk it up to an inborn digestive stolidity and years of regular yogurt consumption—I’ve got enough good bacteria residing in my alimentary canal to…do a lot of whatever good bacteria does. Sometimes I imagine that the natural limitations of digestive performance simply don’t apply to me, that superhero-like, I’m capable of transcending the normal bounds of human physical functioning. I’m not suggesting that I imagine I’m one of those Guinness Book popinjays who, piece by piece, consume bicycles or other ridiculously inorganic matter; no, I mean to say that on occasion I fancy I can tuck into a bowl of potato salad that has been warming in the sun for three days, or chug a quart of badly expired milk, and yet feel nary an ill effect. I tell you I am a healthy man—I’ve never even had a cavity.

Have I gone on enough? You know what’s coming next, right? Last Saturday, after spending more than seven months in the gastroenteritis capital of the world, with only three weeks and change left in country no less, I took ill. It began innocently enough: a mild headache in the morning, hardly worth mentioning; then a noticeably loose—ahem—movement in the early afternoon; then a growing feeling of malaise that led me to leave work around 3:30. By the time I reached home I was already in the throes of a fever—the sun has never felt as near as it did on that walk (granted the temperature was hovering around 100 degrees); it quite literally felt as if its light were burning my skin upon contact, as if I were being broasted in my tracks.

Just Another Saturday Night in Udaipur (Kenya?)

Last Saturday night, I attended a party some distance from Udaipur—twenty-two kilometers outside of town to be exact. The party was held at a private residence, a high-ceilinged one-story place with a curving, interior marble staircase leading up to the roof. The house was secluded, surrounded on three sides by fields and fronted by a long, gated gravel drive and well-manicured lawn. Music could be played as loud and for as long as partygoers desired; there were no neighbors to complain. The roof was spacious and open to the stars, which shone with cool brilliance at this remove from the city. Food, beer, and transportation were provided free of charge—I, along with the others in my group—four Americans and three Indians—was picked up in Udaipur by private car and taken directly to the house.

The provenance of the party wasn’t clear, I think, to anyone in the group. It was hosted by a forty-something Indian, Surendra, who was acquainted in some manner with several East African university students who occasionally attended parties thrown by one of the Americans, Andrew. I had been led to believe that the party was a housewarming, but this proved not to be the case, as more of the truth emerged on our ride there. Shakil, who drove three of the other Americans and me in his little white hatchback (about half of the cars on the Indian road seem to be little white hatchbacks), owned the building in which several of the Africans rented. “They are my tenants,” he told us, more than once, by way of explanation. The party, in fact, was a celebration of the end of exams and the close of the academic year for the Africans. Andrew, by virtue of his acquaintance with both the Africans and Surendra, their apparent benefactor, had finagled an invitation for us all, not that it had probably taken much—foreigners, especially white ones, are hot commodities for any Indian celebration.

Ownership of the house was apparently shared by Surendra and Shakil, who were old friends. It was a retreat of sorts for each when necessary; both lived in the city, Surendra with a wife and thirteen-year-old son. Shakil had been a national field hockey team trainer and coach; Surendra was a businessman—he pointed out one of his gas stations on the ride home. I think that the house was newly built, which would explain the housewarming rumor, and why Shakil had difficulty finding it in the dark, as well as why he seemed uncertain as to which rooms lay behind which doors. We were the first car in our group to arrive, and the house was dark—we had expected the party to already be under way. “We may die here tonight,” someone joked. However, within fifteen minutes two more cars pulled up, disgorging our friends, the Africans, food, and an ample supply of beer. Things were, as they say, about to jump off.

In all, perhaps twenty students from East Africa —primarily Kenyans and Tanzanians, in addition to a few Ugandans—would populate the party, along with the eight in our group and a handful of Indian students. The night wore on, and the groups mixed with increasing confidence—talking, dancing to Akon, Sean Paul, and Fifty Cent, and enjoying the warm evening and delicious isolation (something to be savored in India). I discussed the Kenyan political situation with some of the students, talked about my limited experience of their country, and led one woman to cackle when I ventured a “How are you?” in her native tongue, Kamba.

Around midnight the music suddenly stopped. I was standing to one side of the roof, my view of the dance floor obstructed by the shelter of the stairway, which projected from the roof’s surface. I continued talking for a few minutes more, unconcerned, until shouting from the dance floor brought me around to investigate. The floor had cleared—in fact, nearly the entire roof had cleared—except for three Africans clustered together, the shouting, in incoherent Swahili, coming from a short but muscular Kenyan in a red t-shirt. I didn’t know his name, but I had found him to be jovial and spirited earlier in the evening—he had cracked several jokes for my benefit. Now he was agitated beyond reason; he had to be restrained by the other two from rushing downstairs. “His father is a poor man!” he shouted in English. “He is nothing!”

An incident had occurred near the dance floor that I was forced to reconstruct from disparate fragments of story. It was generally agreed that the Kenyan had been bumped into or had bumped into someone else, likely a Tanzanian named Eric; that words were exchanged; that someone, probably the Kenyan, had been pummeled to the ground and then repeatedly kicked by Eric and two other Tanzanians who had just arrived, uninvited; that a couple of the Americans had intervened to rescue the Kenyan; that someone had broken off a beer bottle and brandished it threateningly.

Some minutes after I had gone to investigate, Eric, chubby and baby-faced, in a white turtleneck with navy blazer, returned to the roof to make peace. As I stood among a clutch of Africans surrounding the two antagonists, Eric approached the Kenyan with hand extended. They seemed ready to shake until Gavin, another Kenyan who, not incidentally, was falling over drunk, reached from behind his compatriot and delivered a slap to the side of Eric’s head.

Things degenerated. Most of the partygoers collected in the driveway and front lawn. Both the Kenyan and Eric made their way downstairs, the former continuing to vituperate the latter and require restraint. Meanwhile Surendra turned his maroon Chevy SUV around in the driveway and part of my group piled in, preparing to leave, while others, myself included, continued to tend to a peacemaking role. At one point the Kenyan broke away from his handlers and pushed Eric over a two-foot drop-off between the driveway and lawn, sending him sprawling on the grass. When he rose Eric shattered a bottle on the coping that fringed the lawn and made for the Kenyan, before being restrained. “We should either get Eric or other guy in the car and go,” I said.

Geoffrey, a Kenyan, had another idea. “We should just let them fight now and everything will be fine tomorrow,” he said.

“Just get into the car and go,” a Kenyan named Michael told me softly. “We will take care of it.”

I told him that I didn’t think it was right to leave. However, after watching the Kenyan’s belligerence intensify with every passing minute, and perhaps fearing a general riot, I headed for the SUV. The Kenyan was raving almost incoherently. “I am richer than you!” he screamed at Surendra. “I am richer than all of you!” As we spent precious minutes corralling the rest of the group into the SUV, the Kenyan climbed into an open door and began to rant at its occupants. The vehicle was a “basket of shit.” Eric was a “cockroach”—shades of the Rwandan genocide. Meanwhile Geoffrey had turned on Gavin and knocked him to the ground with an open hand, before planting his foot at the base of Gavin's neck with a thud.

Andrew was having the greatest difficulty extricating himself from the crowd, and when the SUV finally took off, he wasn’t yet inside; he was forced to run beside the vehicle, hopping in at a gallop. The Kenyan chased after the car, beating his palms against the back window and bellowing menacingly. The gate at the end of the drive still had to be opened, but the SUV and its cargo—five Americans and four Indians, including Surendra—were safe. Shakil and the property’s caretaker—a middle-aged Indian—were left to quell the unrest.

Once on the road, with the success of the evacuation assured, Surendra seemed to sigh. “No more Africans,” he said. I protested, as did others. “They only want to fight,” he told us. Silence reigned for much of the ride back. A few minutes outside of Udaipur, Andrew received a phone call from Michael. Things had calmed down.

More Disturbing Than That Bogeyman

Within the last week, I have seen Seva Mandir’s dysfunction manifest itself in ways both more baffling and more disturbing than that bogeyman inefficiency, which, even if occasionally staggering in its scope, can, in many cases, at least be comprehended. Last Tuesday, the day after the pilot received sanction, I learned that one of its components had received particular scrutiny from the Chief Executive—namely, the plan to regularly chlorinate several of the village's wells. This, as with the overall bent of the pilot strategy, I had disagreed with from the beginning—in my strategy paper, which was intended to inform Seva Mandir's approach to the pilot, as well as its approach to the drinking water issue in general, I had written, "Ultimately, chemical treatment of wells is a largely temporary solution to a persistent and tenacious problem." Thus, the objections regarding chlorination coming from the top seemed, at first, sweet vindication of my own misgivings.

However, over the course of the next week, as the background for those objections surfaced, my smugness was transformed to something rather more like disgust. I soon learned that, contrary to what I had been told, Seva Mandir had (as I had heard rumored on more than one occasion) worked on the drinking water issue in the past—and in the recent past, no less. And it had been a high profile effort! Four years earlier, as part of a collaboration with the M.I.T. Poverty Action Lab, the organization had undertaken four "action research" projects, including one to determine whether the chlorination of wells would be an effective means of improving the safety of drinking water in its target area. This particular research project had been led by Seva Mandir's Health Unit, and it was the only one of the four that wasn't ultimately scaled up to a full-fledged field project. So why hadn't I been informed of this work previously? And why, precisely, had the chlorination effort been abandoned?

Much of the answer to the first question is tangled up in the strained relations among Seva Mandir's various departmental units. The units—Natural Resource Development (NRD), Health, Education, Woman and Child Development, GVK (Community Governance and Development), and the People's Management School—often seem to function as six independent bodies bound only by the shared name of their parent. They don't communicate, frequently behave as if in direct competition, and at times seem to harbor a scarcely concealed animosity for one another. This has obvious repercussions for the functioning of the organization—beyond issues of camaraderie and cohesion, many projects don't fall neatly under the bailiwick of a single Unit, and sharing knowledge and experience across departments is essential.

Thus, as the NRD Unit has prepared to inaugurate its drinking water efforts, it has either been unaware of, or has chosen to ignore the recent and highly relevant experience of the Health Unit on the subject. What's more, even had the Health Unit known that the NRD Unit was taking on the drinking water issue—and it almost certainly didn't—it seems unlikely that it would have shared its experiences with the NRD, given the Health Unit's belief that drinking water should be its exclusive domain. The upshot of this foolishness is that, only four years ago, a major research effort undertaken by Seva Mandir determined that a key component of the NRD's current clean drinking water strategy was not viable, and no one said anything, or possibly even knew enough to say anything, until the pilot was preparing to launch.

At the behest of Seva Mandir's Chief Executive—the first to sound an alarm—I contacted a former long-term volunteer, a Canadian man named Bruce Daviau, who had worked most closely with the chlorination research effort in 2004. Beyond shedding light on the reasons behind Seva Mandir's decision to abandon well chlorination as a drinking water strategy, he wrote:

"it is unfortunate that you have only recently been made aware of previous work done in relation to clean drinking water. in fact, there has been enough research data around for some time now for an effective clean drinking water program. and this data is specifically relevant for the udiapur (sic) region."

And now, despite what I've come to know and share about Seva Mandir's previous misadventures in chlorination, the NRD appears determined to push forward with its strategy as originally conceived; that is, chlorination and all. It seems that in an organization where communication and solidarity are weak, turnover among staff is high (both Health Unit staff who worked directly on the chlorination research effort are long gone), and institutional memory is limited, learning from the past cannot be taken for granted. Mistakes, in such an environment, are doomed to be repeated—and probably repeated again. How's that for inefficiency?

A Favorite Parlor Game

Among those volunteers and interns who have been around for any length of time, it has become a favorite parlor game to dissect the many perceived failings—institutional, managerial, missional or otherwise—of Seva Mandir. Anyone who must daily navigate the organization’s strange and tangled byways soon finds that it is not a particularly well run or efficient entity, and neither has it been, by many measures, particularly successful at achieving its aims as a development organization. Theories, or pieces of theories, in the way of explaining these failures abound: the organization is too big, or it got too big too fast; upper management, such as it exists, is incompetent, out of touch, or both; the organization is plagued by a glaring absence of accountability at all levels; it is too bureaucracy-ridden; its employees are demoralized, cynical, and lazy.

Each of these accusations contains at least a glimmer of truth and in some instances perhaps a good deal more, but none is especially useful in pointing toward constructive and realistic reform of the organization. And Seva Mandir is very much in need of reform—its problems are not merely the imaginary outgrowths of the festering frustrations of volunteers. Evaluations of its projects are regularly scathing, turnover among the staff is dizzying, and within the last three years, a number of major donors, including the Ford Foundation, have cut off funding. Seva Mandir should be soul-searching, or at the very least reassessing its direction and purpose—yet it doesn’t appear to be doing either.

The standard prescription among the volunteer punditry is for a massive bloodletting (a fantasy I admit to having also voiced on at least one occasion), which would simultaneously reduce the size of the organization, improve accountability (theoretically), and jolt the staff out of its stupor (and savings could go toward supplementing the paltry salaries of those still standing), but such a step ignores an obvious truth about the not-for-profit world: unlike businesses, which may always trim fat in order to improve performance, even when already making money, non-profits don’t make cutbacks unless financial straits absolutely demand it.

But Seva Mandir isn’t a business and shouldn’t be run like one. Efficiency is a cardinal virtue for any organization, but a non-profit must be careful to always view it as a means to achieving their goals and never as an end itself. Business is as much science as art; it thrives on predictability, certainty, and the efficiency that naturally derives from the two. There’s a reason the private sector isn’t lining up to build clinics, provide clean drinking water, or organize women in the impoverished corners of the world: development isn’t an efficient, predictable process, and it isn’t profitable. Despite at least fifty years of close study, it is almost entirely art and very little science. No business would, for example, attempt to promote sustainable land use patterns among pastoral communities in the African Sahel in order to forestall desertification—not only is there no money in such an initiative, but the probability of success is too limited, and too dependent on forces beyond anyone’s control, to merit the effort, not to mention the resources. Businesses don’t want challenges, they want formulas with easy-to-plug figures, and they’re much better at exploiting existing demand for a product than creating demand for something new.

According to their natures, the private sector and the development world have both divergent aims and divergent approaches to achieving them. Are they then to be judged by the same standards for efficiency and success? One wouldn’t ask Seva Mandir to abandon its non-formal education program because it is expensive and because the majority of its students aren’t ultimately returning to the formal school system, as is the goal. It is understood that attempting to return drop-outs and never-wents to school is a worthwhile endeavor; it shouldn’t be given up simply because it hasn’t achieved a level of success commensurate with the amount of resources being invested in it, or because Seva Mandir is getting more bang for its buck in other programming. Development is like medical research: lack of progress can’t deter further trials, further investment. If a product line fails, it is discontinued; if Seva Mandir’s drinking water pilot fails, are its drinking water efforts to be discontinued as well?

Certainly development organizations should be held to high standards of both efficiency and effectiveness, and for the most part, they are. Donors favor the most effective, most cost efficient organizations—philanthropic foundations, international NGOs, and governments don’t enjoy squandering their money any more than businesses do. But quite simply, calculations of effectiveness and efficiency for the private sector and for the development world require different metrics, and we shouldn’t expect, nor should we even want development organizations to perform like corporations. That is not to say, however, that Seva Mandir has nothing to learn from the world of business, only that it won't better serve the rural poor of Udaipur District by eliminating programs that have produced disappointing returns on money invested.

At Long Last, the Pilot Receives Approval

It was approximately four o’clock in the afternoon on March 31 when word finally came: the clean drinking water pilot project had received official approval from Seva Mandir’s Chief Executive. I arrived in Udaipur and began work on the morning of September 14; March 31, then, was my 200th day (if one counts vacation and weekends) with Seva Mandir. Work on the pilot hasn’t yet begun; it is at least another week off, and probably two. Had I been given some premonition of the start date of work on this, my project, upon arrival in Udaipur—a date attached to a fact, shimmering with the light of undeniable truth—I wonder how I would have received it. With surprise, certainly, but a surprise which may have quickly given way to fear. “Am I going to be hospitalized for an extended period?” I might have worried. Or perhaps I would have rationalized: certainly I was fated, in the months ahead, to be diverted for some time in work of more immediate interest to the organization?

But, alas, neither scenario approaches the truth. It has simply taken this long to assess needs, to craft a strategy, to explore the logistical dimensions of that strategy, to create a proposal reflecting those logistical realities, and to have that proposal approved. I’ve written previously on this blog about the incremental nature of development, about how its progress should be measured in generations, but if all development moved at the pace of my little drinking water project, I think we would do better to measure it in centuries.

Four months ago, on December 1, I received the results of bacterial tests conducted on six drinking water sources in Dhala, the pilot village. The previous day I had collected samples from four of the community’s most commonly used wells and two randomly selected households, packed them in ice, and whisked them off to the lab. The results of the tests were startling: None of the samples met the WHO’s minimum standard for levels of coliform (fecal) bacteria—a maximum of 10 organisms/100 milliliters of water. More distressingly, three of the samples—those from the two most commonly used wells in the village and one of the household samples—revealed bacteria counts in excess of 1,800 organisms/100mL.

In all likelihood, nearly everyone in the village was drinking unsafe water, and many were drinking water so contaminated it could give an elephant the runs. The two heavily contaminated wells provide drinking water for eighty-two households—30% of the village. How many others were ingesting hundreds of coliforms—literally—with each sip? And this was the beginning of December; the most dangerous period for drinking water is thought to be from May to August. During the months leading up to monsoon (May and June), many wells run dry and more dangerous sources must be drawn from; when monsoon arrives (July and August), wells are inundated by rainwater and effluent gushing down from the hills, a shit-dimmed tide mingling with the well water. What would tests reveal then?

It would certainly be enlightening to conduct a household health survey in Dhala now. How many cases of typhoid would be reported for the last four months? How many bouts of diarrhea? How many instances of hepatitis? Cholera? How many days of school will have been missed due to waterborne illness? How many days of work? How much income will have been lost? How much discomfort endured? How much misery? Meanwhile, Seva Mandir’s strategy is to deal first with protecting the community’s water supply. Purifying the water will come later, once sufficient momentum has been built within the community for the idea of clean water, the idea that it is something worth investing in. Besides, I am told, people aren’t yet ready to use and maintain a household-level filter, no matter how simple. It’s better to move slowly with these things. Communities must be prepared for changes in thinking and doing; things don’t happen merely because we want them to.

And they’re probably right. Certainly I’ve never implemented a project on the ground in the developing world—not in Africa, nor in India, nor in Rajasthan, nor in Udaipur District, nor in Jhadol Block, and certainly not in Dhala. I must take them at their word; I must trust in their experience, for I haven’t any of it. I make inferences based upon what limited observation I have done here; I calculate probability with a limited set of data. I am not so arrogant as to presume that I know better. Am I?

We will protect wells with walls; we will repair handpumps; we will educate the community. It can’t hurt. Some of it may help, even in the long-term. But I’m afraid that it won’t. Still, after nearly three months of bearing the private indignity of having my ideas undermined and ignored, I am now entirely resigned to the progress of the pilot as currently constituted. After all of this time, it is moving forward, and I am content in that. It is the three months that irks now, the 200 days, the four months elapsed since test results revealed horrific contamination. Certainly this isn’t a case in which torpor is a virtue. Contaminated water continues to be consumed. Volunteers and interns at Seva Mandir are told to scale back their expectations; perhaps Seva Mandir should be meeting us halfway. The notion that change takes time, that development is a painstaking process is a valuable, practical insight—it shouldn’t also be an excuse.

Spring Comes to Udaipur

Spring has arrived in northern India and along with it a measure of relief at the discovery that the changing of seasons here is not merely accompanied by a change in temperature—it may be observed in other transformations as well. Winter had seemed nothing more than a cooler continuation of the post-monsoon autumn; granted the days were shorter (though thankfully not so short as I am accustomed), and a stubborn haze descended upon the city, but the sky was as cloudless and nearly colorless as ever, the sunlight seemed just as direct, if not as intense as it had when I arrived, and the city’s flora surrendered its verdure so deliberately that any change in its hue was scarcely perceptible. Now the coming of fervid spring has had a curious double effect on the plants of the city: some—the bougainvillea and its bushy and creeping brethren, marigolds, roses, and other perennial flowers—bloom riotously, as if in a hothouse; others, primarily trees, betray the pains of an unrelieved thirst. In the past month, the two silver oaks bordering my squarish courtyard, always untidy, have discharged their frond-like leaves onto its surface with a redoubled intensity. The leaves’ former mossy greenness has been subsumed by a sere brown; they crackle underfoot like a gravelly rasp.

The same divergent fortunes can be traced in the flora of the countryside. The hills have never been so ugly in the candid light of mid-day as they are now—even those not entirely denuded seem brown and barren and wretched. The effects of irrigation are manifestly obvious: where green greets the eye water has been channeled. No other living thing, in such impoverished circumstances, can hope to put on such signs of health. The lone exception is a native tree sparely distributed among the hills; its deeply orange blossoms seem unnatural, like the icing confections of a cake decorator. From a distance the trees are beacons, their blossoms fiery heralds of softer springs, lovelier worlds than this.

It is not only the plants that awaken, either; spring in India means rebirth and reawakening for certain segments of the animal kingdom as well. Insects suddenly pullulate: mosquitoes haunt my evenings and flies my morning walk to work; ants march; and a swarm of bees closed the balcony on the third floor of Seva Mandir’s library for days. Bird calls, never silenced, seem more spirited, more resounding. Puppies abound, presenting poignant miniatures of their mongrel parentage (but, alas, a less heartwarming sight when one contemplates their certain fate). The bulls, as if agitated by the heat, are quicker to lock horns and the bristle-backed pigs less active by day, likely for the same reason. A form scuttling along the wall in the kitchen one night proved not a mouse, as I had feared, but an unblinking gecko, returned to life from months of secretive slumber.

The light of the sun has altered too; it is whiter, purer, and, like a newlywed spouse, more honest and less forgiving. The world is better illuminated by degrees; the light, though, is not yet hard and cruel, only brilliant and vaguely unreal, almost otherworldly. Strangely, clouds have begun to appear in the afternoons, shading the world from the sun. Sunday night I heard thunder for the first time since arriving; Monday afternoon the world became gray, and the thunder returned. Lightning flashed in the distance, and a strong wind bent the trees and bushes, scattering the vibrant blossoms of the bougainvillea. A little rain fell. As I walked home, the road seemed newly made—I couldn’t remember when I had last seen pavement glazed by rainwater.

The small storm seemed a revelation, although of what sort, precisely, was not clear. In the India I have known, clouds never worry the face of the sun, and the air is eternally limpid and breathless; rain never keeps down the dust in the street. In such a world, the rumble and flash of a thunder storm assume a primal gravity; they brim with mystery and meaning. Only I fear I’m insufficiently attuned to tease out that meaning: I must be content with the knowledge that the world has indeed changed, as it is wont to this time of year, even in these latitudes. Perhaps the bland and featureless days of sunny calm have truly gone elsewhere, at least for the time being, and if so, I am glad for it. Even if this is as no spring I’ve known before—I’ve held no vigil for the purple-headed crocus or the first robin, harbored no expectation of tulip blooms and cherry blossoms, mourned the passing rites of March Madness and Opening Day, unobserved—the season remains a profound symbol of growth and rebirth. Even the sun can become a weighty emblem of death when it shines so long without opposition.

Reduction, Third Attempt: Playing Fortune-teller, Pt. 2

The trend of farming supplemented by migratory wage labor seems a rough compromise between the desire of the Indian farmer to remain on the land and the desire of the Indian government to see him off it, and yet it is not a compromise that is acceptable from either an economic or social standpoint: under such an unregulated, ad hoc arrangement, too much arable land lies fallow, labor flows and productivity for those industries dependent on the migrant force are unpredictable, and the costs to families imposed by the ruptures of migration, though difficult to measure, are no doubt considerable. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is, in some sense, an attempt to address this issue, and yet it is plagued by its own serious problems of graft and poor administration. Thus the question must again be posed: How to shift one-sixth of a labor force as large as India’s from the countryside, its ancestral homelands, the plow and the scythe, into the city, the SEZ, and onto the assembly line? Twenty-first century India is not Stalinist Russia; as Nandigram shows, the government can’t simply force people from their farms at riflepoint. Can it?

Meanwhile the pressures of the "agrarian crisis" continue to mount: Indian farmers must contend with the falling prices of many agricultural commodities, including rice; diminished state support for farm livelihoods; a dearth of credit; and, perhaps most ominously, the increasing adversity of meteorological events. Broad scientific consensus suggests that global warming will serve to intensify existing patterns of precipitation: wet areas will receive even more rain, thereby becoming flood-prone; dry areas will receive even less, becoming drought-prone. Semi-arid regions such as southern Rajasthan may tip toward desert and become largely, if not entirely, uncultivable; regions most buffeted by the monsoon in the South and Northeast of India, already menaced by floods on a nearly annual basis, may very well spend every June, July, and August under water. Thus Mother Nature, with an invaluable assist from human negligence, could, at least in part, do what the Indian government cannot: if the science of climate change is sound, many farm families may have little choice but to give up their land. They will migrate to the cities, downtrodden, aggrieved, and ill prepared for life outside of the village.

And global warming will make its presence felt in India in other, more insidious (though perhaps no less catastrophic) ways. Last year scientists were shocked to discover that ice cores taken from Himalayan glaciers revealed no evidence of the radioactive fall-out generated by atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and '60s, thus suggesting that the glaciers have been shrinking for at least the past half-century. Given that the ice fields of the Himalayas provide drinking water for half of the Indian population, their diminishment is serious cause for alarm. A concerted national water conservation effort seems warranted, and the most logical first step would be to impose strict limits on the amount of water made available for irrigation, since the practice consumes far more of the resource than any other activity. From the Indian government's perspective, such an imposition would be doubly advantageous: not only would it conserve water, but it would further hasten the flight of the Indian farmer to the city.

Despite myriad hardships, most of the 16% of the workforce to be absorbed by the manufacturing sector will cling to the land. Farming for many Indians isn’t a way of life; it is life itself, all some families have known for millennia. Dozens of daily suicides attest to the fact that faced with economic ruin, many Indian farmers would rather die than forfeit their land. But if the Indian government is determined to thoroughly modernize its economy, to ensure that everyone shares in the rewards of the Asian Century—if it feels, as that old absolving saw goes, it must act for the good of the nation—by hook or by crook, it will have its way. Further blood will be shed, and the only matter in question will be whether more farmers perish by their own hands or via the clammy appendages of state sanctioned violence.

But for the loss of life likely to accompany a new, modernized, rationalized Indian economy, odds are that a rousting of the countryside wouldn’t threaten the legitimacy of the state. Repression would be decentralized and local, resistance fierce but fragmented, and the central government would be reluctant to intervene, both out of deference for state sovereignty and out of self interest. Those who remained on the land—after all, the overwhelming majority of rural Indians—would be grateful for their good fortune and inclined to remain silent, lest they also find themselves compelled to vacate. Nandigram, whose atrocities were well documented in the press, inspired the outrage of the intelligentsia and politicos in Kolkata and Delhi and a large demonstration or two, but little in the way of widespread condemnation from the masses—I have not once heard it mentioned in conversation in Udaipur. City dwellers might see little evidence of the enormities of their government’s policy and care still less; that is, until the displaced and destitute begin swarming into the cities.

Here, finally, is the event with the power to ignite the nation and all of its latent and not so latent prejudices. A migration of more than 100 million embittered and resentful village dwellers—one driven by resource scarcity, natural and man-made calamity, and government coercion, whether overt or not—into India’s already bursting cities over the course of, say, fifteen years, if not properly planned for and managed, could have disastrous consequences. Not only would such a migration strain already woeful infrastructure, thicken already clotted streets, swell the ranks of the unemployed, heighten competition for resources, and boost crime rates, it would also provide a ready supply of scapegoats for a political class whose strategy of first and last resort has long been one of divide and conquer. India is already a society of the aggrieved, and for the shrewd Indian politician, every grievance represents an opportunity. The opportunities proffered by a massive and rapid urbanization of the rural population (or at least a part of it) would be bountiful blessings indeed.

Put another way, the disaffection engendered by a Great Indian Migration—that belonging to both the dispossessed farmer and the put upon urbanite—would be a vein so deep and so rich that politicians would fall over themselves in their haste to exploit it. Disaffection, the fountainhead of Indian political power, is also malleable, particularly when felt generally, for general disaffection can be most easily twisted to desired political ends. Blame can then be assigned where most convenient: today to migrants, tomorrow to Muslims, the next day to upper caste oppressors. In the event of a face-off, both dispossessed farmers and put upon urbanites would have their cheerleaders, strategists, and co-opters among the political class—harboring excess stores of anger and resentment, the two factions would function as ideal instruments of political ambition. And it's not as if either side will require much goading in order to take up the lathi, cudgel, and torch, or much convincing to divert their wrath, as necessary, to other objects—those which best serve their political sponsors and their own preexisting prejudices—as, notwithstanding the Gandhian legacy, the impulse to violence is still strong in Indian society, as it is in most of the world.

It takes little imagination to conceive of a scenario in which the violence borne of such a conflict swiftly widens its clutches, spreads from city to city, escalates in ferocity, turning into something its political abetters can no longer summon, direct, and dismiss when convenient; the malignant feeling feeding such violence cannot be neatly allayed, being so deeply rooted and diverse in aspect that timelines for reconciliation must be understood not in weeks or months but in years. Of course such a scenario first depends upon a lengthy and improbable concatenation of neglect, misfortune, malfeasance, and treachery in order to come to life...but even that slight probability must be carefully considered. The Indian state is not nearly so stable, nor so assured of prosperity as is widely believed.

Reduction, Third Attempt: Playing Fortune-teller, Pt. 1

The answer does not much stretch the imagination; it’s an old story really, with a few contemporary twists. Too many people, not enough land—that’s how the most ancient strand goes. The trope about the government pushing to modernize its economy and getting pushed back has been around for a couple of centuries as well; a parallel tale is that of the agrarian nation urbanizing too rapidly. But too many people, not enough water? That’s more contemporary. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Climate change will make everything a whole lot worse.

The thesis isn’t terribly original, and the equation even simpler: Scarce resources that grow ever scarcer; an enormous, burgeoning, and largely uneducated rural population being herded against its will into cities; massive generalized resentment; a society divided against itself in more ways than can be counted; and a nation with a bloody history, a long memory, and politicians eager to exploit differences within the population for a soupcon of power. I’m not suggesting that large-scale civil strife in India is inevitable, or even that it’s likely; but I am suggesting that the Indian government—and the rest of the world, for that matter—ignores the elements in this equation at its peril. The future character and composition of the Indian state, and by extension that of South Asia, may very well depend upon the Indian government’s ability to relieve or sublimate the strain of those forces that have already begun to tug at the margins of society.

As has already been noted, 56% of the Indian workforce is employed in the agricultural sector; furthermore, seven of every ten Indians live in rural areas. For many reasons the status quo will not endure; for starters, agriculture is the least productive and least dynamic sector of the economy—if India is serious about achieving broad-based, pro-poor growth, it cannot permit the majority of its workforce to scrabble away in the fields at hardly better than subsistence levels. The problem is one perhaps inherent to the sector (no major modern world economy rests on a foundation of agriculture), but it is undoubtedly one driven by scarcity: ninety-six percent of Indian farmers work plots of two hectares (five acres) or less. It is the rural population that continues to drive population growth in India, and with each successive generation of farmers coming of age, family holdings are further subdivided, shares of land become smaller, and it becomes increasingly difficult to make a living from the earth.

It is already commonplace for farmers in India’s arid and semi-arid zones to migrate seasonally to towns and cities seeking work as wage laborers in construction and other unskilled trades (in fact, within Seva Mandir’s purview, families garner the majority of their income from wage labor, not from farming). Due to water scarcity and the absence of irrigation infrastructure, most are able to only grow a single crop annually, or two at best—farmers in those regions blessed by liberal rainfall are capable of raising three. However, given the inexorable carving of the fields, perhaps it will soon become common, if it hasn’t already, for even those farmers in high precipitation areas to spend at least part of the year as wage laborers in order to make ends meet. Yet in spite of the momentum of this trend, the hoped for demographic transition is no nearer as consequence; given the option, few Indian farmers will abandon their farms in favor of the better (though still miserably) compensated life of a full-time wage laborer. They will only turn from the land grudgingly, with rancor and bitterness, if they turn from it at all.

But given national economic imperatives and the exigencies of land and water scarcity, the pressure on the Indian farmer to leave his land is daily ratcheting in intensity. In 2006, current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—the former Minister of Finance who oversaw India’s economic liberalization in the early ‘90s—said, "Manufacturing has to be the sponge which absorbs people who need to move out of agriculture in pursuit of higher incomes." The government has predicted that the percentage of the nation’s workforce in the agricultural sector will fall from 56% to 40% by 2026--this perhaps reveals more an implicit goal than any expectation of organic economic reshuffling. And if India is to have any hope of addressing the astonishing poverty of the bottom third of its population, this is perhaps a low-end target. Even at that, is it a realistic one? How to induce more than 100 million people to move off of the land if they simply don't want to?

Some clues have already emerged: in several states the government, citing powers of eminent domain, has seized farmland for the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs)—manufacturing and industrial centers often gifted to foreign consortiums and bundled with tax holiday bows and ribbons of relaxed labor and environmental standards. Farmers and their political allies have opposed such seizures on principle and claim that owners of expropriated land have not been fairly compensated. Last week in Punjab farmers blockaded railroads in protest of one such land grab; last March, in Nandigram, West Bengal, recalcitrant villagers refused to abandon 10,000 acres destined to become a chemical hub and at least fourteen were killed in the subsequent face-off with police. Violence flared again in November when Communist Party of India (CPI) cadres attempted to retake the land on behalf of the government; dozens more were killed and the cadres burned homes and corpses in a clumsy attempt to conceal their crimes.

Reduction, Second Attempt: Playing Doctor

Begin with history, which is perhaps the greatest predictor of such things. Though it’s tempting to view India through the gloss of that famous epithet “World’s Biggest Democracy”, its sixty years of nationhood have been more notable for their tumult than stability: three wars with Pakistan, and the conflict over Kashmir still simmering; war with China; the assassinations of two prime ministers; two years of emergency rule; battles with Punjabi separatists; and throughout, periodic flarings of civil unrest. Given such a history, it’s remarkable that democracy should have endured at all—many post-colonial nations have collapsed into authoritarianism or calcified as one-party states beneath far less wrenching pressures. Despite thirty years of relative political stability, however, India remains a nation wracked by forces that try the mettle of its democracy: Naxalite (Maoist) rebels in the South and Northeast; wrangling with Pakistan over borders and territory and the concomitant threat of terrorism on Indian soil (although it should be noted that terrorism in India has many faces and many objects); agitation over political and other reservations by Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs); and the omnipresent specter of “communalism”—euphemism in polite society—the press, political circles—for Hindu-Muslim violence.

With Pakistan absorbed in a struggle for the preservation of its historically (more or less) secular and democratic state, it is communalism that is perhaps the clearest present threat to Indian peace and prosperity (although some would argue, and not without merit, that in its instability Pakistan represents an even graver threat to India than it does when at peace). The danger of communal violence seems especially keen now that the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is resurgent following important victories in state elections in December (including a volatile contest in the key state of Gujarat). Historically, BJP leaders have had little compunction about exploiting and even instigating Hindu-Muslim tensions for political gain. Indian politicians are, if anything, even more prone than their American counterparts to foist blame on their enemies for any national misfortune or disgrace—accusation and recrimination being a sort of double reflex in politics here—and the BJP is almost as fond of blaming Muslims and other non-Hindus for the country’s ills as it is the nationally ruling Congress Party. It’s no coincidence that the BJP played an incendiary role in India’s two most recent large-scale incidents of communal violence, each of which resulted in thousands of deaths, primarily of Muslims.

And yet, given the overwhelmingly Hindu character of the nation—82% of the populace, as opposed to only 13% Muslim—it seems unlikely that communalism itself poses an existential threat to India (unless, that is, it should manage to precipitate nuclear war on the subcontinent)—although not insignificant, the Muslim minority could not endure a protracted skirmish with Hindu nationalists. Though perhaps the most profound schism in Indian society, the Hindu-Muslim divide is not one so wide as to cause permanent rupture. In fact, no single divide in India is broad enough to threaten a lasting division of the nation; it is the aggregate fracturing of hundreds of minute divisions among its people that, given a single seismic event, one shaking the entire country, could cause the entire edifice of the state to crumble.

It is a terrible irony that some of the nation’s greatest strengths—its diversity, its commitment to political, educational, and economic inclusion of traditionally marginalized populations, and its strongly federal system of governance, among others—are also fundamental sources of division. In the U.S. we tend to think of diversity as an unalloyed good, a desideratum, something to be striven for as a just end in itself rather than as a means to some other goal, forgetting that diversity, however desirable and beneficial, is also very often a catalyst for conflict (which isn’t to say that it should ever be forsworn as a social goal or otherwise). India is a state comprised of thousands of ethnic groups, castes, sub-castes, jatis, and other distinct populations. It is the birthplace of three major world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism), and with the exception of Indonesia and Pakistan, it is home to more Muslims than any other nation on the planet. The last census found that more than 1,600 languages are spoken within its borders. Indians joke that India is not a single large country, but thousands of tiny ones: travel only fifty kilometers from wherever you are, they say, and you will encounter a new language, a new culture. This is said with pride and a bit of astonishment; even Indians can’t believe how disparate the nation’s population is.

This grand diversity, so different from our conception of the term, one which defines diversity most readily in racial and national terms—diversity is the New York melting pot—isn’t inherently dangerous, especially so long as all of its constituents share some common identity or sustaining narrative of unity. This isn’t necessarily true of India, where, despite a visible patriotism among its people, significant segments of the population tend not to identify with their country of birth and residence (one old man in a village I visited in September didn’t even understand that he was a citizen of a broader political entity called India). The nation’s extensive system of political, educational, and employment reservations for SCs, STs, and OBCs—an impressive and commendable program of affirmative action—has often exacerbated this disassociation from nation in favor of narrower allegiances to caste or tribe.

The reservation system, conceived of to speed the integration of all segments of the population—specifically those historically repressed—into broader Indian society and to redress past injustice, has, in some cases, resulted in the hardening of traditional distinctions. Ethnic identity often becomes more important than national identity, because it affords advancement; resentment builds among the non-SC, ST, or OBC population, particularly its impoverished elements; unrecognized marginalized groups agitate, often violently, for legal recognition of SC, ST, or OBC status; and recognized SC, ST, and OBC groups stridently oppose the efforts of these groups because their recognition will result in a reduction in the reservations of the already recognized groups. In Rajasthan, the Gujjar people currently seek ST status and are employing large-scale demonstrations and blocking roads in pursuit of that end; their fiercest opponent hasn’t been the police but the Meenas, one of Rajasthan’s ST groups.

Given India’s history, diversity, and vastness, both of area and population, the nation’s federalism is both strategic and concessionary—it seems the best way to govern an enormous, far-flung, and multifarious population as well as a necessary acknowledgement of the country’s heritage of fragmentary administration—even the British failed to bring the nation under a single, central government. India is nearly as much colonial fabrication as any African state, and perhaps the only thing in which Indians have ever been united was their detestation of colonial rule; thus the reliance on a system of governance in which Indians states have been given an autonomy of which the American Federalist Society would heartily approve. Yet federalism has also perpetuated the historical geographic and cultural divisions of the subcontinent and highlighted the inequalities between populations—the development of southern states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu is several generations advanced beyond that of others like Bihar, Orissa, and Assam, where the quality of life of inhabitants is more typical of sub-Saharan Africa and the world’s least developed countries than what one would expect of an emerging economic power like India.

In the minds of Indians, state lines are too often more than imaginary boundaries; they are tangible demarcations of different peoples. In a nation where everyone is an “other” to everyone else, state affiliation is just another way of defining the “otherhood” of another person. And the fracturing of state identity is not yet complete: three new states were born in 2000 out of old ones—Uttaranchal from Uttar Pradesh, Jharkand from Bihar, and Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh—and it seems likely that another state, to be called Bundelkhand, will emerge from Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh by the end of the decade. Tribal regions in several other states, following the lead of Jharkand and Chhattisgarh, are also working toward independence. The further atomization of the Indian state, with all of its ramifying social implications, seems inevitable.

On January 27, Raj Thackeray, the leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Shena (a Hindu nationalist party and affiliate of the BJP), publicly denounced the presence of North Indians in Mumbai, specifically citing emigrants from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (incidentally two of the poorest states in the country), claiming that they were taking South Indian jobs and insulting South Indian culture with their adherence to native practices. Mumbai is India’s most cosmopolitan city; Thackeray’s outburst was roughly equivalent to Al Sharpton telling all of the Mississippians and Alabamans in New York City to get the hell out. Thackeray’s xenophobia (if it can even be called that) seems absurd, and yet it inspired a wave of violence that left at least one man dead; on Saturday Thackeray warned against public celebrations of Uttar Pradesh Day in Maharashstra, suggesting that Shiv Sena members would put down by force all who disobeyed his extralegal proscription. The hullabaloo surrounding Thackeray is a morbid outgrowth of an endemic prejudice: in private conversation I have been told by educated South Indians that North Indians are generally unfriendly, arrogant, and disdainful toward those who don’t speak Hindi, and many North Indians' opinions of Southerners are equally derogatory.

Hindu vs. Muslim (and other non-Hindus), caste vs. caste, tribe vs. tribe, state vs. state, tribal vs. non-tribal, North vs. South: all are divisions daily in evidence in India’s newspapers. The largely invisible divisions and resentments of class, education, and rural vs. urban populations are no less profound for their latency. In a nation of a billion ruptures--some tiny cracks, others daunting crevasses, but none so large as to alone be capable of collapsing the idea of the Indian state--what sort of force is then capable of convulsing the entire nation at once, thereby acting on multiple ruptures concurrently?

Reduction, First Attempt: Like V.S.

I have quixotically hoped, during my time in India, to arrive at some confident assaying of the Indian character—the spirit of the nation, the psyche of its people, that sort of thing—knowing full well that it was, by its very nature, an impossible undertaking, and probably an undesirable one as well. I have wanted, in some sense, to do as V.S. Naipaul has so often done—to enfold an entire country, a people, in a single well-crafted sentence, to encapsulate them in a terse declaration, to reduce them to a single idea. Naipaul really has reduced entire peoples—that is the proper word—for he rarely has had much but scorn for the inhabitants of what people used to call the Third World. He has found them ignorant and superstitious and wanting for industry and originality; after having traveled much of the post-colonial world in the last half century, his assessment of the progress of its inhabitants is starkly uncharitable. They have grown and achieved little, he feels, since the lifting of the colonial yoke—the implication being that if a people clamor for independence, they should not then squander its dispensation.

It is likely that Naipaul has only escaped lasting opprobrium because, as a native of Trinidad, he was once one of the liberated peoples that he savages; just as only a black person can utter “nigger” and not be castigated, so can only a post-colonial describe his own country as a “picaroon society with its taste for corruption and violence and its lack of respect for the person” without serious censure (it also doesn’t hurt that his writing bursts with a rare intelligence and percipience). That’s not to say that Naipaul doesn’t acknowledge and tacitly condemn the deleterious colonial legacy, in particular its psychological effects; his position on the issue is not an extreme one, and yet his thinking does represent one particular polar strain—that the problems of the post-colonial world can largely be imputed to its people and culture—in the interpretation of its history. But in examining his work, one must accept, with the requisite grain of salt, Naipaul’s fundamental conservatism, his arrogance, his chauvinism, and the fact that these tendencies have only deepened with age (he has even gone so far as to recently deprecate the work of his erstwhile friend and fellow Caribbean native and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott).

An opposing strain of interpretation suggests that colonialism arrested and blighted the efflorescence of established and well-ordered societies the world over, where people lived largely peaceful and mutually reinforcing existences free from the taint of the unfettered pursuit of profit, the impulse to exploit the natural world, and the desire to master one’s fellow man. This romanticization possesses more than the whiff of the Noble Savage myth in it, and notwithstanding the slivers to be found in each of these strains of interpretation, it should be evident that the whole truth, as it invariably does, lies somewhere in between the two.

Naipaul has been especially critical of his ancestral homeland, and perhaps no nation has so embodied the frustrated promise of the pre- and post-colonial periods as has India. India’s value as a trading hub to the Portuguese, British, and French was enormous—it may very well have been the most precious jewel in the diadem of Empire—and few if any post-colonial nations have contributed more (both through its native population and its diaspora), in real terms, to the world economically and culturally since independence. Everyone is by now familiar with the presumptive narrative of Indian ascent: the still fecund IT industry, the febrile financial sector, the burgeoning professional class, the prodigious entertainment biz, the enlightened government (“the world’s biggest democracy”!)—we have entered the Asian century, even if it’s not yet evident.

And yet: the agricultural sector’s share of the economy is shrinking, even as it employs the majority (56%) of the Indian workforce. The epidemic of farmer suicides seems intractable, as does the scourge of female feticide. Primary school enrollment is abysmally low and the child mortality rate disturbingly high, particularly for a nation aspiring toward a position of global prominence--India was ranked only 128th out of 177 countries in the UN's most recent Human Development Report. The entire country has a mere 5,000 miles of four-lane highway; in comparison, China has constructed more than 15,000 miles of 4-6 lane access-controlled expressways in the last ten years alone. And while a staggering number of Chinese, 180 million, live on the equivalent of less than US$1 per day (the World Bank measure of extreme poverty), 370 million Indians contend with such destitution. That’s almost one-quarter again the entire population of the U.S. and considerably more than the 300 million living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa—and people speak of this impoverished mass as the “other” India, as if it represented some aberrancy.

Sir Vidia, the Grand Belittler, would undoubtedly seize upon the recalcitrant residue of brutality clinging to Indian culture as evidence of its prevailing backwardness: the feticide of course, but also the preponderance of lynchings, the acid attacks of spurned suitors, the culture of scholastic bullying (known as “ragging”; it seems to inspire at least one prominent murder case each month), the temple stampedes, the so-called “communal” violence (to which we shall return). Such appeals are a double-edged sword, however, as most cultures harbor an atavistic bloodlust, even Naipaul’s beloved British; an accounting of the signifiers of contemporary American brutality would likely consume the better part of an entire post.

What is most distressing about India, then, is not its brutality, which is quite commonplace even among so-called “advanced” societies, or its dismal social indicators, or even the boggling number of poor; it is the very real fracturing of its populace along hundreds, if not thousands of fault lines, both visible and invisible—cracks delineating religion, caste, class, wealth, politics, geography, culture, and language, among other things—which, when coupled with a tendency toward brutality among certain segments of its population, is the greatest cause for alarm. Though perhaps I am alone in suggesting such a possibility, it seems that India possesses more than the necessary ingredients for fierce and protracted civil strife—though one not imminent or even near enough to be easily discernible, it might arrive twenty or thirty years in the future, when the forces of cleavage have had time to widen small fissures into unbridgeable chasms of discontent and alienation.

Touring as Something Other than Hell, Part 2: Himalayan Vistas, River Worship, and a Thrilling Roar

Following the trauma of Delhi and Agra, the hills and fields and rivers of Uttaranchal, a state carved from Uttar Pradesh in 2000, seemed a proper antidote to the sclerotic and suffocating city. With our base in the comparatively drowsy and diminutive capital of Dehra Dun (which we explored on our first day in the state), my mom, dad, brother, and I made day trips to Mussoorie and Haridwar, before departing for our final stop outside of Ramnagar and Corbett Tiger Reserve.


Mussoorie: Located approximately two kilometers above sea level (6561 feet), Mussoorie, the “Queen of Hill Stations,” is a flock of buildings—including an inordinate number of hotels—flung across a heavily wooded ridge in the Himalayan foothills. The only road to Mussoorie from Dehra Dun (Elev: 2296 feet) is tortuous and steep, and though only about 30 kilometers separate the cities, it takes well over an hour to traverse the distance between the two. Although it aspires to offer a great deal to tourists, Mussoorie is little more than a grand view—two views, in fact, each dramatic in its own fashion. To the south, in the direction of Dehra Dun, a panorama of the Doon Valley unfolds, green and riven by the fingers of the foothills, which point towards Delhi. To the north, peeking just above a muscular ridge, are the distant snow-packed heads of the Himalaya. Too bad, then, that the day was swimming in haze; the southern exposure in particular was blurred and indistinct. It hardly mattered, though: the city had postcard poise (see above) and even from afar the Himalaya announced themselves with a fluent grandiosity.

Haridwar: Wiith my dad was sidelined by intestinal distress, the next day my mom, brother, and I departed for Haridwar alone—alone, that is, save for our driver Samuel and his four-year-old munchkin son, Lucky. As a result of its propinquity to the source of the Ganges River (Ganga in Hindi), Haridwar is one of the four holiest cities in all of Hindu; it’s also believed that Lord Vishnu spilled nectar here and in doing so left his footprint behind. The city stretches for several kilometers along the river and occupies a narrow swath of land between the Ganga and a steep, scrubby ridge. No doubt owing to the nearness of its source, the Ganga was a pale and milky green (shades of the non-St. Paddy's Day Chicago River) and looked nearly clean enough to drink from.


Haridwar has two famous hill-top temples, Mansa Devi and Chandi Devi, both most enjoyably accessed by cable car—or ropeline, as it’s known in India; in fact, the ropeline to Chandi Devi is the second longest in the country. The views from the temples, Chandi Devi in particular, were commanding, or rather would have been if not for the unshakable haze. The temples themselves are uninspiring—dispiriting is a better word, given that their primary function seems to be the extraction of rupees from visitors’ pocketbooks (a subject which certainly merits its own post, although it’s likely I’ll never get around to writing it)—and the temple monkeys (above with pilfered ice cream cone) are even better shake-down artists than the pandits. In accordance with the American way, the Gaffs tried to take more than they gave, and we made out handsomely: tikkas for our foreheads, bracelets for our wrists, consecrated money for our wallets, consecrated sweets for our bellies, and marigold garlands for all! My mom’s garland was the heaviest and gaudiest, hanging below her waist, while my brother’s was small and understated. Mine was just right.

After looting Mansa Devi, we secured a spot along the Ganga at the Har-Ki-Pairi (The Footstep of God) ghat, where the daily Ganga aarti ceremony is held, and spent the ninety minutes before sunset watching inspired bathers and waders shiver in the current and monkeys scramble across roofs, trees, and walls on the opposite bank. As there is not a single square inch of India where the pursuit of money is thought profane and properly barred, we were also forced to fend off a steady and miscellaneous stream of vendors, beggars, and children demanding ten rupees for a tikka. One fellow with broken eyeglass lenses and ragged clothes importuned me to convey his plaints to the President of the United States and the U.N.—the tribals and lower castes of Uttaranchal were being brutally suppressed, he told me. He spoke fluent, stilted English and didn’t ask for money.


At dusk the Ganga aarti began. I don’t know much of the ceremony’s history or the significance of its forms and rituals; it is simple veneration of the river—the Great Mother—and aarti is a particular variety of worship involving the lighting of lamps. At 5:45, bells began to clang in that joyful, rhythmless temple style and five men came to the river’s edge bearing large lamps. As ponderous music piped over loudspeakers, the lamps were ignited and held aloft. Some of the assembled (and there were likely a few thousand) sang along to the music in call-and-response style; the calling was done by a shrill and nasal soprano voice whose style typified what, until relatively recently, was considered the truest, most beautiful expression of the female singing voice in India (it used to grate on me terribly; now it’s as much a part of the unregistered ambient tapestry of this country as the honking of car horns). At indecipherable intervals, the men slowly and gently swooped the lamps in an arc below their knees. The lamps burned with some high-octane fuel—their shivering flames rose several feet into the gloom (see above), projecting solid stripes of orange light onto the river’s surface. Darkness settled, and glowing offerings—sturdy vessels constructed of large tree leaves and brimming with the blossoms and petals of flowers arrayed around a central candle—were released into the current. I had hoped that the entire river might be choked and glittering with their light; alas, the scintillating armada of my imagination was, in reality, no more than a twinkling flotilla.

Corbett Tiger Reserve: It all comes back to tigers. For the trip’s grand finale, we entered the forests of the night in search of that singular, ferocious, and most fearsome of predators in a nation overflowing with hot-blooded hunters (not the least of which are the omnipresent vendors, hawkers, and beggars--it all comes back to them too). We arrived at the entrance of the Reserve shortly after 6, the first jeep of many to roll up in the pre-dawn gloom, waiting for the gates to admit us at 6:30. It would be nearly 5 when we departed, dusty, dead-eyed, and deprived of a tiger sighting—that is not to say, however, that we left disappointed.

Corbett National Park is enormous, more than 1300 square kilometers, and its Tiger Reserve, though smaller (around 500 square km), is nonetheless significant. And while only 15% of the total area of Ranthambore Park is accessible to tourists, it would seem that nearly all of Corbett can be reached by jeep—in the afternoon we spent hours traversing muddy tracks deep in the forest, combing the remote bowels of the Reserve for the striped menace of legend. Corbett is even more beautiful than Ranthambore, greener and more thickly forested, full of rills and broad, stony riverbeds, deep ravines, bluffs, gently sloping hills, and stands of tall, yellowing grass perfect for concealing tigers. It abounds in deer (three species) and monkeys (two species), and we also observed a wild boar, several varieties of birds, and a sizable herd of pillaging elephants.


On our second venture past the elephants, in the course of making our way back to the Reserve’s “campus” for lunch, we stopped so that our guide, who moonlighted as a wildlife photographer and seemed dismayed by our frugal snapping, could amuse himself with my camera. After several minutes of shooting, one of the elephants took exception to our presence and made an abortive charge toward our jeep, stopping perhaps thirty yards short and releasing a minatory trumpet. We were suitably shaken and urged our driver to get moving; however, shortly thereafter, a guttural bark somewhere in the forest off to our left caused him to throw the jeep into reverse and rapidly retrace our tracks. The bark, we quickly learned, was the distress call of the langur monkey; it suggested that a tiger was in the vicinity.

We waited attentively for perhaps ten minutes while the barks continued intermittently, occasionally drifting back in the direction of the elephants (who continued their pillaging unperturbed in the distance), occasionally backtracking further in the opposite direction. It had been several minutes since the last bark when two elephants behind us suddenly made a right turn toward the road; we heard a brief bellow from close by. “Tiger roar!” our guide whispered excitedly (it wasn’t a proper roar—tigers are capable of dozens of vocalizations), but instead of backing up in the direction of the sound, we remained rooted in place and waited, every fiber of our being focused on the forest behind us. And waited.

We never saw the tiger; it never emerged from the thick undergrowth, at least within eyeshot. Nevertheless, the experience was thrilling—in many ways more thrilling than spotting the Lady of the Lake in Ranthambore. It was the thrill of pursuit and the thrill of fear that quickened the pulse—the fear that the thing you were pursuing, a beast so terrible it turned aside creatures more than ten times its own size, might decide, on a whim, to turn on you. And the thrill didn’t soon subside.

Touring as Something Other than Hell, Part 1: Tombs, Forts, and The Lady of the Lake

It is probable that the pleasure one can have strolling through a virgin forest or hunting tigers is marred by the idea that one must later make an artful description to please as many bourgeois people as possible—Gustave Flaubert


The time has now come for backtracking—not retraction precisely, just a bit of backtracking. Much has been made in this blog of the wretchedness of the tourist experience in India; it’s possible, even, that someone, perhaps rather theatrically—let us say in the spirit of showmanship—ventured to place side by side, in a rather incautious manner, two dissimilar things—for example, that peculiar, aforementioned experience and a certain nether-realm of the Christian imagination—and in so doing implied, or even suggested outright the overlapping nature of the two. And now, in the spirit of fair and evenhanded reporting, I’d like to say that the trip wasn’t all, or even mostly agitation and torment; it offered a good bit of wonder, pleasure, and appreciation, too—appreciation of the creations of both man and nature.

Tyger, Tyger: When I was seven, my best friend Michael Pecina and I whiled away many an hour imagining ourselves into tigers and the human masters at whose bidding they worked (not always to moral ends, as I recall); had I been able to undertake a trip to Rajasthan’s Ranthambore National Park then, my life may very well have turned out differently—what happens to a child who is granted the most fervent desire of his heart at such a young age? Alas, it would be twenty-one long years before I would have a chance to see a tiger in its natural setting, and even the most passionate of romantic loves rarely have sufficient reserves of ardor to burn for such a span. That’s not to say that I wasn’t pumped about the prospect of encountering the biggest of the Big Cats in the wild, only that I wouldn’t be descending into the hysterics that, had we traded places, my seven-year-old self undoubtedly would have.

Ranthambore possesses the desiccated loveliness typical of Rajasthan, with towering massifs above which, on the day of our visit, the sky crimsoned prettily in the minutes before sunrise. Due to the vagaries of booking, my sister and brother-in-law were seated in a jeep other than mine, theirs being bound for Zone 3 of the Park; my jeep, which I shared with a Mumbai investment banker and his mother, wife, and two children, sped off for Zone 5. After two hours of fruitless searching (I say fruitless though we saw two species of deer, a large antelope, crocodiles, peacocks, langur monkeys, and other sundry creatures), we turned back for the park’s entrance. “I want to see a puppy!” the little girl from Mumbai exclaimed.

Not far beyond Zone 5 we came across a cantor—a large open vehicle seating about twenty—stopped in the road, and after some feverish whispering between the guides of the two vehicles, our driver backed up a safe distance and killed the engine. Following a few breathless moments, a tiger emerged in the undergrowth of the forest perhaps fifty yards from the jeep. It strode languidly on a line parallel to the road, occasionally glancing over in our direction. We followed its path as best we could, but after less than two minutes, it was lost irrecoverably in the forest. The tiger was a three-and-half-year-old female nicknamed The Lady of the Lake; I didn’t catch her measurements or turn-offs. Alas, the zoom of my little camera proved insufficient to capture The Lady; I did, however, manage to take thirty-four seconds of video footage that make the Bigfoot tape seem, in comparison, definitive evidence of the Sasquatch’s existence.

Humayun’s Tomb: (Scene from the Bollywood film, Fanaa)

Guide: This is Humayun’s Tomb. It was constructed for him by his wife Hamida.

Husband (to his wife): Take a look at what a wife made for her husband. And you can’t even make me breakfast.

Wife: Don’t worry, I’ll start building your tomb right away.


On Christmas Day, the entire Gaff family (at right, arrayed just inside the Tomb’s walled gate), reunited for the holiday in Delhi and made its way to Humayun’s Tomb, which, though a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is little known outside of India. Humayun was the second Mughal emperor, and the elegance of his final resting place clearly influenced the design of the Mughal-built Taj Mahal. H.T. is an impressive structure to be sure, all domes and minarets and filigree, and most distinct from the Taj in its builders’ employment of red sandstone, rather than white marble, as the primary material of construction. In my most objective reckoning, ignoring the shadow cast by what was yet to come, it ranks as one of the more remarkable buildings I’ve ever seen; the Lincoln Memorial, in comparison, is a prosaic monument, pale and stunted.

The Taj Mahal and Agra Fort: In June of 2005, I made my first trip to Yankee Stadium, one of the most storied venues in all of American athletics. Site of an unprecedented number of World Series contests (and victories), the only perfect game in Series history, Reggie’s three home runs in three pitches, Maris’s 61st, and the showground for some of the game’s all-time greats, the House that Ruth Built is hollowed turf for any true baseball fan, Yankee-lover or not (I am not). It also turned out to be a huge disappointment—blandly featureless, largely devoid of charm, and—it would seem—determined to ignore its incandescent history. Forgive me for fearing that the Taj Mahal might likewise disappoint; how could it fail but to collapse beneath the weight of the stacks of purplish encomiums penned on its behalf?


And yet one glimpse was enough to dispel such fears; if nothing else, the Taj delivers on its promise of being the most visually sublime structure humankind has yet had the sensibility to erect (go ahead, try to prove me wrong). The Taj is a bit smaller than I had anticipated, but this is a cavil and in any event one quickly subsumed by the inexorable gushing of the Taj’s deathless charms: the unmatched and impeccable harmony of design; the epically suggestive (and satisfying) arches and domes; the shocking marmoreal brilliance, at once cool and white-hot; and, upon close study, the astounding flourishes of detail adorning its iconic face. It is difficult to reconcile this face of Islam, which could create something so senselessly beautiful that it approaches unearthliness, with the one which finds beauty so threatening that it must be concealed beneath chador, jilbab, and burqa.

Immediately following our visit to the Taj, we headed to the Agra Fort, our third UNESCO World Heritage Site in two days. It was certain to be a letdown—what wouldn’t be after the Taj?—but, after all, Sgt. Pepper’s had The White Album and Star Wars had The Empire Strikes Back and Joe Dimaggio had Mickey Mantle so maybe it wouldn’t be all bad. And so it proved to be; in fact, though it is no doubt blasphemy to suggest, the Agra Fort, in many ways, is the Taj’s superior. The Taj is a bit of a one-trick pony, if you’ll excuse the awful cliché; it’s absolutely stunning to look at, but in the end it’s only a tomb (how many times has someone said, “Calling X a Y is like saying the Taj Mahal is only a tomb”?). It provides little stimulation beyond that frisson of wonder one receives at first glance—although as far as frissons go, they don’t get any better.

If it were a contemporary actress, the Taj Mahal would be Penelope Cruz, who is so ridiculously, unfathomably attractive that she tends to obliterate the very consciousness of the viewer (perhaps only male viewers, and perhaps only this male viewer) to the fact that there is a story, a film, going on around her; one is also likely to fail to notice or, for that matter, even care that, after all, she can act a little too. But sit Cruz down on a talk show couch, and you quickly realize that, after a week, you’d have nothing to say to the woman. Agra Fort, then, is Cate Blanchett—beautiful too, though in an entirely differently way than Cruz, and yes, not as beautiful—but my God, she knows a bit about everything and has a crackling mind that would keep you hopping well into your dotage. Given a choice between the two for a day, or even a week, you would choose the Taj; anything longer and you would be sure to run into the arms of the Fort.


Agra Fort is a rambling conglomeration of buildings, courtyards, and gardens encircled by high sandstone walls 2.5 kilometers in circumference. Initially (as the name implies) only a fort in function, it would gradually evolve, over the course of its first 100 or so years, into a palace complex, small city, and administrative capital of the Mughal Empire, until, under British control, it was reduced to a mere fort again. Made to enclose the dreams of generations of Mughal rulers, the structure is grandiose and inscrutable. Though it doesn’t possess much or any aesthetic continuity, it is nonetheless a fantastic hashing of halls (see above) and mosques, marble and sandstone, turrets and arcades. We wandered about its grounds, stumbling dazedly in appreciation among the muddle of exquisite forms. At closing we were reluctantly shooed out of the Fort by security; as we left, the paterfamilias of an Italian clan paused before us for one last look. "Magnifico!" he exclaimed, and we snickered, but he was right—it was magnificent.