Also, for those of you who are my Facebook friends & asked me about my recent status ("Back from an extended trip to India - best & most life-changing trip ever. "When there is conflict btn the heart & the brain, let the heart be followed, b/c intellect only has one state, reason, & w/in that, intellect works, & cannot get beyond. It is the heart which takes one to the highest place, which intellect can ...never reach; it goes beyond intellect, & reaches to what is called inspiration." - Swami Vivekananda), this post is not going to cover that either, but I will definitely fill everyone in on that in my next few posts.
Things I love:
- Everyone is "related" & every relationship has a name whether it be for relatives, neighbors or random people you meet for the first time at stores or even the Riksha driver (Bhaiya, Bhaabhi, Mausi, Mamma, Naani, Didi, Auntie, Uncle, & the countless others that exist). I have always loved these names, because they show closeness, respect & a general spirit of "we are all family."
- How religion/spirituality is everywhere & in everything. I'm personally a far more spiritual person than I am a religious one, but when I'm here I feel a greater connection to my spirituality & God because both are given so much importance in life's daily happenings; however, I do have some unlove on the religion front as it plays out here as well (see below).
- How colorful everything is! Everything - the clothes, homes, trucks, etc. - is so vibrant and full of life.
- How sexy I think Indian clothes are in spite of their showing nominal to zero skin. "Sexy" in the US is often plunging neck lines, short skirts, slinky dresses, "how hot one looks in a bikini" (basically an acceptable in-public version of underwear) etc. whereas here a tiny bit of your midsection/back peeking through a saree or "cut sleeves" (sleeveless) on a salwar suit are all you need to turn heads. I'm personally obsessed with desi clothes & I think that everyone looks better in them, so I live it up straight fob-style as much as I can while I am here, & I am likely to as much as I can when I get back (sorry in advance to my friends, your already foberiffic friend will be even moreso when she gets back! :-P). It seriously bums me out that in our generation, we only wear desi-wear at weddings b/c if I knew how to properly tie one (& if it wouldn't be considered completely looney tunes), I'd rock a saree every day.
- I find something so endearing about a husband & wife (& often 2-3 of their kids) all on a bike/scooter en route to wherever.
- I'm a huge Hindi fan in general (I swear I half think in Hindi), but I don't think there is anything cuter than lil' kids speaking in Hindi..."SM-Bua - btw, I am going to go through major depression not hearing 50 lil' bache who are all actually my grandnieces/nephews calling me that :*(, Achha, Oh Bete, Arre Vah!, Kyu kyu?" & all the other adorable things they say. Side note on "accha" which is my absolute fave word with all it's many meanings... it can mean that something is good, agreement/"okay" & then also "Really?/!" when said with a questioning tone... "Achha?!" Yes, if you didn't know it before, yours truly is an uber-fob (& to all the real "F.O.B.s" out there, I mean that with no unlove)
- Non-stop Hindi music heaven. One of the best things about being in India (if you're me or obsessed with Hindi music) is that you are unlikely to find a single person who - whether they watch the movies or not (which by the way I have yet to meet someone who doesn't watch them) - does not have a mental database of thousands of Bollywood songs - the classics to present day- plus ghazals, bhajans, etc. 99% of all Hindi music is about love in some form unlike American music which although it definitely has love as a major theme, also includes all kinds of inappropriateness (that don't get me wrong, I totally jam to) that includes songs like "My Humps, U & Dat Booty", the Thong song & every Ludacris song ever made. & it might just be me, but the same exact expression like "I love you" (especially set to music!) said in any of the hundred different ways you can say it in Hindi feels a hundred times more meaningful.
- "Yes" can be said with with a quick side tilt of your head (which I have totally adopted & am sure to be called crazy-side-tilt-girl when I get back) & "No" can be said with a little click of your tongue (hard to describe, but I can demonstrate either for anyone who is curious :-P)
- The closeness I feel here with people after meeting them just once & how expressive everyone is about how they feel. On a trip a few years back, I met my older cousin brother's friend; he's in his 50's, married with 2 kids, and he was so touched at meeting me that he wrote me this incredibly beautiful poem about me in Hindi. Hearing it brought me to tears & even though I can't read a lick of Hindi (anymore & which is a huge distress to my Hindi professor Mommy!), I still cherish that poem as one of my most prized possessions. In this trip, after meeting one of my closest friend's cousins & her family in Bangalore at a mall, I fainted (I hadn't been feeling well previously but tried persevering b/c I wanted to meet them). They were so tremendously sweet, took care of me like family & after 2 hours spent driving me back to my hotel they said how great it was to meet me & how they would love to keep in touch. In Mumbai, another close friend of mine connected me to her family there, who offered for me to stay at their home, receive me at the airport, arrange for me to visit a Bollywood shoot (I went to Yash Raj Studios - Aaahhh, thank you to J&A if you're reading this!! :-D) & within a few hours of our meeting, they were saying "it feels like we have been close friends forever" & I felt the same way. Yes, these 2 families & how they treated me are also a reflection of my wonderful friends & their relationship with their families & me, but I am always blown away by the "just like family" feel I get here even after brief encounters and how people wear their hearts on their sleeves.
- I'm not saying that all marriages in India are perfect or anywhere close, but I admire that marriages - for the most part - are about core cultural & family values. Most of all, they are about compromise & commitment especially in the arranged-marriage type situations, which by the way, I have no more unlove for. I've seen so many our-generation arranged-marriage couples & they are AMAZING - just as if not moreso than most love marriage couples I know. More on all that in my next post. When it comes to marriages & families, people here make it less about "me," personal satisfaction, appearances (i.e. - how hot one's wife looks after having babies) or other should-not be-end-all-be-all-type-things (like how hot sex is however many years into marriages), but about a shared purpose of what's good for the family or what people here often speak to - their "duty" as a wife/husband/mother/father. Again, I'm not saying that couples in the US - Indian & non - don't operate the same way, but I definitely think its to a different degree in both countries.
- Things happen with a certain timeliness here... I've said it in other posts, but I really do appreciate & respect that sense of urgency for what I think are 2 of life's most important life's happenings - marriage & kids. In India, for the majority of the population as soon as you finish your undergraduate studies the search for finding one's jeevan saathi (aka life partner) begins. When I told people here about American dating/marriage timelines and trends - for example, how one is practically deemed crazy if you are in your mid 20's and want to get married (especially if you are a female) and how most people want to delay having kids for as long as they can post getting married so that they can enjoy without-kids married life - they all had a moment of quiet gratitude that they were raised in India and many chuckled out of pity as if we had it all backwards. On top of that, several people who are our age and had arranged marriages (families searched on their behalf, they met one or two times & then were allowed to say "yay or nay") said something along these lines (a bit of this gets lost in translating Hindi to English!)... "It's interesting that in the US you do everything out of your own choice including who you choose to marry. However, 50+% of these 'love marriages' end in divorce. We might not know wild passionate romance or know what the US version of 'in love' feels like, but I think we Indians here as a whole have a better sense of 'love' in its true meaning." I definitely agree, & more also on this in my next post.
- The country is every man's urinal & every person's garbage dump. "Oh SM, you're done with that Bisleri bottle? Let me be a doll & toss it out the window for you." The majority of the population seems to only be concerned with their own life's happenings/financial progress and could care less about their surroundings. The whole idea of "community service"/"social responsibility" seems to be lost on 95% of Indian citizens; it's like a "why bother since no one else does" attitude & it's unfortunate, because considering the incredible amount of man & brain power here, all of India could be completely transformed if just that one thing changed.
- Along the lines of the above, although I'm a huge Bollywood fan, if all the celebrities in India donated money to causes the way US celebrities do or became a spokesperson for them in a very public way (for example, if Shahrukh Khan spoke openly about AIDS prevention or made using condoms sound cool) then so many things would change for the better, because even the little 4 year old boy living in the most remote area of India in a hut made of cow dung knows who SRK is. True story - I tried this out.
- Rampant and blatant corruption everywhere. If you know anything of Indian politics (or have perhaps seen any Bollywood movie) the entire Indian government system including the police force is completely corrupt. Everything is done or undone with bribery; just recently, the Chief Minister of U.P. was "gifted" a necklace made of bills totaling 22 million rupees. It's pervasive everywhere else as well... want a job? Pay the employer or a go-between a few hundred thousand rupees... you're a drug rep & want a doctor to write your drugs?? Give him samples (that he will then sell to his patients) & pay him several thousand rupees to recommend your products. I used to be a pharma rep (& who knows, I might end up doing it again), but even back then, I thought giving pens, post-its & free lunches was not right in influencing a physician's writing habits.
- As religious & ritualistic as people here are, their actual day-to-day behavior doesn't line up with what Hinduism (all religions) teach us - how to be a good human being (see everything in "what I can't stand"). The vast majority of people here are forever doing some kind of puja, fast, bathing in the river Ganga, & are constantly making deals with God for their personal properity (i.e. - "I will do this, give/give up this if you give me this") & call me religiously naive, but I imagine that God doesn't respond well to bribery.
- On top of all that, people here are so (in my opinion) INSANELY superstitious & believe in good/bad luck that life is constantly lead in fear of things like "don't cut your toe nails on Tuesday, don't wear new clothes on Sunday, don't buy/sell steel on Saturday, don't step over your brother/sister or they'll stay short forever, don't have your shoes facing opposite directions, don't eat anything white at a person's house" & so on. I was always being told to "not do" something b/c of a particular day or some other reason, & when I'd say that "I don't believe in that stuff (regional superstitions)" they looked at me like I was the crazy person.
- In spite of my amazing experiences with relatives of my friends, helping a stranger "just because" is far from the norm. When I landed in India, my cousin & our driver were loading my suitcases into the car. Another man standing close by lent a hand (if what he did can even be called that); I said "thank you" & he said "100 rupees please." On a flight to Bangalore, an elderly woman was struggling to put her bag in the overhead compartment, & neither the man next to her or behind her reached to help her. She continued to struggle & until I reached her was she able to get her bag up. A professor at my cousin's school helped her get a copy of her degree (which she paid for); he called up my aunt asking to see how my cousin was doing in the US & that my cousin "could thank him for his favor by bringing him back a camera." Eh??
- Traffic here. Ok, I can't stand traffic anywhere, but in India, it makes NO bleeping sense what people do on the roads. Sure, you have everything from massive trucks, cars, bikes, scooters, bicycles, rikshas, & sometimes cows all sharing the road, but even where there should be traffic flow or some kind of rhyme or reason in places like the big cities, there isn't. Everyone is just trying to forcefully insert their mode-of-transportation into the non-existing space in front of someone else. & I understand (& kind of like) the whole go-on-to-the-opposite-side-of-the-road-to-overtake-someone-on-your-side since some things on the road (like your cart being pulled by a buffalo) move painfully slow, but if people actually followed the rules or even bothered to make some, half of their lives wouldn't be wasted in traffic.
- Whether it be traffic, a line to somewhere or life in general, Indian people for the most part have an "overtake" mentality. I say for the most part, because in August of last year at a "Meet & Greet Shakrukh Khan" in the Chicago area, me & my friends were trampled in a stamped (formerly a line of 200 people) whereas had everyone just stood where they were, we all would have met him. I experienced this again & again in India and especially while taking flights for domestic travel which blew my mind considering we all had assigned seats. We'd be standing in a line for our gate & as soon as they started letting people enter, everyone from the back flooded to the front... I was making my way on to the shuttle that takes us to our plane & an Uncle literally pushed me off the step, so he could make his way on... Instead of deboarding a plane by row, everyone gets up at random & bum rushes their way into the aisle. I was the 5th row in and after having about 30 people walk by and not let me into the aisle, I inserted my way into the line. I then started to let the people in front of me go & an Auntie shoved my back and yelled "Chalo Na" ("Move now!")... On my flight back to the US, I was sitting at the end of the middle row which had 5 seats... I had put my carry-on in the overhead bin right behind me and several minutes later, I'd gotten up to get something from my bag & I saw that the man behind me had passed it to the man at the opposite end of the aisle & he was passing it back to someone else all in an effort to make space for their own bag. Don't worry, normally non-confrontational SM definitely said something.
- Autos-rickshaws (Although rikshas in general break my heart - some half-my-waist-size-but-twice-my-age man gets paid 15 rupees - about 33 cents - to bicycle 2 people weighing 200+ lbs for a mile. My god). If you don't know what auto-rickshaws are, see this link (http://www.ictpm.co.uk/images/resources/auto-hyderabad-india.jpg), but they are murdering India's environment, & if it all plays out the way Al Gore said so, then the whole world's in turn.
- How & how much people eat here. Abdominal obesity is rampant & the majority of the general population is living LARGE; I don't know what it is about the Indian genetic make-up (& I suffer from it as well), but most of us are plagued with skinny arms & legs and all of the weight we carry goes straight to our midsection. On top of that, I'm also pretty sure 90+% of the desi-in-India population has diabetes and likely high BP as well (talk about being heavy-handed w/ the salt!). From white rice to paranthas and pouring on the ghee in EVERYTHING, it's a serious situation. & I personally have no idea how people visiting India lose weight while they are here b/c I am going to need a few weeks - maybe months - of hardcore effort to undo all the Maaza, Thums Up, chowmein, ras malai, & late night dinners. My god...
- & the absolute WORST thing about India (& perhaps desi culture in general) is how women are viewed. We all know the basics (I highly recommend everyone watch awesome Bollywood movies like Lajja, Water, & Astitva), but in general (& yes, this is probably more in smaller cities versus metropolitan areas), women are viewed as a "Bhoj" (burden); people often have an obscene # of babies in an effort to have a blessed baby boy & although it's illegal to find out the sex of your baby before birth, sex-based abortion or the killing of baby girls after they are born is rampant here. Men here are viewed as such prized possessions that they & their families have an absurd amount of power in the whole "rishta" (relationship) game. A Boy's family puts out an ad for a girl, hundreds of girls families call & a huge basis for accepting or rejecting a relationship (in addition to caste, profession, fairness, height, horoscope matching & every other criteria) is how much the girl's family willing to shell out for the wedding/dowry & in order to get a "yes" to the marriage.
1 observation: Life in the big cities (or at least Mumbai which I had a chance to visit this time) for people who are our age is pretty much in line with life in the big cities back home. I went out one night in Mumbai & I felt like the most traditional, conservative & LAME person in the planet in my flare jeans & chiffon kurta top. They were as trendy - if not more - as us & woah nelly, they were all super forward & open. Everyone was drinking up a storm, dancing wildly (sigh, I think I've actually become a grandmother here...) & tons of people seemed to be coupled up. They were not shy about being coupled up either whereas in the US, we try to keep things a bit under wraps, & they also had zero sharam (shame) about PDAs - I'm talking makeout fests galore. Since I looked so out of place, I decided to full out be out of place, & started interviewing random people about dating life there (I told them that I was from the US & that I write a South Asian Dating blog). The girls said that although everyone seems coupled that for most of the guys, their girlfriends are usually just a "time pass" until their parents set them up with someone for marriage. They also said that they feel that it is all about appearances and that guys' eyes are constantly wandering in search of the next prettier girl he can have on his arm. This one group of guys (who were all ridonculously good looking & JACKED; I asked if I could take a picture of them b/c I had never seen guys who were so fit in India :-P), told me that everything is about image, appearances & sex appeal and they therefore put in so much effort taking care of their physiques and expect the same of the girls they pursue. I bantered about a little more & then after 2 hours of what felt no different than every other brown-fest party at any local Chicago lounge, I was over it & asked my friend if we could leave. Basically, after my Mumbai experience, I realized that the life that I really love in India is the simple & slower life in the smaller cities.
1 super fun experience I got to have: I spent a significant amount of time at my older cousin brother's home in Saharanpur, U.P. where his son-in-law (which also makes him mine), Vishal, owns a health & fitness center. I went to take yoga/aerobics classes a few times but then Vishal asked me if I would lead some fitness classes and speak about nutrition. I excitedly said "haan ji!" & ended up leading about 4 or 5 classes and got to speak extensively about weight reduction/maintenance through diet and exercise (in spite of me having zero formal training & simply having an interest in all this stuff, my nephew-in-law had made me out to be a complete "expert"). & apparently, I'm much more motivational & inspirational in Hindi, because two weeks passed before I was able to go back to his classes and when I did, all these women were thanking me for "changing their lives." I'm not sure if I've ever "changed someone's life" in the US, & it was really an amazingly rewarding thing to experience. Basically, if this whole J.O.B. thing doesn't work out stateside then I'm moving to the Motherland to start my desi version of "Curves." :-P
Well, thats all from me & hey, I told you it was going to be RANDOM! Thank you RS for your help with the blog while I was away & I hope everyone else is doing well.
Write soon ~ Smile Moon :)
Write soon ~ Smile Moon :)
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