Taken Sept 7, 2013 at Gandhi Bazaar
DAILY PHOTO: Flower Market
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Category Archives: India
DAILY PHOTO: State Central Library
Taken on September 3, 2013 in Cubbon Park
Bangalore has many buildings that look dull red in the midday light but become a vivid orange when exposed to the long, low light of dawn and dusk. This is but one. Others include the Karnataka High Court and the State Museum.
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DAILY PHOTO: Orange as Cammoflague
The background in this photo is the Hindu temple that is on the site of Tipu Sultan’s Palace, but which predates the Sultan’s Indo-Islamic teak structure. There is a simple but beautiful garden in between the palace and the temple that displays various flowering plants.
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DAILY PHOTO: The Tree of Life
Taken September 3, 2013 in Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens
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The Horn As A Navigational Tool
When I was learning to drive, one piece of advice I still remember was:
Never blow your horn because whatever damn fool thing the other driver is doing to get you in an accident is predictable. They will continue to do the same damn fool thing. Therefore, focus on avoiding the collision, and not venting your anger. Honking the horn can only cause the other driver’s panicked reaction to be unpredictable, thus making the situation more dire. The horn can cause inopportune slamming of the brakes, gunning the accelerator, or swerving sharply (invariably in the direction one was hoping to avoid them.)
This isn’t advice practiced in India. Rather the horn seems to be used to say, “One of us should be paying attention right now, and I kind of need a break.”
I suspect one reason why Indians don’t follow the above advice is because there is no erratic response to horn blowing here–there is no response whatsoever. The locals don’t even hear the horns anymore. I’ve only been here three days and I’m already becoming desensitized to them. (Although I took an early morning walk this morning and everything was perfect in the world because the horn blowers had not yet awoken.) No doubt, many literally cannot hear the horns after a lifetime subjected to the blare,
I wonder whether the blowing of the horn isn’t just an attempt to assert one’s existence among the whirring throngs of motorists.
Bangalore suffers from regular, albeit ephemeral, power outages. Sometimes the sewer drains don’t work as intended. Sometimes, cars come to a gliding halt; hoods popping up. But one thing works with the certainty of death and taxes. and that’s the horn on every single motorized vehicle in the country. One would think the horns would wear out, that they would choke and sputter, but there seems no sign of that.
Only 1 in 3 drivers are looking at the road at any given moment (but the one not looking slams on his horn to alert others to keep an eye on him.)
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DAILY PHOTO: Backstreet Bangalorean Chapel
Taken September 2, 2013
Once and a while stumbling through the back streets pays off, and rewards one with an unexpected treasure.
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DAILY PHOTO: Handicrafts Market
Taken September 1, 2013 in Bangalore, India.
This is my first post from my home for the next two years–Bangalore, India. I arrived in the wee hours of the morning, and–owing to fuzzy-headedness that I’ll blame on jet lag–I forgot to put a memory card in my computer. Thus, I haven’t had a chance to take many pictures yet. More to come.
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Enough with the Indian Food Warnings, Already
Bengali Full Meal; Source Nandinissaha (via Wikipedia)
When I tell people that I’m moving to India, a common–but strange–response is for them to issue warnings about the food and water. I find this odd for two reasons.
First, said warnings are often issued without much firsthand experience of developing world dining (not including high-brow resorts), and without knowledge of my dining history.
Here are few facts that might help one to better understand my approach. I’ve dined on cold seafood salad in a Phnom Penh cafe. I’ve noshed on snake-on-a-stick in China. I once supped at a home/restaurant in the Peruvian Andes whose latrine consisted entirely of a squat-hole cantilevered out over a cliff side. A couple of days in Bangkok, I consumed nothing but street-food. I was raised on a farm with non-pasteurized milk, and had a father who wasn’t above cooking up a nice-looking piece of road kill. Not a bloated opossum mind you– but I’ve gnawed clean the drumstick of a pheasant that died not by birdshot, but on the grill of a Peterbuilt. (Funny story, spellcheck wanted to change “pheasant” in the preceding sentence to “peasant.” That would have really freaked you out.) So while my home life has been first world, I’ve got a little third world in my gut.
Now you’re probably thinking, “This idiot is infinitely lucky to be alive, and given his behavior he will probably die soon.” Au contraire mon frère. It’s not that I randomly engage in high-risk behavior. Even locals get Delhi Belly if they don’t choose wisely–despite the full panoply of aggressive gut organisms working on their behalf. I’m quite aware of the hazards, and take calculated risks backed up with sensible precautions.
It’s funny that people live in terror of street food–not that there aren’t some carts that one should run from screaming. However, do you really know what the pimply-faced teenager is touching or scratching during the act of assembling your burger at Chili’s? I know exactly what the hands of the old lady grilling my moo ping on Sukhumvit Road looked like. I got a good look because there was always a line that I had to wait in– and gladly so. (FYI – sanitary wipes or hand sanitizer are one thing you should take with you wherever you go in this world.)
I’m not saying that I’ve never gotten an upset stomach, but I’ve done some remote third world travel and never experienced anything worse than resulted from any given trip to Taco Bell.
I’m quite fond of Indian food, and am sure I will cope well with having it for the majority of my meals for the next couple years. Yes, I’ll have to severely reduce my intake of ice-cold beverages and raw foods. (Ice and wash water are the hidden killers that probably cause more food-borne ailments than anything else.) However, ice-cold beverages –while refreshing and pleasant– are not really that healthy for a body in high temperatures anyway. (Flash heating or cooling of things at the other end of the temperature spectrum is bound to cause problems–one’s organs aren’t that different.) While I like raw vegetables, the human body is more efficient at extracting nutrients from cooked food, so there’s a side advantage there as well.
I think people freak themselves out and miss out on some excellent food. One individual who traveled widely once told me that she never ate the local food for fear of getting sick. I felt bad for her. She traveled to the source of some of the world’s best food, and then dined on American fast food–that’s a squandering of no small part of the travel experience. Of course, some people have very weak systems, and that may have been the case for her. (American fast food may be bad for you, but it is uniformly bad throughout the world.)
The second thing that I find strange is that when I was moving to England 25 years ago, no one warned me that I would be going to one of the most gastronomically unappealing places on the planet. Let’s face it, the reason Britain took over India in the first place was so that they could get something decent to eat. Curry is also the reason they didn’t let go easily.
Is there some bias whereby people tend to respond with negativity when one says that one is moving to the developing world, versus positive responses to moving within the developed world? One probably shouldn’t respond with negativity to news someone is moving anywhere, but–if you must– you should tailor it to the individual concerned. For example, if one said to me, “That shrill flute in their music is going to get on your last nerve.” Well, sorry, but that’s probably a correct statement. (No offense, I’m sure it sounds lovely if you were brought up with it, but it will be–at best– an acquired taste for me.)
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Outsourced as a Guide to Indian Corporate Culture?
As my wife and I prepare for our move to Bangalore, we are doing research to help us avoid inadvertent insult and blasphemy . We’ve learned such useful facts as: a.) don’t tug on a Sikh man’s beard, and b.) don’t buy a statue of the goddess Durga to use as a hat rack.
Durga Source: Dipankan001 (via Wikipedia)
These are just the kind of faux pas a well-meaning but uninformed American couple might make. (Oh, you say, not really?)
Every culture has its little proclivities that seem insane from the outside, but which are so deeply ingrained as to be invisible from the inside. (In fact, I had trouble thinking up such American cultural proclivities, but I believe they exist. Our norms are just so ingrained as to be hard to see. Of course, we are also a diverse society, a young nation, and tend toward the irreverent in the social domain– all of which may make our cultural idiosyncrasies look a bit different from those of more traditional societies.)
We’ve been reading books like Culture Shock! India, which is one of a series of books that explain the various cultural idiosyncrasies of different countries. (I was first introduced to the series through Culture Shock! Cambodia, though I have read other such books about China and Japan.) Such guides are extremely useful for explaining do’s and don’ts. However, they don’t necessarily prepare one for the corporate culture of India, which is a mix of Indian, Western, and multinational business cultures. For insight into the corporate culture we turned to:
For those of you unfamiliar, Outsourced was a sitcom that ran for one season (2010-2011) on NBC. The premise of the show was that the manager of a novelty company call center is moved from the US to Mumbai. He becomes acquainted with Indian culture as he must teach his staff enough about American culture so that they can communicate with the customers they are on the phone with all day. Some of the humor comes from the exposure of a very conservative workforce to products that include dildos and slutty Halloween costumes, but much of it is just cultural tension more broadly. The show was popular with critics and Americans familiar with India. Unfortunately, that was not enough to keep it on the air, particularly when Americans who buy tacky crap and couldn’t find India on a map were the butt of the joke at least as much as were Indians. (Americans who buy tacky crap and are geographically illiterate are a large demographic within the television viewing public.) At any rate, the show was clever and well-acted.
One may scoff at the use of a sitcom as reference material, but the show seemed to be well-researched. For example, I know that its discussion of the famous Indian head bobble matched the description in the cultural guide quite well. The bobble is a non answer that can mean virtually anything. The video below gives a more detailed explanation, but the visual is not so good. From what I’ve seen, most people tend to do this action more with the top of the head staying relatively stationary while the jawline swings side-to-side.
This left us wondering whether other elements of the show will ring true. The show introduced me to a new term, “holiduping.” This is when one’s employees convince a manager that a day is a holiday, when in reality it isn’t. To get the joke, you must know that Indians have enough work holidays to make US Federal employees say, “Damn, that’s a lot of holidays!” Furthermore, not all the holidays are national. There may be days taken off in Karnataka that are not in Gujarat, and vice versa. This can make it a challenge for new comers to keep track.
I’m curious as to the views of people in-the-know about how accurate Outsourced was. Most of the cast were Americans of Indian origin, but it doesn’t look like the same was true of the lead writers.
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Transmigration of Blog
We’re down to about a month until our move to India.
The house is largely in order with only a few odds and ends remaining.
Most of our worldly possessions are in storage, and I haven’t really missed any of it. (A lot of “moss” collects when your stone stops rolling for a few years.) The house now echoes. Movers will be coming to get the small amount of stuff we’ll ship to India in the next couple weeks. Then we’ll really be living minimalist.
We’ve got all our shots with the exception of the final doses for Hepatitis. We’ll get those in country. With respect to shots, when moving to India, one has to get… well, all of them.
Visas are in the works though we’ve had some delay on that front. However, fortuitously, the local Indian Consulate is beginning to take applications, and so I won’t have to send my application off to another city and can eliminate the time and risk of postal transit.
My list of things to do consists of fewer large, all-consuming tasks and more quick and easy jobs.
All of this means that I’m getting back to writing. This is a bit like getting a corroded junk-yard jalopy running again. It’s remarkable how much the creative juices curdle when one spends a few months focusing on home repairs, monitoring contractors, getting shots, and other mundane tasks of international relocation. I worked almost exclusively on drafting two novels for a period of a little over a year, and now–as I resume writing and revisions–I’m having to re-read just to figure out what they’re about. On the bright side, I sometime surprise myself with what I wrote. For me, there’s definitely economy of scale in long writing projects. Writing eight hours a day yields a lot more than eight times writing for one hour a day. I lose voices, character idiosyncrasies, and plot detail so easily unless I’m immersed in them.
As for this blog, I think a rebirth is in order. Since I’m moving to India, I’ve invoked the concept of transmigration of soul. In Hinduism, some sects of Buddhism, as well as a few lesser known religions, there’s a belief in reincarnation in which the soul may be reborn into an altogether different type of container. For example, if you were good in your last life, you might come back as a lama or a lap cat. If you were bad in your last life, you might come back as a slug or a Congressman. So the question of the moment is what this blog will be reborn as when it sputters up from out of the ashes.
I would like the site to remain (or, perhaps, become) humorous, but I’d like the humor to be less curmudgeonly. This presents a challenge because I’m not sure that I know how to be funny without being a curmudgeon. In point of fact, I’m not sure I know how to not be a curmudgeon–funny or otherwise.
I want this site to be reflective of my new life. I’ll continue posting photos, though after the move they will be disproportionately from Bangalore, India, and a few adjacent countries to which I will be traveling. So it’ll remain part travel site. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of lessons learned about travel in India to share.
When I’m not writing or sleeping, I’ll be engaged in a quest of self-improvement. The development of mind and body have been raised to high art in India, and I hope to find some of those individuals with that knowledge.
Expanding my abilities and understanding of martial arts is one of my goals for this period. It’ll be a challenge to keep from becoming rusty in the jissen kobudō (Japanese old school martial arts that emphasize pragmatic skills) that I have been studying my entire adult life. However, in addition to working on what I know, there are other activities that I think will help expand my understanding while keeping me suitable limber and conditioned. I would like to learn a little about indigenous Indian martial arts such as kalaripayattu, silambam, and–if time permits–gatka. Furthermore, I would like find a place to train in Bangalore where I can do some training in what I’d call general jissen (practical fighting) skills.
However, my attempts to improve myself will not be limited to martial arts alone. India might be cursed with plagues of poverty, pollution, and–well–plague, but they have no shortage of gurus–whether I can find one that’s reputable and willing is another matter. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that I don’t have a firm grasp of my mind. My mind runs and I don’t pay enough attention to what it is telling me; I don’t put enough effort into fixing what is broken. I read a quote recently about people who put great effort into studying the external world, but who remain ignorant of themselves. This struck close to home, but it’s not just me–it’s widespread. People study psychology in school and learn about cognitive biases, but they don’t put the information to use in becoming more virtuous people. For example, a person might learn about the “self-serving bias” –whereby people claim responsibility for successes but place blame for failures on external factors–and say, “yeah, it’s funny that other people totally do that.”
Part of practicing martial arts is keeping one’s self healthy, against all odds. While I’ve never practiced yoga, I appreciate the belief that mind and body are inseparable. I would like to work on building a body that is less likely to be crippled by the practice of martial arts as I age. I intend to study Thai yoga massage, which incorporates stretching and pressure point massage. There’s an interesting connection between India and Thailand with respect to this form of bodywork. While it’s most closely associated with Thailand, some claim that its roots are in Northern India with a master called Guru Jivaka. While visiting Thailand, I developed an appreciation for the health benefits of this type of massage–particularly for one prone to have things out of whack. However, I didn’t have the time to study it during that visit. There is also the more distinctly indigenous holistic healing system of India, Ayurveda, and I would like to learn more about it as well.
In short, I intend to have a pretty full agenda while living in India, and I hope readers will find my posts about these experiences interesting and worthwhile.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 