Dear Friends, You may not want to read this chapter and the five that follow—all of them on India.  One of the reasons I am not blogging in a public forum is that I don’t want to offend while painting with my own broad brush, but I also don’t want to have to beat around the bush in personal reminiscence to friends and family.  What follows in these six chapters on India is a consequence of my own particular experience and my own reactions to that experience.  Nothing more.

I have been utterly defeated by even the thought of writing about India.  And that predicament has gone on now for several days in the midst of shipboard work and without relief—to the point where we will soon land in Mauritius, an entirely different milieu, and I’ll still be struggling to make sense of it.  Maybe I always will.  India’s new tourist marketing slogan is IncredibleIndia!  It is that, indeed.

I have slept the last two nights while at sea, though, after not having slept nearly the entire time of the six days in the country.

And I’ve made progress on my hand wash.  Most of the students don’t even try.  What they don’t send to the ship’s laundry room to be bleached in hot water they just discard.  Nearly everyone has tossed shoes or boots out.  The ship’s crew spends two days after leaving the second (western) Indian port of Kochin cleaning the carpeting on the stairs.  The stairs were one of the few places they couldn’t cover with cardboard and plastic before we arrived at the first (eastern) Indian port of Chennai.  (To be fair to India, there is really not a passenger seaport in either Chennai or Kochin so our ship is docked in areas that primarily serve freighters and tankers.  The trucks with container cargo travel to meet vessels over roads and terminals with more dirt than pavement so that everything is black with soot.)

If you really want to know what the world will look like when global warming and climate change are further along and they arrive with full force in the Northern Hemisphere, come to India in the Southern Hemisphere.  It is dusty, dirty and drought-stricken and it is hard not to despair at the extreme poverty in the land and among the people we see at every turn, especially in the north near the capital.  Many parts of the north have had no rain for months—except for when the monsoons come and then torrents run off the parched earth.  Many of the most noteworthy historical sites are in the north so we travel through towns and villages where the lack of rain is painfully apparent.  In my tour group for a four-day trip north, we have a distinguished scientist who has been arguing in class and informal discussions that the human race will not give up soon enough on a carbon-based economy but will simply find ways to adapt to hotter temperatures and higher sea levels.  I suspect that what he sees in India makes him re-think that perspective.  How desperate will it make all of us to live in unsustainable, crowded, parched, squalid conditions?  Do we really think that all of us who are accustomed to comfort and cleanliness in full measure in our daily lives will prosper when it all shrivels?

When we return from the north to Kerala in the south—and we speak to people who’ve not gone to the north and express concern at the widespread heat and dryness in the south—we tell them that the southwest near Kochin is a veritable and verdant tropical paradise in comparison.  The state of Kerala, of which Kochin is a part, is also manifestly better run and governed by a Communist Party that is currently in power and has been for some time.  After China, Vietnam, Cambodia and now the Indian state of Kerala—all of whom have social policies in place to control population and make opportunities in labor, education and health more equally available and distributed—it is hard not to be in favor of the social democracy they all implement in varying ways.

Democracy seems completely inadequate to the task of India.  Remember the Janis Joplin song with the lyric—“freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”?  I can’t shake those words but I am also too ill-informed to completely resolve in my own mind all of the paradoxes of India that I see.  Still, I’m not sure that the country needs the kind of freedom we see everywhere at its most absurd.  India seems to be one enormous village—with some families slightly more advantaged than impoverished and all families vying for subsistence (if impoverished) and favor (if better off).  We’re told that corruption is widespread although it’s hard to know whether that’s anything but a natural outgrowth of family and class interconnections.  I mean, exactly what are the alternatives if nothing else matters but hustling, family connections and class? (The parallel with what is happening in our own American society with growing gaps between poor and obscenely rich—and loss of a large, viable middle class—haunt me constantly in India.)

Religion is even more troublesome in that Hinduism is basically the state religion (80% of Indians are Hindu) while Christian groups and socialist coops run relatively small-scale charities.  It’s hard not to take the saintly Mother Theresa to task for not being a standard bearer in favor of population control when that is so clearly the most critical issue in a country where so many problems are in extreme supply.  What kind of compassion doesn’t dare look at root causes for misery?

After we depart, it takes a full day for the acrid smell of smoke and trash fires to dissipate from inside and outside the ship.  It takes another full day before India’s haze clears and we see the sky again.  When it does reappear it reflects an Indian Ocean in tones of azure blue, aquamarine, and ink blue—azure when the sea is smooth, aquamarine when it’s stirred up by the ship’s path, and ink when a cloud passes overhead.  After our rock and roll experience in the so-called Pacific, the surface of this beautiful wide ocean resembles antique, wavy glass that almost looks like it must be a gel as it folds and unfolds past the bow of the ship.  On the horizon there are so many different types and levels of cloud formations that they look like whole white cities of clouds.

My spirits begin to lift from my black mood of the last few days.  I am 60 years old and I have to say that I worry about our American young people.  Most of them are always tired, and that’s not just because some of them party all night.  Many show real interest only for sports or recorded music—since most can’t afford to text or phone all the way back home—or when a camel, elephant or monkey appears among the livestock along the roads.  (The top note of our four day trip appears to be the elephant ride at the Amber Fort in Jaipur.)  They take a lot of photos and record a lot of video to use in their projects but they don’t seem to ever enter into the spirit of the places we visit.  Instead, many deal with India by plugging into their iPods and sleeping straight through on our buses and rail cars while I can’t take my eyes off the sights we go by even to read.  Many of our guides ask if they should stop talking because so many of our students are obviously dozing.  It is hell to get them out of bed in the morning for the very early morning departures; I don’t have my usual problem waking early because I don’t sleep.  My work as trip leader is frequently maddening and tiresome and I constantly try to remind myself to be of good cheer through it all.   I flag in spirit but I last and I even revive when I see so much that we visit is so remarkable.  There are just so many distractions for young people that can suck up huge amounts of their time for naught: The students who smoke are always looking for their next chance to smoke and the ones who drink too much are always looking for their next chance to drink.  Nearly all of them look forward to every opportunity to take in vast quantities of food and drink—much left on their plates—while I want to gag and never eat again at the sight of so many bone-thin people in our host country.  We all must defecate more in a day than some of the Indians eat in a month.  The one thing many students can do for interminable amounts of time is to shop.  They can all shop far beyond the time they would otherwise drop if they were doing anything else.  I feel sorry for many of the most disaffected students when I don’t feel ashamed for all of us.

But despite all of the homegrown privileges and attitudes the students bring to this trip of India in extremis, maybe there is more to the story of the students than is apparent to me as our trip unfolds.

And I hasten to add that in post-trip conversations and formal reflections in their seminars some of the students demonstrate that they do, indeed, struggle to deal with what they encounter in India and the experience has stirred them in ways they did not expect and don’t completely understand.  (Who does?)  A few of the young men choose to leave one of our large organized trips near its end and fly on their own to Mumbai (Bombay).  The next morning they visit the immense slum called Dharavi, the largest single slum neighborhood in all of Asia, home to over 1 million people.  55% of Mumbai’s 16.4 million population lives in slums.  Later they tell me that they met with a friendly reception—much different than their experience as American tourists targeted for sales in a large group—among the children and women hauling water from a public standpipe.   The favorite activity is for adults and children to pose with the students and see themselves on LED screens.

Perhaps all of the students are more touched than I can ever appreciate.  At the end of our field trip, I speak with a small group of the young women about how future trips might enable them to engage more directly, and still safely, with the Indian people and students.  They feel badly about needing to ignore and push past all of the hawkers and beggars near the tourist and shopping sites.  We hand-on those recommendations to our executive dean when we return.  (The young men prefer to and can walk the streets, neighborhood slums and parks on their own to engage with local people, but that can be both inappropriate culturally and unsafe for the young women unless some of our far-fewer male students volunteer to accompany them.)  It is becoming increasingly obvious to the smarter students that the large motor coaches of our organized field trips are a magnet for the dispiriting crush of vendors who want to do nothing but sell trinkets to the students for the best price they can get.  The bargaining isn’t fun in India like it was in Vietnam or Cambodia, nor polite and restrained like it was in China; in India there is an edge of desperation.