A travel essay of a recent visit to India, which reveals, with humor and insight, the tensions and contradictions facing the emerging world power. In particular, the book explores the roles of women and children in India today and includes discussions with experts on this topic, providing insight into this important and often neglected issue.
A travel essay of a recent visit to India, which reveals, with humor and insight, the tensions and contradictions facing the emerging world power. In particular, the book explores the roles of women and children in India today and includes discussions with experts on this topic, providing insight into this important and often neglected issue.
Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws: A Journey through Modern India
224
Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws: A Journey through Modern India
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Overview
A travel essay of a recent visit to India, which reveals, with humor and insight, the tensions and contradictions facing the emerging world power. In particular, the book explores the roles of women and children in India today and includes discussions with experts on this topic, providing insight into this important and often neglected issue.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555916183 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Laura Pedersen has written for the New York Times and is the author of Play Money, Going Away Party, Beginner's Luck (chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection), Buffalo Gal, and Buffalo Unbound. In 1994, President Clinton honored her as one of Ten Outstanding Young Americans. She has appeared on Oprah, Good Morning America, Primetime Live, and The Late Show with David Letterman, and she writes for several well-known comedians. Pedersen lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws
A Journey through Modern India
By Laura Pedersen
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Laura PedersenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55591-754-8
CHAPTER 1
Bewildered, Bothered, and Bewitched
My introduction to India came through that bedrock of American recreation during the latter half of the twentieth century, the television. Specifically, the 1960s sitcom. Bewitched starred the stunning, nose-twitching actress Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stephens, a good witch who decided to forego her magical powers (most of the time) in order to achieve the 1960s version of the female American Dream as an average suburban housewife. However, when otherworldly symptoms arose, more often than not caused by the bumbling Aunt Clara and her spells gone bad, it was necessary to call on the family witch doctor, Dr. Bombay. Thereby my first association with all things India at the impressionable age of five was in the form of Welsh-born character actor Bernard Fox, appearing out of thin air dressed in outlandish costumes, surrounded by a coterie of sexy nurses, cracking corny jokes, and providing questionable cures.
India next appeared when I started kindergarten, in 1970. There weren't any students who hailed from the subcontinent in my Western New York elementary school, but American Indians were going from being called Indians to Native Americans, except by actual Native Americans who, by and large, preferred being called Indians. So when someone said the word Indian, kids often asked, "Dot or feather?" This was just before political correctness came into being (Need any Helen Keller jokes?).
However, such nomenclature confusion existed for good reason. Indian was the name Christopher Columbus (the Italian who got funding from Spain to discover a country that would be taken over by England, only to gain independence with help from France) gave the people he found in the New World, believing he'd arrived in the Indies, which was the medieval name for Asia. To further befuddle things, islands in the Caribbean Sea came to be called the West Indies when it turned out they weren't the Indies of the East. And, just for fun, the islands known as the Lesser Antilles are located in the eastern West Indies.
In the neighborhood where I grew up, people regularly headed off to play bingo at the Seneca Indian Reservation or the neighborhood Catholic church, despite the Corinthians 1:36 edict against ill-gotten gains. The Seneca Reservation had the advantage of tax-free gas and cigarettes, while the church offered nonalcoholic refreshments and guilt. In the 1980s and '90s, American Indian tribes around the country were busy expanding their gambling enterprises by building actual casinos with hotels and stage shows. Meantime, India Indians in America were taking over 7-Elevens, Carvel stores, and roadside motels at a rate that provided a gold mine of material for stand-up comics — the likes of which wouldn't be seen again until Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot his hunting partner in the face and Osama Bin Laden was found to have more pornography than Times Square in the 1970s.
Technology began booming in the 1980s and the subcontinent soon became known for operating call centers, where your service inquiries would be routed, especially for operational issues, such as whether your CD — ROM drive could interchangeably hold a disc or a coffee cup (Answer: no). As a result, by the time I arrived on Wall Street and the word Indian came up, colleagues asked, "Computer or casino?" Political correctness was late in hitting the stock exchange, as evidenced by the weekly bimbo contests in which traders competed to see how many scantily clad women could be lured to the tradinng floor for "free tours" tha ended on a balcony with a Plexiglas barrier that transformed pantygazing from a sport into a vocation for hundreds of male employees.
I'd wanted to travel to India for many years but feared that the poverty and misogyny would be too disquieting. I had read articles about children purposely maimed to beg more efficiently and wives cast out of their husband's homes after mysterious cooking accidents and forced to live on the streets scarred and deformed, if they survived at all. Meantime, the stories went on, if a woman's husband happened to die, she suddenly found herself in terrible circumstances. And women in bad marriages regularly resorted to suicide rather than apply for divorce because of the social stigma. Having been raised as a Unitarian Universalist during the 1970s, when the opportunities for women in this country were still largely limited to housewife, teacher, nurse, or Miss America, I spent many weekends marching to support equal rights for women while my dad enjoyed pointing out that our local feminist collective bookstore contained no humor section. So I secretly worried that upon entering the country I'd have flashbacks complete with a Helen Reddy soundtrack, dash into the first Indian women and children's advocacy group I came across, and devote the rest of my days to folding pamphlets, building birthing centers, and promoting the serious business of change.
However, by the start of the new millenium, surveys were confirming that the recent success of the Indian economy was partly due to the fact that women had finally been given the freedom to fully participate in this surging democracy. Their contributions, from piecemeal worker all the way up to president, were a substantial component in powering an economic engine with a 9 percent growth rate and the potential to lift millions out of poverty. When women were no longer discriminated against or treated as encumbrances, but given opportunity, they quickly became society's biggest assets. This was something worth seeing.
Another factor that had been holding me back was that the land of swamis, meditation, yoga, toe rings, and walking barefoot on fire was also renowned for mob violence. When two Sikh bodyguards gunned down prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, more than three thousand citizens were killed during the frenzied days that followed. In 2002, a train fire that killed fifty-eight passengers, mostly Hindu pilgrims, was blamed on Muslims, and more than two thousand died in the riotous aftermath; people were burned alive, women and young girls were raped while government officials looked the other way, and two hundred thousand Muslims were driven from their homes. On a lesser but still worrisome note, when a popular 1980s Indian television serialization of the religious epic Ramayana came to an end, viewers took to the streets with bricks and bottle rockets in a region that was home to some particularly dedicated and hotheaded audience members. Would the safety-conscious traveler need also to carry a TV guide?
Lastly, when it came to corndog-fed foreigners, the food and water in India had a reputation for being a dysentery delivery system that resulted in what we called the crabapple two-step back home in Western New York.
Obviously the United States has its fair share of problems, but at least here I could vote, protest, and volunteer and thereby feel that I'm at least attempting to make some small contribution to improving my corner of the world. In India, I'd be nothing more than a helpless observer.
However, by 2010 I wasn't getting any younger. I'd survived disco, Afros, Pintos, Jaws, Odd job, atomic wedgies, rainbow wedgies, and Watergate. I went to school back when trophies were handed out for winning, not participation. I was on my sixth dog, to be exact, and reports from the subcontinent suggested that things were changing for the better. Furthermore, India was one of the few countries in that part of the world where citizens didn't hate the United States like it was a job they were getting paid to perform. After trips to Greece, Russia, and Egypt, I was tired of pretending to be Canadian, which entailed keeping up with hockey scores and memorizing recipes for making peameal back bacon.
My divorced parents, after having both lost their spouses within the space of fourteen months, seemed to be getting back on track as best they could. At least they appeared healthy — Mom solicited actual doctors' opinions, and you just sort of eyeballed Dad to make sure he was getting his daily allowance of coffee, cigarettes, Corona, and pastrami, since he's a man at two with nature. As an only child, it occurred to me that some energetic younger brothers and sisters might come in handy, especially since Mom and Dad were living two thousand miles apart. Unfortunately, when you advertise for siblings on Craigslist at this age and stage, consumers are more interested in your potential as an organ donor than as a big sister.
CHAPTER 2Eastward Ho!
Two days after buying my ticket on the state-owned Air India, direct from New York to New Delhi, the airline experienced a horrible crash that killed 158 people. A plane coming from Dubai overshot a runway in southern India, hurtled into a ravine, and exploded. My travel agent e-mailed: But that was their first accident in ten years — Freakonomics would tell us that the odds say you are safer on them after an accident because they are not "due" for another ten years!! Or you now prefer I explore connecting options?
Her logic was compelling — until you factored in that the cause of the crash was poor pilot training and tricky landing facilities. But the meandering cloud of volcanic ash tap-dancing its way across Europe like crickets on a hot stove still made a direct flight preferable, so I threw caution to the wind the way one does when climbing aboard Coney Island's rackety Cyclone roller coaster. Air India it was. The key to a brilliant vacation is finding adventure and possibility in the face of disaster and tragedy. And a prescription for Ambien.
By catching a cab from Manhattan to JFK Airport, in Queens, you already feel that you're halfway to Southeast Asia, since most drivers in Manhattan hail from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, and they jabber away in their singsong native tongues on hands-free cell phones while attempting to break the taxi land speed record. These phone calls entail multiple listeners, so a driver can apparently have his entire extended family of six hundred on the line at once to discuss who's bringing the rasam masala to the Friday night mosque social. The constantly under construction JFK Airport, with its outdated facilities, poor signage, sickly fluorescent lighting, and flock of live-in birds, operates much like a developing country, so this furthers a smooth transition.
I arrived at the airport just twenty-four hours after fed-up flight attendant Steven Slater performed a spectacular "take this job and shove it" on the JFK tarmac subsequent to being cursed out by a defiant passenger. He grabbed a couple beers, disembarked on the inflatable emergency evacuation slide with one in each hand, dashed to the employee parking lot, and headed home, where he was promptly arrested for reckless endangerment and criminal mischief. The Washington Post dubbed it "pulling a Slater," perhaps to suggest a nonviolent version of "going postal." I felt everyone's pain — passengers, pilots, and flight attendants alike. The tarmac at JFK is an enormous parking lot where one spends mind-numbing hours waiting to take off amidst the sound of jackhammers and strange smells that, best I can tell, involve past-its-prime egg salad. Or else one waits for a gate to open up following a long flight while babies cry and toilets overflow and people are famished for anything but a minipretzel. New Yorkers know that rules about remaining in their seats don't apply to them. What are the airport police going to do — take away our feet?
Surely there will soon be an annual awards ceremony for individuals who go berserk in the most newsworthy way, such as when a cell phone rang nonstop during a one-woman off-Broadway show. When the theatergoer finally answered, the actress hopped offstage, got on the line, and explained the circumstances to the caller. How many actors can say they've received a standing ovation just ten minutes into a performance?
I haven't yet turned into a cell phone freak, but sadly I have become one of those people who arrive for long international flights wearing pajamas. I vaguely recall that when I was a child, people actually used to dress up for plane travel as if they were going to a wife-swapping party. That was back before passengers were required to strip, have their skivvies wanded, and submit to a colonoscopy prior to boarding.
Nowadays many people wear their sweats and scuffs to the airport like toddlers being taken to a drive-in movie. It's hard to blame frequent fliers, since they know what it's like to spend several days waiting out a power failure, terrorist attack, or volcano eruption while sleeping atop molded plastic chairs and bathing in the shallow metal sink of a public restroom. And just when that ordeal ends, reclaiming one's luggage is more like awaiting the birth of a first child. That's why a sequined poly-blend tracksuit has come to symbolize what naturalists call adaptability and functions as the linchpin to our survival as a species. Or as Gilbert and Sullivan so memorably wrote: "Let the punishment fit the crime." Next stop, New Delhi.
CHAPTER 3Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws
I discovered that catching a cab from the airport to your hotel in any Indian metropolis is an exercise in patience and networking, as would seem to be the case throughout much of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. You will see lots of taxis, but whenever you inquire about hiring one, a man leads you in the opposite direction. A transaction may eventually occur that appears to be on the up-and-up, but you still don't climb into a cab. Noisy caucusing continues at curbside or in a parking lot as if political candidates are being selected in some smoke-filled back room. There are more conversations and peregrinations, and finally you're excited to be loading your bags into a trunk. However, the driver now disappears for a period of time. Several people have asked you for money "for helping," which is a good moment to point out that you requested a taxi and not to be led through a labyrinth of wheeler-dealers who appear to have been extras in Slumdog Millionaire. The driver then returns with someone else who has also been "helped." On the bright side, using the prepaid taxi stand (which does not cut out nearly as many middlemen as one would think) avoids any unexpected companions and tours of the city that serve to run up the meter. However, the only place I've seen more hot meters than in New York City is Bulgaria, where the taxis are driven by former Olympic weightlifters and thus negotiation is discouraged.
The real culture shock of New Delhi doesn't begin so much with the separate exit from baggage claim for ladies as it does upon hitting the highway. You're driving in a country where one hundred thousand people a year are killed in road accidents, which would be like losing the entire population of Boulder, Colorado, by the end of every December. The city of Delhi alone has about ten thousand accidents a year, with twenty-five hundred fatalities. And this is a place without blizzards, black ice, or avalanches. Driver's education clearly needs to be supplemented with classes in applied physics, because the main problem is that the roads are filled with a wide range of objects of varying weights, number of legs, and trajectories traveling at different velocities, including but not confined to: pedestrians, pedicabs, pushcarts, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, scooters, careening motorcycles, antique tractors, heavy machinery, brightly painted trucks, buses, cars, thirty-year-old Fiat taxis, SUVs, donkey carts, oxen, bovines, goats, and equal numbers of three- and four-legged dogs. My favorites were the makeshift vehicles constructed from the leftover parts of others (presumably demolished in accidents), such as a combine seat and steering wheel atop a minivan chassis with the windshield of an old crop duster and the bell from a bicycle. Think Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. None of these modes of conveyance contained seatbelts or airbags (unless you include animal bladders). Anything framed in metal featured numerous dents, while anything framed in fur sported bald spots. Two questions immediately arose: (1) Is my life insurance paid up? and (2) Where are all the trial lawyers?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws by Laura Pedersen. Copyright © 2012 Laura Pedersen. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Bewildered, Bothered, and Bewitched 1
Eastward Ho! 9
Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws 13
Mother India 21
Old and New Delhi 29
Taj Mahal 41
Safaris, Spas, and Shopping 49
Shall We Gather at the River? 57
Oh! Kolkata! 65
Salaam Mumbai! 81
All Aboard! 101
Down South 111
So Many Gods, So Little Time 123
Caste Away System 145
Boldface Names 151
Monkeys and Tigers and Snakes, Oh My! 167
Game Changers: Women and Children 175
India Unbound 191
About the Author 210