Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Should I stay or should I go?

The summer of being a corporate wife is over. Straw poll: should I keep this except not write about work? But then what's the fun in that? Or do I start over somewhere else? Or, do I just give in to the urge to let it go? The trip's documented, my travelogue more or less done.

Friday, August 17, 2007

Home again home again, jiggedy jig

We're home. Monster jet-lagged. Happy.

I figured out after the last post that the Hindu majority stuff is the rhetoric of Partition. The last thing the Brits did/first thing the new govt did was create the states of Pakistan (Muslim) and India (Hindu). It's like if the trail of tears just happened: mass displacement, mass killings. Government sanctioned mutual mass murder. It was a parting shot for the British, and while Ghandi was against it, the new governments were all for it: the nation-state needs an ideological other. The upshot is a lot of evil BS.

I'm home for about 4 days then I'm off to Puerto Rico with my family. I'll be gone for a week, then home for a day, and then school starts.

No, not crazy at all.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Not buying it

We're in Delhi.

I keep being told (by media and tour guides) that India's got an 85(ish)% Hindu majority. And yet, everywhere I look I see evidence to the contrary. I get the feeling it's a bit like claiming the US is a Christian country.

On the same note, I had no idea of the incredibly pervasive Islamic influence here. I know that Hyderabad and Delhi were Muslim kingdoms at different points (I think one King built stuff in both places) but still--even in Kolkata/Calcutta and Mumbai--lots of mestizaje. The north more so than the south.

One amusing thing about it: our guide today kept referring to the Muslim invaders like it was a recent thing: first ones were about a thousand years ago. We went to Qutb Minar, the first mosque in India. They tore down Hindu temples to build most of it, and while they destroyed a lot of the faces and bodies, a lot is still visible. So, you see these Hindu pillars inside a mosque, complete with Islamic script. It's a gov't monument now, noone uses it for worship--and apparently they had to cover (with a green metal cage) a bit showing Ganesha; people were praying there. And if you have Hindus praying at the site of a mosque, well. All hell could well break loose.

And I kept wondering about my skepticism about holding that particular grudge, especially given the comparisons I keep making to colonial Mexico, where I think calling the Spanish invaders makes total sense. It comes down to cultural politics: in Mexico the Spanish won hands down. To this day anything European is privileged: materially and culturally. In India, that's really not the case. Muslims are a minority, especially in terms of cultural capital. While the biggest monuments in Indian cities are Muslim and English (the historic Hindu stuff was trashedby the invading armies), cultural and religious hegemony belongs to the Hindus. Indigenous tribal people here are as dispossessed and marginalized here as they are in the Americas; only here, nobody ever talks about them.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Negotiations

I keep thinking about ideas and social justice--in particular about microcredit and the ways it makes me reassess the ways I've almost always thought about capitalism. My class identification's conflicted, but I've been largely at an intellectual impasse about it. At best I said: yup, I'm a contradiction. Doing: ok--give. But thinking through it--that was the hard part. Thinking through it. This whole visit's made me do that, indeed the entire reason we're here makes me think about globalization and capitalism in a way far more complex than: globalization=bad/local=good. But then, that's true of almost everything, when you get down to it. Binary oppositions foreclose any sort of complex analysis. And to be honest, I've never seriously pushed a critique of the easy critiques of globalization. Yes, many horrendous things have come out of it. That part seems easy. Further than that, though, I hadn't gone far.

I think one of the reasons that Yunnis's book (and by extension, the notion of microcredit and its larger implications) has stayed with me is the absolute practicality of the question it approaches: How do you help the people at the very bottom--the poorest people in any given capitalist society? In the academy, where Marxist/post-marxist thinking is most effective, the focus is on an analysis of capitalism, not the way to a socialist utopia. It's useful for analyzing how capitalism shapes how we think and understand the world, the means of cultural and material production and reproduction. The post in post-marxism comes in here: you can use these analytic tools to negotiate the system you are subjecting to critique. Marxism itself is often invoked to describe a economic/political system, and yet The Communist Manifesto is all about industrial capitalism. While I understand that the radical critique of any system that oppresses people often involves a divestment from that system, its a position that doesn't seem tenable to me. Capitalism, especially in its information based, globalized form, isn't going anywhere anytime soon-- in spite of the hopefulness of calling it "late capitalism." Complicating this are my observations being in a developing, third world country. There are some very very good things about modernization, that capitalism can, and has, brought about here: basic quality of life stuff. And yet, not for the poorest of the poor. The benefits are uneven--cruelly and fantastically so.

Ding's comment below has gotten me thinking again about negotiating class, or any other system of privilege (race, gender, sexuality) from below--how do you negotiate terms you didn't agree to and that don't benefit you from the get-go?

Obviously, I'm on the side of negotiations. The metaphors of war don't get you far. Chicanas are always already traitors--we come from a long line of vendidas, as Moraga would put it. The alternative is to negotiate:to do that, you have to learn the other side's language, the other side's rules. You become part of both sides, something new--classic new mestiza stuff.

I don't think, however, that anyone's used mestizaje, or a Chicana feminist methodology to think about how poor women might negotiate capitalism. As a model of transnational feminist consciousness yes, as a challenge to the canon, of course. But the jump from thinking to doing, that's where we need help. Poetry, art, culture, all of these offer a vision of change: but the doing--that still matters.

The thing is, you need to be in a position to negotiate in the first place.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Felicidades to Dr. Stinky

I'm almost a week late. Still, Happy happy wedding wishes! Many felicitations. May your married life be full of all the best parts of hanging out with your sweetie.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Money! Money!

We're back from Kolkata. Indulged ourselves in a decadent and hideously expensive manner. Seriously. Sion had his first facial, and I spent hours at the spa and in the swimming pool. We drank lots, and bought lots of things in the market. Presents! And now, all I can think about is going home. We leave Hyderabad Saturday, then it's a day in Delhi, a day in Agra, back to Delhi, then home. Home. Home.

It's time. The housemates are all back, including my favorites, the Swede and his wife.

I'm reading Mohammed Yunnis's book, Banker to the Poor, and learning about microcredit. I had heard about it before from a student I used to talk to all the time (though she was never in any of my classes). Now of course, confronted with the materiality of serious poverty all the time, and my own relative wealth, I'm really thinking that I have to think about poverty, wealth, and capitalism from another angle, just to wrap my brain around it. Yunnis argues that capitalism doesn't have to be greedy, that it can be just as easily be driven by social justice; the entire logic of the Grameen bank is that there could be such a thing as a social-consciousness driven free market. It's a fascinating idea. That, and his emphasis on and insistence on working with communities of women.

I know. Those two paragraphs are at war with each other. What else is new?

Friday, August 3, 2007

Kolkata for the weekend!

Huzzah! We're off for an exotic weekend in Kolkata. Yeah; fancy hotels and restaurants, real exotic. It's our anniversary so we're being more self-indulgent than usual. Everyone here says Calcutta--I wonder what people there say. I have to pack now! Being picked up in a little over an hour. I'll come back with stories and lots of pictures.

I've been quiet because I don't want to turn this blog into a bitch-fest. I was, in many ways, totally unprepared for just how much I detest being "the wife." I think everyone must. No wonder so many middle class women go quietly nuts. And me without some key files I need to work on major projects, so I'm reduced to small and new pieces of writing--really not my plan for the summer.

I'm happy when adventurizing, but surly midweek, what with all the waiting. But now, we're off!

Monday, July 30, 2007

Talk to Strangers

Abids, a commercial district in Hyderabad, where there's lots and lots of shopping (clothes, shoes, electronics, department stores) is also home to a street book market on Sundays, when most of the shops are closed. I'd read about it somewhere online and we went to check it out. Sure enough, for about 4 blocks down the main street, and on at least two side streets (for another four blocks) there were piles and piles of books for sale. People just set up on the sidewalks, streets, and most impressively, across a pile of gravel. No blankets, no tables, just scads of books from the 70s and 80s. Mostly ancient computer programming books, textbooks, and paperbacks from the early 80s. There were old copies of fashion magazines cheek by jowl with microwave cookbooks (including one that came with a GE electric range/microwave my folks had in 1980). I saw copies of books I read in 7th grade: The Outsiders and some random Sweet Valley High books.

As we browsed, several poeple asked if I read Telegu (usually when I'd pick up something with an interesting cover that suggested lots of pictures). No, I'd tell them. I don't. End of conversation. At one bookstall, a man in his late 50s asked me what language I spoke. I responded English, and Spanish. Ah, he says, habla espanol? You could have knocked me over with a feather. We chatted for a bit in Spanish and then he tells me he's lived in Houston for 20 years; he's in town visiting his brother--who meanwhile has struck up a conversation with Sion. After a bit, we go over to his brother and Sion, and he introduces me: she is from US. To which his (elder) brother counters, apparently in a show of "ha ha I win," gestures to Sion and says "he is from UK!"

Sadly, Sion declined an invitation for coffee--he thought I wouldn't have wanted to go. So now he's got the directive: if we're just mooching around and they're not creepy: hell yeah, lets go talk to strangers. (I think it's because the last time we accepted such an offer we had a hard time extracting ourselves from his wierdo company: but that was Vegas and involved a lot of drinks).

Friday, July 27, 2007

Lost in Translation

The joys of an overpriced dirty Grey Goose Martini. (Add you own accents as appropriate):

me: I'll have a Bombay tonic please
waiter: Sorry Madam; we have no Bombay gin.
me: Ok, then a dirty grey goose martini.
him: ???
me: a martini with grey goose vodka, and add olive juice and olives. You add the olive juice, and that's what makes it dirty.

He comes back with a plain vodka marini.

me: can you ask the bartender for some olive juice please?
him: olives, yes
me: olive juice
him: orange juice?
me: no, no orange juice. Olive, ah, olive liquor, um, the brine?
him: ah, wine.
me. No, no. the liquid from the olives.
him: (looking like I've asked for the blood of a newborn or worse) yes, madam.
He returns with a shot glass of olive brine.
me: (inwardly) Victory!!!
Huzzah! So worth it.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Music Music Music

You really haven't lived until you've heard "Hotel California" belted out by a five piece band of strolling Malaysian musicians. I so regret not buying their CD. They followed it up with Tom Jones's "The Green Green Grass of Home" and Lionel Richie's "Hello" and some Cliff Richards (who's from Lucknow, who knew?) And then they did one Malaysian song. So great.

One of my favorite things here has been the music, or rather, the apparently universal appetite for it. It seems like pretty much every movie has big song and dance numbers in it (even apparently serious dramas). Musicals are on pretty much every channel, and there are several shows at night that just show the musical numbers from movies. Telegu pop music is fairly infectious--perfect pop that gets stuck in your head--and everyone seems to love it. I've heard very little classical music, and pop music seems to be enjoyed by grownups, not just kids. It's played in every store--from the upscale to the local grocery store. Hirin goes around singing constantly, and he puts music on whenever he's got a chance--pretty loud: yes, he's a teenager. Equally, Narasima (who's our age, at least) keeps his pop CDs pretty much blasting in the car whenever he's alone, and often has the music going quite loud even when we're in the car with him. I rode in an auto yesterday that had been kitted out with some major speakers. Yes, that's right, a covered scooter rickshaw, with a really loud sound system.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

All better

See? Bitching works. We got our clothes back, and I had a shower and got some clean clothes. All better. I talked with my mom, and with a good friend from home today, so all is well.

I know you were worried.

Rant.

Warning: some serious bitching and moaning to follow.

We have NO CLEAN CLOTHES and haven't for THREE WEEKS. The washing machine in the apartment broke two weeks ago. We hadn't had our clothes washed for the week prior. We tried doing it once before but the water pressure is such that the housekeeper has to do some crazy thing with the hoses; it's a mystery to us, so we are dependent on him. The office is in charge of all these things; they waited a week before they agreed with us that we needed to send our clothes to a laundry; and its been more than a week since our clothes have gone. Not only do we not have any clean clothes, we have no dirty ones to hand wash (which is what we'd done before that). This I'm told, by other Indians, is typical. It's nice to be a little relaxed about time and deadlines, but really not when it concerns my personal hygiene, thanks. So, that's the part of me that wants to come home already.

The part that doesn't want to come home yet is that in two weeks we go to Kolkata (Calcutta) and then the weekend after that, we go to Delhi, and then on to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, and then home. We went to Mumbai two weeks ago, and I loved that. I'm perfectly happy to have the Indian experience of flying by the seat of my pants when we are traveling and feeling like tourists. It's the every day part, where I'm stuck in a suburb, and Sion is working 10 hours a day, that I'd rather have my regular life back.

It's beastly hot and humid. Lightweight cotton or death. Oh there are many things I miss. Clean non-diesely air. Good booze. Meat. My own damn kitchen. Not having a 17 year old boy housekeeper underfoot all the damn time. My own space. I really wish they'd believe us when we say we don't need a housekeeper. He does things like put away oniony knives and stores onions in the fridge, next to the yogurt which isn't sealed properly. My pet peeve is onion food contamination. Especially on fruit and dairy. I know I made fun of Allison for bitching about the kitchen, but she was only here for a week. When we came back from Mumbai, he'd apparently amused himself by smoking cigarettes in our room, and left pee in and on the toilet. That pissed me off and creeped me out. I'm sure he was just pretending to be the boss, but really there are two other empty bedrooms in the apartment that he can hang out in.

I really do miss my own space. This is the thing: there is very much a servant class here, and everyone has "help" and because it's so normalized, they don't mind it. They depend on it. The "servants" arent' really people, so they can't invade your privacy. Plus, well, privacy? What's that? That's loneliness.

All the violent misogyny's really fucking with my head too. So many stories of women brutalized without any consequences in the papers every fucking day. Dowry's are real, even among the middle class. Just yesterday someone in the office was telling me about her family: four sisters, and two had been married. Her dad had to pay 8 lakh for the latest one; that's 2 grand US. That might as well be 20 or 200 grand for working people here. So many elderly widows disowned by their families, forced to beg. There was a story in the paper today of a ten year old girl "dragged by eve teasers": apparently a jeep full of young men were verbally harassing a group of girls, this one got caught somehow (her sari?) in the wheels of the jeep and was dragged some distance, breaking two vertabrae. You know what they're charged with? Disorderly driving.

Thus endeth the rant for today.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Being Recognized

On our way back to the apartment yesterday afternoon, we asked the auto driver to make a couple short stops (to pick up some groceries, then at the wine shop for a bottle of vodka) while Sion was fetching the latter, I waited with our bags of loot in the auto. As we waited, an elderly woman came by asking for money, which of course I gave. She blessed me, I blessed her, it went back and forth a couple times. When she left I had this conversation with the driver:

him: you are nice people, you give money. [I had just given another elderly woman money at the previous stop]
me: oh, um, thanks. Was she a widow?
him: yes. You are nice girl. Are you Hindu?
me: no. Mexican.
him: Ah, Chicana.
me (eyes popping out of my head): YES! Chicana. You know Chicana!
He says nothing, just seems pleased with himself.

Immediately after I said Mexican, I think: Duh: the appropriate answer is Catholic, NOT Mexican (much as they might slide into each other for me). But the hilarious thing is that I heard Hindu in the way Mexicans and Chicanos refer to EVERYONE in India. Growing up, that's what I thought Indians were called, as distinct from American Indians.

And yeah: he knew the right name for me was Chicana. I still can't get over that. People at home don't know Chicano. Much less Chicana.

Comparative Patriarchies

Sounds like a women's studies class, no? But that's on my mind this morning. I woke up feeling sick, shoulder and arm cramping--the physical aftereffects of a hideous nightmare involving my sexual assault by a large group of young men and boys. As I lay there doing a dream post-mortem, it occured to me that everytime I'm in another country: Mexico, the UK, Spain, France, in this case, India--the local articulations of patriarchy strike me as brutal, baldfaced, and somehow harder for me to deal with. I know full well that patriarchy is doing just fine in the US, and that misogyny is chugging along quite nicely. My skin, however, is used to deflecting that particular set of arrows. I suppose it has to do with the with my particular social milieu; as an academic, the circles I generally travel at home are populated with people who are my allies, are indifferent, or know better than to voice their hatred of me outloud. I have made a safe little niche for myself. I suppose that's to some extent how this blog has functioned for me.

The housemates are now gone (for now) but in their company I had the impression that if these (smart, affable) guys are any indication: educated American men (still?) don't regard women as their equals. Not really. Affluence and education aren't guarantees against hatred. I say hatred because that's how it feels to be regarded as less than fully human.

I'm trying to think comparatively here because that's how I like to read: put two or more things together and they'll shed some light on each other.

At home, there's a popular sense that women are equal, and that feminism is redundant: obnoxiously so. People get pissed when this myth is undercut, and that's when the hatred really comes out--often in the form of accusations of hatred. This, I think, is a particularly American cultural habit. It happens with pretty much any other form of oppression: race, class, sexuality, disability. Americans need to think of themselves as fairminded and egalitarian, so any evidence against that is a threat to that sense of self.

Here, cultural politics are harder for me to read. The country's just elected their first woman president, Pratibha Patel. The cultural significance of this is hard to read: on the one hand she's a woman, but then so was Thatcher and Indhira Ghandi. Not much feminist or progressive analysis that I can find online, but one blogger puts it this way (http://feministblogs.org/author/aishwarya/):

India’s presidential elections are a couple of weeks away (on the 18th of this month), and a woman, Pratibha Patel, is contesting. This is, of course far less interesting than the U.S presidential elections and Hilary Clinton, since the Indian president a) isn’t elected by the public and b) has very little power to do anything anyway. Our
current president has spent much of his time writing execrable poetry and motivational texts.
Since they don’t actually have much of a role to play, the choice of president is often an exercise in tokenism. We have had presidents from minority/disempowered castes, religions, etc before, and though they have been quite good ones, one suspects that their real function was to prove what an equal society we are. I have heard people say smugly of India that the fact that we have a Muslim president, a Sikh Prime Minister and Christian power-behind-the-prime minister proves that we are a diverse and egalitarian country (it also gives the Hindu right wing something to feel oppressed about) regardless of what normal Sikhs, Muslims and women may experience in day-to-day, nonpolitical life.*

My anecdotal observations are are small, limited to hanging around one IT company of around 200 people, conversations with a handful of individuals, going out in the city, and reading the local English language media (newspapers, billboards, and TV mostly). Complicating this is the fact of the enormous diversity in this country: ethnicity, religion, language, state. So there is no such thing as the Indian attitude towards this or that. I've heard that Hyderabad is a relatively progressive place for women. I've seen women (not many, but some) driving their own scooters, and there actually are a handful of women working in the testing department at the company--more than in a similar place in the States. I've also seen the dispossessed widows who are forced to beg--disowned by their children at the death of their father. I've seen ads proclaiming: "She is goddess, and we've created a world just for her" pushing some new clothing store for women. I've been harrassed on the street. I've also been told that police are "sympathetic" toward women, so having one with you when you go make a report (on a stolen cell-phone for example) is handy as it will get your case handled sooner.

Some things are familiar, some not. Different articulations of the same assumption. Men are more fully human. The norm.

You know what brought this on? Two things, I bet. 1. My very brief encounters with two elderly widows yesterday, and 2. An old Cary Grant flick: The Awful Truth. 1937 screwball comedy in which both Grant and his wife are apparently cheating on each other: he divorces her--and the focus is on her whether or not she's innocent. In the end, he believes she is, and they reconcile. His apparent infidelity is forgotten. The eponymous truth is, I'm sure, suppossed to be that they love each other. Against the grain, there's some hope here that its a satire of marriage, but I don't think that's why it won academy awards.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Food

The food we can buy for ourselves to prepare in the apartment is pretty much kid food. I had a bowl of corn flakes with (soy)milk and banana for breakfast, an eggsalad sandwich on wheat bread for lunch, and some crackers and peanut butter just now as I wait for Sion to come home. (Our dinner reservation's not until 8:30). I made a salad of grated carrots and cucumbers with lemon juice, (god I miss greens: no lettuce or spinach here, just some very unfamiliar herbs)and we are eating a lot of toast and cheese and cookies and potato chips when we hang around here. Junky kids's food.

We can make pretty good dirty rice (but really that's kid food too) We've tried making grown up food with what we can get, but the successful dishes are ones that I associate with childhood--ie: simple one-note dishes. There's jarred pasta sauce, so we can doctor that up with garlic and onion, but honestly it's still kid food. We made beans: that's fairly standalone, so's the rice. So we can eat rice and beans, plain. I've yet to make a successful salsa. I can make a pretty good vegetable soup that's based on cabbage: but again it's the sort of thing you eat when you're a sick kid. You can buy frozen but not fresh chicken, and those are some stringy fighting birds. If you want fresh you have to go to a separate place where they are walking around and you pick one out. I'll pass on that particular bit of authenticity. It's all about ingredients, and they're lacking for complex Western dishes. Restaurants clearly have avenues not available to me.

So we can have grownup food if we go out, but if we stay in then it's kid food. Except for plain yogurt with honey or mango; most kids I hate yogurt, right?

It's comfort food because not only is it familiar and therefore comforting and comfortable, but in this case: we don't have to rely on someone else to either call for delivery or more importantly, go out when we're tired and/or hungover. Ah well, at least we can buy the stuff to make kid food.

I'm a little bit homesick: can you tell? I miss my life, even as we're having adventures. That they're not contradictory states (having adventures and planning them on the one hand, and being homesick on the other) suprises me.