First pass

After considerable self-undiscipline and some recent harrassment from a couple of you, I'm finally doing a little communicating. With my old (10+ years!) friend Laura's departure today for Oakland, each of the three phases of this six-weeks-and-counting trip has come and gone at least once. I've spent time with my family in Punjab and Delhi, conducted some (preliminarily successful) research on my carbon trading project, and traveled some of the South for the first time with Laura and my sister Sheeba. So now seems like a good time to get off my ass and write a little.

I'm typing from Cochin, a city on the coast of central Kerala with strikingly Bay Arean geography, the grittier city of Ernakulam playing foil as Cochin's Oakland. I came to this place this morning with little context outside of the lone but important fact of Kerala's rule, since 1957, by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a descendent from near the base of Indian Marxism's family tree, where it branched in a Chinese direction from its more Ruso-phillic comrades. Even with the posters greeting those disembarking from the Fort Cochin ferry that generically decry war and solidarize with the Palestinians, this proves to fail as any meaningful context at all. But I realize, and it's a new admission to myself, that despite my three prior trips to India and my Indian descent, thin context is not much less than I've generally had in this country.

This is a partial statement since, for example, many hippies come year after year, seeking the Indian commodity of spirituality, harboring attitudes that Orientalism still, thirty years after its writing, fully prosecutes. That's a lack of context, truly. On this trip I've experienced India for the first time outside of a family caravan. This may not have resulted in any reportable advances in my understanding of this place, but it at least allows the beginnings of a context, of a rough vantage beyond that of a fleeting traveler or a 2nd-generation kid returned "home" from which to observe this country. Something that might allow me to make use of social reference points, in the way that we all naturally do on our home terrain.

I have always been puzzled by sites similar to what we saw in Goa, where no less than 15 sequential watermellon stalls, selling watermelons and nothing else, stretched with few breaks for a quarter mile. In each, a pyramid of watermelons stood as the foreground to one or two dark, shoddily-attired Goans. How do they make any money, with identical competition selling the exact same, cheap good in the immediate vicinity? It's not just a tourist phenomenon--in prior visits to Delhi I'd noticed the same arrangement in a sub-district specializing in marble for home construction. Many similar puzzles are all over. Why do Indians, who are properly known for colorful dress and lavish celebrations, almost universally live in comparatively drab interiors of their own making? Why have Indians imported computers but not spreadsheet software to replace the bulky ledger books in every store, and brought in western toilets but not shower curtains to provide some kind of a divide between baths/showers and toilets?

I don't have answers, but it feels like progress to begin to undestand how to identify questions, at least in a way that departs from my previous trips. The few days worth of solo traveling I've done has helped. As have V.S. Naipaul's books. His view of Hinduism is mostly dispassionate, anti-reverential and not ignorant, which for me is unique. His missives on the caste system and the mechinisms by which it continues to thrive and operate have finally given the concept some flesh. My thinking of caste before was a combination of textbook descriptions of picture-book simplicity (brahmins are priests; untouchables are despised) and what I'd taken by way of analogy with other stultifying social institutions, like race. But of course Indian caste is its own thing. From the way I see it now, it has the topography and complexity of India's array of hundreds of dialects. But it doesn't seem so much conditioned by cultural and social evolution, as languages for the most part are, but a primary force in the shaping of India's versions of these evolutions. It lies behind the visual scenes of India that are universally seen--poverty and dirt, business and activity, spirituality and carefreeness--but differentially understood. I'd always seen those things, simply, as glimpses of life. But Naipaul raises the idea, most likely not unique, but nevertheless new to me, that poverty has a place in the caste-dominated social order, as does spirituality among some, sloth among others, and entrepeunership among still others. That India's lack of dynamism is not only an emergent property of its history, but also a factor engendered by casteism and its culture.

It's a big idea in the sense that it sheds a different light on things I've seen while I've been here. I had a similar experience in differential understanding during my trip to the Himalayas with an activist/organizer from Delhi. I'll talk about that another time, but for now, he is Gandhian in his politics, and again I was afforded a new factor, a large one with which I am effectively unfamiliar, with which to consider people's responses to the political struggles, like development vs community, that in other ways exist everywhere that capitalism does.

So that's sort of an amorphous overview, if not of this trip, then of what I've been thinking about very recently. More later. For now, it's time to try some fish curry (first foray into meat after throwing up on the top bunk of a sleeper train three nights ago) and catch a train to meet up with Vivek in Chennai. Oh, and I'll put some pics up soon too.