I miss my India

I've been thinking a lot about India lately. Staying with my friend in San Mateo, I have eaten at an Indian restaurant here no fewer than five times in a week. It is possibly the best Indian food I've ever had and only a few blocks away. My friend and her daughter, new to it, refer to my favorite dish Saag Paneer as "the goosh." They can't get enough of it. Strangely, the first time I ate Indian food was in San Francisco, in college, visiting a friend in the city. The restaurant offered a tour of their kitchen and the Tandoori oven and I, of course, took them up on it. And strangely, while I've overplayed my music during the 40-minute commute, the only songs I don't tire of are those from the Bend it Like Beckham soundtrack.

This December will be the ten-year anniversary of my two-month trip to India. I was recently looking up a town that I visited and discovered that all the names of the towns and cities have been changed since I was there. They were starting it when I was there - Bombay was already Mumbai and Madras was already Chennai - but all the names of the little towns (I visited over twenty) have been changed. When I returned to the U.S. I remember someone asking me if I would go back. I think my answer then was that there were so many other places I wanted to go, I couldn't see myself going back to a place I'd already been. But despite the wear and tear on my body from eating the food, the minute the plane left the ground, tears streamed down my cheeks and I cried "I miss my India!"

Ten years later, I still don't miss an opportunity to talk about my travels and many memories are as fresh as the day they happened. There's something about the country, the culture, the people, that get in you. I left India but it never left me and when I read or hear things about it, it's like hearing about a place I used to live or a person I used to love. There has been a lot about India in the news lately. There was a slew of polls in Time magazine and one said that people in India were two-three times more optimistic about their future than Americans. The commentary was that people are happier in a society that's in the process of improving than in one where things are already good. The author surmised that it was a feeling if things are good, they can only get worse.

But progress always has its price and a while back I saw an article about the giant boulders in India - across the Deccan plateau - that are being blown up with dynamite to make way for new construction. Yes, they're that big. One of my favorite places there was a town called Hampi (it's not on the map anymore, they changed the name!), just a little ways from Bangalore - then called the Silicon Valley of India. I can't help but wonder now if there are more Indians in the tech industry in the U.S. than in India. I read that the software industry is so booming in India that engineers from the U.S. can go home to India and take their jobs with them. But I digress, the article was about a society formed to "save the boulders!" of Hyderabad. It even describes one guy who built his house around a boulder, something that should have a been the subject of a Dr. Suess story. I don't usually post professionally published photos but this was just too beautiful and I don't have any of my India photos scanned (they were taken pre-digital!)


I spent time in Hyderabad and I don't remember the giant boulders there, but I do remember them in Hampi. Out in the middle of a huge plain, along a river, hundreds of giant boulders are stacked and sitting in piles, miles away from the nearest mountains. The first question you ask is where did they come from? The second is why are they here? When you focus your eyes you notice the buildings that have been carved out of stone by a civilization thousands of years ago and realize that the "buildings" are the size of a thimble compared to an orange. The boulders are way bigger than they look initially.

Protest is now part of the familiar modern tale of development vs. nature, but nature is starting to be more valuable I think. I also heard on NPR that Indians are protesting the arrival of WalMart that is threatening to replace the "mom and pop shop" with jobs, robbing Indians of their independence and freedom sell what they want, and only benefitting a few. We're starting to realize, as the article says, that once certain things are destroyed, they can't be brought back. Which is why, ten years later, I find myself thinking about India and wanting to go back to that which someday will be no longer.

The culture mash

My mother was telling me that the last time she was in England, her cousins took her to a supermall that had been built near them. It's so huge, there's an actual ski slope inside. They were especially excited to show her the "American section" of the mall which boasts a replica of New Orleans' Jackson Square, a real Texas BBQ and cowboy shops, a fifties diner and the pièce de résistance, a bowling alley! When my mom did not express the unique kind of joy they were expecting, her cousin said "but I thought all Americans were bowling mad!" Apparently not.

"Ridiculous," my mom continued, "why do they think I would be excited about that? If they came to the states, I wouldn't take them to have English tea." I thought about it for a moment. "Well, we took Chiemi to Benihana," I said, reminding her of the ensemble of exchange students we hosted in my high school years. Chiemi was from Japan. "Oh yeah, we did!" she giggled.

"And I'm pretty sure we took Jenny (from Sweden) to Solvang (the replica of a Danish town)." My mom is suddenly mock-embarrassed. "Oh yeah, we took her to the smorgasbord restaurant for Swedish meatballs!" She howled with laughter. We too, succumbed to the urge to show someone's culture to them in a foreign land. I think this impulse is one of peace-making. It's a way to say "our country values your culture." The risk, of course, is that it's more likely that our country has perverted, diminished and commercialized their culture, but it's the gesture that counts.

What I think is a more powerful expression of appreciation is a merging of the two cultures. One of the biggest attractions in Los Angeles is a restaurant that on weekend nights hosts an Elvis impersonator. It's not the entertainment of someone karaoking to Elvis that's made "Thai Elvis" a cult-figure (you need only Google "Thai Elvis" to find the restaurant), it's the tangible culture mash that's so appealing.

On my walk today, someone was practicing the bagpipes looking over the ocean as the sun set. It sounded very good and he was getting quite a bit of attention. As I got closer, I could see that the bagpiper was African-American. How fantastic! This is the merging of culture that makes Los Angeles the special place that it is.

Who's delivering the message?

I was having breakfast with some ladies last weekend. A TV writer was telling me about teaching summer school algebra at an inner-city school in LA. She said there were two distinct groups of kids taking her class: freshman Korean kids who were hoping to get into a more advanced math class the next year and African-American seniors who were getting a last chance not to fail out of school. These kids, she made a deal with.

"I have no interest in failing you," she said, "it's in my best interest that you graduate high school." The only two requirements she told them, to passing the class are 1) Show up every day and 2) Don't prevent any one else from learning. They didn't do either of those things and almost all of them failed.

One kid, however, wanted to turn in his homework. He asked her if there was a way to do it without his friends seeing. See, it wouldn't be cool to turn in homework. They would accuse him of "trying to be white". In his culture, learning and doing well in school (and presumably getting a job and everything else that might follow) is equated with whiteness.

The Korean kids are raised in a Korean culture, here in LA, that has a very clear definition of success. Their definition of success does not threaten their culture, because it's defined by their culture and supported by their community in the United States.

Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink, talks about just how pervasive it is in our society to associate positive ideas with whites and negative idea with blacks. Even liberal, open-minded whites and enlightened, successful blacks are susceptible to the subtle associations between blacks and crime, drugs, and a lack of education.

In what I believe is a search for cultural identity, the kids failing out of school are rebelling against what they feel is an attempt by the dominant culture to absorb them. All they've done is develop a completely whacked definition of success that doesn't include getting an education or a job that requires an education and unless they have an entire community supporting them in some other type of endeavor, they aren't going to have a lot of options.

When this woman was telling me about her students, I thought to myself 'she got it all wrong'. She assumed if she set the bar so low, they couldn't possibly fail. But how can they rebel against the dominant culture when the dominant culture is constantly lowering the bar and expecting less and less of them? What would happen if a teacher demanded everything? Pushed them to succeed. Embarrassed them when they came unprepared and tracked them down if they didn't show. It's a lot of work, I know, and few want to do it but guess what? If you set the bar so high they can't possibly reach it, they can rebel without even trying and in the meantime, might actually turn in some homework.

A friend of mine who teaches in Jamaica, Queens, does just that. She's been attacked, her life threatened and kids in her classes have died - they live difficult lives that I can't even imagine. But she has students that have gone to Columbia and other universities because she tells them that they can and they should. She tells them they are wanted at those schools and the schools will pay them to come. She tells them every day because words have that kind of power.

My friend, like me, is white and although her message gets through, it's not easy because of who she is. Her school has several teachers who are graduates of that school and they, she said, are received very well by the students. They can say, "I'm you. I went to this school. I grew up this neighborhood. I'm not trying to change you, just give you options and a view into the bigger world."

I always say that everything is marketing and this is a perfect example. The three most important things to determine when selling anything are:
1) Who is your audience?
2) What is your message?
3) Who's delivering the message?
It's everything.