Being in The Real India

The trip from New York to Delhi took about 27 hours, door-to-door, and since Sunday passed our plane in the night (that's what happens when the sun is going westward and you're flying the other way) we left on Saturday but arrived on Monday. An extremely motherly country coordinator was there to greet us and get settled into a hostel for our first two days.

And it was after that, after a few foggy days of jet lag and orientation, that we stepped out from the metro into the wonder-world that is Old Delhi. Transported back at least a hundred years from the exceptionally clean, exceptionally silent Japanese-designed subway system, a full-fledged bazaar of the East came to greet every one of our senses. Merchants selling wares; streets too small for the oxen that strode through them; men gathering to stare at the strange group of 32 young people clearly out of place. Authenticity. Finally, we had arrived.

Okay, so that last paragraph may have sounded a little...odd. "Problematic," "exoticized," "essentialized," and "irresponsibly simplistic and/or Orientalist" might be some fancier academic synonyms for "odd." And that was sort of the point. Because, you see, despite what years of rigorous study, critical self-reflection, and a whole lot of time spent getting used to political correctness might have done to me - and to the rest of this interesting and interested group of students on IHP - a lot of us still found that this was the immediate, exhilarating, beautifully romantic way that we first saw this part of town.

"Old" Delhi is actually the second-youngest of at least half a dozen major cities that have occupied this plot of land over the last 5,000 years - and on top of that, it's said that this "city of cities" actually comprises seven different cities, all of which have been absorbed into its geographical mass as the urban population expanded from a less than 1 million in 1947, to about 16 million today.

And so I've already had the chance to see many other sides of Delhi: the bachelor's pad that is my home-stay. The hilarious but fascinating academic panel on a feminist book written by an Indian author (Seeing Like A Feminist - sounds fantastic so check it out!) that I accidentally wandered into while looking for a poetry reading. The stock exchange building across the street from the old-school market near the train station that carries extremely packed cars along the world's greatest rail system that runs a few kilometers away from the tourist-y craft spot where I bought a fun shirt to wear to the wedding where I am pretty sure a sixteen-year-old boy was hitting on me. There's a lot here - but let me indulge in a little well-deserved romanticizing of Old Delhi anyway.

You walk along narrow boulevards lined with shops and food and an incredible number of human beings. Above you, the monkeys who have infiltrated the city climb along the masses of cables that carry electricity, Internet, phones, and who knows what else into buildings over a hundred and fifty years old. The smells change second-by-second as you stroll past highly specialized shops: That's the bread frying that you smell there. Now it's the scent off the thousands of bars of soap from the soap store. And the slightly more chemical smell of hair products from the barber cutting hair in between the street and the sidewalk. Here's more frying bread - mixed in with chai tea brewing across the way.

You think your tour guide has gone missing but then you realize that he's just disappeared into a long, thin, pitch-black corridor that runs the length of the shops, emerges into a courtyard that houses two ATMS for the National Punjab Bank - and a little guy with a big grin who apparently runs a legendary sandwich shop out of the cart you just passed.

Look up, and a mass of metal rods and things that look like speakers are really the cell phone tower that the homeowner has rented out to the cell phone company. Look to your right, and you'll see one of the dozens of wedding card shops that are famous the world over - whether you want invitations made of carved wood filled with chocolates, or just some nice paper instead, this is the place Indians come to whether they live in Delhi, in Rajasthan, or even in the USA.

This place is romantic not because it feeds into all of our Western, pre-conceived notions of what India is and should be. Well, okay, that aspect is certainly at play - but it feels romantic also because it feels more honest. I say "honest" (as opposed to "authentic" or "real") because, after a few hours of strolling and a few more just sitting and watching it, I think that even though no place can be objectively "real," at least this one feels honest.

Old Delhi bears its past in plain view, whether it means to or not - you can see this in the massive and diverse commerce taking place, in the pre-colonial architectural styles on the first story of a structure that suddenly morph into British-style building on the second. You see an incredibly long, complicated historical context of a place displayed on every surface. It's not any more "real" than the rest of India - it's just got more context than that Dior billboard over there, or the Greco-Roman "India Gate."

Other adventures, this one in space...

...and my one-dollar haircut!

 

Disorganized Musings On Urbanity

I've been thinking about communities a lot lately. Anybody who has ever spent more than thirty minutes with me has probably heard something about the summers that I've gotten to spend in rural communities in Latin America with a group called AMIGOS de las Americas. And maybe the single biggest impact that those experiences have had on me is how they've made me think about community. I've seen - I've gotten to be a part of - communities of people where a powerful sense of belonging and home and identity and mutual support comes wrapped up with the reality of growing up and growing old with certain people in a certain place where everybody knows everybody else.

But I guess I always assumed that community was something that only flourished in rural, quite likely impoverished, villages. It was only within a geographically confined group of people (of a manageable size, and in a remote location) that a real community could exist.

Now I'm feeling hopeful that I was wrong. There's something about the close proximity that cities create - the fact that people are pushed face-to-face and forced to interact with each other because of the sheer volume of humanity left with no other option than to coexist - that seems to facilitate distinct community identities, maybe even better than rural places do.

You can see this in the myriad community organizers of New York. Or in the passionate - perhaps zealous - perhaps obsessively over-invested - folks who show up to community board meetings to discuss the banal details of urban planning in their neighborhood. Or in the constant reevaluation of identity prompted by the urban juxtaposition of intense contrasts - rich and poor, old and new, black and white and brown - and the sense of camaraderie that emerges from the process of collective reevaluation.

I've got lots of questions and reservations about this trend I'm noticing. And maybe the rapid change that takes place in urban environments actually makes them destructive to communities, rather than supportive. But I still feel hopeful about what it might mean for a world in which (as IHP as reminded us a good dozen times by now) more than half the world's population now lives in cities.

Some ironic clocks in hipster Wiliamsburg

The change of cities is a major theme in IHP. Take last week, when we heard from a man at Friends of the Highline. He works for a fascinating project: during New York's industrial era, a railroad track was constructed along most of Manhattan (raised above the ground after one too many pedestrians got hit by the cars that carried sausage and steel and coal through the city). Left abandoned, it became an untamed urban forest during the 1980's. And in the last decade, the city was convinced to put up 100 million dollars to turn it into a beautiful walking park...under the assumption that the new attraction would raise surrounding property values more than enough to compensate in real estate taxes.

It is now a gorgeous structure - as much a park or trail as it as a sightseeing tourist trap that offers a unique way to see one of the world's great cities from what is literally a different point of view.

But later, we heard from a community organizer who explained that as property values go up around the Highline so will rent, and then lower-income families get forced out of homes they have always lived in but can no longer afford, putting the communities that define New York at the mercy of urban planners far removed.

Providing cheap public housing might be one way to keep those communities secure, but real estate developers don't like that method and the city seems ambivalent about their implications for crime.

Or, we could use rent control policies to preserve communities - but those are easily manipulated by landlords interested in driving out subsidized tenants for those who will pay New Yoirk's exceptionally high prices instead. And requiring more "affordable housing" is tricky: the definition of "affordable" is based on the median income of the entire city, about $90,000 a year. Some neighborhoods make more, and some less - in Chinatown, the median is $22,000.

"Save us from our perfectly fine middle class life" in gentrifying Chinatown

I struggled to write this first "in-country" blog post. I have enough material to write a hundred of them, but it's another thing to find enough coherence to tie all that material together. The questions of community and change have been two of many themes, and they seemed like the right way to frame the start of IHP - but wait a second, Seth. What is IHP?

Let me explain the program through the people who make it what it is. We are thirty-two students from American universities, traveling to four continents in four months (most of us are Americans, but Romania and Hungary and Zambia and China are represented as well). Three professors travel with us, each teaching a course - on politics, culture, and urban planning.

Add to that a Coordinator in each city; that's a local expert who curates an ambitious schedule of site visits and guest lectures. And top it all off with a Fellow, who helps with everything from logistics to counseling to coaching us on an independent study project (our fourth class this semester - and my topic will be "The Commute").

Put all those people together, and you get a program with the goal of teaching us to ask better questions and think more critically about the complex issues that affect cities and the people living in them. It makes for a busy, unpredictable, exciting, fascinating, self-professedly "intense" experience of seeing the world through an urban lens. We're the thirty-two lucky enough and masochistic enough to embark on this little adventure.

In New York, a few of the things we saw and did:

   
Canvassing with community organizers in the Bronx, Chinatown, and Harlem
   
Lectures on the history of police, the definition of gentrification, and the role of Wall Street in the financial crisis
   
Lots of orientation: bonding, talking about safety, thinking about travel and privilege, and playing an exorbitant amount of Trainwreck
   
Grand Central Station's 100th birthday party
   
A food tour of Brooklyn, plus a visit to Newton Creek - a superfund site with inches of toxic sludge remaining on the stream floor after decades of oil spills and pollution
   
Visits to the nation's second-largest urban farm, to the New York Stock Exchange, and to a panel of community organizers and advocates of squatting and one communist professor.

...plus one unplanned visit to the Museum of the Moving Image, which calls for a shout-out to my grandpa. Many of his immediate family members boast exciting and quirky credentials (one sibling in Ethiopia, another in Vietnam) but his post-retirement job probably takes the cake: Magic Lantern shows. The magic lantern, the Victorian-era predecessor to the movies, is (in my poor attempt to explain it) like a huge projector at uses painted glasss slides to used to tell stories. My grandpa goes around to schools and museums and China and Mexico and everywhere in-between to show off this old technology, and his own master storytelling skills. And sure enough, I found magic lanterns on display here in New York! Shout out to Grandpa.

Now let's see what there is to find in Delhi.