India by Chris Crutcher (February 2011)
I’m almost glad I have the long layover in Frankfurt on the
way back from New Delhi and Mumbai; I need the time for re-entry.
Most of the people I went there to see have money, or at least their parents do. They pay twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year for their kids to go to junior and senior high school. They are international business people and diplomats or other workers for the U.S. Embassy for the most part. But you cannot visit India, particularly Mumbai, without being impacted by the sheer numbers of people who have nothing. They get almost no government help; they pay as they go for their health care, which means most of them don’t get health care. If you happen to contract a disease your immune system can’t cure, hope you have a good friend somewhere with a few bucks, because otherwise, too bad. The traffic is otherworldly. Very few traffic signals, and most of those are just suggestions. I think I saw one “Walk/Don’t Walk signal and it seemed like a dare.
And yet the traffic, both vehicle (car, taxi, rickshaw, bicycle) and pedestrian, moves. Horns and blinking headlights in Mumbai are language, and it’s a language that continues non-stop, day and night. One driver told me he tried to drive the way he knew in Washington D.C. and “up comes the finger.” The finger, or whatever signal they might use in its stead, never comes up in Mumbai traffic. And it moves, and the people seem to respect each other moving through their day.
If I give a homeless person in the United States five bucks to ease his or her day a little, I walk away feeling like I did a little something to ease pain at least for a few minutes. If I give any amount to a beggar in Mumbai I am almost trampled. You carry food: a bunch of bananas, or grapes. And you feel like you’ve made no dent. Mothers carrying babies knock on your car windows, touching their mouths with two fingers and a thumb, indicating hunger. Your driver will tell you that the head bandage around the baby’s head with the large red spot on it was on a different baby yesterday; many of these people are “professionals.” Pretty low standard for a “profession.”
Discussions for solutions to hunger and disease in third world countries are always complex, answers hard to agree on. I get it that there are no simple answers, but I have to say it makes me embarrassed to come from a culture where a significant portion of its political activists – voters – believe that culture’s national dream is accumulation. Shameless, infinite accumulation. Our economy crashes and the ultra-rich get ultra-richer. If we don’t find a way to attach the welfare of the wealthy to the welfare of the poor, we may not only see our citizens taking to the streets, but find ourselves with no moral compass whatsoever. “He Who Dies With The Most Toys, Wins” might be a funny bumper sticker, but think about having it attached to your celestial suitcase when you arrive at the gates of whatever heaven you believe in.
In Mumbai I was allowed the privilege of volunteering a few hours at an orphanage for kids, probably between the ages of two and ten, whose mothers were lost to the sex trade, many dead, others having contracted HIV and/or full blown AIDS. My Indian Sarah Byrnes was there, maybe six years old, horribly scarred on the left side of her face, eye socket holding a worthless part of an eye. I glimpsed her scurrying past, from only the good side and she was so beautiful it stung my heart. Eager kids, wrapped around my ankle, petting my knee as I read David Shannon’s David Gets In Trouble, excitedly yelling out answers regarding David’s “bad choices.” One little ten year old couldn’t get his hand up fast enough to answer questions, not in that annoying way of gaining attention, but in that intellectually curious way that said he knew the value stepping forward with your knowledge. When asked later what he wants to be when he grows up he said, “I want to be a ‘sir’.” He wants to be a man who garners respect for who he is and what he does. I think there is a very good chance he will become a sir.
They live on the mercy of volunteers. They’re the lucky ones; stumbled into the sights of someone who gave a shit. Volunteers from the school for rich kids volunteer their time because you can’t live there without developing a sense of awe of humanity – all humanity – that I fear Americans are losing, or have lost.
The Superintendent of the American International School of Mumbai told me how he’d been threatened and then fired from his first teaching job in the states on the heels of telling his social studies class that an Iraqi mother who loses her child hurts as much as an American mother who loses hers. Hard to blame him for taking his considerable talents elsewhere.
I can hear the usual suspects telling me the poor will always be with us, or that those who pick themselves up by the bootstraps prevail, or that welfare creates a lazy culture. Now would not be a good time for them to say that to me.
Most of the people I went there to see have money, or at least their parents do. They pay twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year for their kids to go to junior and senior high school. They are international business people and diplomats or other workers for the U.S. Embassy for the most part. But you cannot visit India, particularly Mumbai, without being impacted by the sheer numbers of people who have nothing. They get almost no government help; they pay as they go for their health care, which means most of them don’t get health care. If you happen to contract a disease your immune system can’t cure, hope you have a good friend somewhere with a few bucks, because otherwise, too bad. The traffic is otherworldly. Very few traffic signals, and most of those are just suggestions. I think I saw one “Walk/Don’t Walk signal and it seemed like a dare.
And yet the traffic, both vehicle (car, taxi, rickshaw, bicycle) and pedestrian, moves. Horns and blinking headlights in Mumbai are language, and it’s a language that continues non-stop, day and night. One driver told me he tried to drive the way he knew in Washington D.C. and “up comes the finger.” The finger, or whatever signal they might use in its stead, never comes up in Mumbai traffic. And it moves, and the people seem to respect each other moving through their day.
If I give a homeless person in the United States five bucks to ease his or her day a little, I walk away feeling like I did a little something to ease pain at least for a few minutes. If I give any amount to a beggar in Mumbai I am almost trampled. You carry food: a bunch of bananas, or grapes. And you feel like you’ve made no dent. Mothers carrying babies knock on your car windows, touching their mouths with two fingers and a thumb, indicating hunger. Your driver will tell you that the head bandage around the baby’s head with the large red spot on it was on a different baby yesterday; many of these people are “professionals.” Pretty low standard for a “profession.”
Discussions for solutions to hunger and disease in third world countries are always complex, answers hard to agree on. I get it that there are no simple answers, but I have to say it makes me embarrassed to come from a culture where a significant portion of its political activists – voters – believe that culture’s national dream is accumulation. Shameless, infinite accumulation. Our economy crashes and the ultra-rich get ultra-richer. If we don’t find a way to attach the welfare of the wealthy to the welfare of the poor, we may not only see our citizens taking to the streets, but find ourselves with no moral compass whatsoever. “He Who Dies With The Most Toys, Wins” might be a funny bumper sticker, but think about having it attached to your celestial suitcase when you arrive at the gates of whatever heaven you believe in.
In Mumbai I was allowed the privilege of volunteering a few hours at an orphanage for kids, probably between the ages of two and ten, whose mothers were lost to the sex trade, many dead, others having contracted HIV and/or full blown AIDS. My Indian Sarah Byrnes was there, maybe six years old, horribly scarred on the left side of her face, eye socket holding a worthless part of an eye. I glimpsed her scurrying past, from only the good side and she was so beautiful it stung my heart. Eager kids, wrapped around my ankle, petting my knee as I read David Shannon’s David Gets In Trouble, excitedly yelling out answers regarding David’s “bad choices.” One little ten year old couldn’t get his hand up fast enough to answer questions, not in that annoying way of gaining attention, but in that intellectually curious way that said he knew the value stepping forward with your knowledge. When asked later what he wants to be when he grows up he said, “I want to be a ‘sir’.” He wants to be a man who garners respect for who he is and what he does. I think there is a very good chance he will become a sir.
They live on the mercy of volunteers. They’re the lucky ones; stumbled into the sights of someone who gave a shit. Volunteers from the school for rich kids volunteer their time because you can’t live there without developing a sense of awe of humanity – all humanity – that I fear Americans are losing, or have lost.
The Superintendent of the American International School of Mumbai told me how he’d been threatened and then fired from his first teaching job in the states on the heels of telling his social studies class that an Iraqi mother who loses her child hurts as much as an American mother who loses hers. Hard to blame him for taking his considerable talents elsewhere.
I can hear the usual suspects telling me the poor will always be with us, or that those who pick themselves up by the bootstraps prevail, or that welfare creates a lazy culture. Now would not be a good time for them to say that to me.
