My goal in this, my first blog, is to explain why I am in India, why I knew last year that I wanted nothing else but to be in India this year.
I should start my blog by stating my thoughts on writing about India. In reading other people's blogs and from some Indian-Americans' responses to my earlier emails I have learned that I have to be rather careful when discussing anything about India, especially anything that isn't praising the country. Indians seem to respond with a certain level of understandable anger at being negatively portrayed. I understand that I am a white foreigner who has only been here for a comparatively short time, but much of what I say about Indian society I have put together from conversations with Indians or books. A second and probably more powerful idea is that I am a white foreigner discussing a country that while very proud of its heritage is still navigating its identity as a post-colonial state. Any sort of discussion about the vast number of illiterate, the high infant mortality, the village culture, or the low status of women seems to, in my understanding, make people feel that their people are somehow lower than others, that Indians are a backwards and undeveloped people. In this reading, I might simply be pointing out with amazement their pitiful lives.
I hope not to do that. Far from talking about India as an exception, I think it is a perfect example of what is happening in today's world. In my application to come here I wrote about how no where else do I think there is such a vast discrepancy between the lived realities of one nationality. Mumbai has both the largest slum in Asia and the second most expensive real estate in the world, creating a situation where millions live in tiny tin sheds while the world's most expensive home, a 27 story $3 billion mammoth, towers above. The south is home to an information-technology boom as thousands of high-tech engineers exit top-notch universities and push forward the limits of technology, while hundreds of millions of their fellow countrymen are functionally illiterate. The country boasts world-class medical facilities that attract medical tourists from around the globe yet it is one of the few countries with polio, leprosy still exists in the poorest areas, and high infant and maternal mortality present a pretty dismal picture of overall health care.
In other words, there is a sizeable and growing first world in a country dominated by third world realities. In this way it is the story of our world today without the veil of national identities. With a billion people, the full spectrum of possibilities within humanity is laid bare under the category of "Indian." Instead of created, constructed, and imagined identities leading to false barriers, people in this country have to deal with the immensely difficult and jarring juxtaposition created by the sharp proximity of vast inequalities.
I want to learn more about how people manage these inequalities, how they understand where they came from and what to do with them. I have already learned from this organization one way they have changed the situation locally (through empowerment) but I will write about later. These inequalities, I am coming to believe, are the most serious problem affecting our world nowadays. They are growing daily as globalization continues to increase the distance between the rich and the poor. The picture is becoming more complicated than just rich and poor nations, though, as described above. It seems as if the rich in all nations seem to be converging on similar lives and lifestyles while the poor remain oppressed, excluded, and marginalized. This is creating the interesting situation wherein I feel more at home and comfortable conversing with the Indian elite than with the African-Americans 8 blocks away from my Oak Park home.
