diff'rent rates for diff'rent folks

Is it discriminatory or looking after their own when Indians charge exponentially higher prices for foreigners than for residents to enter tourist destinations?

That's the question that Donnie, Blonde Kim and I debated with Prati and her sister, Priti, late into the night in Delhi after we returned from our whirlwind Taj Mahal trip (coming to you now from Darjeeling, by the by, which involved a cross-country flight and a car ride up a steep, treacherous and lushly beautiful road above the cloud line).

It cost 40 Rupees (less than $1) for Indians to enter the Taj Mahal, while foreigners each pay 750 Rs. (more than $15). Coming from the states, Donnie, Kim and I felt it discriminatory that different people are charged different amounts. In the U.S., we argued, we may have different rates for children, seniors and veterans, but it doesn't matter how rich or poor or what color folks are--any old person speaking any language and hailing from anyplace will pay the senior rate to enter a given attraction.

Prati and her sister argued that India is so dependent on tourism and its own population is so poor that it depends on foreign cash to bolster its economy, that tourists make so much more money than the average Indian per month that it's really no burden to pay more and that, even if it is morally wrong as we three Americans were claiming, it's how the system works.

I don't dispute the fact that Indian citizens are much poorer than people of many other nations, especially with the Rupee-dollar exchange rate working against them. But I maintain that it's logically flawed to say that all Americans (we focused on what we knew in our argument for why foreigners shouldn't be charged more) are wealthy. I'm not wealthy. My dollars go far here, but my return to the U.S. will mean a return to paying  U.S. rates for everything. I'm just lucky. Most "poor" Americans would never get to come here at all with a variety of socioeconomic factors working against them. And the "Indians are poor" reasoning is a valid argument for instituting government-funded assistance programs or the like, but viewing cultural sites like the Taj Mahal is in no way necessary for existence. Tourists--Indian and foreign--make the effort to travel here to see and learn and, yes, to spend some money. And we should all be treated the same when we do.

I'm open to other viewpoints (Hi, Prati!) in the comments.

takeaway from traveling to agra and back in a day via two endless road trips through gridlock with cows

Apparently, it's a thing to pose for photos making it look like the subject is touching the tip of the Taj Mahal. Seeing a whole row of people doing this and photo takers crouching at odd angles to catch the perspective didn't look absurdly amusing to me at all. Not a bit. (Facebook pals, see more Taj Mahal pics in the first 20 photos of this album.)

welcome to india (courtesy of le' blackberry)

We woke up this morning in our rented rooms in the Delhi suburb Gurgaon, drank three cups of chai like the Americans that we are (we're used to such big beverages that a "normal" drink here feels like a sip, something that became a running joke last summer), watched Cayden enraptured by "All the Single Ladies" and then headed out to Cafe Coffee Day for a "thank goodness we're in a metropolitan area" caffeine fix. I asked Prati to get me an iced coffee. Their first attempt was a Frappuccino equivalent; Prati's husband Donnie pointed out that, generally, if it's not on the menu here, it's a puzzlement.

Then we were set to head back--leaving Donnie to get a much-sought pedicure :)--when the skies opened. The infrastructure in Delhi, while it's constantly being expanded and improved, is mostly sketchy, and a downpour floods the roads' potholes and indentations with an amount of water that, in the U.S., would close the road. We had walked to buy coffee, on roads that were now lakes, and the baby was getting tired and cranky. So Blonde Kim stayed to get a pedi too and Prati hailed a bike rickshaw for her, Cayden and me. Those things feel unsteady on a good day. Today, the driver couldn't see the submerged potholes and speed bumps, and I was sure we'd end up tipping over and swimming. I gripped the side with one hand and my purse on the other. We made it, of course, but shakily, passing a few roaming pigs. Kim, meanwhile, thought the salon guys didn't like her nail polish selections, since in India they indicate assent with the sideways head tilt we use to mean "meh."

Fast forward a few hours: like every other time we've spent together, Prati decided I needed a haircut. Last year, I had my hair done at the air force base where her sister lives. This time, we went to Prati's favorite hair magician, a beefy, fabulous transvestite named Sylvie with a couple little sparkles attached to her front teeth. In about five minutes, Sylvie managed to give me the cutest haircut of my life and smack my ass, this in a country where queerness is not part of the mainstream narrative.

goodbye to all that

credit: satyajewelry.com

Today at Rosh Hashanah dinner, I must have been asked 20 times where in India I'm going and what I'm going to do there for two months. The response remains: I don't know. I'm India-bound tomorrow (!!) because I miss my pretend older sister and my godson, and it's a fascinating country that's so different from everything here. It's fun to let Prati do most of the choosing, because she knows what's there, what I enjoy and how to combine them. Not knowing exactly what's going to happen doesn't bother me. Unlike that family trip to San Francisco where it was necessary to book tickets to Alcatraz months in advance, in India the most basic things are so different—monkeys instead of squirrels! Saris instead of jeans!—that just taking a stroll feels interesting and new.

That said, the follow-up question to explaining away worried puzzlement that I mostly don't know where I'll be in the next couple months is, "Are you excited?"

Surprisingly, no, not yet. I hate going through customs and sitting still for the amount of time it takes to get from New York to Delhi. And I still miss Ridgefield a heck of a lot more than I ever thought I would. What 25-year-old former city dweller on a reporter salary falls for an affluent bedroom community full of older folks and young families? This one does, it turns out. A friend recapped earlier:

 Friend: you can live many places

 me: sweetheart so can anybody

Friend: nope

me: ok then explain in more words

 Friend: nope

 me: people our age who have lived in ny are not supposed to like suburbia

  full of old people

 Friend: yes. but you are good at finding people and making them feed you

 me: yes, because otherwise i'm hungry

Friend: doesn't matter why

 me: is that not a normal skill?

 Friend: nope

 me: i actually didn't realize that. people are so willing to feed me

so now i know: i need a cute baby, a good yoga studio and a few friends around with a job i like and i'm good

  so that shouldn't be too hard

 Friend: nope

 me: oh—and a coffee shop

Friend: yes yes

 me: but contrary to recent practice, my yoga teacher doesn't actually have to be married to its proprietor. that was just an added bonus

I miss said yoga teacher and her studio's atmosphere. Even though I've carved out time for practice these past few days, and I now have the same necklace she and one other yogi regularly wear as a reminder of the person I want to be and the practice I want to be devoted to, I already feel disconnected, untethered. (The necklace says "truth" in Sanskrit, which I'm hoping doesn't make me one of those wannabe Indian westerners if I continue to wear it during my trip.) There's no getting around the fact that my moving out ends my consistent study there. I miss, too, my yoga pal and his wife—both entertaining, quirky, smart and kind—and their two amazing children. I miss a friendship that grew just before I left. I miss living two seconds from an organic farm's roadside stand, open seven days a week.

My job was untenable, and I didn't have the time to do anything as well as I'm able, and I leaped because I want to try and build a future closer to the one in my dreams (Hi Harper's and New Yorker and Wall Street Journal, I love you!). But I'm friends with and respect my former Fairfield County coworkers, I believe in the importance of what the journalism folks at Patch are trying to do, and I unexpectedly grew ever so fond of my adopted town. I chose to leave, but it's turned out to be the hardest choice I've ever made.

a life in (other people's) letters

Is this a dorky, incongruous compendium of a life or what?

so lucky

Grandpa George: There's plenty of money out there. They print more every day. But this ticket—There are only five of them in the whole world, and that's all there's ever going to be. Only a dummy would give this up for something as common as money. Are you a dummy?

-Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the film)

Yesterday—funemployment, day one—I felt like my job had slapped me with a burlap sack full of bricks on my way out the door. After 10 months identifying as "the Patch lady" 24-7, just being me was disorienting and a little off-putting. My work is such a large part of my identity. I stayed up until 1 a.m. on Wednesday morning to write my final story.

Also, work's absence allowed all the other stuff I have very little time to accomplish to rush in and demand mind space: sell furniture, realize the landlord and I had a misunderstanding and I might pay for all of September even though I won't be living here, pack my apartment, pack for India, change addresses, work out billing... all those common-sense lifey things I hate.

I woke up this morning (funemployment, day two) feeling about the same. It's a good thing I live alone; I hopped from bed with the urge to create a shiv with a glass-shard flourish and then stick it to an unsuspecting passerby. I reached for my Blackberry, and there was a message from Ridgefield's State Representative playing the inside joke card on my Facebook wall.

Then I confirmed a meeting with someone I love and haven't seen in many months and opened an e-mail from the parent of a former babysitting charge, who said her daughter woke up this morning in Manhattan asking about me, though I haven't seen them in many months either. I'm headed to yoga as soon as I stop this babbling, and I'm meeting an old journalism pal who lives near my parents next week. My sense of being overwhelmed and angry was pushed out by a sense that my heart, well, overfloweth. (This is where you turn, get the gagging noises out of your system and then accept the cheese factor and move on.)

Maybe this is just life and happens to everybody, but I have a tendency to amass a contingent of beloveds as I move from place to place. What's half a month's rent when I get to reconnect with some of them and then travel across the globe to see others? Pattabhi Jois famously repeated, "Do your practice and all is coming." One way I interpret the nugget is in the karmic sense that the universe returns what you give, and I am so lucky to get this reminder—that my giving may not be perfect, but the love and intention are there—at a moment I needed it.

last day of work

Screen shot

It's all about to be real.

hear ye, hear ye

This blog will have a new and specific mission for the foreseeable future. Instead of being a closely-held little source for occasional rants and rambles, I plan to use this space to document my travels and adventures in upcoming months.

I'm leaving early in September for an almost-three-month trip to India, Dubai and Jordan. (Refrain from Eat, Pray, Love comparisons, please; I didn't quit steady employment to scour the globe searching for myself; I already know that, wherever you go, there you are. Also, speculate in my general direction about emerging adulthood at your peril.)

I hope to write full-fledged posts before and during my trip regularly, but I make no guarantees. So this space will also feature my most recent tweets, since that will be another quick-study communication method I plan to use in the countries that haven't banned Blackberries by the time I arrive. You can also subscribe to get e-mails whenever I publish new musings.

I'm visiting Dubai/Jordan with one of my best friends from college, who works in one place and hails from the other. For background on why I'm going to India (again), click here.

happy 88th birthday, poppy!!

You're the absolute best.

eat, pray, love: overscripted, under-messaged

credit: Facebook

I took myself to see "Eat, Pray, Love" last night, following the cinema's directions through the back roads of Redding into Bethel. The roads were long, tree-bordered tunnels with few street signs and no lights, and I had a moment of something like panic when I realized I had no idea how I'd find my way home in the dark.

"We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it," I thought—the best bit of received wisdom come my way since "people who kill themselves never get to find out what happens next."

I read "Eat, Pray, Love" a few summers ago, at the height of its popularity, when my grandfather finished his copy. I remember wanting to be one of those sophisticated folks who dismissed the whole thing as hokey and contrived and bourgeois. But Liz Gilbert has an intelligent, engaging, honest writing voice, and if memory serves she spent some time in parts of Connecticut I know well, and we could all use a little wish fulfillment reading now and then. So I did like the book, though I probably never brought it with me in public.

The film adaptation was a disappointment. It did have some of the things I hoped for: Italian food porn, a few moments in India that rang true to my experience, a diverse cast (standouts included Hadi Subiyanto as an adorable Balinese medicine man and the young Indian girl forced into marriage), a radiant Julia Roberts. But the whole thing felt forced and far too long.

The dialogue was full of melodramatic, faux-spiritual cliches. It was as though the actors were not playing three-dimensional characters interacting in a meaningful way, just types with scripted bits to get across before their chess piece was knocked off the board. Roberts' Liz wafted around the globe with seemingly bottomless money and an inability to get over herself. Americans work too hard, she was told. Forgive yourself. Empty your mind and "the universe will rush in." I'm sorry, but these aren't epiphanies.

Granted, my impressions could have been colored by the fact that I kept flashing back to a recent pre-practice tidbit from my yoga teacher. She's reading Guruji, a new book by students of the late K. Pattabhi Jois. In the chapter by David Swenson (whom I took a workshop with in Westerly!!), she said he recounts grappling with disillusionment by joining an extreme monastic sect that lived apart, practiced celibacy, etc. All he found there was that the same pettiness, angst and hierarchies replicated themselves in that environment. Removing yourself from life to seek enlightenment, she said, is not better or easier, just different. Put another way, the Sutras say something like "it's not the world, it's how you're looking at it."

That said, on my way home I took the plunge into the darkness, attempting to retrace my route through the woods. Turns out I was paying close enough attention on the way that I was able to find my way back and even appreciate the drama created by the illusion that the tree-bordered roads were infinite. Oh, the profundity.