What Week is This?

Learned Truth: Beef is tasty. Coffee is good. Showers are awesome. Clean clothes rock. Highways are wonderful. My bed is on the other side of the world. My friends and family are too...


So far this blog has been about experiences and not feelings. That can be explained.

The first three weeks were loaded with experiences as I got my footing here in India and started to get comfortable and functional in my host country. There was little time for introspection and I pushed aside most of the feelings that did come up so they wouldn’t interfere with the experience.

The second three weeks were/are routine with only a few new experiences. There were a bunch of new people that helped continue with a sense of newness but routine was mostly the order of the day. Not much new is happening right now.

I have been exploring more of the spiritual side of India, mostly in the Buddhist temple and in my talks with the monks. In my talks with the monks and Tibetan laymen I am also educated about the situation in Tibet. I haven’t written about that here and I probably won’t. That’s not what this is about. I will however talk about it when I get home. I made a promise that I would tell people the real story.

So anyway, besides good coffee etc. (See learned truth) this past week I’ve begun to miss odd things from home. For example one day I was sitting in the daycare and had a massive urge for Taco Bell. It stuck with me though they day. The next day I had a craving for Dunkin Doughnuts iced coffee. For those of you who are born and raised in California, its a chain of doughnut shops in the East coast, kinda like Krispy Kream. (“Time to make the doughnuts”). Just today on my way home I really wanted to watch a US Football game. So yeah I’m homesick.
I don’t dislike India at all but some of it is wearing on me. There is no word in the Hindi language for “Privacy”. Seriously. It can’t be directly translated and when its indirectly translated most Indians would wonder why someone would want such a thing. Its completely foreign to them. There could be a wide open space with plenty of room and if a person sits down among all this wide open space its a given that the next person to come upon this space will choose to sit right next to the first person and immediately ask questions like, “What’s your name?” “What do you do for a living?” “How much money do you make?” “Are you married?” “Why not?”. Actually that’s not so bad. When I want to be alone my psycho stare works here just as well as it does elsewhere but just the general lack of privacy does wear on me.

I think the infrastructure or lack there of is what gets to me the most. Not so much because it inconveniences me because it doesn’t. If I were here on business I’d go mad but I’m not so the lack of good phones, internet, transportation etc. isn’t really affecting my daily life though at a few isolated times it has. The real reason why is gets to me is the reason for the shitty infrastructure. The people who build it.

I’m not sure but I don’t think there’s a word in Hindi for “Quality” either. Just barely good enough for now is the best one can hope for in quality here. Built to last is as foreign as toilet paper to Indians. Oh yeah, toilet paper is a commodity here but only among Western tourists. Westerners learn soon to carry their own and every one here past their second day does. But that’s a tangent so back to the infrastructure...

The people who do the building in India are mostly from the Dalit or Shudra castes. There’s a blurry line between Shudra and Dalit but the Shudras are the laborers and the Dalits are the untouchables (they do the labor even the Dalits wont do. Together they comprise most of India’s poor which is about fifty percent of the country. They are uneducated, illiterate, unskilled and they build the roads and the houses and what comes out of the factories. Yes they are unskilled and build stuff.

On my way to the daycare and to the Hope Center (where I teach English to the monks) I pass road construction sites. One is on the side of a steep hill and right now the retaining walls are being built. The other is on the edge of what can loosely be called a road and its an open-air aqueduct (basically a sewer, more on that later) I’ve been paying close attention to the progress of both. The rebar is sloppily tied off and not welded. The concrete is mixed onsite in small mixers by, you guess it, an unskilled laborer. One can plainly see the quality of the concrete differs from batch to batch in the color and density of the dried concrete. Parts of the retaining wall that were poured a week ago are already crumbling. Same thing for the aqueduct. There’s a few places in the aqueduct where they encountered an obstacle and just stopped there and continued past the obstacle. And no, they probably aren’t going back to deal with it later. There’s plenty of examples of work done years ago where one can see the builders just stopped when it got hard and started again where they could making the whole project pointless. I could go on but I’d rather not. Its depressing.

These people don’t wear any sort of safety gear. Most are in bare feet or sandals. They wear the same thing everyone in India wears. A thin cotton or wool collared shirt and pants. The woman wear their saris (Indian dress). The woman bring their children to the job site. Babies are carried in cloth cradles in front of their mothers who carry large stones or bricks on their heads or load stones into the concrete mixer. One day I saw a baby’s head no less than six inches from the moving cement mixer as rocks were being thrown in over its head. The older kids play right at the job site. Not off to the side, they are playing a few feet from where their parents are breaking rocks, pouring concrete, mixing concrete or whatever. Oh and they don’t close or cordon off roads where there is construction going on so cars and other vehicles are whizzing on by. This leads me to the next thing about India that is wearing on me.

The strongly held belief in karma in reincarnation leads to a lower valuation of human life than in the West. If something bad happens to someone its always their fault because their karma dictated it. Everyone is responsible for their own karma and good deeds build good karma and bad deeds build bad karma. If a bus went over the edge of a road and killed twenty people those people had bad karma and deserved it. Yes, there’s grieving etc. but that’s just superficial. This is why there are kids playing at the job sites. They were born into the low castes because they led a bad life the last time around. They don’t need to go to school or even be in a safe environment. Their karma dictated their fate and no one is going to change it.

I’m going to post this now and continue in a day or two. Much more to come...