By Jason Overdorf
(Outlook India, October 27, 2008)
Normally, when an Indian wins the Booker Prize, the country rallies round to cheer, and even the most dubious "voracious readers" from the pages of Stardust suddenly develop an interest in literature. But Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was never a book Indians wanted to read, and even with the much-coveted stamp of approval from abroad, it's hard telling whether it will get the 1,00,000-copy boost in sales experienced by Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss.
Consider the front-page Times of India story that announced the news. The first paragraph cites as the reason for the win Adiga's "alleged ability to offer insights into the struggle of a developing nation on the rise"—effectively condemning the Booker winner as a fake. The conventional and obviously objective alternative would have been to say, "In awarding the prize, the judges praised Adiga's skill in providing insight into the struggle of...." 'Alleged', which to the newspaper man implies somebody is being accused of a crime and the lawyers are worried about a case of libel, is a word used to skewer. Any editor will tell you that its use here was no accident.
From the beginning, The White Tiger received an uncomfortable reception. The author (a friend of mine) is, if not actually a foreigner, then foreign-returned, which my wife tells me ranks even lower on the totem pole. Worse still, regardless of his ethnicity, he was a writer for Time magazine, and therefore guilty of writing bad stuff about India: that the people here are poor; they suffer from diseases like polio and tuberculosis that have been eliminated across much of the world and similar nonsense. And he did it in the book, too! The White Tiger is about a guy from Bihar, for goodness sake! Naturally, the reviews, and even some of the news articles, are peppered with backhanded compliments.
But there are worse things than being called poor. Compared with Inheritance of Loss, The White Tiger is more compelling, better written, and—and this is the really important thing—less Orientalist.
Inheritance of Loss infuriatingly propagates the "little brown men doing cute little things" rubbish, that by all rights should have disappeared with India's colonists. But Indian readers overlooked this allegedly cute stuff about Anglo-Indians and Nepali immigrants and their silly ways, because of the book's nostalgic, patriotic content. Though The White Tiger has its own broad brush moments, that kind of pandering—cheap, tired jokes about "peculiar" Indian English and the like, with which that schlocky, much-praised tome Shantaram was chock-full—is largely absent. The trouble is that The White Tiger is gleefully vicious in lampooning the middle class who are, regardless of the tired accusations about "writing for the foreign market," Aravind's true audience.
It's a familiar reaction. The critics of the foreign correspondent corps insist we are always banging on about poverty and filth, when we should be pointing out the five-star hotels. But stories about India's slowness in eradicating poverty, malnutrition, disease and the like are rarer than you think. Aravind has called The White Tiger "a result of my secret, uncensored articles", because it is almost impossible to get anything into Time or The Economist or Newsweek about the problems that India has had for decades and—because they are too big, or the system is too flawed, or whatever—hasn't been able to solve. Poverty is bad. It is everywhere. But it is not news. When articles on these topics appear, nobody should be surprised. The same thing appears in the Times of India every day and Outlook every week.Nor should they be angry, unless the writer tries to imply that some white guy could step in and sort the mess out in a year or two.
It's the other kind of foreign correspondent rubbish, the Orientalist crap, that ought to get people incensed. Why does every article have to begin with a woman in a colourful sari, squatting in the dust? Why are western readers so concerned with the fate of tame elephants, snake-charmers and eunuchs? And why do we always find somebody to quote who speaks in Indian English as unbelievable as that invented by Gregory David Roberts? Because it's exotic, because it's allegedly cute. But it makes you all out to be little brown folks, funny but inscrutable.
I, for one, would rather be called poor. And I'd rather have somebody, like Aravind, to make me angry about it.
Showing posts with label Outlook India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Outlook India. Show all posts
Monday, October 20, 2008
Monday, May 05, 2008
the pom-pom girls save the world
Baulk at the bimbo? When it's Americana, India will learn, this too shall be.
(Outlook India, May 12, 2008)
JASON OVERDORF
Not long ago, a columnist for the New York Times celebrated the arrival of the Washington Redskins cheerleaders in the Indian Premier League by remarking that this hallowed event must surely signal that India now more than ever looks to America, rather than Britain or Europe, as its model for cultural development. Apparently, while you are still playing cricket—a kind of baseball with a flat bat—you are now doing it in a satisfyingly snazzed-up American way.
As a red-blooded Yankee with a more than passing love for the steroid-pumped spectacle of the US National Football League (the one with armour and the funny-looking ball), as well as the more historic American standbys of Mom, baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, I felt my eyes well with sentimental tears. Not since the foul-mouthed hulks from Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment toured India has American culture had so representative an emissary as the humble and hardworking cheerleader.
Keep your Ramanujan and your 6,00,000 engineers a year. So you invented zero. Discovered it. Whatever. It's a number for losers anyway. For statistical and mathematical gimcrackery, we'll take our guys any day. Consider P.T. Barnum, the circus promoter who calculated, "There's a sucker born every minute." Or, of course, Earl Whipple, who invented the giant foam finger, aid to sports fans everywhere, that eloquently proclaims "We're Number One!" Anyway, what's math compared with Reality TV? Most of your software geeks are even now cracking open cans of Budweiser, and watching large-bosomed women wolf down plates of worms on Fear Factor. Yes, readers, I will say it. American culture has converted "pop" into a celebration of the dumb. Today's Elvis is Britney Spears. Genius!
Naturally, I was stunned to discover that not all Indians have greeted our scantily-clad emissaries with my own enthusiasm. Some members of Parliament have rashly sought to ban them, others to curb their freedom of expression by imprisoning them in pants. Clearly, this is both prudish and undemocratic. Worse, even, than rejecting our nukes.
It is obvious from America's present ascendancy in economic and political affairs that the dumb-beats-smart phenomenon is not limited to sports and entertainment—stupidity and vulgarity triumph over reason and good taste in all arenas. To prove this to the world, we elected George W. Bush, a former cheerleader. Twice! It is now time for you to fall in line. You're starting to get the hang of stupidity. So far you are doing very well with Indian Idol and Nach Baliye, and Bollywood has mastered the art of stealing Hollywood plotlines and denuding them of their last vestiges of intelligence. You even refer to Vijay Mallya as "doctor". Why baulk at the bimbos?
Most Americans—who, to be quite honest, remain perplexed about why Christopher Columbus was looking for India in the first place—are blissfully ignorant of this blatant slap in the face. But were they to read of it, perhaps at the end of an amusing story about a eunuch who has run for mayor or a village woman who has married an elephant, it would only confirm their convictions that we are embroiled in a battle more perilous than the one we fought against communism. The truth is, we can't help but feel we are beset on all sides, because we are! No matter which backward country to which we bring the joys of freedom and democracy—processed food, bleach blondes, and some other stuff to do with civil rights and powerful detergents and whatnot—the people greet our sharp-dressed marketing executives and our fresh-faced soldiers the same way: with suspicion and distrust. When even our cheerleaders—who did for the ballerina what Velveeta cheese spread did for brie—receive such a reception, it is no surprise we're always wondering, "Why do they hate us so?" Ours is an utterly thankless task.
Perhaps a bit of background is needed, if the cheerleader is to make a comeback in an India worthy of KFC. Once upon a time, American sports were primitive and wholesome, like cricket, and there were no cheerleaders for the professional teams. (Now only Major League Baseball remains sadly bimboless). Cheerleading began at the University of Minnesota in 1898. Through what now seems an obvious oversight, the squads were all-male until 1923. But as it evolved, a dearth of athletic activities for women made cheerleading into a sort of substitute sport for the fairer sex. The original purpose, that is the leading of the crowd in cheers ("Rah, rah, ree! Kick 'em in the knee! Rah, rah, rass! Kick 'em in the other knee!") has long since been forgotten. The crowd is better at organising its own cheers anyway, and the players have money and performance-enhancing drugs to keep them motivated. But high school cheerleaders—like Olivia Newton John's character Sandy in Grease, or more recently the characters played by Mena Suvari in American Beauty and Hayden Panettiere in Heroes—have become iconic representations of America's youthful exuberance: contortionist Lolitas in tiny skirts, fresh and innocent...or maybe not.
Still more progress was made in the Farrah Fawcett 1970s by the cheerleaders for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys ("America's Team") who scrapped the virginal facade and made cheerleading unapologetically sexy. In tiny white hot pants, white cowboy boots and cowboy hats, they merged the worldly glamour of the Coffee, Tea or Me era airhostess with Playboy's liberated (but still pliant) bombshell. Now, professional cheerleaders look and perform less like wholesome girls filled with school spirit than like the entertainers known in America as "exotic dancers". You may not understand, but this transformation has reached its peak in India, where they play a wonderful double role—first as women with remarkable (if surgically enhanced) bodies, and second as the white, blonde temptresses of the West—in encouraging India's much ballyhooed rise.
I dare say this important reinforcement of femininity—cheering for men, rather than playing on a team yourself—has been no less important than the Barbie Doll. But it is faltering in America, due to a foolish new emphasis on women's athletics. Not long ago, for instance, when a mother in Texas committed first-degree murder to make sure her daughter made the cheerleading squad, the court was not sympathetic. The judges failed to see she was defending a vital American tradition that is now under serious threat.
Today, it is mostly in nostalgic films and TV shows that the cheerleaders are the most beautiful and popular girls, ruling the school together with the male athletes in their varsity letterman jackets, tormenting the smart kids by pushing their heads down the toilet and similar time-honoured pastimes. In real life, sad changes are afoot. At the school I attended, for instance, the pretty girls turned up their noses at cheerleading, letting those who were plain and slightly overweight fill in the ranks. The guys who played guitar and could dance—even some "straight A students", what we call the kids who ace all the exams—had more girlfriends than the football players. Something has to be done to stop this perversion of the natural order of things.
Thankfully, as it did with the Miss Universe pageant, India has stepped forward to shoulder the burden, casting off benighted traditions like purdah and socialism. It is high time somebody said it. Like the editorial staff of the Indian Express, who last week decried the joyless opposition to the "shiny, happy girls who inject a bit of pep into the IPL".So brave it was, it reminded me of a red-white-and-blue declaration along similar lines: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
(Outlook India, May 12, 2008)
JASON OVERDORF
Not long ago, a columnist for the New York Times celebrated the arrival of the Washington Redskins cheerleaders in the Indian Premier League by remarking that this hallowed event must surely signal that India now more than ever looks to America, rather than Britain or Europe, as its model for cultural development. Apparently, while you are still playing cricket—a kind of baseball with a flat bat—you are now doing it in a satisfyingly snazzed-up American way.
As a red-blooded Yankee with a more than passing love for the steroid-pumped spectacle of the US National Football League (the one with armour and the funny-looking ball), as well as the more historic American standbys of Mom, baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, I felt my eyes well with sentimental tears. Not since the foul-mouthed hulks from Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment toured India has American culture had so representative an emissary as the humble and hardworking cheerleader.
Keep your Ramanujan and your 6,00,000 engineers a year. So you invented zero. Discovered it. Whatever. It's a number for losers anyway. For statistical and mathematical gimcrackery, we'll take our guys any day. Consider P.T. Barnum, the circus promoter who calculated, "There's a sucker born every minute." Or, of course, Earl Whipple, who invented the giant foam finger, aid to sports fans everywhere, that eloquently proclaims "We're Number One!" Anyway, what's math compared with Reality TV? Most of your software geeks are even now cracking open cans of Budweiser, and watching large-bosomed women wolf down plates of worms on Fear Factor. Yes, readers, I will say it. American culture has converted "pop" into a celebration of the dumb. Today's Elvis is Britney Spears. Genius!
Naturally, I was stunned to discover that not all Indians have greeted our scantily-clad emissaries with my own enthusiasm. Some members of Parliament have rashly sought to ban them, others to curb their freedom of expression by imprisoning them in pants. Clearly, this is both prudish and undemocratic. Worse, even, than rejecting our nukes.
It is obvious from America's present ascendancy in economic and political affairs that the dumb-beats-smart phenomenon is not limited to sports and entertainment—stupidity and vulgarity triumph over reason and good taste in all arenas. To prove this to the world, we elected George W. Bush, a former cheerleader. Twice! It is now time for you to fall in line. You're starting to get the hang of stupidity. So far you are doing very well with Indian Idol and Nach Baliye, and Bollywood has mastered the art of stealing Hollywood plotlines and denuding them of their last vestiges of intelligence. You even refer to Vijay Mallya as "doctor". Why baulk at the bimbos?
Most Americans—who, to be quite honest, remain perplexed about why Christopher Columbus was looking for India in the first place—are blissfully ignorant of this blatant slap in the face. But were they to read of it, perhaps at the end of an amusing story about a eunuch who has run for mayor or a village woman who has married an elephant, it would only confirm their convictions that we are embroiled in a battle more perilous than the one we fought against communism. The truth is, we can't help but feel we are beset on all sides, because we are! No matter which backward country to which we bring the joys of freedom and democracy—processed food, bleach blondes, and some other stuff to do with civil rights and powerful detergents and whatnot—the people greet our sharp-dressed marketing executives and our fresh-faced soldiers the same way: with suspicion and distrust. When even our cheerleaders—who did for the ballerina what Velveeta cheese spread did for brie—receive such a reception, it is no surprise we're always wondering, "Why do they hate us so?" Ours is an utterly thankless task.
Perhaps a bit of background is needed, if the cheerleader is to make a comeback in an India worthy of KFC. Once upon a time, American sports were primitive and wholesome, like cricket, and there were no cheerleaders for the professional teams. (Now only Major League Baseball remains sadly bimboless). Cheerleading began at the University of Minnesota in 1898. Through what now seems an obvious oversight, the squads were all-male until 1923. But as it evolved, a dearth of athletic activities for women made cheerleading into a sort of substitute sport for the fairer sex. The original purpose, that is the leading of the crowd in cheers ("Rah, rah, ree! Kick 'em in the knee! Rah, rah, rass! Kick 'em in the other knee!") has long since been forgotten. The crowd is better at organising its own cheers anyway, and the players have money and performance-enhancing drugs to keep them motivated. But high school cheerleaders—like Olivia Newton John's character Sandy in Grease, or more recently the characters played by Mena Suvari in American Beauty and Hayden Panettiere in Heroes—have become iconic representations of America's youthful exuberance: contortionist Lolitas in tiny skirts, fresh and innocent...or maybe not.
Still more progress was made in the Farrah Fawcett 1970s by the cheerleaders for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys ("America's Team") who scrapped the virginal facade and made cheerleading unapologetically sexy. In tiny white hot pants, white cowboy boots and cowboy hats, they merged the worldly glamour of the Coffee, Tea or Me era airhostess with Playboy's liberated (but still pliant) bombshell. Now, professional cheerleaders look and perform less like wholesome girls filled with school spirit than like the entertainers known in America as "exotic dancers". You may not understand, but this transformation has reached its peak in India, where they play a wonderful double role—first as women with remarkable (if surgically enhanced) bodies, and second as the white, blonde temptresses of the West—in encouraging India's much ballyhooed rise.
I dare say this important reinforcement of femininity—cheering for men, rather than playing on a team yourself—has been no less important than the Barbie Doll. But it is faltering in America, due to a foolish new emphasis on women's athletics. Not long ago, for instance, when a mother in Texas committed first-degree murder to make sure her daughter made the cheerleading squad, the court was not sympathetic. The judges failed to see she was defending a vital American tradition that is now under serious threat.
Today, it is mostly in nostalgic films and TV shows that the cheerleaders are the most beautiful and popular girls, ruling the school together with the male athletes in their varsity letterman jackets, tormenting the smart kids by pushing their heads down the toilet and similar time-honoured pastimes. In real life, sad changes are afoot. At the school I attended, for instance, the pretty girls turned up their noses at cheerleading, letting those who were plain and slightly overweight fill in the ranks. The guys who played guitar and could dance—even some "straight A students", what we call the kids who ace all the exams—had more girlfriends than the football players. Something has to be done to stop this perversion of the natural order of things.
Thankfully, as it did with the Miss Universe pageant, India has stepped forward to shoulder the burden, casting off benighted traditions like purdah and socialism. It is high time somebody said it. Like the editorial staff of the Indian Express, who last week decried the joyless opposition to the "shiny, happy girls who inject a bit of pep into the IPL".So brave it was, it reminded me of a red-white-and-blue declaration along similar lines: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
objective observations of a ludicrous freak
Often, it all ends up as a strange, involuntary, one-man circus act by a bald, white man
By Jason Overdorf
Outlook India (Jan. 14, 2008)
There is no one moment that has defined my experience in India, no epiphany when it was all made clear. Rather, my time here has been a confusing blur. A synaptic overload. In the course of my job (I’m a journalist), I travel to strange places and try to catch the essence of what is going on. I try to record a mental image of the scene—what the principals are wearing, what the hawkers are selling (and for how much), the particular sort of stink (nullah? body odour? diesel?)—and at the same time to get "the story". I’m not sure I ever succeed.
When I show up, everybody surrounds me to scrutinise my every word and gesture. Somewhere I have run across the idea that the presence of the observer has a subtle, often unreported influence on the phenomenon he’s meant to be observing. My experience is nothing like that. It’s more like the phenomenon I’m meant to be observing comes to a complete halt and normal life is replaced by a strange, involuntary, one-man circus performance by a bald white man. If I were to be truthful, I’d headline all my stories the same way: Objective observations made by a ludicrous freak, while ignoring the woman staring into his ear and trying to take notes with a serious and dignified air.
You think I’m exaggerating. But that is because Indians are capable of doing many things at once. You can conduct a heated argument while brushing off a beggar tugging at your sleeve, accepting a cup of tea from a servant and ignoring a religious figure of some sort who is chanting, setting something on fire, or just making some kind of piercing noise over a loudspeaker. You don’t even think about it. For you this is normal.
I’ll give you an example. Before the last national election, I took a taxi to Gorakhpur to write about Sonia Gandhi’s "road show". I’d managed to track down Salman Khursheed, then president of the UP Congress, and wangled my way into his fancy jeep (a Scorpio or Sumo or something) for the ride out to the villages where Sonia was supposed to whip up enthusiasm for her campaign. It was the only time I was going to have for an interview, and it wasn’t likely I’d get any time with Sonia herself.The convoy took off as though somebody had waved a green flag, all the drivers jockeying for a position close to Sonia’s car, bumping quarterpanels like some kind of khadi-clad nascar final. Every so often, a policewallah would come alongside in an open jeep, lean out like a polo player, and clout one of the Scorpios or Sumos or Qualises with his lathi to force it back in line. All the while, I’m firing interview questions at Khursheed and the other UP Congress bigwigs, with my eyes riveted to the road ahead so I won’t miss my last moment on earth. If I hadn’t had a tape recorder, the only thing I’d have gotten out of the whole experience would have been the thwack of a lathi on the roof and, when the driver made a move to off-road it through a deep ravine to inch closer to Sonia’s car, the sudden interruption of Khursheed’s erudite explanation of the caste equation in UP so that he could exclaim: "Mat karo! Mat karo!" Later, I listened to the tape. Sure enough, Khursheed had given me articulate, even eloquent, answers.
Another time, near Vidarbha in Maharashtra, I went to visit the families of some farmers who’d committed suicide. In one house, I remember, the man had killed himself only the day before, and his wife, probably in shock, lay without speaking in a bed in a darkened room in the back. There I was being shepherded around by an activist for the farmers who was really just a politician by another name. My usual circus-act arrival had attracted a lot of attention when we rolled in, and now we had an entourage of a dozen or so villagers who all wanted to go on record with the story of the tragedy.We trooped into the widow’s house, all the way to her bedside. It was a horrible invasion. But she didn’t react. If she had, she wouldn’t have been able to get a word in edgewise, there were so many people competing to tell me how bad things had become, watching my reactions, cataloguing the expressions of sympathy and concern I was able to muster. I was trying to look at the widow so that I could describe her in her anguish—steeling myself for a part of the job I’m not sure that I believe in—and everybody else was rubbernecking at me.
Sometimes, too, it’s the great Indian instinct for hospitality that throws my observations off kilter. I’ll be sent to a Dalit village someplace, or to the home of a notorious goonda, or to an encampment of bonded labourers, and everything will come to a stop as first a plastic chair is unearthed for me to sit on, then discarded in favour of a charpoy. Then tea appears. A conference develops: perhaps the foreigner won’t drink tea, foreigners get the loosies from all manner of things, and so on. The tea disappears and is replaced with Pepsi. Everyone talks at once. The translator summarises five minutes of narrative with a single sentence. I stupidly write down "woman in blue sari" and "boy in Nike T-shirt". I should be cutting my subjects, who earn all of 50 rupees a day if they are lucky, in on the proceeds from my article—which will affect a tone of outrage and perhaps occasion a coffee-table discussion or two. But instead they’re buying me Pepsi.
Those are, I suppose, after all, my defining experiences of India. It’s too immediate for definition. There are too many interpreters. Too many guides for me to look and listen properly. So I don’t experience India at all. I just try my best to stop it from experiencing me.
Jason Overdorf is a Delhi-based American freelance journalist and a frequent contributor to Newsweek
By Jason Overdorf
Outlook India (Jan. 14, 2008)
There is no one moment that has defined my experience in India, no epiphany when it was all made clear. Rather, my time here has been a confusing blur. A synaptic overload. In the course of my job (I’m a journalist), I travel to strange places and try to catch the essence of what is going on. I try to record a mental image of the scene—what the principals are wearing, what the hawkers are selling (and for how much), the particular sort of stink (nullah? body odour? diesel?)—and at the same time to get "the story". I’m not sure I ever succeed.
When I show up, everybody surrounds me to scrutinise my every word and gesture. Somewhere I have run across the idea that the presence of the observer has a subtle, often unreported influence on the phenomenon he’s meant to be observing. My experience is nothing like that. It’s more like the phenomenon I’m meant to be observing comes to a complete halt and normal life is replaced by a strange, involuntary, one-man circus performance by a bald white man. If I were to be truthful, I’d headline all my stories the same way: Objective observations made by a ludicrous freak, while ignoring the woman staring into his ear and trying to take notes with a serious and dignified air.
You think I’m exaggerating. But that is because Indians are capable of doing many things at once. You can conduct a heated argument while brushing off a beggar tugging at your sleeve, accepting a cup of tea from a servant and ignoring a religious figure of some sort who is chanting, setting something on fire, or just making some kind of piercing noise over a loudspeaker. You don’t even think about it. For you this is normal.
I’ll give you an example. Before the last national election, I took a taxi to Gorakhpur to write about Sonia Gandhi’s "road show". I’d managed to track down Salman Khursheed, then president of the UP Congress, and wangled my way into his fancy jeep (a Scorpio or Sumo or something) for the ride out to the villages where Sonia was supposed to whip up enthusiasm for her campaign. It was the only time I was going to have for an interview, and it wasn’t likely I’d get any time with Sonia herself.The convoy took off as though somebody had waved a green flag, all the drivers jockeying for a position close to Sonia’s car, bumping quarterpanels like some kind of khadi-clad nascar final. Every so often, a policewallah would come alongside in an open jeep, lean out like a polo player, and clout one of the Scorpios or Sumos or Qualises with his lathi to force it back in line. All the while, I’m firing interview questions at Khursheed and the other UP Congress bigwigs, with my eyes riveted to the road ahead so I won’t miss my last moment on earth. If I hadn’t had a tape recorder, the only thing I’d have gotten out of the whole experience would have been the thwack of a lathi on the roof and, when the driver made a move to off-road it through a deep ravine to inch closer to Sonia’s car, the sudden interruption of Khursheed’s erudite explanation of the caste equation in UP so that he could exclaim: "Mat karo! Mat karo!" Later, I listened to the tape. Sure enough, Khursheed had given me articulate, even eloquent, answers.
Another time, near Vidarbha in Maharashtra, I went to visit the families of some farmers who’d committed suicide. In one house, I remember, the man had killed himself only the day before, and his wife, probably in shock, lay without speaking in a bed in a darkened room in the back. There I was being shepherded around by an activist for the farmers who was really just a politician by another name. My usual circus-act arrival had attracted a lot of attention when we rolled in, and now we had an entourage of a dozen or so villagers who all wanted to go on record with the story of the tragedy.We trooped into the widow’s house, all the way to her bedside. It was a horrible invasion. But she didn’t react. If she had, she wouldn’t have been able to get a word in edgewise, there were so many people competing to tell me how bad things had become, watching my reactions, cataloguing the expressions of sympathy and concern I was able to muster. I was trying to look at the widow so that I could describe her in her anguish—steeling myself for a part of the job I’m not sure that I believe in—and everybody else was rubbernecking at me.
Sometimes, too, it’s the great Indian instinct for hospitality that throws my observations off kilter. I’ll be sent to a Dalit village someplace, or to the home of a notorious goonda, or to an encampment of bonded labourers, and everything will come to a stop as first a plastic chair is unearthed for me to sit on, then discarded in favour of a charpoy. Then tea appears. A conference develops: perhaps the foreigner won’t drink tea, foreigners get the loosies from all manner of things, and so on. The tea disappears and is replaced with Pepsi. Everyone talks at once. The translator summarises five minutes of narrative with a single sentence. I stupidly write down "woman in blue sari" and "boy in Nike T-shirt". I should be cutting my subjects, who earn all of 50 rupees a day if they are lucky, in on the proceeds from my article—which will affect a tone of outrage and perhaps occasion a coffee-table discussion or two. But instead they’re buying me Pepsi.
Those are, I suppose, after all, my defining experiences of India. It’s too immediate for definition. There are too many interpreters. Too many guides for me to look and listen properly. So I don’t experience India at all. I just try my best to stop it from experiencing me.
Jason Overdorf is a Delhi-based American freelance journalist and a frequent contributor to Newsweek
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