Blogs are Wrong

I recently got my hands on Teach Yourself’s Beginner’s Hindi, and in 48 hours, I learned more Hindi than I did in months staring at the Learn Hindi In a Month books I got in Ahmedabad.

I like the new book so much, in fact, that I used the pages from the Learn Hindi in a Month book as toilet paper on the train back from Mumbai last night (actually, this was more due to a lack of toilet paper than any particular derision, but the sentiment is there, nontheless!)

hindi bahut accha bolu!

ok, maybe not yet.  but soon!

Some days I get incredibly frustrated when I think of silly made-up words like “fluffernutter” or “snickerdoodle”
Some days it doesn’t bother me at all.

But on the days when it bothers me, I’m sitting in my chair, thinking silly words for candy to myself over and over again and feeling furious at the universe for allowing all the meaning and thought to flow out of it and be replaced by concepts like snickerdoodles.  We’re all turning into drones, just pouches of money and fat with no room for thought or love or the choice to not have key insights into our demographic delivered by focus groups.  I’m angry and want to yell or punch a nestle marketing executive.  Right in the fluffernutters.

The heat is bearing down on our little two-wheel scooter, the heat and the horns and the dust of the Ahmedabad streets.  Our speed slows to a jerking, unsteady crawl as we weave through the packed streets of the old city.  Somewhere in this packed, jostling expanse is a store that sells oscilloscopes, a fundamental tool for the electrical engineering bench, and we’re making our wobbly way to it.  A huge bus lurches to a stop an inch behind us, releasing an explosive sigh of its air brakes and a deafening blast of its horn.  I can feel the blasts of heat from its engine,  breathing down my neck, and I’m suddenly very aware of the tiny difference between its bumper and my spine.  From my perch on the back of the scooter, I nervously squirm, feeling vulnerable, and tighten my grip on the bike as we force our way through throngs of shoppers, food vendors, speeding motorcylists, buses, bicycles and children.  Preetam, my friend and fellow engineer is driving the bike, somehow unfazed by this universe of activity surrounding us.  Twisting around in my seat to look behind us, I stare straight into the lazy, implacable eyes of a camel, casually flapping its lips as it pulls a cart through the street.  Staring at the camel’s whiskery face, I think back to my boss’ whiskery face at my first electrical engineering job, heart in my 22-year-old throat as I asked him to buy me an oscilloscope to use debugging electronic circuits. 
Back then, in the immaculate, air-conditioned office, the hard part was making the case that I needed an expensive piece of equipment, and that the increased quality of my work was worth the investment.  Here at DWPower, I’d asked for an oscilloscope and my boss, an engineer himself, said “sure!  If you need one, go get one!”
That was the easy part.
The hard part was coming up.

You see, Ahmedabad, India, where I work, is not an oscilloscope-friendly kind of town.  When you go into downtown, you’re likely to see lively street vendors, elephants trundling through the streets, restaurants and beggars and motorcycles and juice stalls.  Oscilloscope stores, not so much.  I realized that without ubiquitous Radio Shacks, web commerce and next-day fedex delivery, I fall into a kind of paralysis, unable to take a high-level vision, wave my fingers and make things happen.  Not speaking the Ahmedabadi language and unused to the city, finding an oscilloscope store, or even a grocery store, for that matter, seems as intimidating a task as flying to the moon.  But there’s a well known fact in India–anything you want–anything at all, you can find in the dusty back streets of the cities.  My co-worker Preetam, who’d spent much of his childhood in Ahmedabad, volunteered to show me this Indian magic trick.
“We’re getting close,” Preetham said from the front of the scooter.  I look around, but can’t make out anything in the crush of the crowd that would conceivably sell electronic measurement equipment.  We park the bike, which is just as well, since we’d been traveling at walking speed, and start looking around.  Preetam asks people in Gujarati where we can get electronic meters, and a variety of responses flood in.  Everybody offers advice–someone tells us to go just down the block, someone else tells us to go to the next town over, 40km away, and a third man sadly shakes his head, saying that there are no oscilloscopes in Ahmedabad.  As we walk through the streets, I get a lot of stares.  There’s maybe 200 foreigners in Ahmedabad, a city of 4.5 million, and it’s pretty rare to see a firingi, a foreigner like myself.  Men take my hand as we walk, saying “Which country?  What is your name?”  I have fleeting conversations with the men before running to keep up with Preetam, who strides through the crowd undeterred.  We eventually make our way to a tiny doorway crammed in between two ceiling fan shops.  The sign on the door reads “Meter World”.
Pushing our way through a narrow hallway crammed with people, we make our way to the desk.  Preetam starts speaking in rapid Gujarati, and while my eyes adjust to the dim interior, I look around in wonder.  The small shop is filled, floor to ceiling, with piles of multimeters, oscilloscopes, light meters and every other piece of measurement equipment you can see.  Huge, Dr. Seuss-like piles of boxes stretch up to the ceiling, towering over us in an intimidating, impossible way.  This entire store, I think, could come crashing down at any moment.  I could be buried here in a tomb of oscilloscopes.
Someone plunks a hefty catalog in front of me and tells me in broken English to pick out an oscilloscope I like.  I thumb through it.  There’s one oscilloscope in the catalog.  “I’ll take that one!” I say.
The store owner dispatches someone to go get the oscilloscope from their warehouse and I run to an ATM to withdraw the ~$300 US to pay for it.  The money in Indian rupees is a thick sheaf of bills about as large as my calf.  I struggle for a while to shove them into my wallet, then give up and cram them into my back pocket,  my pants jutting out awkwardly around the wad of money.  Preetam and I walk back to the store, sit on a couch underneath a groaning shelf of multimeters, and we wait.
and we wait.
and wait.  In the heat and the dust.  The fans overhead creak and strain but produce no real wind.  The noise from the street and the arguments in the crowded shop are deafening.  While we stand there, crowds come in and out of the shop.  Everyone in Ahmedabad, it seems, wants a multimeter.  Over all of this, stockboys pass heavy boxes back and forth over our heads.
Two hours later, the runner comes back through the door with a large box.  He opens it and pulls out an oscilloscope completely different from the one in the catalog.  Actually, it’s a very bad one, without the features we need.  “This is no good!” we protest, “We want the one we picked.” 
The shop owner scrutinized us, scowling beneath his mustache.  “That one is not available here.”
The obvious question hung in the air over us.  “Why did you make us wait two hours?” I wanted to scream, but I already knew the answer.  We waited two hours because we’re in Ahmedabad.  It’s as simple as that.  Are you going to sulk over it, are do you want an oscilloscope?
Pritham and the store owner launch into another animated Gujarati conversation.  After a few minutes of standing there helplessly, Preetham turns to me and says, “the oscilloscope you want is on the other side of town.  We can wait here…” (No!  I scream inwardly) “… or you can go over there and pick it up”
I say I’ll pick it up, and the shop owner scribbles and address for a shopping center on the other side of town.
Preetham says he has to go do work, so I’m left on my own.  I hail a rickshaw and show the driver the address, and we lurch our way there, chasing the mythical oscilloscope across the city.
The driver drops me in the middle of nowhere, in an abandoned concrete square somewhere I’ve never seen before.  There’s nothing that looks like a shopping center, but he insists that this is the right place before shooting away.  I walk around, looking for a passerby, find an old woman crouched in the shade, and ask her in my simple Gujarati where the shopping center is.  She points with her stick to a small muddy alley.  “That’s the shopping center?” I ask.
“Yes, yes.  Just through that alley”

I walk into the alley, sloshing through the mud and puddles and cow dung.  “Where the hell,” I think, “am I going to find an oscilloscope in the middle of this?”
As if to answer me, a growl of noise and a shower of sparks flies out of an open doorway, hitting me in the chest.  I jerk back–someone’s cutting steel with a grinder.  I peer inside the doorway, looking at nine men standing around in the heat of a large machine shop.  The name on the shop matched the name on my piece of paper, so I step inside, skirting the stream of sparks.  There’s what looks like an office above me, with a steep ladder leading up to it.  I climb up and say to the couple men sitting there, “I want to buy an oscilloscope”

“Of course!” one man says, as if this happens all the time.  “Sit down, sit down!  I am Sandip!  Which oscilloscope you want?”
I show him the page from the catalog, and he leaps up and runs into a backroom, shuffling through boxes and papers.  A few minutes later, he emerges with the exact oscilloscope I wanted.  We plug it in and test it, with several of the machinists climbing up and clustering around in curiosity to see what a gora could be doing with a piece of equipment up here.
The oscilloscope seems perfect, so I hand him the wad of cash, which he counts with great solemnity, and he then calls to the machinists, who swarm around the oscilloscope, packing it carefully and putting it back in its box, taping it over and over again until the cardboard is completely eclipsed in a mountain of tape.  They hand me the box and I make my uneasy way down the ladder, through the muddy street and hail a rickshaw to take me and my oscilloscope back to the office. 
Just another day in the employ of D W Power.

Everybody loves playing the “take a picture of a kid and show it to him” game

Taken near Sandila in Uttar Pradesh

Girls playing in a village near Sandila in Uttar Pradesh

There’s a missing section in my lonely planet.  This section would address, “what to do when you’re out riding your bike in Ahmedabad at like 2am because you can’t sleep and you just got the engine tuned up and it’s practically begging for a ride, and you turn onto the Nehru bridge into the old city and suddenly find yourself in the middle of a massive muslim motorcycle drag race/bike rally”

The section, of course, would only contain two words

gun it.

A kid on a roof in a village near Barabanki, in Uttar Pradesh

This is what motorcycles are made for

I was breaking into the roof when the lights went out.  I was trying to get onto the roof because the first monsoon had come to Ahmedabad and I wanted to watch the storm from the 12th story rooftop of my office building.  It was 11 at night, and the monsoon had started without warning, a gentle drizzle giving way to a ferocious thunderstorm in just a few minutes.  And there I was, standing on top of a rickety ladder in the pitch blackness with a bunch of tools stuck in the lock while water poured down on me from cracks in the roof.

I abandoned that plan and walked downstairs.  I figured I’d walk the couple kilometers home in the rain and take in the storm.  Under the building’s awning, I took a deep breath, savoring the feeling of dryness before stepping out into the rain.

Within a second, I was soaked to the bone.  It was like walking in the deep end of a swimming pool.  Water was everywhere.  It dripped down my face, into my mouth, blasted out of drainspouts and flowed in rivulets down the street, cascading over my sandaled feet before speeding off downstream.  Even though it was nighttime and in the middle of a downpour, it was still about 85 degrees out, and I felt great.  I couldn’t help myself–I started running through the empty streets and shouting at the lightning above me.

I walked towards a larger street and I started to hear the delighted shrieks of Indians who had come out to be in the rain.  People were speeding up and down the street, three to a motorcycle in ankle-deep water, huge wakes spraying out from their wheels as they screamed in joy.  Two children smiled up at me from a partially-submerged bicycle.  I reached in my back pocket for my camera, only to have a comic stream of water pour out of the camera.  ”What the hell,” I thought, pulling out the memory card and throwing the camera away.

By now, the street was completely submerged, and the water was up to my ankles, even my knees in some places.  Hordes of Indians were in the streets, walking down the street in laughing groups, splashing, falling over and running through the rain.  I saw that they were all going in one direction, the opposite way that I was going.  I stopped a man and asked him where he was going, and he screamed crazily with laughter and ran off into the night.  I asked another man, and he told me “we are going to visit our family.”

I walked a little more, and as another hundred people passed me, I thought to myself, “I should follow the people–I might see something”

I about-faced and walked with the procession.  By now, the water had ridden to the height of motorcycle engines, and the streets were scattered with bikes shorted out by the water, their drivers stomping futilely on the kickstarts.  People were shouting in the rain and pushing muddy bikes out of flooded intersections. Follow the people Motorcycles sped all around us, their lights flickering crazily as they shorted intermittently while the riders shouted loudly at everything. Follow the people, follow the people I kept thinking as I walked, struggling to stay upright.

And then everyone just kind of disappeared.  The crowd just kind of funneled away down alleys, into buildings and rickshaws, and I was left standing alone on a street somewhere in the middle of Ahmedabad, at midnight.  I grabbed a man about my age and asked, “where is everyone going?”

“wada!” he replied, a circle of people forming around us

“What?”  I shouted through the rain

“Wada Wada!”  he shouted, laughing at me with his friends while they splashed water at me

“Jesus,” I thought.  ”I’m getting the hell out of here before they eat me”

I ran off a safe distance from the splashers and spun around trying to get my bearings.  Follow the People, follow the people, I thought futilely.  There was nobody around.  The night was eerily quiet.

“You poor schmuck!” I thought a second later, “You’ve just wandered miles and miles through the city with no plan.  You’re soaked, it’s like one in the morning, you don’t even know how to get home and you’re knee deep in water”

Looking around for guidance in the dazzling flashes of lightning, I saw a field of cows, forlornly munching at muddy grass in the rain.  When there was no lightning, everything was inky black, but in the flare, I could see the cows as plainly as day.

“What do I do now?” I shouted at the cows

The cows didn’t say anything.  They just chewed

“Well, which way home?” I asked.  Yes, it was dumb to talk to cows.  I just didn’t really have a better option.

No reply.  I stood there a moment in silence, my feet sinking into the mud and water pooling in my jeans

Dark, flash, cows, dark, flash, cows.  I turned around and walked back the way I’d come, pushing uphill like a salmon through even more hordes of arriving people.

Something happens to you in the rain.  Being drenched, being mad, being in the middle of a biblical flood, you just get swept up in the emotion of the whole night.  There’s nobody out who doesn’t want to be there.  There’s no rules at all–no structure.  It’s a kind of mardi gras; utter lawlessness and jubilation in the rain, and on the walk back, it seized me.  ”I want,” I thought, “to steal cars right now.  I want to dance and shout.  I want to scream into the rain!  Show me the action!  Keep the night’s chaos rising–I want more and more!”  I grinned madly, drips of water descending from my canines.  This was wild, but I could handle it.  I am mighty, after all.  Bring it on, India!

I got to an intersection with hip-deep water and watched while rickshaws drove full speed into the intersection.  The body of a rickshaw cab has a big flat bottom, and if the water is deeper than the bottom, the rickshaw stops driving and just starts floating around, its wheels spinning plaintively in the water.  It becomes, effectively, a rickboat, set adrift.  Then it sinks.  This was pretty fun to watch to watch for a while.  Rickshaw drivers who must have lived through a rainy season in Ahmedabad just didn’t seem to care about the consequences and kept driving into the lake-like intersection.  Vrrrrooom, splash, shout, sink, over and over.  I helped push out a couple capsized rickshaws and then walked on my sodden way.

The lights to most of the city were out, so I kept to the edge of the street and squinted at the street signs, looking for clues as to the way home.  Finally, I made out through the rain a Gujarati sign that said ‘Paldi,’ my home neighborhood.  I turned down the deserted street and followed the swirling water home.

After a few blocks, I realized I didn’t know this street at all.  I kept looking for more street signs, or anybody, but all I saw was water.  I took a step and suddenly I was swimming.  Not metaphor swimming.  Not exaggeration swimming.  The water was over my head and my feet tread frantically to keep me up.  ”This,” I thought as I swam for shore, “is unacceptable”

I pulled my dripping body back up onto the curb.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I questioned why there was a nine foot deep trench in the middle of a road, but given the circumstances of the night, it made a perverse kind of sense.  Sloshing through the night with a more cautious step, I made my way to some railroad tracks.  I followed them, looking for a familar intersection, and was relieved to see a street I recognized.  Shivering now from the rain and wind, I trudged to my doorstep.  No sooner was my door closed than I stripped off my clothes in a sullen puddle on the floor, showered off the mud and grit and collapsed into my bed to dream of wild monsoon nights.