Places - 4

This is from a time seventeen years ago when I was rather green, or certainly a darker shade of green than I am now.  My opinions were unformed; like formless clay.  Perhaps they are now taking some sort of a discernible shape at the metaphysical potter's wheel but back then they were like clay being softened for some future ceramic project (a project that is way past any scheduled completion).

I had started a new job then, one that promised an annual week long visit to some place that wasn't in United States and was often in Europe.  The location of choice the year I started this job was Marrakesh.

I remember being beyond a normal state of excitement.  Oh I was not going around saying how much I had always wanted to go to Morocco or how awesome it was, how exotic...none of that.  It was just a destination that filled me with curiosity and a sense of awe that names like Casablanca and Marrakesh have the power to inspire.  But I was rather surprised at how underwhelmed my coworkers were at the prospect of this trip.  There were constant moans and groans and whining along the lines of, "Why couldn't it have been Venice, Monaco, Rome or Cannes?"

I used to ask them, "Marrakesh is exciting! Why are you guys so bummed about it?"

I don't know if I ever got an answer that made sense to me at that time.  The answers indicated the following notions and/or perceptions:

a) Poverty
b) Squalor
c) Poor facilities and amenities
d) Bad food
e) Bad water
f) Poor transportation
g) Getting sick
h) Getting robbed

None of these concerns diminished my enthusiasm about the trip.  I hailed from a country where these things were commonplace.  After all it couldn't possibly be as bad as sidestepping all kinds of feces on the roadside en route a bus stop or seeing people urinating against a wall or spitting and expectorating in stairwells and alleys and walls etc.  Gold chains were often snatched in buses and trains, women were scared of traveling alone or traveling in crowded Delhi Transportation Corporation buses for fear of being molested.  So how bad could Marrakesh really be?

But the moans and groans continued until we left on Royal Air Maroc.  The airline made them even whinier, they seemed to forget that all airlines experience turbulence and that this wasn't a RAM specialty.

It was as if my co-workers and co-travelers were closed to any possibilities.  They didn't even want to give this destination a chance.  I decided to ignore their negativity and see things for myself.

I had a wonderful trip.  How could one not in a place as culturally rich as Morocco? Our hotel was palatial, the services, the rooms were all extraordinary.  The locales chosen for the evening events, the dinner functions were all amazing in their splendor.  Everything was rich, exotic and wearing a sheen of textured brilliance.  I was very pleased to be there.

When people from other countries indicate that they are big fans of Hindi film actors and Hindi film music I am always pleased, it always makes me smile and in Morocco this happened with some frequency.  They all wanted to know if I knew and could sing the song, "I am a disco dancer", for them.  There were also the carpet salesmen who were eager to show me a flying carpet.  They had me sit on one then they lifted up the edges and swung me around on it.  It was all so much fun.

But that's a digression from what I had really been thinking of writing about.

Feelings of shock, shame and general disgust have passed through me in waves over the last few days as I've seen India stumbling and fumbling with the preparations for the Commonwealth Games.  There are.graphic pictures of squalor at the accommodations for the athletes, there are reports of rampant corruption and substandard construction, it appears as though every ugliness hidden under the "India shining" rhetoric of the past is suddenly out there for the world to see.

These reports don't seem inaccurate and they are building perceptions, adding to stereotypes, further fastening the third world tag that India has been eager to shake off and burn in the recent years in a bid to be recognized as a powerful player on the global stage.  Perceptions are quite a force.

Ages ago when the dream of coming back to the US was just a glimmer in my eye, Indian news magazines were reporting the "dot-busters" incidents in New Jersey.  It was frightening to read about this and it led to us jumping to the conclusion that America had turned into a place where Indians were routinely shot and killed.  That's how powerful perceptions are.  The perceived intensity of a real event is always amplified and magnified. 

At Marrakesh, my American colleagues got into various debates with the European visitors when we got together at the end of the day for cocktails or dinner.  The Americans continued to whine and express their dismay at the signs of poverty all around.  When we visited the souks they failed to take any pleasure from the local color, the hustle and bustle, the various arts, crafts, textiles, tapestry, rugs, pottery etc. on display.  They were always too busy wrinkling up their noses and complaining about the smell, the dirt, the squalor.  They said it depressed them to see how people lived here, so on top of each other in such congestion.  They thought it was all very sad and the conference should not have been organized at this venue.

The European viewpoint, which was always offered to contradict the American one, was about how irrelevant the poverty and the squalor were and how shallow it was for Americans to not see how happy people were, how at ease with their situation, how accepting of life as it was for them.  The Americans were bashed for their desire to change everything, to drive things to a place where the rest of the world was better off not going.  The Europeans relished Moroccan cuisine, the Americans kept asking the waiters to make spaghetti with meat sauce for them if it didn't exist on the menu.  I just kept glancing from one group to another thinking about the deeper undercurrents that flashed through the behavior of both sides.

I wasn't able to form an opinion about whether things in the world needed to be spic and span and up to snuff by American standards.  I couldn't find fault with the American spirit of driving change, of changing your circumstances, these are the things this world is built on - a desire to make things better.  But isn't "better" relative? The Europeans' attitude was extreme as well.  It seemed strangely snobbish, as if the scenes they were witnessing were in a museum or a zoo, as if they were walking around saying, "how utterly quaint!"

In my mind there is some tenuous association between the reluctance that athletes from countries like Scotland, New Zealand and Canada are showing in wanting to attend the Commonwealth Games in Delhi and how my colleagues felt about going to Marrakesh.

Yes things may be bad in India, bad enough to make the Indian diaspora cringe because the reality of how things are is clashing once again with the pride Indians can so easily be roused to feel because they threw the British out, because things get outsourced to India, because it is the largest democracy in the world, because publications like The Economist sometimes call India an Asian super power.  A pride that is so easily bruised when a satirical article in Time magazine jokingly refers to the city where Thomas Edison was born taking on a third world tinge because of an overwhelming presence of Indians.  Why take offense to the truth? I have seen enough betel juice stains on Edison streets to be more saddened and despairing than offended by that article. There has been immense pride and what we are now witnessing is the fall that was inevitable.

The real India still has a large percentage of people living below the poverty line, the real India needs a Right to Food campaign because obviously many people are denied this basic right.  The problems go much deeper than anyone can fathom.  The media gloss about a rosy, shining India should be taken with as much of a pinch of salt as is the current media condemnation.  A flat perception is not how one can see and understand a country like India.

As for the whiny athletes from first world nations, why not go with an open mind, play the best game you can, win all the medals you can and return to your plush lives? You might even emerge as enlightened citizens of the world contemplating future courses of action toward shaping a better world.

I have to write so I don't do other useless things

I can either rest the laptop on my lap and find a million distractions on the computer as I try to unwind from worthless yet tiring days, or I can just open up this box on blogger and start typing whatever comes to mind.  Typing up stuff like this doesn't cost money, or at least doesn't involve a direct an immediate outlay (the costs are hidden in my carbon footprint and in my energy bill) and is ultimately more fulfilling than anything else I end up doing when I am tired of thinking about all the things that are ostensibly important things to think about.

The thing that I am most tired of thinking about is not being able to write.  So here I am, writing.  I know I am just rambling and not saying anything that could interest anyone or anything that could take me to that haloed place where writers dwell.  Let's just say I am being selfish.

The last 164 words have soaked up the last ten minutes with such seamless ease, ten minutes that would have been spent on Facebook scrolling through my news feed and gaining nothing from the experience.  These precious minutes could also have been spent on the website of New York Times or The Guardian.  Ordinarily this is time well spent but then one notices the "share" links at the bottom of all the articles one reads and one wants to share them with one's virtual friends.

Such sharing, be it links to news or one's own thoughts, always leads to expectations of reaction.  The reaction, when it comes is like a drug.  It feels good to be heard, to find people who share one's views but then one craves more of the same.  The "reaction drug" is as viciously potent as any other easily abused drug.

The voicing of an opinion, the public declaration of our likes and dislikes, the sharing of music or of any article, from any news source one frequents, also has tinges of competition; more self-branding, more shouting about one's uniqueness.  It's nothing more than ensuring some form of minor immortality.  It amounts to virtual screaming, often shrill in pitch. And since birds of a feather do always flock together all "friends" often end up sharing the same links, the same songs.  They "like" the same things.  So if I hadn't been spending the last twenty minutes talking about this virtual screaming for attention I probably would have been screaming for some attention and what would that get me except more self-loathing?

[This post will end up appearing on Facebook because I checked a box somewhere, some time ago, that makes everything I write here available to everyone on Facebook.  So even as I talk about this virtual screaming I am still doing it and have no intentions of not doing it or undoing it.  But hey, shame is another casualty of these times we live in.]

So, yes, this piece of writing is pointless.  It's directionless, it's going nowhere and doing nothing for anyone.  But these days I am a real nowhere woman, sitting in this nowhere land, making all my nowhere plans for nobody.  But when I allow even one word to follow another word; when words go marching one by one - hurrah, hurrah - I feel better.  The change in mood is almost instantaneous.  The air clears a bit.  I can think again, even breathe again.  If before I was in a state of numbness about my condition, about standing at the corner of "This Dull Life Street" and "Exciting New Life Avenue", paralyzed, now I feel as though I am ready to take a step in the right direction.  Writing anything, even nonsense such as this, has that immediate effect.

I feel like nattering on some more... about changing the settings at home, about placing a desk near a window, about surrounding myself with floor to ceiling bookshelves, about not taking for granted the importance of the right physical setting for doing the thing one is most passionate, most serious about.  Resting my head on the headboard of the bed with the laptop crouching in the space between my knees and my belly while I do pointless things on the Internet is not going to help me with my need to write.  Writing this gibberish has allowed me to see this with some clarity.  The ghostly light of this realization should last at least until the next ramble en route to some meaningful writing.

This ramble is now coming to a close.  It has succeeded in clearing away some of the funk.  Some happy hormones appear to have been released and I feel somewhat prepared to think about or take on the next set of ostensibly important tasks.