I Am A Spoiled Princess or, A Tumbleweed of Meaningless Thoughts Blowing Through My Mind

Poor me. A friend of mine back home said that India is “just one of those countries where it’s hell on earth” and I agreed. Sometimes I feel I am really suffering some major inconveniences and hardships in yucky India. I keep thinking I’m about to have a breakdown in dealing with understanding everything. I am a spoiled, whiny child yet simultaneously ashamed. If you haven’t guess yet, yes, I’m about to spin out more of my thoughts into a web about the clashing of two completely different worlds: my own and that of my students.

I think about my students perhaps too much because I cannot believe what they endure. They have no possessions other than their books and some clothes, and many live in makeshift homes that are probably flooded as the rain pours down outside at this moment. Compared to them, I have everything: a flat, running water, clothes that I change on a regular basis, education, and the potential to buy almost whatever I want. I have contacts, opportunity. Many of them do not have access to those things, or don’t (yet) have the finesse to acquire such prospects.



While I’m grappling with this subtle third-world “shock,” they are regularly dealing with one or more of the following: rat bites, disease, hunger, an alcoholic parent, many younger siblings to feed, a single, overworked and/or illiterate parent, malnutrition, verbal abuse. Despite these hardships they sacrifice everything for their families’ survival. They lack basic stuff that we all have: Toilets. Beds. Yet they live every day with a smile and a LOT more laughter than I can evoke. A few of my students as young as 17-18 years old actually bear strands of white hair, a sign of either malnourishment or abuse of drugs, albeit something minor like sniffing glue as young children to stave off hunger.

The day I thought about and realized the cause of my students’ white hair, I felt ashamed for allowing such self-pity (like what I’ve been whining about here in my blog) to occupy my mind. Still, I wonder: is what I’m doing here worth it? I’m working quite a lot just for the experience. I may change a few lives, but at what expense? Am I not just growing older, and making myself more senile in the process, to think about it all? And how could there be such discrepancy in the world, if there were a god? It is agonizing to encounter such shameless and raw suffering, just outside my door, and to look it in the eye makes one pause for a moment. The squatters near the train station and basket weavers in the streets: what will become of their babies, hanging in afghans tied at the ends to two posts along the roadside? I’m just walking by them on the way to work. But that’s their permanent home, on the street. That life, the one of simplicity and survival, is pretty amazing, and humbling, and touching.



My students are the most honorable, dedicated and persistent kids. They want the best for their families and will do whatever it takes to achieve some of the simplest comforts in life. When kids’ parents are earning 100 rupees a day (around 2.50 USD), it makes you realize why India and China will rule the world in less than two decades. Masses of these people have nothing, and will do whatever it takes to earn something. They can’t even afford to buy a mobile phone.

My students don’t wanna wash cars or make tiffins. They are the children of the car washers and tiffin cookers, and they are gonna get what they want by educating themselves. These kids are smart and are on the cusp of acquiring what the middle class here already has: access to a pretty solid education. American children, wake up! Your competition has arrived. Summer school is to be in session because you’ll need to learn Hindi and Chinese. And these guys will kick your butts in grammar because I taught them. Well, at least 35 of them.



I think that coming from Sweden has made the discrepancy even more glaring than if I had come from living in New York or someplace else in the U.S. In Sweden, no one has a servant. Okay, no one except the royal family and maybe Zlatan and his wife in Malmö. Here, everyone who lives in a flat has a servant and usually several at that: a cleaner, a cook, a person who does the washing and ironing, and a car washer. Many hire drivers, and that’s all that those drivers do: drive their employers to work, from work, to the gym, take the kids to clarinet and tennis lessons… all day. Then there’s also usually a separate woman who washes the toilet and bathroom (from one of the lowest castes). Here, the market is huge for less attractive jobs because there are a lot of jobs and a lot of laborers who need the work.

Personally I have three such servants, though they are not live-in. And I must note that it is the weirdest feeling in the world to pay someone 5 U.S. cents to iron one of my shirts, one, because I have always taken great pride in ironing my own things, but two because I feel I’m exploiting the person (because I’ve also been made to iron shirts as a nanny for some bastards in Italy) and three it’s cost and time-efficient to refuse when I’m commuting for just over two hours a day from my home to the office to the school and back again.

In conclusion to this jumble of thoughts, and because it is really late now, I’m wondering a lot about what my friends and family have been asking me: What are you going to do in India? And I am thinking and reconsidering what I am doing here and I am trying not to think that but breathe instead as I encounter the masses at the train station, all staring vaguely at me. They are asking me the same thing with their eyes. And at this point I don’t really know. But I am living in the present, frightening, wonderful moment.