Where Reality Meets Idealism

I was listening to Radiohead’s lyrics in “All I Need” the other day and remembered seeing the video back in the spring. Here's one verse:

I'm the next act
Waiting in the wings

I’m an animal
Trapped in your hot car
I’m all the days
That you choose to ignore


The lyrics are about a person suffering in a relationship, but I think they also capture the idea of being victimized by poverty.

The video shocked me, because in many ways it captures the idea why I made the decision to come here. If you havent seen it go to youtube to check it out. But essentially it compares and contrasts the lives of two boys: one Western and one Eastern. In the end, after viewing the routines of both boys simultaneously on a cut screen, you see that the American boy is actually wearing the shoes that the Chinese boy has made and it leaves you with the question about why the world is this way. But these lyrics also capture what I feel some days when I am walking through the streets and I can’t believe I’m not dreaming (or having a nightmare).

Last night, my friend and I were stepping out of a club and into his car after we paid for the valet parking. As the car door was held open for me I noticed a woman watching me from across the street. She was just lying there, half reclined, about to go to sleep for the night. After living in Sweden for four years, that is just absolutely shocking to see it firsthand because poverty like that doesnt exist there. It’s still amazing to consider that this is how so many people live, just strewn about on the streets, lined up like grey matchsticks on the sidewalk amongst rubble and the darkness.

Then earlier this week on the train home from work I think I experienced one of the most harrowing events I’d ever encountered. But each time I am confronted with a harrowing experience, I become more immune to feeling as bad as I did the previous time. So I saw this and thought, My god! but simultaneously, Seen that before: no big deal. A month ago I would have thought, My god. Hell on earth. Oh my god. And then I would have spent at least an hour or two thinking about what I saw. Perhaps it’s the amount of public defecation that goes on down here that will eventually create a kind of immunity to just about everything.

But on the train, I was standing in a not-so-crowded first class car. The train started to move just after a stop and suddenly a pack of five or six women and children jumped on. The reason I say pack is because they did indeed resemble a group of wild dogs…hair in bunches and bleached from the sun, wearing rags, yellow teeth … looking—and behaving—like animals. Once on the train, the children began to make rounds, going to each woman, tapping, holding eye contact with pleading eyes and extending hands out and then back again towards their mouths.

So one of these urchins who looked perhaps like one of Dickens’ worst nightmares approached me and proceeded to beg. I just looked straight down at her and said, quietly, “Jiao” (meaning, simply “Go” in Hindi), not in a condescending way but more like a discerning “I can’t be bothered” way, and flicked my wrist, gesturing towards her. I can’t believe I actually do this now because at one time I would have only given money, immediately and without a second thought.

Needless to say for the first time, I think in my life, I felt like a heartless bitch for dashing that girl’s hopes. But when you see it every day and you live on a modest salary, you eventually realise you can’t do it anymore. There are just too many people, and all of them need and want money. I’ve chosen to give food when I can, but that’s all that I can do. Survival is the unwritten law of this jungle, and that is also what I have learnt to do. It’s really amazing what this place can do to a person after only seven weeks.

I don’t know if it was part of the begging act or not, but just after the girl surrendered hope and moved on to the next woman to ask for money, one of the two children who belonged to the two ragged mothers (who sat on the floor and looked no more than 18 or 20 years old) began to wail and scream with such ferocity that it chilled me to the bone. The crying wouldn’t stop but I couldn’t look to find out what was going on; it was too painful to hear it, and I knew that to see whatever was happening would have surely been worse. But I finally did glance over at this screaming child in the arms of the teen mother, and the look on the mother’s face was of extreme anguish and despair. Her head was between her knotted fists, and her fists nearly covered her ears, as if she couldn’t take the poverty or the task of being a mother anymore.

My only thought was, Are we not human? This woman is obviously suffering and living in her own hell. As women, how could we sit or stand in that train car and not feel that woman’s fear and desperation, made public by the cries of her child? We were standing there listening to iPods and reading the paper, and she and her child were seen, and treated, no better than animals might be. I looked at her and for the millionth time felt that collision of two worlds in my soul, that of mine and hers, and pondering that everyone is just mingling and carrying on like it is nothing much to think about.

Then I had the horrible wish that I could be more like the people around me, who seemed totally detached from the entire act, especially when one woman stepped forward and told this woman to get off the train at the next stop with the English words, “First Class” thrown in. So my question is, where is the right balance, where you acknowledge that pain in a sensitive way and use that as fuel to take action to make change in the world, yet not become too emotionally involved? It is a fine tightrope and I’m walking it. This entire situation of what I saw on the train is a perfect analogy of the work I’m doing and why I’m doing it. And I still think I have gone insane.

Other than learning to deal with the begging and children following me around as if I’m the Pied Piper (and believe me there is a Hell of a lot of it, esp if you are white skinned and red haired), the last work week has actually been, I believe, my first normal week since I’ve left Sweden: normal in that I’m finally running and going to the gym on a regular basis; I have a regular daily routine and my food/cleaning/wash/etc sorted; normal in that I know that when I get in a cab I’ll probably spend a half hour to an hour in it, and normal in that my bigger problems are in the process of being solved.

I was at rock bottom last Friday when I was sick, hacking in bed that night by 10 p.m. after I’d had a complete breakdown in front of my supervisor at the office. Why, you ask? It could have been, perhaps, a combination of my lack of physical exercise, no internet access at home, lack of contact with friends/family, pent-up everyday frustrations, layers of culture shock, and the resulting cold/flu that kept me in bed for three days (plus throw in a few financial worries and an issue or two with details regarding my work contract). That night, just before coming home, I went to take out 2800 rupees from the ATM (about 70 USD). But somehow I entered one zero too many and ended up taking out 700 USD. So I survived another rough week there.

But things are much better this week after I have attempted to address all the above one by one. I also got a gym membership at Gold’s Gym. (Must write an entire segment on the hi-may women I see there and the live DJ spinning after 9 p.m. Incredible and even better than the nice gyms in NYC!) Still cannot believe I am actually a member at Gold’s….just not really digging that crowd, but still! there must be a few people like me there.

Sorry no pics this time. You’ll have to use your imagination until I load them next time...but there will be quite a few then.