Finding India

Another day, another flight. But this flight will take me away from the subcontinent which for the last several months, has been my home. A few hours later, I am groggily wandering in the streets of downtown Dubai, where once again I have a day to kill. But this time it is different. It is August, and the mercury is rising inexorably. Beads of perspiration form on my forehead and roll down my face, causing a burning sensation in my eyes and making it impossible for me to wear my glasses. Suddenly, I realize that it has been about eight hours since I´ve had anything to eat. I start to feel pangs of hunger in my stomach, but every restaurant I pass seems to be closed. I find a 7-11 convenience store, and ask the clerk where I can find a café to sit down, have a bite to eat, and relax. ¨Sir, it is Ramadan, all the restaurants are closed until 8 pm.¨ India had denied me some comforts while I was with her, but food was never among them. I decide to reject the clerk´s advice and continue my search. I grab a copy of a local paper on the way out. As I thumb through the pages, an article captures my attention: ¨Unmarried couple get year in jail for having consensual sex¨

[. . .]The Dubai Misdemeanour Court yesterday convicted the 25-year old Pakistani accountant and his 26-year-old girlfriend of having consensual sex. Prosecutors accused 25-year-old G.I. and his 26-year-old Filipina girlfriend of having consensual and unprotected sex which led to the maid´s pregnancy. According to court records, when the Filipina´s Emirati sponsor discovered she was pregnant he told the police.

After another hour of walking I see a sight which is too good to be true: A Burger King, and it is open! ¨Is it a mirage?¨ I ask myself. I walk in and feel the welcome blast of air conditioning. I place my order, and sit down at a table. ¨Sir, it is not permitted to eat inside the restaurant during Ramadan.¨Did Allah include a little-known ´to-go´exception to the rules of Ramadan, I wonder to myself as I find a nearly leafless (and nearly lifeless) tree under which to chow down on my Whopper. A few passers-by stare at me with looks of disgust. I attempt to nod respectfully, but this appears to only deepen their revulsion.

After finishing my meal, I find an internet café and while away a couple more hours in air-conditioned comfort. I notice that this café serves coffee. I order one. It is Nescafé, a bit of a let-down after the delicious filter coffee of South India. ¨You won´t be able to drink that in here, I am sorry,¨ one of the server girls tells me. Like many of the foreign workers here, she is from the Phillipines. ¨Como esta?¨ I ask her, knowing that ¨how are you¨ in Tagalog is the same as it is in Spanish. ¨Mabuhay!¨ she responds. What´s life like in Dubai?¨ I ask. ¨It is a hell,¨ she says, grinning.

As I walk out, she warns me not to let the police see me drinking the coffee in the street. I find an alley nearby to drink my coffee in the shade of the 45 degree celsius (113 degrees fahrenheit) heat. Suddenly, a few meters away I see some armed men wearing uniforms emerge from the other end of the alley. I hold the coffee behind my back and then pretend to look for something in my backpack. The uniformed men walk toward me and one of them locks eyes with me, studying me for a moment. Then they walk past me and in the other direction. Time to head back to the airport, and for another flight which will take me back to the Western world.

Over the last year, I have stayed at people´s houses from Spain, to Morocco, to France, to Finland, to Hungary, to Turkey. Some were old friends with whom I was getting reacquainted after many years apart. Some were new friends which I hope to have for many years into the future.

In India, I learned first-hand about the benefits of having a strong family, as I came to be closely acquainted with a family that previously had existed to me largely as a concept. All of them welcomed me into their homes and treated me with great affection. I met one uncle who was a bit frustrated that I didn´t get up at the crack of dawn every day (I´m going to keep working on this, chickappa) and an aunt who entertained some of my pointed questions about culture and philosophy, and fired back with some equally pointed questions of her own to me. I met my cousins, most of whom work long and insane hours for Western companies, for a meager fraction of the salary they would earn if they did the same work in the US or Europe. Many of them spend three hours a day commuting to their jobs, in part because Bangalore has nearly doubled in size in the last 10 years and the infrastructure is struggling to keep up with the growth, and in part because in India, it is unthinkable for a young adult to move outside of the home until they are married.

I was at times surprised by how many things members of one family can have in common despite very different cultural backgrounds, and also at times how different we could be despite being members of the same family, because of those cultural differences. One thing I thought about quite a bit was the extent to which culture permeates discourse and predisposes human thought, in many cases in ways that we are not aware. Sometimes being an outsider in another culture enables one to gain insights about such things that might not be apparent to an insider. It also works in reverse, being an outsider in another culture can allow us to gain insights into aspects of our own thought process that we might not previously have questioned.

Tomorrow I will board another plane which will take me to another country with another language, its own unique culture and another family I have not seen in a long time. But this time the language is English of a non-Indian variety, the family is my parents, and the country is

A Segue to Ceylon, continued

While I was in Colombo, Columbo died. Peter Falk, the actor who played Columbo on a long-running American TV series, died of natural causes. But despite the death of their namesake, the residents of this city appeared to stoically go on with their lives as usual, not betraying any sense of grief or loss.

Actually the city of Columbo itself was a fairly upbeat place. The streets were surprisingly fairly clean and well-organized in much of the city, and there were ample sidewalks most places I went (often a luxury in India). But overall, there was nothing strikingly different in Colombo than in a random Indian city. There were still large crowds of people, who looked like they could be South Indians. Still there were trains and buses filled to the brim. Even the food, Roti and Dosa, was similar to the food I gotten to know quite well during my stay in Karnataka.

I started to become curious as to exactly what were the differences between India and Sri Lanka. I found part of the answer at a dusty but comfortable hotel overlooking a beautiful Colombo beach in a place called Mt. Lavinia. After negotiating a good price (1300 Sri Lankan rupees, or about $12 a night), Mr. Ashok, the hotel manager, and I began to have a conversation about Sri Lankan and Indian cultures. "India is our brother," Mr. Ashok said with a smile, as he poured me some of the local coconut Arak (many Sri Lankans I spoke to seemed to have a similar attitude toward their neighbor). Mr. Ashok told me that one of the key differences in Sri Lanka might be the fading away of the caste system and arranged marriages. In India, the vast majority of marriages are arranged marriages, with members of the same caste . Mr. Ashok explained to me that a generation ago, the situation had been similar in Sri Lanka, but among the new generation most people opted for love marriage. Mr. Ashok was a member of the majority Sinha population, and like most Sinhas, was Buddhist. I asked him if it was common for Sinha Buddhists to marry Hindus. He said it was increasingly so as well, and introduced me to one of his two assistants, Krishna, who was a Tamil Hindu. Krishna had married a Sinha Buddhist, and told me that his parents had come to accept this relationship. Perhaps subjective intepretations such as those of Mr. Ashok should not be given too much weight, but Mr. Ashok seemed quite well-informed, and I also noticed as I walked down the streets that there were many young women wearing skirts, not so common in South India.

My stay in Sri Lanka was a short one, so that was about as far as my inquiries into culture could go. It also meant that what I could see of the country was limited. Everyone I talked to had a long list of recommendations for places that I should see in the country, but I only managed to see a good deal of Colombo and the coastal city of Hikkaduwa. To anyone who has the chance, I would definitely recommend a visit to this island. I think there is always something enchanting about visiting lush tropical islands, and Sri Lanka doesn't disappoint.

A Segue to Ceylon

A few weeks ago, I was visiting the somewhat Francophone Indian province of Pondicherry. It is a charming, small city on India's East (Indian Ocean) coast, about 150 kilometers south of Chennai, the capital of neighboring Tamil Nadu state. Pondicherry bears the distinction of having been the penultimate European colony to revert to Indian control; it was returned by the French in 1954 (the last was Goa, not returned by a laggardly Portuguese fascist dictatorship until 1961).

Pondicherry was a pleasant place. Although it was humid, there was usually a breeze from the coast to keep the heat from becoming unbearable. The streets, many of which bore French names, were filled with cracked and faded, but still charming, colonial style edifices of the type one might expect to find in Cuba. Although Tamil and English are now, without a doubt, the dominant languages in Pondicherry, one still occassionally hears even among the locals exchanges such as 'Bonjour! Ça va?' a remaining echo of a not too distant colonial past. Also, there are a fair number of French bakeries and restaurants in the streets.

It was at one of these places that I was sitting down, sipping a cafe latte and munching on a perfect croissant as I scanned a local newspaper (English-language).

COLOMBO, June 14, 2011 (AFP) - A passenger ferry began operations between India and Sri Lanka for the first time in 28 years on Tuesday after a previous service was disrupted by the island's ethnic war, officials said.
The 1,044-passenger Scotia Prince docked in Colombo harbour after setting off from the southern Indian port of Tuticorin on Monday on its inaugural run with 201 passengers, a port official said.

For people who are used to traveling in Europe, where even places that are relatively far are usually well connected by ferries, rail, and air, it is hard to fathom that a country which, at its closest point, is only 18 miles from another would have no ferry service to connect it. Indeed, over one thousand years ago, in the 10^th and 11^th centuries, the South Indian Chola dynasty had employed its own ships to invade Sri Lanka and annex it to its empire. But it was in fact another war, a brutal nearly three-decades long civil war, between Sri Lanka's majority Sinha population and the minority Tamils, led by the Tamil Tigers, which had severed India's sea connection to Sri Lanka, until now. Four days later, I boarded the third passenger ferry between India to run in 28 years (the first and second had run the previous week).

The moment I set foot on the boat that would take me to Sri Lanka, I noticed that this would not be a typical ferry ride. There were a few dozen passengers on a boat designed to hold over a thousand. I wandered through the empty corridors on three floors, and found a casino filled with slot-machines equipped to take dollars (the machines were switched off), and two unstocked bars and a duty-free store empty of merchandise. The walls of the boat were covered with touristy pictures of seemingly random destinations such as the Yucatan Peninsula and Nova Scotia. As churning monsoon-season waters of the Laccadive Sea rocked the boat from side to side, I began to feel disoriented. So I talked to some of the crew on the boat, a mixture of Hondurans, Jamaicans, and Eastern Europeans, as well as the captain (an Indian).

They told me that the boat had originally ferried travelers between Maine and Nova Scotia, and later between Florida and Mexico. For a time, it was used to house evacuees from Hurricaine Katrina in New Orleans. Subsequently, they told me, it had been used for cruises in the Mediterranean, and recently to evacuate people from Libya during the recent unrest there. At least a few of the crew members had been with the ship during all of its incarnations. I looked at a picture on the wall of a white man cutting into large juicy steak which invited people to go to the ship's restaurant (now open only twice a day and serving a decidedly more Indian fare) and wondered what the ship's crew must have made of their new location and passengers.

I also talked to the passengers, most of whom were Indians, who, like me, had read about the ferry service and had boarded out of curiosity. It was during one of these conversations that it was announced that the bar would be opening (for one hour). On tap: Sri Lanka beer, French brandy, Swedish Vodka, and Scottish Scotch (believe it or not, there is such a thing as Indian Scotch). Suddenly the Hollywood Bar, which had been vacant just a few minutes before, was filled with Indian men, mostly from the 50 plus age-group, sitting in small groups and swilling brandy and scotch, laughing and talking loudly to each other (just an hour later, the combined effect of the rocky sea and the strong liquor would prove too much for many of these men to bear).

'The Indians are no goddamned good.'

I've been reading Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. The book provides provides a detailed accounting of the events, decisions, and personalities which have determined the course of India over the last 70 years. I was reading about the friction between East and West Pakistan and subsequent creation of Bangladesh (and India's role) when I stumbled across a couple of gems from Richard Nixon on India. Apparently he was not a big fan.





Richard Nixon on India:

"The Indians are no goddamned good."

"The Indians are bastards anyway....for them [Pakistan]to be done so by the Indians and after we had warned the bitch [then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi]."

India vs. Pakistan (photo diary)

To say that India and Pakistan are bitter historic rivals is a bit of an understatement. So it's not a surprise that a cricket World Cup semifinal match which happens to pit the two against each other would be something of a big deal. Big enough for the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan to attend the game....if India wins, it means they will be just one more game away from a World Cup victory, the first since 1983.

I have a hard time sitting in one place for several hours watching a sporting match (and am rather unfamiliar with the rules of Cricket), so I decided to walk around Bangalore and watch other people watching the game.























Can you tell that things started getting a little wilder towards the end?

Actually these scenes reminded me very much of some that I saw last year when I was in Colombia during the final match of the World Cup (soccer/football, not cricket).

Here are a couple of pics from that match:






When I started writing this post, the game was still afoot, and fairly close. Now India has won, and is headed for a final duel with another sub-continental rival, Sri Lanka.

Bangalore's Explosive Growth

In India and in the United States, the new census numbers are out. And, while back in my home state we have depressing headlines like these to contend with: 'Population drastically declines in Ohio cities,' here in Bangalore, exactly the opposite trend is at work [full disclosure: I have personally contributed to both demographic trends].

84.74 lakh and counting in Bangalore

BANGALORE: It's almost official. The estimated population for BBMP's 198 wards as per the 2011 census is 84.74 lakh, up from 45.92 lakh ten years ago. There are more men than women — 44 lakh and 40 lakh respectively. The estimate falls short of BBMP's 2010 projection of 94 lakh based on the growth rate. "Considering the rising congestion across the city, we expected the numbers to go beyond 1 crore but it's about 15 lakh less. Therefore, Bangalore remains a B class city," senior BBMP officials told The Times of India.

That is to say between 2000 and 2010, Bangalore's population increased from 4.6 million to 8.5 million people! It's as if nearly the entire population of Norway or Finland had been added to Bangalore over 10 years, or seven Helsinkis, or four Stockholms. In the history of humankind, has a city ever grown on such a massive scale as this? Clearly population decline is bad for a city, and a vibrant city should have a healthy growth rate, but is it possible to have too much of a good thing? How will infrastructure and public services possibly keep up with such explosive growth?

An almost perfect park

Soon after arriving in India, I had a realization. I had to get back into shape. A seemingly endless array of food, from crema catalana to brouchet de poulet to Hungarian fish soup, had brought nirvana to my palate, but, combined with a supply of beer and wine from almost every country in the European Union, it had also left me with a buddha-like girth.

I soon figured out after my arrival in Bangalore that cycling would be out of the question, as the streets are seemingly permanently choked with vehicles which adhere to few traffic laws, so my other option would be running.....but where? Bangalore is the hub of India's new economy, and as such is under a state of permanent construction. There are all sorts of public works projects going on, nearly all above budget and behind schedule. Dust is permanently in the air. But most problematic was that while construction is going on, there are often no sidewalks left for pedestrians.

So with cycling out of the question, and apparently no way to run, it appeared that my new life in India would be one of physical sloth.....and to compound the problem, my relatives kept feeding me generous-sized portions of delicious South-Indian food. Masala dosa, idli, bisi bele bath, rothi, chapathi, and of course, rice, rice, and more rice. It was one day over such a meal that I expressed the exercise problem to my aunt. "You know there is a park with a track just five minutes away," she told me.



The park was actually quite a nice one, by any standard. It was verdant and painstakingly manicured, with numerous flowering trees and bushes. And the track was about a quarter of a mile long, long enough for running. So I started running that morning......and then a park worker, who I had seen earlier watering the plants in the park approached me. He showed me a lock and gestured to me that the park was about to close. "Why?",I asked in English, not yet knowing this vital word in Kannada. But he didn't understand my question, or didn't know enough English to tell me the answer. I tried to ask him, once again in English, why the park would be closing at 10 o'clock in the morning. But he just repeated "closed." I started to head for the gate. "Wait," the man said, as he put his hand on my shoulder. "You run."

"It's okay," I said, "I will go." "You, run," he repeated, and gestured for me to return to the track. Never before had I been to a park where the groundsman had offered to keep the park open just for me. I felt bad that he would have to keep working just for me, but seeing that he was determined to do so, I decided to run just a few final laps. I finished and approached the groundskeeper again to thank him. He was seated on a bench in the shade. He gestured to the spot next to him and said "Sit."

He put his arm on my back and we began to talk. Shivakumar was his name. He said he had worked in the park for several years. He was a middle-aged man, about five feet tall, with graying black hair and a bushy black mustache. His skin had the dry cracked look of someone who had spent a lifetime toiling in the sun. "I half Indian," I told him in my broken Kannada. "My father is from Karnataka." He seemed to find this fact very interesting, and his face lit up with a smile as he patted me on the back.

I kept coming back to the park, and I had several more conversations with Shivakumar. Soon I figured out that the park was only open very early in the morning and very late in the evening. Later I would learn that these were the standard operating hours for all parks in India......Having parks open during the entire day might lead to slothful youth spending their wh days in parks doing nothing, my aunt explained to me. Also a friend had told me that police in Bangalore regularly question young men and women who are sitting together in the park, and ask them if they are married and if their parents know that they are in the park with a member of the opposite sex. And then there is the Indian aversion to the sun.

In Spain, which to most Europeans is a country which is synonymous with sunny warmth, people embrace the sun, spending as much time outside as possible, going for walks, to the beach, and sitting in outdoor terrazas when going to bars and restaurants. That seems a practical attitude for the Spanish to adopt, because they live in a sunny country. India is an even sunnier country, so I thought that the Indian attitude to the sun might be somewhat similar to the Spanish one. True, the Indian sun is considerably more intense, I thought, but Indians on average have darker pigmentation and are largely equipped to deal with it. But it turned out that the opposite was true. Indians in general go to great lengths to avoid the sun, and above all, to avoid getting a tan. Sun screen in Indian stores is called "anti-tan creme," and it sits on shelves next to whitening cream, a seemingly popular cosmetic product here. And when I go outside on a sunny (but not too hot) January day, my family seems to grow genuinely concerned for my well-being.

But I was concerned for my well-being too, which was why I was running. Actually I was the only one running. In mornings and evenings, the park was full of portly Indian men wearing sweatshirts and sweatpants in the 90 degree weather, and Indian women sporting colorful saris. The men would walk for five minutes and then sit down on a bench for 10 or 20 minutes and talk to each other. Apparently they believed that sweating, and not actual exercise, was the key to physical fitness. The women were actually more active, sometimes walking for as long as thirty minutes before leaving the park.



In one corner of the park, there was a blue tarp, draped from the fence bordering the park. Initially I assumed that the tarp was used to house tools for park maintenance, but one day I saw Shivakumar cooking something over a fire next to the park. "Naam mane (Our house)' he told me. For Shivakumar and the several other groundskeepers in the park, this tent was home.

What the hell is going on in this country?

This question was posed by the justices in a recent majority opinion of the Indian Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court (SC) questioned on Thursday the Centre’s inertia in sparing major black money hoarders, such as Pune stud farm owner Hasan Ali Khan, custodial interrogation and asked it to respond by Tuesday.

“What the hell is going on in this country?” an anguished bench of justices B Sudershan Reddy and SS Nijjar said as it heard a PIL filed by noted lawyer Ram Jethmalani and others over black money stashed by Indian tax evaders in foreign banks.

Khan, who is alleged to have stashed away around $8 billion, has been served a notice demanding tax of Rs50,000 crore. SC also asked solicitor general (SG) Gopal Subramanium why three key enforcement directorate officials probing a case of alleged foreign exchange violation by Khan were transferred midway and ordered their immediate reinstatement. “It’s unfortunate,” the court said[...]

A flight unlike any other

After so many flights to sundry far-flung corners, the whole experience of flying had become second-nature....get to the airport on time (but not a minute too early), prepare the carry-on, check in, security.....read or try furtively to sleep, and then....the beckoning lights of a new city, and time to land. But the flight from Sharjah to Bangalore was unlike any experience I've ever had flying...

It started as I boarded the crowded bus which would take me from the gate to the plane...I saw a sea of South-Indian faces. "How many of these people will be my neighbors, my fellow Bangaloreans?" I wondered to myself. Many of them looked at me too, and my not-so-South Indian visage. They seemed to be thinking to themselves "what is this long-haired fair-skinned looking fellow doing on a flight to Bangalore? Shouldn't he be backpacking in Europe or something?"


Me in India, 1989 (far right, seated next to my dad)

In 48 hours I had slept less than two hours, but I couldn't fall asleep on this flight. Not with the thoughts racing through my mind as my destination drew near. The last time I was in India, in Bangalore, was in 1989....1989, when my parents bought their house in the house in the burbs (or the xurbs), the Berlin wall was teetering, and the nine-year old me was getting a crash course in a culture that was strikingly different than that of the staid Midwest. For six weeks, my grandparents, aunts, and uncles, took me out on the bustling streets and showed me off to all of their friends, I instantly received everything I asked for, I ate all kinds of new foods, I pissed on the side of the road when traveling by bus and drank juice from a freshly felled coconut hacked by a man wielding a machete. I got a fever and nausea. I wanted to go to McDonalds. And then it was time to go back to America and a more comfortable, predictable existence.

Except it was never possible for me to see my existence in the same way, in the same terms as my counterparts. It was now clear that Cincinnati was only one very small part small part of the world, and that in other parts of the world, things are very very different. And I always wanted to go back to that different world....back to India....and explore and discover. Eventually my desire to explore would propel me to Europe, where I would spend a year as an exchange student in Sweden, and Mexico....and Spain....but as the years went by, I never found the opportune moment to make it to India. It was always just a little too far. You can't go to a place like India for just a week, or even two weeks, especially after such a long time. You don't spend just a few days in a different world. So the years rolled on, and the perfect moment never came......

Until now. The engine of the aircraft shifted to a now-familiar whine, followed shortly by the announcement that we were preparing to land. I looked out the window, and saw city lights. The lights of Bangalore. How odd it seemed, I thought to myself, that the flight from Sharjah to Bangalore had lasted just three and a half hours. After 21 years of waiting to return to India, it seemed like the flight should have lasted ten, one-hundred, one-thousand hours. It was hard to believe that the lights that I was seeing were the lights of the capital city of the state where my father had been born,and grown up, and where most of his siblings, and their children---my aunts, uncles and cousins, not to mention my grandmother, now lived.

As I walked through the airport, I was nervously giddy. The Bangalore airport was quite similar to all the other airports I had been to, if only a bit dimmer, a bit dustier. I walked to the immigration desk and pulled out my recently minted PIO (Person of Indian Origin) card, along with my US passport. This was the document which would entitle me to live in India, and work, own property, essentially do everything but hold a government job, vote, or declare myself a candidate for the India's parliament, the Lok Sabha (Rahul Gandhi could rest easy for now).

The immigration officer stared at the PIO card and then looked at me. “You are having family in India?” He asked. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if he was inquiring about my plans for procreation on the subcontinent. “You are having family here?”, he repeated. “Yes, uncles, aunts cousins, my grandmother.” He dutifully placed the entry stamp in my passport.

BENGALURU INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
DEVANAHALLI
16 JANUARY 2011
BUREAU OF IMMIGRATION

I walked out of the airport. "James!", they shouted. There were my uncle, two of my aunts, and my cousin. My aunts and uncle looked essentially the same as I remembered them, if only a bit grayer. My 19 year old cousin wasn't born yet on my previous visit. When I asked them how they recognized me so quickly, they all said "you're way of walking is just like your dad's."

A Day in the Desert

When I arrived from Istanbul to the United Arab Emirates, I knew I was closer to India almost as soon as I stepped off the plane into the airport. I had a fourteen-hour layover, long enough to leave the airport and see what the United Arab Emirates was about. But to leave, first I would need to be granted a visa.

I followed the signs to the immigration control area, and beheld a sight unlike any I had seen at any immigration control I had passed in Europe in the past few months. On one side there was a desk marked "GCC Countries." There was no one waiting in the line. On the other side were fifteen desks marked "other countries" and each of them had a lengthy queue. In fact, the whole room was packed, and about 90 percent of the people who were waiting with me appeared to be Indian (or perhaps Pakistani). I had read before about the United Arab Emirates using cheap laborers from the Indian subcontinent to build their post-modern artificial oases, but now I was seeing it for myself.

I got on a bus from the Sharjah airport to Dubai. The driver was an Indian. I sat in the front seat and watched the faces of passengers as they boarded. Nearly all Indian. Several Indians made various inquiries of the driver in Hindi before boarding the bus. To my left sat a beautiful young South Indian girl, wearing a blue flowing silk sari, and appearing slightly startled. She was seated next to a South Indian man who I took for her husband. What kind of life would Dubai hold for this young couple, who likely had never left India before? Would they make enough money to send back home to their family (and perhaps save for the future?) Would they be exploited by their employers? These were the questions perhaps all three of us were asking ourselves as the bus glided down the palm-lined highway into the asphalt-coated desert.

I went for a stroll around Dubai for a couple of hours, and took a taxi to the beach. After having heard so much about the Persian Gulf over the years on the news, I wanted to go for a swim in it... The cab driver was another Indian, from Kerala.

"There are lots of Indians working in Dubai," I commented to him.
"Yes, too many," he said, appearing not to be joking.
"What do you think about life in Dubai?" "It is great, the money is good," he said. He asked me where I had flown to Dubai from. When I said Turkey, he responded "There are many Turks in Dubai, too many Turks!" Then the conversation shifted to my destination. "What are you going to do in India?" "I am going to look for a job," I responded. "You are going to look for a job---", he responded, his voice trailing off in a now somewhat familiar incomprehension... The total fare for the 25 minute cab ride was the equivalent of four dollars.




The white sand and blue water of the Persian Gulf was an impressive sight to see. I sat down near the water, and glanced around. Suddenly the Indians were gone; they had been replaced by an assortment of Europeans of the type you could find on any decent Mediterranean shore in September. To my right, were some Italians, to my left, Germans. Having lacked the foresight to bring swim trunks, I stripped down to my boxers (if the obese sixty-something Englishman could wear speedos surely my wearing boxers would not be such a grave breach of etiquette) and jumped in. Only a bit cold; not bad for January. I came back to the beach and stretched out on my towel, and started to dose off, hearing in the background the sounds of the ocean and the soft patter of conversations in English, French, and Swedish. There are too many Europeans in Dubai.

I woke up nearly sunburned from the January desert sun, and headed back to the city. I went to an outdoor shisha cafe, puffed for awhile, and returned to a collection of South Indian short stories I had been reading. Seated at tables around me were affluent-looking Arab men, and a few smiling Europeans. I looked up from my book and noticed a nervous-looking woman woman draped in black cloth and wearing a black hijab walking towards the cafe. With one arm, she cradled a baby against her chest. For a second I wondered if she, too was going to smoke some shisha, but as she approached a nearby table, I realized that with subtle hand gestures, she was asking people for money. I felt tremendously sad for this woman, and wondered what kind of social programs a State like Dubai, awash in oil wealth, might have for people such as her.



I walked around for a couple more hours, taking in the massive skyscrapers. If peak oil and Indian toil had created this strange place, what would happen when the oil ran out....would it dry up and blow away, leaving behind only these monuments to a time of artificial splendor? The sun was now beginning to set on what would be for now and perhaps forever, my only day in the Middle East.

I caught the bus that would take me back to the airport and watched as we passed seemingly endless rows of recently constructed shopping malls. The bus slowed, and then nearly stopped as the 10 lane freeway became clogged with shiny new SUVs. I was getting a bit nervous about the time and got up to talk to the bus driver.


As I approached him, he was talking to someone else already on the phone. "Een samachara," I heard him say. This was a language I could recognize. "Were you speaking Kannada?" I asked him as he got of the phone. "Yes," he said, and he began to grin...."How do you know Kannada?" "Kannada is my father's language," I told him, I don't really speak it, but I recognize some basic expressions. He was delighted. "Have you been to India?" "Just once," I told him, adding, "Actually I am going there right now, to Bangalore." "You are flying to Bangalore, that is where I am from!" Just in time, the bus rolled up to the airport, and I got off. "Good luck!" the bus driver said to me, grinning once again, as we waived goodbye to each other.