Dishonesty
Academic plagiarism and political corruption get all the press--and rightly so, as both are endemic here--but I have noticed plenty of other kinds of lying as well. Our house staff, for instance, have both proven to be liars. We had to fire one of them last week because we discovered she was asking for time off not for physical therapy, as promised, but because she had another job. The other servant (the cook) basically pulled the same stunt on another family in order to come work for us. We found this out much later, when she locked herself in the bathroom one Saturday afternoon while Violet was having a playdate with a school friend. Turns out the girl was a family friend of the cook's spurned employer. Yes, you got that right: a grown woman was hiding from an eight-year-old. In a restroom.
Superstition
There was a holiday last month called Akshaya Tritiya, which was widely advertised by banks and jewelers, because astrologers had declared that it was an auspicious day to buy gold. As you might expect, the price of gold coins and bars (Indians buy these in astounding quantities) shot up that day, but people agreed to pay the premium because...it was an auspicious day to buy gold. Yes, people honestly believed that if you bought gold on Akshaya Tritiya, it would beget more gold. Like golden mice breeding in your safe. Here, astrology is not just a pastime of waitresses and cat ladies. Marriage ceremonies, for example, often occur in the wee hours of the morning because the family astrologer decried that time to be the most auspicious.
Oppression of Women
Like in America, the local-news page of the daily paper is filled with items from the police blotter. Most of these involve women being brutally murdered in the villages outside Hyderabad, and occasionally in the city itself. Most often the deceased is a young woman whose family was unable to pay the dowry demanded by her husband's family. Dowry is technically illegal in India, but plenty of families still demand it. Many observers decry it as a lower-class thing--a way for poor families to make a buck by literally auctioning off their daughters. But several reputable sources tell me that the practice is just as common among upper-middle-class families--and I would argue that it is more wanton in those cases, because the demands are more venal. (A rich family doesn't strictly speaking need a new refrigerator the way a village family might, but while they're making the list.... Think of it as marriage registry, Indian style.) Sometimes the bride's family is unable to deliver everything they promised. So the collateral (the bride) is repossessed. I wish I were exaggerating. I read this story three or four times a week. And the newspaper only covers this state.
Filth
Let me be clear about this: I am not a germophobe. But I am a pissing-in-the-street-a-phobe. And a hocking-loogies-in-the-pool-a-phobe. And a restaurant-restroom-grosser-than-a-set-from-Naked-Lunch-a-phobe. I am too young to remember America pre "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute" but it could not have been as bad as this. On the train home from school I once watched a woman methodically unwrap six skeins of yarn, throwing the clear plastic wrappings one after another out the window of the carriage. I feel like a prig reporting this, because who cares about litter when people are starving, right? But I don't see the benefit of littering to the litterer, or street-pissing to the pisser. Is the convenience worth the cost? Friends here have told me that they know Indians in the US who obey all the strictures about trash bins and recycling and so forth when they are in America, but when they come back here they revert to throwing their trash on the ground. It pisses my friends off, too, but obviously it's going to take more than an (unenforceable) littering fine to change the culture.
The Music in Restaurants
Last Sunday afternoon Violet was over at a friend's house. Jessica and I decided to go out for lunch, just the two of us. It would be nice, right? Maybe even romantic. But it was ruined--as every restaurant here is ruined--by a soundtrack of American lite hits from the eighties. Here's a playlist from last Sunday's lunch: "Stuck on You" by Lionel Richie, "Only a Woman" by Billy Joel, "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins. There was a Hall & Oates number, too, but I don't remember the name. I think I've heard "I Had the Time of My Life," from Dirty Dancing, in half a dozen restaurants around town. Why? Beats the fuck out of me. And in the case of Sunday's restaurant, it wasn't even Lionel Richie singing: it was a sound-alike.
Oppression of Women, Part Two
You know it's time to leave India when your eight-year-old daughter says she can't wear shorts in 110-degree weather because "it would not be modest."
Oppression of Woman, Part Three
In India it is illegal to use ultrasound scans to determine the sex of a fetus. This is because male children are strongly preferred, and the government recognized that the scans were leading to sex-selective abortions. But this has not solved the problem. The sex ratio (defined as the number of girls born per 1000 boys) has fallen over the last thirty years from 945 in 1981 to 914 today. In the northern states of Haryana and Punjab (near Delhi) the ratio is only 830. Some doctors are still performing sex-determination scans, but there is also a crisis of "disappearing" infant girls. Experts disagree on the root cause: some say it's economic (see the discussion of dowry, above), while others argue that it is patriarchal (the need to continue the family name, etc.)
