One more note from India
Hi family & friends,
Thanks so much for reading these updates over the course of the past three weeks - more than anything, these were helpful for me to process so much of what has happened on this trip, though they still are just scratching the surface.
I'll get into the work for this week in a minute, but for those immediately curious, yes our team was able to get inside some prisons. It's dire, to say the least, but I'll write more on that in a minute.
We wrapped up our last day in India. To tell you all the truth, I'm actually writing this from Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, on a behemoth layover for my flight back to Boston. I left India this morning at 1:20am Mumbai time, and will arrive back in Boston 26 hours later. The trip was by many accounts a huge success, both on a personal and a professional level (though to be honest, some students were better than others!).
Incidentally, my last day in India was also a national holiday - Republic Day - which is similar to our 4th of July. I picked up a copy of the local paper, and they had some pull quotes from young professionals (all under 35) about what they dream for the future of India. Some samplings:
"I hope to see India become a First World nation in my lifetime."
"I hope the next decade is a decade marked by a dramatic increase in wealth."
"I hope India continues to grow in the technology and financial markets, and becomes a true competitor in this world."
That's certainly one perspective (anyone reminded of Arundahti Roy right now? She's a well versed author and essayist who asserts...in my mind correctly...that the war on terrorism is as much about exporting U.S. capitalism and marketplace values as it is about fighting jihadists...if indeed it was ever about fighting jihadists).
Here's another perspective on desires for India. On my cab ride into downtown Mumbai, this sign was placed atop a delapidated building:
"The day everyone of us has access to our own toilet is the day that our country will truly know it has reached the pinacle of success."
Somehow that sentiment was left off the front page of the paper. With 70% of Mumbai's citizens alone living in slums, you can see that the pinacle of success by this standard is still quite a way's down the road.
India is paradox. Another example...last Sunday I met a barrister from England at a country house near the village of Revdanda. The house was in the mountains, surrounded by rice fields, mango trees, vegetable gardens, and brush - a kind of tropical oasis two hours away from the intensity of Mumbai. I was standing on a marble balcony overlooking this all, and said "Wow, this is the first time I think I've felt anything close to solitude in India."
To which the barrister replied: "Oh, you're never alone in India." At which point, three wild cows and a half dozen residents from the neighboring village emerged from the forest.
"You're never alone in India." As foreigners go, I think these five words could probably sum up anyone's first visit (or first 20 visits) to India, at least on the surface. The crowds, car horns (I can't stress enough how relentless the car horns are), beggers, shopkeepers, mosquitos, cows, taxis, slums, Bollywood billboards, children playing cricket, rickshaws, glam restaurants, dive restaurants...there's not a square inch of Mumbai that doesn't seem taken up by all of these. I kid not; on my final day here, I went to the financial district area, where a cow was resting in the middle of the busiest street, with some chickens and goats nearby. Imagine seeing
livestock in the middle of Wall Street, or Constitution Avenue, or Park Street!
"You're never alone in India." I thought about that statement a lot this week. If you define alone as sheer numbers of people, animals, and things, I think the statement holds true. But if loneliness is something deeper, and I think many of us would agree that it is, then it wouldn't matter if India had two billion, or four billion people. There'd always be a certain someone, or group of someones, alone.
Here's where the work comes in. We spent more of this week interviewing former prisoners, in particular more drug addicts, and more sex workers. I focused mostly on the drug addicts. There is nothing in my recent memory that has hit me so raw as the stories of these folks. I could write a book on their words, but for space I won't. Here's one story that sticks with me.
Bailey, so desperate for brown sugar (heroin), is starting to go through withdrawal. All he can think about is his next hit. He gets some, it's early morning, and he's so strung out that he doesn't stop to think about finding a quiet place to inject himself. He shoots up in the open, and is soon tracked down by a police officer. He is beaten. He is arrested. He is taken to prison, where he is put in a barrack with 100 other people (in a space meant for 40), many of whom are drug users. Soon after he arrives, he starts going through withdrawal symptoms. Moaning, diarrhea, throwing up, convulsions. And it's not just him. There are dozens in the barrack facing the same situation. Imagine the sounds and smells of 30+ people going through withdrawal at the same time, in a space as big as a one-car garage. Meanwhile, they are beat by the other prisoners for creating such a maddening scene. Some are raped, others forced to sleep in the toilet, others denied food or water. Bailey himself never even sees the inside of a courtroom. Two months pass, and finally the system says he can go free if he agrees to plead guilty. He does so.
When our team got access into one of the prisons, we saw many of these things. Overcrowding. Poor water. Rats. Cockroaches. A barrack for the mentally ill where they are literally chained up for hours on end. The sounds of inmates going through withdrawal. Scabbies. A sick barrack where HIV+ inmates are kept with TB patients. I could go on.
But what sticks with you more than any of these conditions...more than any of these conditions combined...are the vacant, downright empty eyes that look back at you, as you walk in with your khaki pants and nice shoes, with your pen & notebook in hand. One of our students said she thought it looked like they had all just stopped crying, as the area around their eyes was sunken and dry. Sometimes it's hard to make out their faces, but you can see them by the size of the abscesses on their skin. And there are foreigners, too...not just Indians.
"You're never alone in India." At the end of the week, as I repeated that phrase to myself, all I could think of was "bullshit." (I admit, however, to being angry and worn-thin by week's end.)
There's so much more to say, both about the prisons, but also about our everday experiences. How do I tell you all about the chortel of our driver, which when he laughs makes the entire car laugh, too? How do you talk about playing cricket with kids who live on the footpath, running on used drug needles as they try to catch balls? Or the group home for children and the 10 girls, all of whom have lost their parents (either to death or to prison), trying to teach us Hindi and laughing at our bad pronounciation? Or the "underground" dance club we went to where hundreds of gay & lesbian people (mostly 20-30 year olds) could feel a reasonable amount of safety in
each other's company, while in the "real world" they can be arrested under Indian Penal Code 377 for being themselves?
How too do I tell you all honestly of the things I'm not so proud of...my initial fear of taking a cab by myself, or being unable to hide my disgust as a rat crawled across my shoe at a drop-in center for drug addicts? Or reaching to feel for my wallet every nanosecond when walking through a crowd or in the slums, as if the damn thing really mattered anyway? Or finding myself longing for a hot shower, when so many of the drug users, inmates and sex workers we spoke to haven't showered in weeks or months, let alone with clean or hot water?
In the end, the importance of this work goes well beyond writing a report on prison conditions. At least I hope it does, or I'll lose faith in why Harvard sends students and employees to do this work anyway. On the grander level, how could this work not be about absorbing all of the brokenness that you can, and somehow using their wounds to fix a part of yourself (and vice versa). This work just cannot be about extrapolating information, writing a report, and then washing your hands (or more aptly, putting on the hand sanitizer). Perhaps the challenge is about giving back more than what you take away.
Anyway, I hope the students wrestle with these questions as much as I am. And I thank you all for your patience with my emotional rambling. Looking forward to seeing many of you soon, or at least talking with many of you soon!
Take care for now,
Mike
PS- forgive the spelling and grammar in this beast......
Thanks so much for reading these updates over the course of the past three weeks - more than anything, these were helpful for me to process so much of what has happened on this trip, though they still are just scratching the surface.
I'll get into the work for this week in a minute, but for those immediately curious, yes our team was able to get inside some prisons. It's dire, to say the least, but I'll write more on that in a minute.
We wrapped up our last day in India. To tell you all the truth, I'm actually writing this from Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, on a behemoth layover for my flight back to Boston. I left India this morning at 1:20am Mumbai time, and will arrive back in Boston 26 hours later. The trip was by many accounts a huge success, both on a personal and a professional level (though to be honest, some students were better than others!).
Incidentally, my last day in India was also a national holiday - Republic Day - which is similar to our 4th of July. I picked up a copy of the local paper, and they had some pull quotes from young professionals (all under 35) about what they dream for the future of India. Some samplings:
"I hope to see India become a First World nation in my lifetime."
"I hope the next decade is a decade marked by a dramatic increase in wealth."
"I hope India continues to grow in the technology and financial markets, and becomes a true competitor in this world."
That's certainly one perspective (anyone reminded of Arundahti Roy right now? She's a well versed author and essayist who asserts...in my mind correctly...that the war on terrorism is as much about exporting U.S. capitalism and marketplace values as it is about fighting jihadists...if indeed it was ever about fighting jihadists).
Here's another perspective on desires for India. On my cab ride into downtown Mumbai, this sign was placed atop a delapidated building:
"The day everyone of us has access to our own toilet is the day that our country will truly know it has reached the pinacle of success."
Somehow that sentiment was left off the front page of the paper. With 70% of Mumbai's citizens alone living in slums, you can see that the pinacle of success by this standard is still quite a way's down the road.
India is paradox. Another example...last Sunday I met a barrister from England at a country house near the village of Revdanda. The house was in the mountains, surrounded by rice fields, mango trees, vegetable gardens, and brush - a kind of tropical oasis two hours away from the intensity of Mumbai. I was standing on a marble balcony overlooking this all, and said "Wow, this is the first time I think I've felt anything close to solitude in India."
To which the barrister replied: "Oh, you're never alone in India." At which point, three wild cows and a half dozen residents from the neighboring village emerged from the forest.
"You're never alone in India." As foreigners go, I think these five words could probably sum up anyone's first visit (or first 20 visits) to India, at least on the surface. The crowds, car horns (I can't stress enough how relentless the car horns are), beggers, shopkeepers, mosquitos, cows, taxis, slums, Bollywood billboards, children playing cricket, rickshaws, glam restaurants, dive restaurants...there's not a square inch of Mumbai that doesn't seem taken up by all of these. I kid not; on my final day here, I went to the financial district area, where a cow was resting in the middle of the busiest street, with some chickens and goats nearby. Imagine seeing
livestock in the middle of Wall Street, or Constitution Avenue, or Park Street!
"You're never alone in India." I thought about that statement a lot this week. If you define alone as sheer numbers of people, animals, and things, I think the statement holds true. But if loneliness is something deeper, and I think many of us would agree that it is, then it wouldn't matter if India had two billion, or four billion people. There'd always be a certain someone, or group of someones, alone.
Here's where the work comes in. We spent more of this week interviewing former prisoners, in particular more drug addicts, and more sex workers. I focused mostly on the drug addicts. There is nothing in my recent memory that has hit me so raw as the stories of these folks. I could write a book on their words, but for space I won't. Here's one story that sticks with me.
Bailey, so desperate for brown sugar (heroin), is starting to go through withdrawal. All he can think about is his next hit. He gets some, it's early morning, and he's so strung out that he doesn't stop to think about finding a quiet place to inject himself. He shoots up in the open, and is soon tracked down by a police officer. He is beaten. He is arrested. He is taken to prison, where he is put in a barrack with 100 other people (in a space meant for 40), many of whom are drug users. Soon after he arrives, he starts going through withdrawal symptoms. Moaning, diarrhea, throwing up, convulsions. And it's not just him. There are dozens in the barrack facing the same situation. Imagine the sounds and smells of 30+ people going through withdrawal at the same time, in a space as big as a one-car garage. Meanwhile, they are beat by the other prisoners for creating such a maddening scene. Some are raped, others forced to sleep in the toilet, others denied food or water. Bailey himself never even sees the inside of a courtroom. Two months pass, and finally the system says he can go free if he agrees to plead guilty. He does so.
When our team got access into one of the prisons, we saw many of these things. Overcrowding. Poor water. Rats. Cockroaches. A barrack for the mentally ill where they are literally chained up for hours on end. The sounds of inmates going through withdrawal. Scabbies. A sick barrack where HIV+ inmates are kept with TB patients. I could go on.
But what sticks with you more than any of these conditions...more than any of these conditions combined...are the vacant, downright empty eyes that look back at you, as you walk in with your khaki pants and nice shoes, with your pen & notebook in hand. One of our students said she thought it looked like they had all just stopped crying, as the area around their eyes was sunken and dry. Sometimes it's hard to make out their faces, but you can see them by the size of the abscesses on their skin. And there are foreigners, too...not just Indians.
"You're never alone in India." At the end of the week, as I repeated that phrase to myself, all I could think of was "bullshit." (I admit, however, to being angry and worn-thin by week's end.)
There's so much more to say, both about the prisons, but also about our everday experiences. How do I tell you all about the chortel of our driver, which when he laughs makes the entire car laugh, too? How do you talk about playing cricket with kids who live on the footpath, running on used drug needles as they try to catch balls? Or the group home for children and the 10 girls, all of whom have lost their parents (either to death or to prison), trying to teach us Hindi and laughing at our bad pronounciation? Or the "underground" dance club we went to where hundreds of gay & lesbian people (mostly 20-30 year olds) could feel a reasonable amount of safety in
each other's company, while in the "real world" they can be arrested under Indian Penal Code 377 for being themselves?
How too do I tell you all honestly of the things I'm not so proud of...my initial fear of taking a cab by myself, or being unable to hide my disgust as a rat crawled across my shoe at a drop-in center for drug addicts? Or reaching to feel for my wallet every nanosecond when walking through a crowd or in the slums, as if the damn thing really mattered anyway? Or finding myself longing for a hot shower, when so many of the drug users, inmates and sex workers we spoke to haven't showered in weeks or months, let alone with clean or hot water?
In the end, the importance of this work goes well beyond writing a report on prison conditions. At least I hope it does, or I'll lose faith in why Harvard sends students and employees to do this work anyway. On the grander level, how could this work not be about absorbing all of the brokenness that you can, and somehow using their wounds to fix a part of yourself (and vice versa). This work just cannot be about extrapolating information, writing a report, and then washing your hands (or more aptly, putting on the hand sanitizer). Perhaps the challenge is about giving back more than what you take away.
Anyway, I hope the students wrestle with these questions as much as I am. And I thank you all for your patience with my emotional rambling. Looking forward to seeing many of you soon, or at least talking with many of you soon!
Take care for now,
Mike
PS- forgive the spelling and grammar in this beast......
posted by MikeJ at
9:30 AM
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