Linguistic Underpinnings

When I first rolled into Mumbai I was immediately aware this wasn’t the best air in the world. When you can see the density of the air at a 50ft distance  you know something is up. Besides the daily traffic jams that pile up at least 4 times a day outside my window, many of the roads are covered in dust and muck that’s kicked up easily, with no rain to wash things away or knock things out of the air once they’re in it. If I stay in, I dramatically notice I feel better– more normal in the sort of breath I can take and generally more energetic, which I’m supposing is because I’m just not breathing in so much junk. But I digress… Can’t just complain about the matter and not take action. I went and bought $15 worth of air cleaning plants.

Here’s a list of goof air filtering plants from NASA… ( I know I’m not sure why NASA was studying theses plants, but I can’t say I mind ).

1. Philodendron scandens `oxycardium’, heartleaf philodendron

2. Philodendron domesticum, elephant ear philodendron

3. Dracaena fragrans `Massangeana’, cornstalk dracaena

4. Hedera helix, English ivy

5. Chlorophytum comosum, spider plant

6. Dracaena deremensis `Janet Craig’, Janet Craig dracaena

7. Dracaena deremensis `Warneckii’, Warneck dracaena

8. Ficus benjamina, weeping fig

9. Epipiremnum aureum, golden pothos

10. Spathiphyllum `Mauna Loa’, peace lily

11. Philodendron selloum, selloum philodendron

12. Aglaonema modestum, Chinese evergreen

13. Chamaedorea sefritzii, bamboo or reed palm

14. Sansevieria trifasciata, snake plant

15. Dracaena marginata , red-edged dracaena

For an average home of under 2,000 square feet, the study recommends using at least fifteen samples of a good variety of these common houseplants to help improve air quality. They also recommend that the plants be grown in six inch containers or larger.

10am.  wake up. look  at broken clock on wall and realize that right now, it shows the right time. poke at stomach.

10:30. Get out of bed and think of showering. Feel optimistic for a 15 minutes. Feel bad again. Doubt doctor.

11am. Take medicine anyway. Maybe it’s not the doctor, it’s me.

11:30. Fall asleep again.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

12:30. Wake up and watch TED talks. Shamelessly post my website address on Facebook thread during Zappo’s founder’s speech because his speech sounds like such a commercial anyway. Wonder what it really takes to succeed. Listen to Zappo’s guy speak about happiness. Wonder if he’s really happy. Wonder  why I didn’t choose some more practical money making career because I’m so good at long hours of work. Watch other speakers. Text friend who is actually at TED talks.  Watch musical section of TED and worry that TED will never come to India again.

2pm. Go to sleep again.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

3:30pm. Wake up again. Realize I have to go out into the world and get rent money from the ATM. Dress nice to make myself feel well. Dressing nice makes people stare.  Someone walks by and says something about “Ghoris…” a fourteen year old boy walks by and says “Seeeexxxyyyy!”  Feel rediculous.  Get money from ATM. Return home past leering men. Set out rent.

4:30pm. Go to sleep feeling bad again.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

5:30m wake up. realize there is no other option besides going immediately to the imported food store and buying familiar healthy foods so I can convince myself not to give up hopes of eating a meal that agrees completely with my stomach. Go to Ghori store. Buy luxerious things such as smoked salmon and  frozen peas. Buy something called “Southern Fried Chicken” which turns out to be too spicy to eat. Buy, of all things, ginger beer because it restores hope in the world and in my stomach also.

6pm. Return home and eat a meal so familiar I want to cry.

7pm. Convince myself I feel good enough to go out with the girls because I am so tired of laying in bed. Last week has had a few bright points of entertainment. Have spent too much time in one room!!  Get dressed up and take all my medicine and hope that nothing goes wrong.

Fingers crossed…..

When I first arrived in Mumbai it was the monsoon season.  I took this for granted because the rainfall was actually reasonably similar to the sort of rain that comes to both Tennessee (my birthplace) and Pittsburgh (my last state of residence in the US). If anything, I found myself thinking of childhood vacations to Florida, where the wind and clouds swirled around and dumped out a thunderstorm almost daily.  Mosquitos and humidity followed but it was always worth it for that brief vacation from the heat and the clean air which inevitably followed.

The same was true here. In that first month in India, I came to think of the rain as a distinct part of this place.  If nothing else,  it provided a reason to stay in bed away from the “What am I doing here?” feeling that followed most misunderstandings or frustrations that take place beyond the wooden doors of my apartment.

Now proceeding into the months of October and November when it hasn’t rained for 3 weeks plus, my roommates and I confess to audio hallucinations of rainfall.  Just a week ago during Diwali, I woke and heard that familiar Tennessee summer storm sound of hard rain on the windows and regular thunder in the back ground. Rolling over I dozed off again, feeling wonderful familiarity: if this is what I was hearing I must be at my parents house, and there would probably be someone waking me up soon for dinner so why not keep sleeping peacefully?

On waking a second time, I found the sounds in the distance were not thunder but fireworks going off, one after another.  Now loud explosions were happening just outside my window as neighbors set off rockets from the roof. Children laughed and cried in unison. The rain had only been my ceiling fan, and I was (and am), a thousand miles from Tennessee.

In June, India’s scientists went to work seeding clouds to encourage rainfall and ease the droughts that were destroying farms in the South. The rains came, (it’s still unclear what the seeding changed) and they lingered almost 2 weeks in the year later than they usually do.

Besides the seeding, other methods were attempted:

The government of Andhra Pradesh ordered  religious institutions to pray for rain

Frogs were married (later some called for divorce)

And in some villages, a girl wearing a skirt made of knitted vines and small branches, sang and danced through the streets of the village, stopping at every house, where the hosts poured water on her. The people of the village followed her dancing and shouting.

Following this,

the rain fell and fell and fell:  for a limited time only.

For the last few days my roommates have been out of town and I’ve figured out how to sit still again. Hard to sit still in a place like Mumbai which offers so many versions of distraction. There are 20 things I see here everyday that I want to sit and write about, and I am overwhelmed…so I don’t write anything! Or I jot it down by hand in a notebook because the fidget of writing something on paper is still valid and appealing.

A few thoughts from the department of quiet time:

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The banana man and his son are always sitting on the corner 1 block away. You can have 6 bananas for 20 rupees which I think might be a little more than average but the bananas are always in good condition and the banana people always remember that for some reason I have decided 6 is the perfect number of bananas to buy at once so we don’t even have to make attempts at English or Hindi. I can’t say the banana man looks cheerful… He has a bright red beard.  But his son seems very cheerful. I find myself thinking that they “just came in on a boatload of bananas”.   Then I feel a bit like a jerk, because if you aren’t thinking you don’t realize that it would be kind of nice to be on a boat of bananas, and the ride might be beautiful, and that’s a huge amount of pudding potential.

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There are a hundred thousand million different fantasy and real versions of the world to partake of.  In Mumbai there are twice that many. If you have a little money, you can pay to enter into almost all the modes of living: If you’d like to think of passing from one ideal to another as going from one building to the another you can. Each place will claim to be the most real and the most important. People from one building to yell across to the next “You are living in a dream land!” and the people who hear it will get defensive and yell it back.  The tough part is it’s almost all legitimate.  You can convince people over time that any building is the best one to be in.

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one person thinks I should move to NY.

one person thinks I should spend some time in Maine.

one person thinks I should move to Chicago.

one person thinks I should move to TN.

one person thinks I should stay in Mumbai.

one person thinks I should move to Portland, OR.

one person thinks I should go back to PGH.

I think I need a shower…

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I am going to spend all day working on a presentation about the Fulbright work I am doing here in India.  I have always thought you really figure out what you are doing when you are required to describe it to someone who is not at all on your wave length. That also may be the point at which you make a complete fool of yourself. What if they just don’t get it? What if your idea is not that valuable? It’s enough to make a person figure out how to at least complete a functional task. ” This project will no doubt broaden the conversation about ______ and  be useful by _______ to depict _______. And in conclusion, ______. “

Done and done.

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I am afraid of a world in which I don’t make sense. Either in reason and logic, or emotion and optimism. I picked up a small booklet that one of my friends already made fun of me for. It’s one of those cheap paper back guru booklets, but the name caught my eye: “Circus of the Mind”. Who would deny there are a few elephants and monkeys in there? Not me.  When the featured Guru, Sadhguru is asked about the adequacy of the mind in understanding the deeper, uncharted realms of the spirit he replies: “It’s like trying to go to the moon on a bullock cart. No matter how hard you beat the bulls it’s not going to get there.”

Here in Mumbai it is Diwali and the sweets, fireworks, and flowers are swirling around the city in a smokey haze. The  monsoons have sadly passed on and left the air quality wanting and the streets unwashed. Had I arrived to this two months ago, I would have much more of a problem with it, but now the unpleasantry seems a matter of fact, and who would dwell on it when there is so much more to capture your senses?

Diwali is a bit like New Years and Christmas combined and for days nothing is organized normally.  The name is drawn from the Sanskrit word Deepavali, meaning “garland of lights”, and the celebration lasts about 5 days.  It is a time for gift giving and hanging lights from buildings and terraces. Each days asks for a different sort of gift to be exchanged, and there are a whole set of customs and legends attached to each day. For example, one days is for giving gifts to family, one to husbands and wives and so on and so on.

For me, Diwali has been a bit like Christmas away from your family. There’s a party and you might get some of the sweets that over flow, but the real sweet being exchanged is the strengthening of the sort of ties that enrich a lifetime in a place like this: a gift to a co-worker, playful gambling with friends and family, or a gift to a partner.

When I first arrived in Mumbai the place seemed a mess, and it still is. Though staying longer, I am beginning to think that while the streets are neglected,  on a personal scale people of all sorts are not, and maybe on some level this sort of human-centered delegation of time and energy makes much more sense than some of the cold order and distant pleasantries that make western cities and holidays what they are.

Of course I am writing from the outside looking in, and I have on some sort of turmeric colored glasses that give everything a delicious golden glow. There are sweets everywhere, here and in other countries, being passed back and forth constantly for both genuine and empty purposes alike. Everyone wants to focus on the taste.

At first the mere delineation of public and private space in Mumbai seems a joke:
Laundry is drying on the divide of the street median, children are using the restroom wherever they choose, and every surface in most every time of day is an appropriate place to nap.

With so many activities that seem to only take place indoors in most western culture taking place outdoors, it is surprising to note that care-taking of public space fluctuates greatly. While some vendors on the street may clean and sweep near their “shop” regularly, others leave everything to the wind and rain, with wrappers piled left and right, mud all across the sidewalk, and concrete rubble piled along side of daily activities.

The city street itself seems a constant churning of physical forms, people, fruit, dogs, dust, rain and even the cobble stones themselves, flip out of order regularly only to be nudged back into place by the bare hands of some sari-dressed day laborer. The order is hard to describe though it does seem there is some logic to it, though the sense and purpose are more nested in immediate pragmatic needs than in the actualization of some method of work and living that will ever make things easier. Even in social settings, planning is unheard of and it seems even rude to ask for a plan. If a plan is set forth it usually changes completely with meetings happening instantly or not at all.

Here and there beautiful things happen though—out walking one evening I passed one of the multi-trunk trees here (the name of which is still unknown to me) and for whatever reason the tree had been fitted with boards between the trunks to create a sort of public bench. Small tin images and decorations were also pressed between trunks giving the tree a very welcoming presence, as though it were a lone wolf-tree park that admitted just two persons at a time.

Certainly, I am still new to the city and perhaps my way of looking for signs of how space is used here are not yet fitted correctly to the culture. At best, my indications so far are that though chaotic, the streets have an accessibility to all classes that western streets do not. This is an interesting place for urban planners, artists, and social scientists of all sorts to begin from as they query the best methods for engaging, serving, and housing Mumbai’s growing population.

A recent visit to Pukar  sat me down in front of a small but extremely helpful set of publications from the 2007 Urban Age India Conference that yielded the following helpful stats. in getting an over view of Mumbai:

In Mumbai 6.5 million live in slums. With a population of 13,662,885 that means close to half of the population occupies slum dwellings.

The city is home to over 300,000 street vendors- just a few thousand of whom are licensed.

Dharavi, the city’s largest slum has populations that range up to 80,000 per km squared. 50% of the city lives in unauthorized housing that likely has unreliable sources of electricity and water.  Much of the occupied land is owned by the government, though surprisingly the slum of Dharavi has organized itself to the point of having representatives in government.

When it comes to travel and transport within the city:

3-13% of households have cars (an interesting fact when you come to learn how much money is being spent to make auto travel most convenient).

40-50% of travel takes place on two-wheelers

40-50% takes place on bikes.

The city relies mostly on walking, cycling, and IPT ( Intermediate Public Transport) to get around. The buses seem only half safe- not so much stopping at various streets but slowing down so that passengers hop off when they need to.

For those living in slums 50-75% of travel is walking or cycling.