Money Hai Toh Honey Hai

The electricity went in and out four nights in a row last week. Vitiligo Clinic didn't give me any exciting patients, either. It was time for the freakin weekend and I needed to have me some fun. Lucky for me, Ellora was visiting C-Garh (as she calls it). We met at one of the air-conditioned malls, Fun Republic (weird name, huh). Her cousin and best friend came with, and these have to be the nicest guys in Chandigarh. We had some initial trouble with a security guard when she noticed that Ellora had somehow brought her camera into the mall (you checked her bag, apparently you suck at your job), so she had to leave, but came back a few minutes later, getting past security with the camera tucked into her pants pocket, haha. After chilling at the mall for a while, the guys gave us a great tour of Punjab University, where they go to school, and where my mom got her Masters in English some thirty years ago.

Later that night, my mom took us out for dinner at a bougie restaurant in Sector 17. Really great food, funny service. Ellora's 21st birthday is coming up, so we decided to order drinks to celebrate. The drink menu appeared some fifteen minutes after we had sat down, whilst we were ordering our food. When the food came, the waiter began to serve each dish to us individually (vegetable rice, naan, malai kofta, paneer, yogurt, mmm). Ellora had already put a piece of naan into her main plate, not the small side plate, which was apparently wrong. She later told me that the flustered waiter had said, "Put it here!" and made her move her naan before putting the sabzis into her plate. Then at least twenty minutes after we had gotten our drinks, and I was actually sipping on mine, this other waiter come by and put straws into each of our drinks, and left the straw-holder, packed with at least another ten straws, on our table. Bringing us four straws each doesn't make up for bringing out the straws hella late. Ellora and I were cracking up...I don't know if the situation warranted so much laughter, but I'm assuming the alcohol helped a bit. It was so great to see Ellora and be able to chat and share our ups and downs and connect on the other side of the world.


The next day, my mom and I finally went and saw a Bollywood movie. This is a super popular thing to do here, sort of a national pastime. We went to see Money Hai Toh Honey Hai, literally translated to "If you got money, then you got a honey." Of course we were lucky enough to be seated next to the only large family in the whole theater, complete with crying baby and all. Two minutes after we sat down, they showed this really patriotic footage showing Indian troops planting an Indian flag at the top of this mountain in the middle of a blizzard. The national anthem was playing in the background, so everybody in the theater got up, my mom included. I was thrown off. "Mom! Do I have to stand up?" I initially got up so as not to be disrespectful, but I have to admit the instrumental version of the anthem sounded damn good and was quite touching.

After that scene of Indian pride, the movie started, and all concepts of traditional Indian society and culture(s) (I'm an anthropologist- I can't be comfortable believing there is one umbrella "Indian culture") were thrown out the window. Two seconds in, the title song began and made fun of Chinese people. I can't do this, I thought to myself. Soon enough, Govinda appeared on the screen and I felt better. This man is hilarious, and may be over 40 years old and slightly overweight, but is a damn good dancer and entertainer. It was also refreshing to see that one of the male leads, Upen Patel, was treated like a piece of ass just like all the dancers (a weird trend of mostly scantily-clad black and white females) in the music videos. Overall, the movie wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be, and I actually did a laugh a little (thankfully, it was supposed to be a comedy). Of course the director was not taught the concept of "showing, not telling", but that's nothing new when it comes to Bollywood. I had a read a review of the movie in the local newspaper that lamented the appearance of the rather portly director in one of the hip-hop music videos, but I actually found it pretty entertaining watching him brushing his shoulders off and putting his stunna shades on. Size don't matter, the man can move. 2.5 hours of creative choreography, sexual innuendo, unsubtle nationalism, and female objectification later, the movie ended with the message that every person is beautiful. This message was completely lost on the slightly critical thinker, who only had to look at actors conveying the message to see through its bullshit- ridiculously fair-skinned girls with blue contacts and hourglass figures.

Relieved that the movie wasn't a whole three hours long, I had the energy to do some shopping. This is a totally different experience in India. There's people opening doors for you, people serving you tea if they make a sale, oftentimes men modeling the clothing they're trying to sell you, and people constantly watching and waiting on you. To buy a pair of jeans, I just went in and told the shop owner my waist size and he started unfolding dozens of jeans, and I would just say whether I liked it or not. I sort of had to ask him to look at stuff myself to make sure he wasn't taken aback by it. The best part of buying jeans in India: they alter them for you! This is great for me, since they're almost always too long for me. The worst part of buying jeans in India: getting stuck in them! I sort of got stuck in one pair of super small jeans and my mom had to help me out of them. I got them on alright and everything, it was getting out of them that was impossible. I definitely would have had to buy them and wear them out of the store if there wasn't another person helping me pull the sides together while I sucked in and undid the button. Let's just say it's the most exercise I've gotten in India. I hope the owner didn't see...

I feel like my shopping experience exemplifies the title of the movie. AC malls are only accessible to a certain portion of the population; not everyone can enjoy a movie from a decent view with snacks, have doors opened and closed for them, salesmen at their beck and call. It was a slightly unusual and uncomfortable experience for me, but the advantageous exchange rate from dollars to rupees puts me in that socioeconomic category here, I guess. If money hai toh honey hai, there must be a lot of single hunnies out there.

It Was The Three Indian Ladies, In The Kitchen, With The Candlestick

Last night was the second night in a row that the power went out at 10-something pm, just as I was getting to bed. Don’t laugh at my senior citizen bedtime; by 6am I can feel the scorching sun permeating my room, and can hear the neighborhood dogs barking, cars honking, and the milkmen and the vegetable venders calling out inaudibly, so I need my beauty sleep. Anyhow, I figured that the power would be back in a few minutes, so I just used my cell phone as a flashlight while I brushed my teeth, carefully balancing my toothbrush in one hand while keeping the other free to press a button on the keypad every 10 seconds so I wasn’t left in complete darkness.

Twenty minutes later there was still no power, which also meant that the AC unit wasn’t working. Which basically meant that I couldn’t breathe because it was so hot. So I decided to take my pillow and light cotton bed sheet downstairs, where one light is always on and backup power keeps one of the fans working. I may not get any sleep, but I knew I’d at least be able to breathe underneath the fan. As soon as I got downstairs, I discovered I wasn’t the only one awake. I was greeted by the maid, (yup, there’s a maid…I will problematize this in a later entry) Usha Didi (didi = older sister, used as a term of simultaneous respect and familiarity). Two seconds later my mom came down. The three of us laughed about how funky the power was acting for a few minutes. Then I decided to push a bunch of chairs together and make a bed for myself next to the dining table, above which the backup ceiling fan was located. I felt a little silly, but had to make do if I wanted any chance of getting some shuteye.

Some ten minutes later, the power came back. Yipee! I thought, running back upstairs to my trusty AC unit, without whom I would be lost in life. But I had jumped the gun. Another two minutes and the power was out again. I sadly gathered my blanket and bed sheet, went downstairs where my makeshift bed was waiting for me, and eventually fell asleep.

...

I woke up quite groggy this morning as a result of last night’s events, so when I discovered a little lizard on the bathroom wall, I yelped like a little girl in the shower. It’s not so much that lizards scare me, just that they surprise the shit out of me. They come out of nowhere and move at lightning speed. I’ve seen them around the house a couple of times, and I’m cool with them as long as they keep their distance. This one apparently did not receive my restraining order: Please stay at least 5 feet away from Nita at all times, especially when she is trying to take a shower. The least it could have done was eat a few more mosquitoes; I woke up with a mosquito-bite triad on the back of my thigh, bringing my grand total to like fourteen or something. Not okay. I feel like I’m 5/8 mosquito or something. A few more bites and I’m bound to sprout a couple extra legs and some wings. Attractive, eh?

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I studied for the MCAT at the PGI library and prepped for more patient interviews, since tomorrow is vitiligo clinic. On my way back, I was sharing an auto (auto rickshaw), and cracked open a biological sciences MCAT prep book. The lady sitting next to me got really excited and thought I was a doctor at PGI or something, and asked me if I could help her interpret some laboratory test results. I was flattered, so I thought I’d at least try and take a look, but of course nothing made sense to me and I could barely read it because Doctor’s Handwriting is apparently a cross-cultural syndrome. I apologized and told her I was just a visiting student, and she was really sweet about it. I also felt like it was a small victory that she couldn’t tell I was foreign. When she was dropped off a few minutes later, we exchanged a warm smile and a nod (the Indian kind, which involves sort of cocking your head to one side). It was nice.

If the mosquitoes strike again tonight, I’m taking the lizard to court.

Don't Hate The Player, Hate The Game

The weekend in Dehli was just for fun. A few days ago I arrived in Chandigarh to get down to business. My mom and I took the Shatabdi Express, the newest and fastest AC train available, to get there. It was a tough ride- pretty smooth and all, but within the first 10 minutes I discovered I had to go pee. Little did I know this innocent call of nature would cause me to almost flip my shit. To my surprise, the toilet was a squatting, not a sitting, toilet, but I rolled with it anyway. I know how to aim, I thought. Then there were 3 different buttons to press for it to flush, apparently they kept dying and had to be replaced. But I eventually figured that out too. The really tough part was when I was all done and had to get out. I couldn't open the door. It was the kind of door that you had to pull in to open and push out to allow it to spread out and close. I tried and tried to pull it hard enough for it to open, trying to stay calm. After about three minutes, the claustrophobia started to kick in. Somehow, miraculously, I managed to open the door within the next minute. Another 30 seconds stuck in there and I might've started to cry. Now that would have been really embarrassing, not good for my street cred at all.

On a more serious note, I found it rather hard to ride in the air conditioning, devour the breakfast that was served to me, and sip on my little carton of mango juice while the view outside was largely a long string of slums, of hardship and poverty, of people planting and plowing with only their manpower to aid them. It really sunk in that the gap between the rich and the poor in India was in fact a gaping, bottomless pit. Like I said, it was a tough ride.

...

Most of you vaguely know that I'm here to do thesis research, and that's about it. In more detail, I'm working with a couple of dermatologists at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER or just PGI for short) to recruit patients for an ethnographic study that will hopefully be the basis of my thesis in medical anthropology and health policy. My research revolves around vitiligo (aka leukoderma aka safed daag aka phulveri), which is a skin condition characterized by a loss of pigment, or basically an appearance white spots onthe skin, which I have myself. Vitiligo is often reduced to a cosmetic condition, and the psychological, emotional, and social health of patients is largely ignored. My research will focus on the lived experience of a handful of Punjabi women with the skin condition, and explore if and how vitiligo is gendered in the context of socially accepted ideals of beauty, normality, and marriage customs. I’ll also be interviewing patients’ family members to get an outside perspective on the condition and learn more about the social stigma surrounding it. In addition, I hope to interview some doctors/hospital administrators to investigate if there is a health policy component to the condition, like a glaring inequality in access to treatment.

But enough of the academic speak. My first day at PGI had mixed results. An autorickshaw took me to Nehru Hospital on campus, and the first thing I thought was, this is rather mediocre-looking (the picture on the right is the New OPD, which is where I actually do my research). Then on my way in, there were sick people (you're probably thinking no shit, it's a hospital), but they were everywhere- not just inside, but outside as well, which made me kind of sad. Then as I got closer to the dermatology unit I went into Christina Yang mode and started to get really excited about the rawness of the medicine conducted there.

I arrived at the office of the dermatologist I had been in touch with. He was exactly as his profile picture had captured him, except he smiled underneath his large mustache when I came in. He was on the phone explaining how to treat some toe infection involving a lot of puss, so I decided to make myself at home and jump into anthropologist mode, taking notes on the ethnographic space. I looked up at his whiteboard, and the first thing I scribbled down was the William Osler quote he had written there. "The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business." Brilliant. I looked to his desk and found a little calendar of daily words of wisdom. That day's quote was that all things are difficult before they are easy. Then I recalled all of his groundbreaking research and published articles on vitiligo treatments. I grinned and thought to myself, I want to be just like him when I grow up. He left for a brief while to tend to a patient, while I did some more snooping and note-taking. At one point, the power went out (a common occurrence here, only Americans freak out about it), and I sat there thinking, hmm, it will be a little odd if he finds me sitting here alone, in the dark, or worse, if someone else comes looking for him and finds me sitting here alone, in the dark. Luckily the power was back within a few minutes and I acted like it didn’t phase me.

Next stop was his boss’s office. He wasn’t nearly as cool. Unforch, he's the one I work with on a daily basis. I went into his office, and gave him a bag of pistachio nuts and almonds and shit in a gift bag (you'll only get this if you're Indian), to which he said, "Oh, you shouldn't have!" and proceeded to half-place and half-throw it aside. "So what is your research about again? If you don’t mind me asking, are you taking some treatment for yourself? So you’re not an actual doctor?” I was a bit annoyed (didn’t you read the email I sent you hella months ago foolio?), but I began to explain. I was cut off somewhere in the middle when his cell phone rang and he quickly said something bossy to the person on the other end in Punjabi. I continued, in English, because he was thoroughly unimpressed by my Punjabi, something to which I took great offense. Two minutes later his regular phone rang. It was then that I noticed this scared looking guy sitting in the corner of the room. Throughout my visit to the office, my boss (if you will) barked orders at him. Poor guy. Grow a backbone for god’s sake. Sort of reminded me of Peter Pettigrew- not to extend the metaphor to his boss and put him on the level of Lord Voldemort (yeah, I said it) or anything.

At the end of our convo, I smiled and thanked Mr. Boss profusely, because I knew he expected it. I was a little annoyed at myself for mimicking the behavior of his backbone-less intern or whoever he was, but oh well. The man must be brilliant or something, because he is the head of the dermatology department. And I probably don’t know him well enough to judge him, but I respect the kind of doctors who don’t just treat the biological component of an illness, but who choose to take a more comprehensive approach and treat the patient, the person as a whole, because there is usually so much more to it. When treating a patient with vitiligo, if all a dermatologist sees are white spots, they aren’t much better than any other person on the street who chooses to stop and stare or ask inquisitive questions laced with judgment. Skin conditions are unique, and such dermatologists are only putting band-aids on wounds that are much deeper and require much more healing and attention than most patients get. This practice is in no way unique to India, though. Nearly every American dermatologist and every curious American passerby I've met has had the same mindset. So maybe I shouldn’t hate the player, I should hate the game. Better yet, maybe I’ll try and change the game.

Honk Please, Use Dipper at Night

I've been in India for over a week now, and have talked to a total of about three people because I've found it nearly impossible to get competent wireless at home, and it's been tough getting out in the merciless heat to grab a rickshaw and go to the nearest cybercafe. Still, I thought I'd try my hand at blogging to keep people updated en masse, since errybody and they mama seems to be doing it. I'm clearly new at it and most of it will be me rambling, but do read if you have the time and internet capabilities (and know that I am deeply envious).

The 18 hours spent in the air were surprisingly painless, as I was asleep for over 50% of the trip. Only the last couple of hours from Hong Kong to New Dehli were particularly painful when a set of little baby boys were having what I could have sworn was a screaming contest. If you ask me, they both won.

After all that sleep, I was ready to quickly check in with Mamaji #1 and get to shopping (mamaji = mom's brother; mamiji = mom's brother's wife. Technically these are my mom's mamajis and mamijis, but I call them the same thing...Indian family trees are complicated. Note that I will be using numbers and not names to denote all the mamajis/mamijis I will be meeting along this trip, because it's just easier that way, not because I am completely heartless). This has to be the most awesome pair of 70+ people in Dehli. Super sophisticated, educated, appreciative, and basically just really awesome. Mamiji was really sweet and kind of hilarious. "You're too sweet! You have such good taste! You're so fair! (as she touches my bare knee) Why don't you wear some lipstick before you go shopping?" Er, I don't really wear lipstick, mamiji, but if you'd like I can put on some lip gloss...

Maybe it's because her grandson is a model. Seriously. You'd think a bunch of my family would be doctors and engineers (that is, if you adhere to ludicrous stereotypes), but here's a model whose face can apparently be seen at your local New Dehli McDonald's. "You have to see his portfolio! He has such a great body!" Umm, sure...if you...want me to, mamiji. Semi-awk, indeed.

Over the next couple days, I shopped til I dropped, visited Mamaji #2 in Ghaziabad, and visited Bangla Sahib, the big local Gurdwara. If you've met any dramatic old Indian women, that about sums up my visit in Ghaziabad, combined with the joys of playing with barbies and helping her granddaughter with her homework. It was surprisingly soothing to hear the six year old read and help her count backwards from 30 to prepare for her math quiz. The highlight was definitely watching her rip off the dolls' heads to change their dresses, though. Some of them were even interracial, if you will...picture a brown face on top of a white body. Hilarious.

Bangla Sahib was as huge and magestic and crowded as it always was. The Sarover (holy water people bathe in) was being renovated, but it was still really cool to see it. Now organized religion makes me a bit uncomfortable, but I grew up Sikh, and maybe it's because I visited that very Gurdwara dozens of times during my last trip to India with my dad, but there was something about visiting that kind of place of worship that can get you emotionally like nothing else can. It was a familiar, surprisingly comfortable feeling.

Shopping in Dehli really varies depending on where you go. The AC malls in Rajouri Garden are bougie and the tandoori chicken pizza was actually pretty damn good, the only drawback being that my mouth felt as if it were on fire afterward. Hella spicy. Now if you go to Ajmalkhan Road in Karol Bagh or Palika Bazar, that's where you gotta whip out them bargaining skillz. It's a madhouse. "Madam! Suits, kurtis! Madam! Pure leather bags! Madam! Yeh deklo!" I watched and learned from the best, mi mama. And then I got the owner of this shoe shop to go from 650 rupees all the way down to 200 rupees on these cute red sandals, roughly the equivalent of $5. So what if they turned out to be so cheap that the humidity made them stain my feet red like mendhi? I think I'm a winner.

The last thing I should address in this post is the title. First let me explain that there are various modes of transportation sharing the same roads in India. Bicycles, regular man-drawn rickshaws, auto rickshaws, scooters, family cars, trucks, taxis, and AC taxis (this last option is heaven sent, saved my sanity in Dehli). Now you may be wondering how all of these function in harmony. The short answer is that they don't. Basically, lanes are just for decoration. You honk in order to say "yo I'm coming" or "move, bitch, get out the way". On the back bumpers of many vehicles you'll read, "Honk Please, Use Dipper At Night", asking other drivers to kindly honk like mofos to announce that they're coming, or to accompany this by politely flashing their high beams when it's dark outside. I have a lot of admiration for every driver in Dehli, takes mad skillz and constant vigilance. Dilli main aap ka swagat hai. More to come soon.