The Privilege That is Mine

Dear Lord, the Great Healer, I kneel before you,
Since every perfect gift must come from You.
I pray, give skill to my hands, clear vision to my mind,
kindness and meekness to my heart.
Give me singleness of purpose, strength to lift up a part
of the burden of my suffering fellow men,
and a true realization of the privilege that is mine.
Take from my heart all guile and worldliness,
That with the simple faith of a child, I may rely on You.

Mother Teresa, The Physician’s Prayer

“Wherever you find yourself useful, go ahead and do it.” These were the only words of advice from my friend before my first time volunteering. Hunter was a veteran of the Mother Teresa system, and had come nearly daily for months now. From his experience, he divulged little tricks of the trade: where to store belongings, to bring you own blades for shaving the residents, which Mother Theresa home to go to (the less-known “Prem Dan” instead of the famous “Kalighat Home for the Dying”). I followed him through morning mass in the Mother House, where ethereal light and the angelic voices of the blue and white-robed nuns coated the tomb of Mother Teresa herself. In the Mother House, the wall held paintings of the brown, suffering masses of Calcutta encircling a glowing and rosy-cheeked Mother Theresa at different stages of life. Her eyes were placid.

I followed him through the breakfast for volunteers, where we took simple bread, bananas, and chai, and sang a simple song for leaving volunteers (“We love you, We love you…We’ll miss you, We’ll miss you”). I followed him in through the backstreets of Calcutta from the Mother House, the site of mass, to the Prem Dan, the nursing home that took care of the “dying and destitute”. The children, as we crossed the railroad tracks, yelled “Hello, hello! Chocolate!” upon seeing us, preconditioned by the presence of many a white-skinned feringhee traveling along this route.[1]

Prem Dan emerged, a bright blue [2] nodule in the surrounding brown. I followed Hunter through the gates, the guard checking my day pass. We walked to the men’s side of the nursing home, passing the women’s space as Bengali and Hindi Christian devotionals reverberated through the tended gardens. The old, disabled, the sick, they were all there across the ground, some in chairs, some on the ground, all of their eyes listless.

Once I entered, though, there was very little following. There were subtle head nods, and glances, but the process was incredibly simple: work wherever you think you should. “KNOW THAT YOU ARE NEEDED” one sign said, directed at volunteers. Wash dishes if there are dishes to be washed. Talk if it is time to talk. Serve lunch if lunch needs to be served. Shave faces if there are faces to be shaved (and you have razors and shaving cream with you). Massage limbs if there are limbs to be massaged.

I did all of these, but spent the first hour shaving. It was a simple task I’d done thousands of times, but never on another, for another. His skin was hard, his beard hair mangled, directionless. He smiled a lot. He muttered in incomprehensible and nonsensical Bengali. I spoke back in Hindi to the little I understood. I shaved carefully, emphatically. I made it a show, dramatically dipping the razor into the bucket and flicking the water with a flourish. I told him what a handsome face he had, what smooth hair, so easy to shave. As I finished the second coat and toweled him off, he grabbed my face with both hands. And then he smiled, and sang. He didn’t sing well, but he sang. He sang a melodic song, a weepy Bengali tune of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Hunter, shaving at my right, looked over, eyebrows raised. “He doesn’t sing for everyone.” I looked at his clean-shaven face, and looked back into his eyes.

It felt good. It felt damn good.

Not a Question of Good or Bad Manners

Calcutta thus far has been an interesting place to be on a “fellowship for service.” The word rings of selflessness, altruism, and noble sacrificial warriors. The truth, though, is that most of my life in Calcutta (and in India generally) has been more of an education in animalistic selfishness.

How could this be true in a country as courteous as India? I have been offered chai in nearly every home I’ve stepped foot into, whether in a talibari, a clay thatched home in the slum, or a mansion in suburban Salt Lake. At times, I have been barricaded into homes against my will and force-fed chai and biscuits to satisfy an overzealous host. Formality around guests requires self-sacrifice, to the point of removing the clothes on one’s back. A country ruled by the British and before that the ceremonial Moghuls, and a city more British than most others in India, has remnants of this pomp and circumstance. At some restaurants, seven waiters attend to your every move, smiling and wobbling their head at each request. They interject like clockwork, asking how the food is, asking if anything else, perhaps dessert sir, would be required. Extravagant politeness and cordiality are the custom, and detection of any hint of self-interest in this world would be strictly off limits. It would be shameful.

This, though, holds true strictly in private spaces and in private relationships. Service comes only in two flavors: the aforementioned, self-sacrificing kind and the kind that doesn’t look you in the eye or give you any value in the universe at all. Naked self-interest is everywhere else once the wrappings of these intimacies are gone. “Guest is god” is an oft-repeated aphorism. What’s left unstated is that anyone not considered a guest is left a devil. The Outside is a Hobbesian state of nature, not just brutish, but lawless, dirty, brimming with raw survival instinct. The proof is everywhere, at the taxi stand, at the roadside stall, in buses, in government offices, even in houses of religion.[3] It’s in the t-shirt seen on one man in New Market, (one of those ubiquitous snarky t-shirts[4]) that displays a gas dial. At full, it reads “PEACE”, at empty, it reads “WAR”. Calcutta, in the open, is an empty tank; survival is the only priority. No room for shame.

It’s there in the booksellers, from Bombay to Calcutta, selling half-xeroxed copies of popular classics (as well as, more disturbingly, Mein Kampf[5]) next to paperbacks with bold, text filled covers, titles blaring to all of New India, “The Science of Getting Rich” or “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and other get-rich-quick or get-popular-quick or get-power-quick manifestos. It’s also there in the various, rude honks that pervade the common space. Whether it’s a jury-rigged horn made of a plastic bottle on a bike or a bus horn that has a turntable setup with thirty different options (as I saw one young busdriver handling as if he was Avicii), this instrument is used liberally without regard for the fellow citizen. I’m numb to this self-interest now, embedded within it. I too fight for what is mine, because no one else will give it to me.

On the way back from Kumbh Mela, in the train station in Allahabad, I wanted a bottle of water. I walked around, gingerly avoiding areas cordoned off by the Indian Army. The Army prescence was not usual: a week before, in the infinite insanity of Kumbh Mela, dozens had died of a stampede in this very station. I stepped around a few sleeping families, heads rested on suitcases, to get to my final destination: the food stand. Outside of the stand was a scene of chaos, rupee bills held in the air, elbows jockeying for space. It was fifteen customers, yelling their orders repeatedly at the lone server. One pudgy mother protected her box of sweets like a running back, one hand stuck out to stiff-arm a competitor.

As I paused in front of the stand, I ran through a dreamlike scenario in my head: in eloquent and inspirational Hindi, I would persuade them with the Logic of Lines, explaining the “tragedy of the commons”, and the benefits that would be accrued to them if they were organized: faster service, less hoarse voices, less bruised ribcages, peace and calm. Then I snapped out of this pipe dream, realized my actual level of Hindi and more importantly my surrounding circumstances, and elbowed my own way into the abyss for my bottle, rupees in hand.

The two mentalities run side by side: utmost, self-sacrificial civility and dog-eat-dog (mostly of the stray kind).

But although this is the naked self-interest I’ve been schooled in, it’s not exactly the one that I’m interested in exploring when discussing the notion of service. There’s a different kind of self-interest, a more modest, clothed variety, that is barely discernable but that exists nonetheless. This is the type that I think we need to observe carefully when performing any act termed “service.” This is the question I’ve come to repeatedly, whether it was waking up at 5 A.M. on that Saturday to head to Mother Theresa’s for the first time, or it was contemplating coming to Calcutta period to work for an NGO that seeks to serve a vulnerable population, or even when being a courteous host myself with an offering of chai I cannot make properly.

Is this really altruism? Is this really empathetic? Or, in the end, is this self-serving too?

There are feelings, physical sensations, that I feel while performing an act of service: feelings of belongingness, of being needed, of the satisfaction of fixing something broken, of the growth of self-esteem and a sense of identity. These are not mirages; they are as real as can be. But the honest truth is that these are things that I am feeling in that moment, no one else, and things that make me feel good. And perhaps these emotions, those dastardly emotions, are what really motivate those who serve more than logic or empathy.

In the end, I believe we are limited by our subjective perception, trapped by this limited sensory apparatus of ours. Escaping this perception seems to me to be a prerequisite for the ability to empathize (not just sympathize) with someone else’s experiences, their suffering, their pain, their needs, and their story. Most of us are limited, I believe, by this original sin. I am hopeful but ultimately skeptical of the idea of pure empathy.[6]

We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of.

David Foster Wallace

And, in the end, if all our actions can only be motivated by our own experiences, our own physical sensations, then we are ultimately self-interested. The whole idea of service is blown up into a million pieces.

The Truth of Giving

Much of our everyday morality is concerned with the question of obligation and spontaneity in the gift.

Marcell Mauss, The Gift

Why even call it service if it is so self-serving? Are there grounds to be so high and mighty? And finally, why pursue service at all? There is a way out, I believe, out of this conundrum. It’s being picky about what your self-interest is and creating a new self-interest: an enlightened self-interest. It’s choosing giving while also observing the positive benefits to yourself in the process.

The sensations above, feeling useful, feeling needed, being part of a team, working on an important problem, gaining respect from someone, all of these only we can experience. They are, in the end, sensations. But that doesn’t mean we can’t say they’re “higher” feelings. Watching TV feels good (especially reality TV), buying a new car feels good, having a secure home feels good, and eating a kati roll feels amazing. But I’d rank of all of these experiences below the ones above.

Eating a delicious kati roll satisfies two needs: immediate pleasure and straight sustenance. The crisp egg and paratha layers, tender chicken, the mixture of spiced sauces and vegetables all sustain the body and the tongue but none of them sustain the human spirit (except maybe on especially desperate occasion). The feelings that we get from service are different though.

What do we ultimately want out of the world? This is the question Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of human needs” seeks to answer. At the bottom are the most basic and fundamental needs that motivate us, like sex and food. As we get closer to the top, we go through friendship, self-esteem, respect from others. Finally creativity and morality are a form of “self-actualization” for Maslow. I’d argue that service, while it satisfies our own needs, satisfies these higher needs rather than ones closer to the base, like eating or entertainment. In giving, in serving, if we’re honest with ourselves provides not only something to someone else but serves ourselves by bolstering a sense of self-esteem, or making us a part of a community, or to be remembered. Making others’ lives more happy or meaningful ultimately makes our lives more happy and meaningful as well. Service is a two-way gift.

Giving, of course, can be done in the wrong way, either to the wrong people[7] or without knowledge of systemic consequences[8]. And survival and self-maintenance and some level of abundance is important in and of itself and as an essential prerequisite for the ability to give. But if we only go by our own limited self-interest, we will in the end be stuck with meaningless victories. The way to fight against this creeping nihilism, whether your profession is a teacher, a doctor, a social worker, a human resources manager, or a “fellow for service” (whatever that means), is to attach yourself to giving in a way that nourishes others as well as yourself. The pleasure extracted from this enlightened self-interest feels better and lasts longer for you.  And, while you’re doing it, the community-at-large is made a better place.

A Chinese Breakfast by Lal Bazaar:
If you wake up at 5AM, you can grab a meal that’s completely unique globally. Calcutta at one time at a large Chinese population, and still has the only Chinatown in India. Remnants of this population still fry and steam staples: momos, pork pies and buns, and rice dumpling fries.

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[1] Visiting one of the Teresa homes is a must-do tourist experience in Calcutta, something I have very mixed feelings about. Mother Teresa didn’t intend for it to be a one day, or even a one week volunteering stint. This tourist-y aspect is reflected in the availability of Mandarin mass, and during breakfast one can as easily converse in Spanish as English.

There are other issues with the Teresa system: respect for the patients, lack of following proper protocols (basic hygiene, for example), and serving only the extremely debilitated and close to death (rather than preventing people from getting to this stage in the first place).

[2] There are two types of blue in Calcutta that are important to distinguish: Mother Teresa’s Blue and Didi’s Blue. Mother Teresa’s blue is in little bubbles, like at the Park Street Metro station where the walls are painted in the pattern of the headscarf of Teresa nuns.

Didi’s Blue, though, is much different and now much more prevalent. Mamata Banerjee (“Didi” meaning sister) is the Chief Minister of West Bengal, a firebrand populist woman whose has the most visible visage in the state. She lives with her mother, wears her simple slippers (for the people), and is a theatrical and dramatic speaker. She was the first person, basically on her own accord, to topple decades of Communist rule in West Bengal. She also is a slight megalomaniac: all of Calcutta, she decided in a citywide directive, would be painted in the color of her sari, a darker hue of blue (with tax cuts for those who decided to comply). Railings, government buildings, and flyovers are still blue, although fading.

[3] The lines are not drawn where you’d expect. Houses of religion are often not the sites of the most selfless, but most self-interested. I went to visit the famous Jagannath temple in Puri, Orissa considered one of the holiest sites for Hindus. My American friend was barred from entry, having the debilitating affliction of being white while monument hopping. As I entered the gigantic, overwhelming complex, I felt a bamboo stick snap me in the head. The offending priest stuck out his hand almost immediately for baksheesh, a donation, and sneered at the twenty-rupee note I handed him for his gracious blessing.

Later, we were offered various packages for viewing the wooden, abstract idol of Jagannath, “Lord of the Universe”, with lower package prices, on sale I’m assuming, for a blessing from the (lower-ranked) god that is the younger brother of Jagannath, Balarama. Still, our purchase of the lowest priced package bought us a V.I.P. pass past the hordes in front of the gates blocking them fifty feet from the big-eyed idol. It did not, however, buy us the complete way in: I had to bribe and jostle with various holy men and policemen on the way in, leaving me with empty pockets.

Pictures from Puri. Along with being an important temple site (both active and inactive monument temples), it’s a big beach destination:

Jagannath Temple

[4] The market for t-shirts with slogans is huge in Calcutta. I’m not sure anyone actually gets the messages on the shirts they’re wearing though. A sampling of t-shirts I’ve seen include, “Drink, I’ll look better,” “Punctuality is the virtue of the bored,” “Don’t mess with Texas,” and, my favorite (seen twice, once in the slum and once by my friend Hallie on a chai wallah): “My Daddy is an ATM Machine.”

[5] A constant bestseller in India

[6] Mirror Neurons are the newest discovery in neuroscience to provide some mechanism for how empathy could be built into the brain. They were discovered accidentally when a monkey had a set of neurons fire off when they did something and when they saw a human research subject do the same thing.

Pretend somebody pokes my left thumb with a needle. We know that the insular cortex fires cells and we experience a painful sensation. The agony of pain is probably experienced in a region called the anterior cingulate, where there are cells that respond to pain. The next stage in pain processing, we experience the agony, the painfulness, the affective quality of pain.

It turns out these anterior cingulate neurons that respond to my thumb being poked will also fire when I watch you being poked—but only a subset of them. There are non-mirror neuron pain neurons and there are mirror neuron pain neurons.

V.S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist

I’m not sold though. Only a few neurons of the entire set are being activated. How much of this experience can we really share with another person? How is empathy being actually measured? How much of this mechanism is self-serving, and how much of it is just simple recognition rather than the high-flown thought process we call empathy? What’s imitation and what’s the deeper understanding we call empathy? It’s got potential, but mirror neurons haven’t been fully fleshed out yet.

[7] Adam Grant is a professor at Wharton who studies organizational psychology (NYTimes). His research divides up people into three groups: Givers, Matchers, and Takers.

Givers give without expectation of immediate gain; they never seem too busy to help, share credit actively and mentor generously. Matchers go through life with a master chit list in mind, giving when they can see how they will get something of equal value back and to people who they think can help them. And takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf.

His research also showed that Givers are either usually highly successful or completely taken advantage of. The difference between successful givers and unsuccessful ones is that successful ones are picky: they only give to other givers and matchers, and avoid soul-sucking takers.

Traditionally, you’d think that serving others and one’s own productivity would be diametrically opposed. Grant’s conclusions are the opposite:

The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other peoples’ lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves. 

[8]

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding

Albert Camus, The Plague

The Pursuit of Discomfort

It was at about the time, early on, when I found myself on the metro sweating at NBA-player levels in the October heat, the aroma of coconut oil from the hair of a fellow voyager wafting into my nostrils, while I rested my elbow the only place I could (on a stout Bengali’s bald spot) and a smartly uniformed schoolgirl finished her homework on my back, that I came to a realization of sorts. That realization almost didn’t make it through to conscious thought, since my conscious thought was then consumed with the peppery body odors that engulfed the damp, humid air and simultaneously focusing on my right pocket, where my wallet laid (why was I worried about my wallet? Someone could have stolen my pants and I wouldn’t have noticed.) The realization was this: I was not very comfortable, and furthermore that this period of my life in Calcutta was not about to be very comfortable.

As I pondered this thought, and its ramifications for my quality of life, some anonymous being crushed my toe. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see their hands moving ritually: hand touching eyes, then heart, then eyes again, begging forgiveness of the gods for touching a piece of divinity (me!) with their accidentally disrespectful feet. Across the cabin, I heard various utterances of “Baap re Baap” and “Oh, Baba,” the Bengali ways of expressing a wide gamut of emotions: surprise, excitement, or (in this case) pain. My laptop, held at my side, was being pressure-cooked by the collective strength of hundreds of gluteal muscles. I was afraid it’d break in half. I held my breath, waiting for the next stop, until the open doors spat out me and twenty other sufferers onto the platform.

Men bathing

Jain temple

Street cricket match on India’s Republic Day

Comfort in Calcutta

The metro is not the only source of discomfort in Calcutta.[1],[2],[3] As I write this, we are exiting the month or so of positively Mediterranean weather here: the breeze is gentle off of the Hugli River, the humidity low, the sun shimmers. Walking around in parks during the day becomes a feature of the average Calcutta resident’s life, and even the smog seems to have lessened (or perhaps that’s just an olfactory illusion).

There are, though, hushed whispers of the impending doom from denizens. “The Calcutta heat is coming,” they mutter ominously, “just wait till you experience that.” I wonder how bad it could be, how unbearable it could possibly get. Could it be worse than how it was in October or November? Each day, after the commute to work, I’d spend an hour in front of the office A.C. drying my soaked shirt. How could the deadly vortex of heat and humidity possibly be more uncomfortable than that?

Mark Twain, upon visiting Calcutta, wrote:

I believe that in India ‘cold weather’ is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy– Following the Equator

To be fair to the rest of India, Twain hadn’t visited Darjeeling yet. He’d only seen Calcutta.

Transport, too, is a huge part of the composition of why Calcutta is so uncomfortable. Metal boxes on wheels barely stuck together (the small ones called autos, the large ones buses) rumble through the congested traffic, heaving and huffing while taking me to my destination. In the past few months, I’ve been on buses that have caught on fire (I hacked until the smoked out bus mercifully stopped after ten minutes of driving, and the conductor got out, filled up a bucket of water, and poured it on the source of our problems before getting the bus moving again) and had live chickens on them (according to the strict rules of this bus, they were only allowed to be in the back where I happened to be sitting).

It’s a menagerie of different types of pollution. Regular air pollution not your style? How about the light and sound varieties? Noise is constant, the car horns blare at eardrum rupturing levels on the streets and no place is safe. Thus far, soundproofing has not been developed as a concept in West Bengali home and office construction. Before dawn, the local mosque blares the adhan, the call to prayer[4], on the minaret’s loudspeakers, then at 5:30AM the laundry man bleats, sheep-like, across the neighborhood in a droning, nasal pitch. Even late at night, young Bengalis are usually either protesting for/against the Communist Party or are celebrating a puja for one of many goddesses (either way the M.O. is the same: they load into the back of a large truck and beat drums while driving around residential neighborhoods). Comfort is nary to be found in silence.

Calcutta life ebbs and flows in waves of intense comfort and discomfort. It oscillates between python-level constriction and open-field freedom, with little in between. This dichotomy is there not only in temperatures, but also in the difference between concussive busses and solid ground. It’s there in the difference between government offices, with forced double-speak and gentle massaging of big egos (and smaller anatomies), and anywhere not a government office. It’s there in the congestion of the City and the serenity of the Wetlands. The highs of comfort are assuaging not despite the lows of extreme discomfort but because of them. And those highs of comfort are hard to come by.

At the Dakshineswar Kali Temple

More at the Kali Temple

The ghat outside of the temple where there’s bathing in the Hugli River

At Byloom’s Cafe

Tell me, have you these in your houses? Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master? 

Kahlil Gibran, Houses

But is achieving a state of comfort really the end goal? Comfort is a pleasurable state. It’s a state that we can luxuriate in, one that delights the senses. We each have a vision of what makes us comfortable, whether it is a vacation resort or a cozy home. And we often pursue material things to get us to that state of ultimate comfort: the massage chair, the television in even higher pixilation and even more dimensions, clothes and apparel. All these things will give us comfort, we logically assume, and pleasure, which leads to the exalted goal of happiness.

But ultimately, pleasure is a state that is never truly satisfying. Like the Greek myth of Tantalus, thirsty and hungry, stuck in an eternal hell of a fruit tree with low hanging fruit and water in a bowl that will always move away from his grasp, if we pursue comfort and pleasure we will never really achieve that end state of rest we seek. Any state of comfort ultimately lasts for only a short while before discomfort begins to infect that state again. After some time, disgust settles in and we must sprint to another pleasure to be satisfied.

Pleasure is contingent upon time, upon its object, upon the place. It is something that changes of nature.

Matthew Ricard, Biochemist and Buddhist Monk

And I would argue, more radically, that pleasure doesn’t really lead to real happiness. Hedonists would say pleasure is the same thing as happiness, but I disagree; taking pleasure in things and attaining comfort is only but a part of real, lasting and true happiness. And if we don’t reevaluate our definition of happiness, and our pursuit of it, we’ll be doomed to the “hedonic treadmill”[5]forever.

The idea of happiness as pleasure has even been embedded in fundamental economic methodology (until relatively recently): a 1920 text by economist Alfred Marshall states “the utility” that is “taken to be correlative to Desire or Want…the measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfillment or satisfaction of his desire.” According to the theory, “utils” as measured by consumer choices reveal how happy a person is. The truth, though, is what we purchase (especially material goods) give us a temporary boost of happiness that soon fades as we return to our level state of happiness.

If we take the happiness research seriously, most of the standard rationales for economic growth, technological progress, and improved social policy simply evaporate.

Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist

A Warm Gun

There is an alternative, though, to this pursuit of happiness as the pursuit of pleasure, as we currently see it. Counterintuitive as it may be to not pursue things that make us feel good for our happiness, we do it all the time. Nobody runs a marathon, has children, or fights for their country out of pursuit of pleasure. These actions are in search of something bigger usually, something the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, or “flourishing”. This, eudaimonia, is what we should be seeking[6], a more fleshed out notion of happiness than the one we have now. The word itself comes from eu, good, daemon, spirit: the good life.

If true happiness is really tied to the notion of human flourishing, we can look beyond the pursuit of pleasure (which includes seeking comfort and material things for the sake of themselves). The word includes the notions of excellence, virtue, meaning and even citizenry. Sometimes it means sacrificing our own immediate pleasures for a greater good (for our values). And we instinctively understand this. There’s a famous Matrix-style thought experiment the philosopher Robert Nozick thought up:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes  attached  to  your  brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Most of us wouldn’t choose to plug into the machine, despite it providing the maximal quantity of pleasure over a life. We’re not just after pleasure. Somehow, we’d want to actually do the things we do, Nozick argues; this is a key prerequisite for life being meaningful.

I don’t take a completely anti-hedonism stance. I take pleasure where pleasure is due: in a cold mango lassi on a sweltering day, in the many layers of flavor in a kati roll, or in enjoying the luxury of the swanky Oberoi hotel. But attachment to this comfort, and confusion of this comfort as the end goal of our lives, is a grave misjudgment. The truth is that things that aren’t pleasurable are also a part of a flourishing human existence. Living with unpleasantness (like thinking about ideas we disagree with, encountering death, being in a place where you don’t know the language, and, yes, uncomfortable rides on the metro) is one of the most human things we can do. And dealing with discomfort is what often leads to open-mindedness, to artistic creativity, to personal and societal growth (there’s a reason it’s called the comfort zone). And a lot of times, a little discomfort leads to a more meaningful and fascinating time.[7] Comfort and pleasure? Those, for me, are secondary.

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[1] Rabindra Sadan is the station that deposits the most metro riders on the way back. As we approach it, there is usually a gradual rise in murmuring among the populace: it’s time to crush or be crushed.  I imagine that the metro should be studied by Realist scholars of International Relations: like nations in a dog eat dog world, the riders tenuously make alliances not out of love but out of desperation and mutual advantage in the dogged, single-minded pursuit of surviving the ordeal.

[2] While I complain about the metro, I do have to proclaim my love for it. It’s a deeply democratic and populist form of transportation, where you’re as likely to see expensive power suits as dreadlocked Israelis, a rocker with spiked hair as a round-faced, large-eyed older Bengali lady clad in red and white bangles that symbolize marriage.

[3] I’ve taken to writing haikus to keep me sane during the daily commute. A sampling:

Old man, pelvic thrusts

Bump n’ Grind, Grabs my thigh

Life on a Metro

***

Relief: just squeezed in

Oh no! I’m on the wrong side

Life on the Metro

***

Window jammed, monsoons

Guess I’ll just get soaked, thanks

Life on the Cal Bus

***

Bag on his shoulders?

No it’s not, it’s a chicken

Life on the Cal Bus

[4] My first response was being naïvely annoyed, but I’ve become deeply appreciative of the call to prayer. It’s beautiful, complex, and reminds one to tap into their highest selves at regular intervals throughout the day.

[5] We notice differences and become dissatisfied with some items and some classes of goods. This treadmill effect has been investigated by Danny Kahneman and his peers when they studied the psychology of what they call hedonic states. People acquire a new item, feel more satisfied after an initial boost, then rapidly revert to their baseline of well-being. –Nassim Nicholas Taleb in “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder”

[6] Maybe the word happiness itself is tripping us up in the pursuit of it, and perhaps it is better left as a byproduct of searching for something else. It seems happiness is one of those things that the harder we try for it, the more difficult it is to attain.

[7] I visited the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the largest single gathering of human beings on earth. An estimated 80-100 million Hindus travel to Allahabad to take a dip into the meeting place of the three holiest rivers. The scene overwhelming in every way; an impromptu city of tents is set up for the voyagers along the banks of the Ganga (with 40,000 toilets). Kumbh Mela occurs once every six years, and this Maha Kumbh Mela was the most auspicious in 144 years. The myth of Kumbh Mela is based on an enormous battle between the gods and demons over the heavenly nectar that came from the churning of the earth. It states that four drops fell from the nectar onto earth (the four locations that rotate hosting Kumbh Mela).

Expecting to go just to see the chaos and see a sight I’d never see again, I ended up with a little bit more than I bargained for. Hunter Gros, a friend and travelling companion, tells it better than I ever could (in poem form): “Here Comes The Kumbh”

60 square kilometers of campsites

What’s in Front of Your Nose

You see, but you do not observe

Sherlock Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia

About a month or so into this fellowship, we had a friend, another fellow named Andrew, visit Calcutta from his placement in Ranchi[1], a town of urban sprawl that’s stuck in a sort of identity crisis between rural and urban. Hallie and I wanted to take Andrew around to some of the major sites of the city to give him a feel for Calcutta (being the good Calcuttan hosts we are). Our first stop could be the site for the image that’s plastered on postcards for Calcutta, the Howrah Bridge, then the technicolor flower market underneath it, followed by a ride on a ferry across the Hughli River from any of the docks (or “ghats”).

It played out messier in reality. We walked desperately in the blazing heat along the main road; we couldn’t find a ghat with a ferry, we were disoriented, and I wasn’t sure whether the dainty handkerchief I carried was taking sweat off my skin or depositing more on it. To make matters worse, the map we used, from a book called “10 Walks in Calcutta,” looked like it was made in Microsoft Paint by a six-year-old. “May not be to scale” was an understatement. “May not use the cardinal directions” would have been more accurate.

Our first attempt was into one of the most famous central riverside ghats: Babu Ghat, known for its enormous Roman style pillars. To navigate there, we had to cut through a brickmaking factory ten feet from the entrance, the orange dust coating the air. Once we got past the pillars, though, I realized we wouldn’t find any ferries here, just dozens of men bathing in the murky waters. We’d have to keep walking. It was then that Andrew asked me if I’d seen it: a mother cradled a crying newborn, not more than ten days old, just feet from the cloud of dust that engulfed the entrance to Babu Ghat. There were little moments like these as we walked with Andrew, his perception of Calcutta reminding me what I perceived when I first came here, but no longer did: the poverty, the stench, the overcrowding.

We continued on, my confidence in my ability to provide any cultural experiences for our guest spiraling downward. The next ghat looked promising: a big blue sign and what looked like wooden planks for a dock. We crossed the train tracks onto the riverside. I looked to my left: there were ten to fifteen shacks along littered riverside.

I gradually panned over to look for any incoming ferries we could grab, but something caught my eye on my right-hand side. There was a strange object lying on the beach. I tried to sharpen my focus: I noticed some netting, then a strangely familiar outline underneath it, and then some vaguely reddish areas. We realized it at the same time: it was the remnants of a human body. It lied there, swollen and burned by the sun, appendages missing and disfigured, a stone’s throw from a small neighborhood of poor households. No one cared, and no one was paid enough to clean it up. Andrew broke the stunned silence with a suggestion to get out of there, with which we quickly agreed. We found a ferry, eventually, and crossed across the Hughli, the peace of the river punctuated by a brother-sister pair of toddlers dancing in ridiculous makeup and garb, their mother playing a drum loudly. Most of the passengers on the boat didn’t give them a second look.

On the boat, I reflected what we’d seen that day. Was I scared with the death and decay that sometimes nakedly showed itself here? Was I mentally overwhelmed with some of the sites that I saw on a daily basis? I searched myself for any feelings of fear or shock, and came up empty. That, I realized was what scared me the most, not the decomposing body, or the newborn engulfed in brick smoke, or the near-lethal smells and intense poverty surrounding Howrah station, but the fact that I was desensitized to all of these things.

I think it would be fair to say my mental frame has shifted in the three months I’ve been here now. In Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese describes an Ethiopian immigrant’s experience coming to America in a beautiful passage:

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It’s a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say “6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce,” the sound, too, was gone. It became part of what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.

Whatever the equivalent of a “6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce” is in Calcutta, I’ve surely figured it out by now (probably the “doh onda, doh chicken”- double egg, double chicken- to the Kati roll man). I can navigate the city by public transit, I know both the best street-food and fine dining restaurants, and I’ve understood how not only how to prevent cutting in lines but also how to cut myself. Familiarity, though, has rendered certain things background noise.

Three months in, I’m desensitized to certain scenes that would have once surprised me when I first came here. I’m desensitized to the men like ants, carrying packages full of goods heavier than they are on their heads, filing by the hundreds of thousands across Howrah Bridge. Desensitized to the man who lies outside Howrah railway station as my bus passes daily, his skin indistinguishable from his clothes in shade of brown. Desensitized to the children, their eyes big and their stomachs small, who tug forcefully at my arm pleading for change yelling “Dada! Dada!” at the traffic stops. I’ve become an expert at avoiding eye contact and giving money in such situations, but sometimes I break. Desensitized to riding to work in speeding iron buses that feel like they’re taped together (one a week ago that caused a three-bus collision and nearly flattened an elderly passenger as he tried to grab onto it as it raced past his stop).

I’m desensitized to the sadhu, an ascetic man of orange robe, patientely waiting in line at the Baskin Robbins on Park Street (apparently, not even people who don’t believe in very idea of the material world can resist 31 delectable flavors). Desensitized to the men loudly hawking loogies from the deepest depths of their esophagus early in the morning, sending phlegm bulleting to the roadside. Desensitized to the “crush or be crushed” mentality of the metro. Desensitized to the insane traffic, no longer insane but comprehensible, a mess through which I can weave with little issue if I have my wits about me.

Now I pop in my iPod on my daily commute and just see these things, no longer observing them, no longer surprised or even aware.

The taxi stand at Howrah station

Boys playing soccer at Rabindra Sarobar park

One of a series of horns stores near Central Station. Kolkata was once a hotbed of jazz, but no longer: “Searching for Kolkata’s Lost Jazz Scene”

The ear-cleansing man under Howrah bridge staring unhappily at me capturing the tricks of his trade.

This was, in some sense, an inevitable phenomenon. It’s a universal rule to how we interact with the world: we’re creatures of equilibrium, creatures of adaptability. Given enough time, new information is eventually synthesized and processed unconsciously by the mind, even if its as much information as Calcutta throws at a person on a second to second basis.

There’s a story about the eminent South African psychologist Joseph Wolpe. Faced with a patient, a teenage girl who was deathly afraid of cars, he pondered about what to do for her debilitating condition. Basing his intervention on Pavlov’s famous conditioning experiments on dogs, Wolpe took the girl into a car and drove her around with the doors locked to decondition her. It was extreme and probably unethical by today’s research standards, but her initial panic lessened after a while and (with the aid of Wolpe’s relaxation techniques) her fear of cars went away. Flooding, they called it: when the very object that provokes a negative stimulus is exposed to the patient in an intense way, “at its worst.” The phobia drops away as the person makes new associations, like ease instead of fear.[2],[3]

Living in such an environment, there’s a steady diet of either flooding and systematic desensitization, a city-wide mode of therapy designed to make you numb to certain things: dirt, squalor, and cognitive dissonance among them.

Shattering a Man’s Sense of Natural Justice

I’m OK, though, with getting used to most of these things. It makes my life easier when, for example, I’m not hunting for half an hour searching for the Esplanade metro station entrance as if it’s on Platform 9¾. What I’m not OK with is degradation of other things along with it: my sense of right and wrong, of justice, of ethics.

It reminded me of an article on the effect of Stalin and Hitler on Eastern Europe, in which the author quoted Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet:

Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality. Mass violence, he explained, could shatter a man’s sense of natural justice. In normal times, had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions….

Murder became ordinary during wartime, wrote Miłosz, and was even regarded as legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. In the name of patriotism, young boys from law-abiding, middle-class families became hardened criminals, thugs for whom “the killing of a man presents no great moral problem.” Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the neighbors away.

For all of these reasons, Miłosz explained, “the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously.” Because they hadn’t undergone such experiences, they couldn’t seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn’t seem to imagine how they had happened either. “Their resultant lack of imagination,” he concluded, “is appalling.”

It’s not a comparable situation at all of course; I’m not really capable of evaluating levels of mass human suffering like that. Still, I was somehow drawn to the idea that in some historical situations, things that would be considered deeply unethical  under normal circumstances become regular, even commonplace. Inequity, disgusting levels of inequity, when there for long enough become part of the background. I’m worried that I, too, am having my sense of justice warped, putting things into the background that shouldn’t be. I’m worried that I’m sleeping through sounds that would have once roused me.

When I was young, we made biannual family trips to Hyderabad where my grandparents lived and my mother grew up. I can viscerally remember the shock at such stark differences to the United States: blue tents pitched next to a Tommy Hilfiger outlet, families (plural) living under them. It wasn’t right, I remember thinking, that kind of disparity. They were as human as I was, but the difference in the opportunities I had and they did was huge (and not unlike some of the inequities I saw when I went back to parts of my hometown of Cleveland). It became a driving force for me, and it was events like that one that have led me to be in Cal today.

There was something else about those trips that I remember though: conversations with people (who were and are empathetic and generous by any measure), my friends and family there, speaking about the situation as if it were set in stone and just a fact of life. They’d lived with these things for their entire life, and I hadn’t, and my naïve and idealistic viewpoint was just an “American” point of view. I’d come around, they seemed to imply with their answers to my pointed questions about such despair and inequity, I’d realize that this was the way the world worked. My moral dilemma was not a dilemma for them at all.

At what point does something intolerable become tolerable? And am I getting to that point with the simple act of living, day in and day out, with some of these circumstances around me?

I’m aware that, like heavy eyelids pushing sleep, desensitization is a seductive and easy prospect. And I’m worried that along with this sense of resignation will come a degradation in my sense of justice, and attached to that my sense of meaning and the things that drive me. The only remedy I’ve found is paying constant attention to my surroundings, not allowing the unconscious mind to swallow the conscious one, and reflection on the disparity between what’s around me and what it could be. Luckily, my work with Calcutta Kids (as thoughtful and meaningful of an organization as they come) helps.[4]

___________________________________________________________________________

[1] In the Lonely Planet guide to India, as Andrew describes in his blog post, Ranchi’s description has the following epigram “For travelers there’s not a lot of interest in the city and it’s not really on the way to anywhere.” Ha- ha good one, Lonely Planet, but I have to disagree with you here. I visited Andrew and Ashutosh there, where we frolicked in the “touch-me-not plants” by their NGO’s headquarters, saw a wheezy, old Bengal tiger and went for a Venetian paddle-boat ride in the zoo, and went through some dangerous villages (read: Maoist terrorists) to get to Hundru Falls, a gorgeous waterfall. Here’s photographic evidence:

Hundru Falls

[2] Interestingly enough, this is exactly what horse trainers do to horses. It’s called “sacking out.” Horses are naturally afraid of unknown stimuli, but the horse trainer has to teach the horse to be unafraid of, say a rope, cloth, or a human leg. Eventually through traumatic ‘flooding’ the horse is taught not to be afraid, and to trust the trainer. I swear to god I don’t spend that much time on “ultimatehorsesite.com”…

[3]  Legend has it that Dean Martin (“That’s Amore” and Rat Packer) did something similar. Dean Martin had a terrible fear of small spaces, which made it difficult to go up by elevator to many of the record company’s headquarters on the top floors of Manhattan buildings. Dino usually had to climb the stairs. Trying to overcome this fear, he decided to put himself into an elevator and ride and up and down in a NYC building until his claustrophobia was gone.

[4]  I promise, more detail on this soon.

Like the Sharp Edge of a Razor

Scenes of the Howrah slums (Top: shacks by the railroad. Bottom right: a bangle factory)

To Undo Your Belt and Look for Trouble

Ms. Emelda Allen eyed me judgmentally from head to toe. “The rains have come late this year, but they have come strongly, no?” She stated this nonchalantly, in a strain of English that one only heard from those Indians who had decades of interactions with British nuns. Then, flipping her sari over her shoulder, she waded in. “Walk in the middle. It’s shallower.”

I hesitated and at the same time tried not to show my hesitation. Ms Allen and Seema-di, one of the community health workers essential to Calcutta Kids’ mission, were leading me through Fakir Bagan, one of many illegal settlements that have sprouted up along the railroad tracks running toward the main train station of Howrah, Calcutta’s sister city across the Hooghly river. These slums are full of migrants from other parts of the country, mostly from neighboring states like Jharkhand or Uttar Pradesh but some as far as Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, who come looking for jobs and economic prosperity.

We were walking door-to-door visiting the homes of pregnant women where the health workers, including Seema, explained to the expecting mothers what they should be doing to ensure their health, and their child’s health.  She cajoled the mothers on a variety of essential topics: what they should eat, how they should rest, where to register for the delivery, and what medications they could take. Here, poverty was as much expressed in the form of lacking knowledge as money.

Ms Emelda Allen, part of the support staff at Calcutta Kids

Leaning down, I rolled up my already-drenched pant legs up to my knees. I wasn’t sure it’d be enough. Should’ve brought an umbrella, I thought, but then again the blazing heat just a half-hour ago had given no indication of the ferocious monsoon storms that were in store for us[1]. They never did. I looked ahead: a gray pool was gradually rising and overflowing from the sewers. This pool had some kind of nebulous black clouds floating in it, along with the occasional empty bottle or stray dog.[2] I would later be informed that this was normal for a hard rain in Fakir Bagan; the feeble infrastructure was simply not capable of handling it, and the massive flooding was a regular feature of life there. I looked to where Ms. Allen was, and followed her down the middle to the next home, the sullied water rising up my legs. It was my first day working with Calcutta Kids.

A man unplugs the sewers after the flooding

Risky Business: Welcome to Calcutta

“Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.”

John Bowlby, British psychoanalyst

Over the last month or so in Calcutta, I’ve been thinking consistently about the idea of risk. Whether it was stepping into murky water in a flooding slum or jumping to catch the (most likely) last bus back to South Calcutta while it’s still moving [3], or even just taking a walk back from the office to the clinic[4], I’ve come to a general conclusion about this:

I take on more risk here in an hour than I would in a month at home in Cleveland. More risk in a month here than a lifetime in the States.  

Not his finest moment on the silver screen…
(Bubble Boy. Dir by Blair Hayes. Touchstone Pictures. 2001).

Most of our lives we rightly attempt to mitigate risk, especially the risk of our eventual death. Insurance, seat belts, occupational work standards are all protocols that have made our environment safer, lengthened lifespans, allowed our bodies to be more secure from physical harm. But the truth is, we human beings are horrible at understanding and perceiving real risks for what kills us. We have, as TIME magazine noted, an “old brain in a new world”:

“These two impulses–to engage danger or run from it–are constantly at war and have left us with a well-tuned ability to evaluate the costs and payoffs of short-term risk, say Slovic and others. That, however, is not the kind we tend to face in contemporary society.”[5]

We’re biased in our fears of potential threats, with flair for the dramatic[6] and a focus on the emotional emotional[7], but a tendency to undercount the abstract and long-term (global warming comes to mind). But even with our deeply embedded irrationality, the U.S. and most nations included in the category of the developed world have done an overall decent job of mitigating and spreading risk.

Here in Calcutta though, it’s more of a mixed bag. I think of every passing man-drawn rickshaw[8] as I walk in the city, with their spikes poking out menacingly, inches from my calves. First, selfishly, I think of the terrible plight that would befall me if a spike were to scratch my leg. I briefly imagine the rust breaking off into my bloodstream, the terrible tetanus affliction, and a dingy hospital room where I’d wait for hours for treatment. Then, less selfishly, I remember that people live their entire lives with this risk or even greater risk.
We can look at life expectancy, an admittedly crude indicator of how well a society’s doing in terms of avoiding mortality and morbidity. Over 100 years ago, in the United States, the life expectancy for a baby at birth that was male was 47.9, and female was 50.7 (CRS Report for Congress, 2006). That means I’d be expected to be six feet under in a little under three decades from today, and in two years I’d have my mid-life crisis. Today, of course, those numbers are at 74.8 and 80.1 respectively. In India, the life expectancy ranges from 58.0 to 74.0, averaging out to 65.1.

But that’s an average. In the slums, the life expectancy is closer to some familiar numbers: 47 for men and 51 for women. It’s almost exactly what America had a hundred years ago (pre- water filtration, when people still died in the U.S. of dysentery Oregon Trail-style from heading west). Worldwide, one-seventh of us (meaning the global population) will soon be in slums with conditions not unlike the kind I encounter daily in Fakir Bagan (UN Habitat Report: State of the World’s Cities 2008). Risks abound here, and it plays a clear and central role in the lives people are able to live.

That, in the end, is essentially what Calcutta Kids is doing as well. They enter this game of risk in the middle of a mother’s life and the beginning of a child’s, through nutrition, immunization, check-ups with an on-staff physician, and regular meetings with our health workers to make sure that all the necessary health behaviors are being followed. Indeed, any healthcare in its essence is trying to reduce the risk of death or illness.[9]

Life of course is fraught with risks everywhere. What I’m coming to realize is that we have to take the decision as to which risks are acceptable and which are not. Any industry or organization without any risk of failure, like some bureaucracies I’ve encountered here, enters a sort of living death, a zombie mode of complacency and slow-moving fans. This happens equally in individuals as well. I think it boils down to not accepting risks that cripple our ability to live freely and with capability, while also understanding and even embracing the risks that enable life and living itself.

Sanity Check

On the Howrah Bridge

“The attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it.”

Joseph Campbell, mythologist

The sensory overload, though wasn’t limited to just my first day. Assault has come from every angle over the last month. Along with physical risks to bodily health, there’s a not insignificant risk of going mad from two main culprits: overstimulation and bureaucracy.

We tend to compartmentalize things pretty clearly in America and the developed world. Factories are in this district, restaurants are over there. Cute, suburban McMansioned neighborhoods are cordoned off from nefarious elements like waste dumps. Here, on the other hand, the smell of feces and body odor, human sweat and exhaust fumes, freely mixes with the sweet aroma of freshly boiled chai or the delicate fragrance of tamarind and mint water for delicious street-side pani-puri. In the slums, within an even more compressed space, bangle factories are adjacent to homes and restaurants, pseudometallic toxins leeching into the air, the workers’ faces maskless and their hands gloveless. The pink clothing dyes run into the streetside sewers, out of which a goat sips.

Terracotta cups with chai during a downpour

Ragda Patties (Photo courtesy of Sriya Sriyakrishnan)

Despite the horror in such a scene, there is a beauty to life in Calcutta, in the slums and the city. It’s absolutely the most photographable city I’ve ever been to, the people are friendly and prone to debate (Addas, in which men sit for hours and discuss politics late into the night on the curb smoking beedis and drinking, are common. If nothing else, I’m going to weasel my way into an adda before I leave, whether I know Bengali or not.), Some of the street food I’ve had, when measured in pure, unadulterated pleasure, is better than five-star fine-dining.

On the other hand, a mental health risk of Calcutta that has no beauty is the extensive red-tape. It’s there for every task from getting internet to getting registered to get into the country. In my frustration, I jotted down a haiku:

Beady eyes, head bald

Need Form B, does not exist

Brown bureaucracy…

An example of the phenomenon: I forgot my phone at a shop, where it was miraculously deposited to the local police station. After a long and convoluted conversation on a friend’s phone, finally figuring out that it was at the police station, I made a trip there (where it was, of course, not at the address the officer gave me on the phone). In the office, there were seven officers “assigned” to my case of the lost phone. For six of them, this work involved staring at me, not believing that I didn’t know Bengali despite my brown skin, and for the other, gradually sipping on chai waiting for another officer who knew what to do. When the officer finally came, he unloaded on me with everything he knew about America (“my brother is in California!”) and insisted at the same time I wouldn’t have to do any of the usual paperwork since I was a countryman (I wasn’t about to speak up then about my U.S. passport sitting on his desk). Then he proceeded to dictate to me a letter for official purposes, that I began scribing word for word. Here it is, reproduced below, in his words and in my handwriting:

To the Officer-in Charge

Hare Street Police Station

Kolkata, West Bengal

Sir,

I, S. Pranav M.A. Reddy, son of Satti Sethu Reddy of Tadepalligudem, Andhra Pradesh inform you that this day (October 5, 2012) I came to K.C. Das shop to have a dessert with friends and carelessly forgot my mobile phone (it was an iPhone Apple edition) to take with me when I left the place. Later, I come to know through a friend and colleague, Mr. Hunter Gros, that the phone has been deposited to this police station as informed by the on duty officer Sub Inspector Sohail. I came to this place and after verifying me through proper procedures conducted by aforementioned sub inspector, the phone was handed over to me for which I am really very much grateful[10].

Yours faithfully,

Pranav Reddy

Needless to say, I made sure I snapped a picture of the letter when 6 of the 7 officers weren’t looking (you can’t win em all). The experience is surreal in a Kafkaesque way, and can even be fun if undertaken with a sense of irony. Survival here requires being both detached and deeply attached, being both a spectator and having skin in the game.

Check out my blog and others on the AIF blog website, where you can catch the experiences of AIF Clinton Fellows.  One of my favorites this month: Brian Tronic working for People’s Watch, a human rights org in Madurai: What good are human rights?

Unless otherwise stated, I took all the pictures on this blog post. ___________________________________________________________________________

[1] By ‘us’, I am including my friend Sriya. Sriya is my partner AIF Clinton Fellow placed at Calcutta Kids, a graduate of Brandeis originally from Bombay, and working on a project related to behavioral change communication. She also has near infinite patience, judging by her sympathetic efforts to translate Hindi for me.

[2]At this moment, I had fairly vivid flashbacks to studying for Parasitology at OSU. I thought about what a petri dish would look like from a single droplet from the gray pool, and then about what kind of strains could potentially be growing. Wasn’t it Giardia? I vaguely remembered it being water-borne and causing some nasty stomach issues (but don’t they all?).

I should also add, when I told him about this, my dad sent me this note: “Living without knowing the risks is one thing (as most of the people in the slums) living carelessly when one knows the risks is another. A deadly infection is a good antidote for all the romanticism.” Ahem, point noted.

[3]Buses, for either getting on or off, only stop for women, not for men (as a rule of thumb). I’ve thought about buying a wig and a sari for my daily commute.

[4]On any given walk, it’s possible that a brick might fall from the sky at any moment, as it already has once a few feet from me, or that a bus (not meant for these narrow and impromptu streets) might run me over flat, as it almost has more than once.

[5]“How Americans are Living Dangerously” TIME Magazine. Nov 26, 2006. (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1562978,00.html)

[6]Imagine the fear against car accidents if it happened in one fell swoop like planes crashes: each year there’s 40,000 fatalities from cars and 200 from planes. Yet fear of flying afflicts more of us than fear of driving ever does.

[7]In Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he quotes researcher Paul Slovic:

“’Risk’ does not exist ‘out there,’ independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of ‘risk’ to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as ‘real risk’ or objective risk.’

In his book, he details how research Slovic did showed that research subjects thought that tornadoes caused more deaths than asthma, even though asthma kills 20 times as many people.

[8]Calcutta is the only city in the world that still has the archaic man-drawn rickshaw (that’s not just for tourists like Hong Kong). There’ve been numerous attempts within the city by human rights groups to ban them, to no success. Despite their callous nature, I saw their usefulness when the main roads flooded, and the only traffic movement was from the carts that weren’t electrical. I still refuse to use them, and to quote Simon Winchester’s Calcutta: “The city is deeply embarrassed by their very existence. How can it project itself to the world as a successful and cosmopolitan city when it still exploits people quite so blatantly and inhumanely as to use them as human mules?”

[9]This is, admittedly, a negative view of healthcare, focused on the disease and pathogen prevention(“pathogenesis”) part of the equation. The sociologist Aaron Antonovsky came up with a profound insight into health from his studies on resilient Holocaust survivors: a new focus on what made healthy groups healthy and how they managed ever-present stress, instead of the traditional focus on disease. He called it “salutogenesis.”

[10]Yes, he actually made me write that at the end.