Well I've been walking through this country
And my eyes are open wide
And the things I've seen and heard
You couldn't imagine them if you tried
-Tom Paxton, "A Rumblin' in the Land"
If I am ever involved in making a movie that involves a high-speed car chase, I have decided I want my stunt drivers to be from India. Having witnessed the trifecta of Boston, Paris and Kuala Lumpur, I thought I was inoculated against shock at crazy drivers. But you ain’t seen nothing, my friend, until you’ve driven through Chennai. All the sightings of entire families on a scooter that used to frighten me in Taiwan? At least in Taiwan they all wore helmets and they didn’t take newborns on the scooters with them, with the mothers holding them while riding side-saddle. Unbelievable.
As if to drive the point home, on one of numerous trips with the drivers my boss hired for our stay in Chennai, I actually got laughed at for fastening my seatbelt. That, of course, just strengthened my resolve to buckle up. Either life is cheap here or everybody is a much better driver than it appears. Trucks share the road with barefoot pedestrians and nobody even blinks an eye.
By now you may have even guessed, if I were to describe Chennai in one word, it would be crowded. Very crowded. That’s not really a surprise, if you know anything about India, but you have to see it to really appreciate just how crowded it is. Definitely an eye-opener to any Westerner who hasn’t experienced the place before. If I ever bother with the Foreign Service Examination again (extremely unlikely, by the way), the experience I gained on this trip will be invaluable.
Before I delve further into my trip to India (my first), I feel I should add a disclaimer here. I have a long history of making people think I was miserable with certain experiences that I actually enjoyed quite a bit. I think this is partially because I don’t shy away from sharing the bad as well as the good (especially on trips like this that were not for pleasure anyway), and partially because some people just don’t get that there is a lot of gray area between love and hate. Lest I sound like I’m blaming it entirely on others, though, I’ve run into this issue enough times to know that I sometimes come across as sounding gloomy when I don’t mean to. So rest assured that regardless of what you might think after reading the following, I didn’t hate India. Far from it.
That said, Chennai is a very poor and crowded city. I saw an awful lot of people living and working in conditions most North Americans and Europeans (and most Singaporeans for that matter) could fathom if they wanted to, and they probably wouldn't want to. Anybody who goes to a place like Chennai and sees only nice things is probably not someone you would want to associate with, to put it bluntly. Although all our meetings were conducted in a clean and modern convention centre (and they went well enough), everything I saw from the car on the way to and from the hotel and the airport was, well, educational. That’s the most diplomatic word I can think of. Chennai is run down and badly overcrowded, and you definitely know you’re in the developing world.
But that’s where the definitely not-gloomy part of the story comes in. As is the case with most poor places (and I really don’t know why this is the case, but it usually is), the people there are remarkably nice. I noticed this on the one and only night the boss and I and our two local escorts went out to eat at a local eatery, the quintessentially Indian type of place where you eat with your right hand – sopping up the beans and sauces up off a banana leaf with vegetable bread – and keep your left hand under the table. That took some getting used to, but I was pleasantly surprised at the locals’ reaction to having a foreigner in their midst. (The boss is originally from India, though he’s now a Singaporean citizen, so I was the only one.) They treated me exactly as any other, except that they spoke to me in English (if they addressed me at all). Back in Taiwan, eating at a place like that always got a lot of attention, though I didn’t mind most of the time, and even in Singapore it sometimes does, even though there are a lot of white people here. Not in Chennai, surprisingly. We had apples for dessert, and I finished mine in the car back to the hotel. When I was finished, I held onto the core until we got back and I could dispose of it in a trash can. Our driver laughed at this (good-naturedly, to be fair) and told me I should have just rolled the window down and tossed the core out. “This isn’t Singapore or America,” he said, “You are in INDIA!” Yes, he was probably joking – but the roadsides in Chennai do in fact look like somebody’s wastebasket. Draw your own conclusions!
Another perk of staying in a city like Chennai is that you pretty much have to stay at a high-end hotel, since it’s either that or a flophouse. So I ate like royalty for all four days there, and had pleasant surroundings for the downtime between meetings. I finally got some work done on my novel for the first time in far too long, too. I love expense accounts.
The trip also brought me to Bangalore, and I was prepared for more of the same. I was pleasantly surprised, though. Starting with the spare but clean airport, Bangalore proved to be a lot more modernized and affluent than Chennai (though you still definitely know what country you’re in). Fortunately, this did not make the people I met any less pleasant to deal with, and the food was just as good. There is, of course, not a lot I can say about the meetings in public except that they went pretty well. There wasn’t a lot of time for playing tourist here either, but the guy I was meeting with did make time for a night on the town for the both of us. Sports bars look pretty much the same wherever you go. The more exotic type of bars do not. At one point in the evening we found ourselves in a swanky looking place with the tables and chairs lined up against one wall. On the other side of the room were lined up, well, a dozen or so young women in traditional Indian garb who stood there and smiled at you until and unless you pulled out a wad of rupees. In that event, the one you flashed the bills at would come over and talk to you for a few minutes. Think of it as chaste prostitution, I guess. No, of course I did not partake of this, but my business contact did. It definitely made for a good scene for a story, anyhow.
The business I was there to attend to was concluded by midafternoon on the last day, but my plane didn’t take off until quite late. That left about six hours to kill, and my contact took it upon himself to fill those with a tour of the local shopping mall (pretty lame by Singaporean standards, but hey, it’s a mall) and a welcome dinner...and, somewhat oddly from my perspective, a visit to his home to meet his family. One of those odd but pleasant cultural differences, I guess, and I am always curious about where and how people in the cities I visit actually live. It beat languishing at the airport all evening.
If I’ve counted correctly, I believe India is the 24th country I have been to. Not bad considering the number was three (USA, Canada and Denmark) just six years ago. And it had some of the best food of the bunch thus far!
Oh, and the rather discouraging title of this post? It was posted outside the hotel bar in Chennai, engraved on a plaque along with the bar’s license number and its opening hours. As an American, I found this perversely refreshing: my country isn’t the only one whose religious right has ridiculous pull in the government after all. The guys I asked about it in Bangalore had a similar reaction; they said their part of India was much more tolerant.
