Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws

by Laura Pedersen

  Indira’s second son, Sanjay Gandhi, was also involved in politics, and has been criticized for his role in a family planning program that involved the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands men and women. Sanjay crashed a plane that he was flying, killing himself and the only passenger.

  Rahul Gandhi is the great-grandson of India’s first prime minister, the grandson of India’s fourth prime minister, and the son of India’s seventh prime minister. His mother is Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the widow of Indira’s eldest son, Rajiv, and a powerful behind-the-scenes political player. Stay tuned, as there seems to be all the tabloid drama of the Kennedy family in this dynastic saga. A miniseries is surely in the making.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986). J-Krish or K-murti, as the media would no doubt dub him today, was India’s first great secular guru. Though born into a Hindu Brahman family, this philosopher believed that the path to truth, self-improvement, life without conflict, and problem solving was open to everyone, and that “Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.” Actually, Krishnamurti might best be called the antiguru since he also denounced the concept of saviors and spiritual leaders. Yet he claimed to have psychic experiences in which he talked to his dead sister and mother. Since the author and philosopher seems to contradict himself on occasion, below are a few Krishnamurtisms so he can speak for himself.

  Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms.

  You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

  Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.

  At this point, you’re probably thinking that the name Krishna sounds mighty familiar. In accordance with common Hindu practice, as an eighth child who happened to be male, Jiddu (Jiddu was the family name) Krishnamurti was named after the Hindu god Krishna. Krishna, often depicted as a young boy playing the flute, is viewed through a kaleidoscope of possibilities—divine hero, god-child, prankster, lover, and supreme being. Just as Hindus have thousands of deities, each one can have various interpretations. So if any Catholic was thinking that there are an awful lot of saints to keep up with, be glad you’re not in charge of putting together a compendium called The Lives of the Gods in India.

  Monkeys and Tigers and Snakes, Oh My!

  Despite environmental challenges caused by the demands of such an enormous population, India is teeming with wildlife, much of which can be viewed in the country’s hundreds of national parks. However, many of the animals are unaware of such parks and happily dwell in the countryside, suburbs, and cities, much like prairie dogs in Lubbock, Texas, who are ignorant of the fact that an entire homeland was set up expressly for them by generous (eccentric?) benefactor Kennedy N. Clapp, who was then named mayor of Prairie Dog Town in perpetuity. Other species are being pushed out of their natural habitats by the rapid pace of development.

  Monkeys are so prevalent that they’re fighting each other over limited turf and resources. In New Delhi, langur monkeys have chased red-brown rhesus monkeys out of the grand government buildings that flank the Presidential Palace, and it’s become a regular West Side Story of rival primate gangs duking it out, retitled the Monkey Menace by locals. However, the langurs have cleverly gotten humans on their side, and during the 2010 Commonwealth Games, they were deployed to patrol stadiums and the athletes’ village and scare off other smaller monkeys along with the occasional cobra.

  When not snatching unguarded food, monkeys will climb into open-air dining rooms and filch jam pots and bread baskets or whatever else they can get their prehensile tails around. One clever monkey entered a hotel room through a second-story balcony door and stole a woman’s hormone replacement therapy drugs. Little did Mr. Monkey know that he was volunteering to participate in a scientific experiment.

  Otherwise, there’s been monkey business at the highest levels of government. In 2004, monkeys threatened India’s national security by scattering top-secret documents around a Ministry of Defense office. And in 2007, Delhi’s deputy mayor S. S. Bajwa died as a result of serious head injuries after falling from his first-floor terrace while attempting to fight off a pack of wild monkeys.

  However, monkey culling isn’t possible, because they’re considered sacred by devout Hindus, who view them as a manifestation of the monkey god Hanuman. He’s worshipped by villagers as a protective guardian, by ascetics as a yogi, and by wrestlers and body builders for his power and strength. To give you an idea of Hanuman’s importance, his Wikipedia entry is the same length as that of Lady Gaga, Elton John, and most American presidents. And instead of saying that someone has Attention Deficit Disorder, Indians describe this condition as Mad Monkey Mind.

  Rats, on the other hand, are not sacred, and the mayors of large cities hire professional rat killers. India is home to the gray-black bandicoot, which is the largest species of rat in the world, aside from the towering thirty-foot-high inflatable rat with buckteeth and beady eyes seen at US worksites protesting the hiring of nonunion labor. Bandicoot rats can be more than a foot in length, have the ability to decimate entire crops of wheat and grain in short order, and emit a piglike grunt when attacking. As a group, bandicoot rats are capable of killing and devouring a human child.

  When people say the Big Four in the United States, they’re almost always referring to the major accounting firms, occasionally the four most-popular heavy metal bands, and every once in awhile the Allied leaders who met at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. India’s Big Four are venomous snakes: Russell’s viper, Indian cobra, common krait, and the saw-scaled viper. They all feed on rodents, so you’ll find them where there are plenty of rats, which is where there also tend to be a lot of people, since rats thrive on garbage produced by humans. Most bites occur by stepping on a snake at night. However, there is a serum widely available, much the way breath mints and bullets are in the States.

  The king cobra, which famously starred as an evildoer in Rudyard Kipling’s short story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and continues to hog all the good movie roles, is the largest venomous snake in the world. A king cobra bite can kill a person in fifteen minutes and a full-grown elephant in a few hours. However, the king prefers to live in dense jungles, where it can feed on other snakes, so you don’t usually hear about them having adventures with humans, unless an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes story is being filmed.

  Attention, ophidiophobes. Serpents do not lurk around every corner or hide under hotel beds. I did not see a single free-ranging reptile throughout my trip, which included animal sanctuaries and national parks. So it’d be silly for someone to skip India for fear of running into a snake, since they’re everywhere throughout the United States. In New York State alone we have three types of poisonous snakes—rattlers, copperheads, and massasauga—along with seriously scary-looking milk snakes, water snakes, and eight-foot black rat snakes. Nonetheless, during a childhood spent largely out of doors, I managed not to become a meal for a single one of them. Yes, vipers live among us, and we among them.

  Snake charming is a dying profession in India, largely a result of the 1972 Wildlife Protection Act, which prohibits owning and selling serpents but wasn’t really enforced until animal-rights activists became involved during the 1990s. However, you can occasionally find practitioners of this ancient art at marketplaces, tourist attractions, and festivals, hypnotizing snakes by playing musical instruments and sometimes handling the
snakes. Snakes are considered to be sacred, and their charmers are regarded as holy men who are influenced by the gods. Ancient artwork regularly depicts the various gods being guarded by cobras. Most snake charmers (at least the ones still living) have removed the poison glands from the snake’s head or defanged it. Spoiler alert: snakes don’t really dance to the music since they have very poor hearing (do you see any ears?), but they can sense vibrations along the ground. The snake may also sway in an effort to defend itself against a charmer’s hand or flute moving above its head.

  While American presidents have been known to travel with mountain bikes, golf pros, and decks of cards, Indian presidents always head to the summer retreat with at least four snake wranglers and one monkey catcher. In 2000 (the last year for which figures are available), a total of four snakes managed to sneak into the executive retreat. At least guests needn’t fret that the proverbial bump in the night is a restless ghost.

  As India’s building boom continues, many former snake charmers are re-careering as snake rescuers, capturing snakes everywhere from presidential palaces to suburban homes and returning them to the wild. I can only hope this works better than my dad’s effort to relocate the bird-feeder-raiding squirrels in his yard to the dam site five miles away, as it seems to take them less than a day to make the journey back home.

  Not surprisingly, India’s infamously apathetic bureaucracy has even aggravated the snake-charming community. A man from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh who had saved many lives over the years by gallantly removing poisonous snakes that were interacting with the citizenry was fed up with a local government that had for years delayed the issuance of a plot of land where he could conserve his snakes, despite it having been approved by senior authorities. So, as an incentive to complete the process, Mr. Hakkul unleashed his vipers in the land revenues office building. The result was that employees quickly cleared out on their own accord and within minutes the snakes had their sanctuary. Perhaps this will go down in Indian history as “pulling a Hakkul.”

  A hundred years ago, there were more than forty-five thousand tigers roaming India, and now there are only about seventeen hundred. The Brits fancied themselves the Great White Hunters and did a good job at decimating the Bengal tiger population. Otherwise, poaching, deforestation, mining, insecticides, and industrial development continue to have a negative impact on the big cats. Strong demand for tiger skins in China and Tibet is still a serious problem when it comes to preservation. Add in the fact that tiger bones, teeth, and nails are used in traditional Chinese medicine (to treat ailments such as arthritis) and they’ve just about run through their own supply of South China tigers. The year 2010 was the Year of the Tiger in China, but instead of raising awareness about conservation, it only served to drive up demand for tiger skins and parts. More than forty reserves around the subcontinent are in operation to protect the Bengal tiger, but even such guarded sanctuaries fall victim to poachers. Demand is so high that hunters are willing to go to great lengths and take enormous risks to kill these animals. Meantime, India remains a key player in preservation, since it is home to about half of all the world’s wild tigers. Much like game parks that allow you to enjoy wildlife in Africa, tourist dollars spent on seeing the tigers in their habitats help save them from extinction in the wild.

  I say “in the wild,” because tigers, unlike pandas, breed extremely well in captivity. The United States alone has an estimated forty-five thousand tigers in expected places like zoos and preserves, and unexpected places such as New York City apartments, New Jersey backyards, and Minnesota basements. On the plus side, I haven’t heard of any prowling the sewers, yet. You can buy tiger cubs on the Internet for between five hundred and two thousand dollars, but I wouldn’t recommend it since within a year they’ll need twenty pounds of fresh meat per day and stalk any other pets you own, and most have a habit of swiping and biting, which leads to surgery and skin grafts.

  Did you know that if you shave a tiger, it has striped skin underneath? Not that I’m suggesting you try it.

  Game Changers: Women and Children

  Historical research suggests that during ancient times, Indian women enjoyed equal status with men in almost all walks of life. They married at a mature age and were free to select their own spouses and could even work in the ESP arts as highly revered sages and seers. However, that all took a major dive in the Middle Ages with the adoption of child marriage, polygamy, women having to cover themselves and sometimes live in restricted areas, the practice of wives committing suicide upon their husband’s demise, and, for those who didn’t, a ban on widows remarrying. Despite being in a region of the world where many of these medieval practices are still in place, India’s women are clearly heading for modernity. They’ve taken places in all the skilled professions and also as CEOs, prime minister, president, state governors, speaker of the Lok Sabha, leader of the Opposition, and president of the Indian National Congress, one of the two major political parties. And if that’s not proof enough, there have been more than two dozen Mumbai Mafia queens.

  Still, change happens slowly, especially in such a large country with diverse traditions. Despite more than a decade of high economic growth and expanding upper and middle classes, more than 40 percent of Indians live below the World Bank poverty line of $1.25 a day. Close to half of all children under the age of three are malnourished, and India has the highest rate of child labor in the world. At least 50 million school-age children are working in agriculture, as house servants, rolling cheap cigarettes, weaving carpets, or as prostitutes. As a result, India has one of the worst literacy rates, especially for girls, where 47 percent of the female population lack an education and cannot even read or write. It doesn’t help that about half of all Indian women are married off before the legal age of eighteen. In villages, girls are sometimes married before they reach the age of ten. Is anyone else thinking AMBER Alert?

  People cite the success of Indian marriages because of the low divorce rate. Well, the divorce rate in the States was much lower when women could be turned out with no money or property or social status and in some cases even lost legal control of their children. In most countries there’s a direct correlation between the prevalence of divorce and the stigma and financial penalty that results from divorce.

  Proponents of arranged marriages like to insist that these are by and large happier than love matches. I’m not going to pick a fight with arranged marriage, which still accounts for about 90 percent of all nuptials, so long as it’s the modern style where the victims, I mean young people, have the right to veto potential partners. In my opinion, an arranged marriage doesn’t seem all that different from typing your dreams and hobbies into an Internet dating service. The joke about courting Indian-style is that your first date consists of meeting the parents, your second date is to agree on the wedding, and your third date is the wedding night.

  However, newspaper and online advertisements for “incredibly beautiful” brides and “extremely handsome” grooms never fail to amuse with their outsized desperation for doctors, emphasis on light skin, requests for horoscopes, and occasional caste requirements. Although, when a high-paying international job or medical degree is in play, a number of other prerequisites can apparently be overlooked. It stands to reason that people want to portray themselves in the best light possible, and therefore you’ll also find ads for matrimonial detectives who specialize in marriage fraud to ferret out who might be lying. For a little extra, they’ll provide you with an additional dossier on your future mother-in-law.

  Indian mothers-in-law are of course renowned for being the butt of jokes and as instigators of the many wicked machinations (which mostly involve torturing daughters-in-law) that drive soap opera story lines. Perhaps afraid of losing their power as a result of new measures that favor daughters-in-law claiming abuse, groups such as the All India Mother-in-law Protection Forum are popping up so this increasingly put-upon faction can exchange grievances and compare remedies (and perhaps excha
nge wily tactics and nefarious schemes). Even if more young women become professionals, arranged marriage goes by the wayside, and social security starts taking care of the old, don’t count those evil mothers-in-law out just yet. Every mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, so there are untold scores that still need to be settled.

  To better understand such customs, Westerners must also recognize that living in extended families is a long-standing part of the culture. Many Indians will happily inform you that Americans raise children the way animals raise their young, caring for them just until they’re old enough to make a living and then tossing them out on their own, into the cold and cruel wilderness of society at large.

  One thing you don’t see in the matrimonial ads are references to sports prowess. Despite being extremely talented at the game of cricket, Indians appear not to have distinguished themselves in many other areas of athleticism and are routinely criticized for leaving the Olympics with few medals in hand, particularly since they have access to more than a billion potentially gifted athletes. Furthermore, I saw countless impossibly skinny men darting through crowded streets pulling carts and rickshaws loaded with ten times the drivers’ weight in people and metal pipes, so there’s certainly no lack of coordination, strength, determination, or dexterity among the populace. I’m venturing a guess that Indians aren’t diving into cold swimming pools or sharpening speed skates at dawn because they’re busy prepping for MCATs. Sticking the landing on a perfect balance beam routine may get you a gold medal, but an MD after your name is apparently what lands a gold wedding band around here.

  One problem with marriage in India today is that many require a (potentially large) dowry be paid by the bride’s family to the groom’s family. What happened to the African system where the groom had to pay a couple of cows to the bride’s family for the pleasure of her company? I mean, the bride is expected to go to the house of her Indian husband and cook and clean and take care of everyone, including his parents. The only thing making her life easier is that Indian children are not taught to walk, talk, or use the toilet. As in African tribes and large Irish Catholic families, they pick it up from the other kids, like cursing and knowledge about sex.