Two weekends ago, I flew up to Mumbai and then Jaipur to shoot a very interesting project that involved a lot of Hathis* (!). I will share more about that when I can but I wanted to write about the experience of traveling in India. Something that I used to love and now it seems India has lost her charm on me. Completely. A couple of weeks before I traveled to Jaipur, I was reading a friend's blog and her experiences traveling in India and I could relate to her sense of wonder and amazement. She was honest about it; there are difficult things to swallow but all in all, it moved her, changed her.
As my companion and I drove towards the shoot location in Jaipur, I started to feel that again... Maybe, just
maybe I was beginning to feel that wonder again and it was exciting. This is what I had to do! Travel! The instant way to restore my fraying relationship with this country.
But it didn't last long. As the weekend wore on, even though I enjoyed shooting the project, the little things kept grating on me. The lack of clean public toilets - as a woman, having to hold it in until you can get to some semblance of a clean toilet and still be disappointed is pretty close to a nightmare. The litter everywhere. The stares. The lack of maintenance of tourist attractions. The lack of order. And then to top it all off, we got stuck in a traffic jam brought on by flooded streets for 3 HOURS. I was so mad. I declared that I hated living in India. A feeling that has grown inside of me for months now but I have not said out loud.
Apart from the relationships that I have here, I sometimes feel that there isn't anything else that ties me to this country. I don't have any sense of national pride anymore.
Maybe it's a good thing. The honeymoon period is over. This stage is painful because now all I see is the bad stuff and that, combined with the slightly-or-more-than-slightly cynical side of me, makes for a lot of hopeless and angry feelings.
After Jaipur, I stayed in Mumbai for about a week and I'm not going to lie, I spent many evenings feeling overwhelmed as the reality of my eventual re-location there in December (more on
that later!) started to dawn on me. Mumbai is harsh, an assault on all your senses. You'd think I'd be more accustomed to this having lived there for three years in college but I have been away for too long and it seems things have gotten worse. And even in college, it took me almost three years and the knowledge that I was leaving soon to finally start to get used to it. Oh, and I didn't have to worry about finding decent accommodation at decent prices at that time either!
And so I crumbled. It felt like Mumbai was a big scary beast that would swallow me alive and I haven't even moved there yet! But then a friend who counselled me through these overwhelming feelings said something like this, "you have to remember that a huge majority of this crowd is made up of
individuals who have left their homes and families in far away villages and are just doing the best that they can to provide for their loved ones."
Sometimes it's annoying how right he is. I mean, what do you say that?
India is broken. If I really wanted to, I could find a way to hide from the brokenness. It's possible to make the brokenness less visible. Everything looks like it runs perfectly smoothly from the outside but problems still exist. Ignorance is only temporary bliss.
And so here I am, the honeymoon period of my love affair with my own country is over. I'm trying to figure out what to do with my heightened senses of the reality. It feels like the more I know, the more I hurt. How do I stay and not be buried under hopelessness? How do I turn all that emotional energy into positive change?
Honestly, I don't know yet. I don't have any illusions of changing the world, all I know is that not trying is not an option. And neither is being hopeless.
An image from our 3 hour hiatus in a Jaipuri-flood. This is what they were looking at.
*Elephants
