Back to where I came from

As a child growing up in England, I was told on more than one occasion that I should go back to where I came from. Being a born optimist, I knew that the obvious intention of the people who said this, was to encourage me to get to know my roots. Many years later after much soul-searching about questions of identity, as a British Indian,  I decided to do just that - when I was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime.

 My parents had moved to Hyderabad, due to my father being employed as a consultant for the construction of the new airport. I wanted to spend time with them as well as to experience the country I had originated from. Altogether, I spent at least a year living in Hyderabad that had been a real education for me, both mentally and spiritually. I went to India with an open mind, not wanting to be prejudiced by all the stereotypes that even I had previously held of India and Indians. I discovered to my delight that I am proud of belonging to such an amazing country with such a rich and diverse culture that is often misunderstood when seen through a Western filter. I had visited many times before, on holiday, but for too short a duration to have any real understanding of what I saw and more importantly, the cultural context it exists in. In the time I had in India I made a pledge to myself to try and observe and interact using my imagination and intuition as a guide rather than what I thought I knew.

Hyderabad has a long and interesting history. I will not even attempt go into detail about that as it would require a book or a number of books to do it any justice. Since I am referring more to the culture of the city, I will start by saying that it does have a distinct culture that is recognized throughout India. Through its various rulers from medieval times to the present, the culture of Hyderabad was always in a state of flux. North and South Indian traditions mingled here when it was an independent princely state with its own flag, army and currency.

 It had a unique culture that resisted invasions and change from outside due partly to its geographical position on the Deccan plateau. Hyderabad was a cosmopolitan city with rulers and influences from Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Hindi and even English, reflected in its clothes and food, clothing, arts and architecture. You can still see remnants of these today as well as the Hyderabadi Tehzeeb of respect, hospitality, openness and tolerance to all faiths, something that Hyderabad was known for, and that had allowed its multiculturalism to flourish.

 

When I first arrived in Hyderabad the first thing that struck me was that it was very crowded compared to the almost empty streets of Vancouver. This was a huge difference in my spatial awareness since the thought of so many living beings being in close proximity was stressful on a level I hadn’t even previously thought about. I did get used to this eventually, as like all things, the initial change in perception is a challenge but gradually becomes normal. The pollution irritated me as I had been used to the clean fresh mountain air of British Columbia and had even forgotten what pollution was. 

The other big difference I noticed, as I spent a good deal of time walking around and taking auto-rickshaws, was the number of crazy drivers who have no regard for laws, but did seem to have eyes in the back of their heads. People driving in India were hyper-aware of their surroundings, evidenced by the high number of near-misses I very anxiously witnessed.

Actually, it was my first impression was that they were near-misses, but then I realized that there was a method in the madness. Indian drivers were like dolphins, not that they looked like them or had big wide-smiling faces (though some of them did), but they were using sound to navigate, a bit like sonar! Incredible as it might sound it is true. One of the first things you would notice if you travelled to an Indian city with a high volume of drivers is a cacophonic orchestra of car, motorbike and scooter horns. To the uninitiated traveler who has just arrived from a country where horns are used only in an emergency or out of anger it seems as if the Indian driver just likes to toot their horn a lot. In fact the horn is used in a highly sophisticated manner, just like the clicking sounds a dolphin makes and for a similar purpose. Dolphins make sounds for echolocation to build up an acoustic picture of their surroundings. Drivers in India use their car horns to give information about their location in relation to other vehicles, and the other vehicles do the same, allowing them to build a similar acoustic picture, hence the sounds serve to regulate traffic flow and prevent accidents.  There are also different types of sounds that are produced based on the duration of the horn and the frequency it is pressed with. For example there is a rapid “bip bip bip” which alerts other drivers that there is a car in the near vicinity that may be in the blind spot of the driver in front. Another beep indicates overtaking and yet another when someone is changing lanes or trying to get behind another vehicle. A long beep with the hand jammed down hard on the horn is used when a cow enters your lane without using it’s indicators. 

There were many things like this that I never understood on my many previous visits to India, I didn’t see the relationship between the different aspects of culture and why people did things the way they did.  After all culture is essentially any learned behavior over a period of time. And like any behavior that exists, there are always reasons why it evolved. In this case, the cow is a sacred animal and is therefore allowed to roam just about anywhere. They do seem to keep their calm in rush hour traffic and bring a sense of serenity to an otherwise chaotic scene. Cultural practices that make no sense in one context may make total sense in another. Only by observation and questioning people who are articulate and educated about those cultural practices can help to elucidate these reasons for people like myself. 

My parents were excellent in trying to explain cultural practices as my brother and I were growing up in London and then the leafy, affluent green-belt of Surrey in England. The area we grew up in was middle-class and predominantly white. When we moved there, there were only 2 other families of any ethnic background in the area. Even with my parents ensuring that we had contact with other South-Asian families and culture we were still heavily influenced by the British view of Indian culture. Therefore in all honesty, there were so many things about Indian culture we really did not fully understand. This contributed toward my decision for leaving behind my cushy (“Cushy” is from Sanskrit origin incidentally) job and venturing to live in India for a year with my parents.

It was great to live with my folks after having lived away for so many years. I found that it was more like hanging out with old friends. After reacquainting myself with family and friends, I spent some time finding my way around the old city (getting lost deliberately) just to see where I would end up. This was a most excellent adventure and I saw and spoke to many people, even improving my level of Urdu and Hindi to the point where local people could actually understand what I was saying! I tried to talk to people from all walks of life so I could get a more objective understanding of the city than just from my parents friends and relatives. I had many conversations with rickshaw drivers, shop-keepers, beggars, Nariel panee walas (coconut water vendors) and anyone who had time to talk, which incidentally, was quite a lot of people. I think a universal truth I experienced, which was brought home to me in India, is that if you have the will to communicate with others, people generally respond favorably if they can sense it is genuine and without expectations. People also happen to be interested in people who show interest in them. I spent so much time talking with people I encountered, that sometimes I wondered how they had the time to talk. I mean, didn’t they have more important things to do? Wasn’t their time valuable?

Time is another culturally determined concept . I discovered this much to my chagrin at first, but then when I embraced it, it changed the way I will understand it forever. I never truly understood the concept of Indian time until after spending a significant amount of it getting frustrated that people didn’t seem to have too much regard for it in India. I thought that I was a little tardy compared to my fellow English citizens, but not usually by more than about 15 minutes for social occasions and a maximum of a couple of minutes for business. For business I was usually quite punctual. When I first arrived in India, and was helping my father set-up a computer network, I would make appointments with various contractors and they would never be on time. Even after agreeing a certain time, they would still turn up late and look surprised when I showed my disdain at this. They would of course apologize profusely, but then be late again the next time. “Five minutes” seemed to be a favorite quantity often promised but seldom delivered. It could mean anything at all from a literal five minutes to even a day or two later. I then finally understood that the god of the old testament must have been Indian. It all made sense. He created the earth in six days - of Indian time!

In Britain, the concept of time is very precise, ‘The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.’ To put it more simply, a second is the duration of the half-life of cesium. This is the standard by which it is measured and an incredibly precise atomic clock runs on this principle. You cannot get more materialistic about time than matter determining time itself.

Compare this to the Sanskrit inspired “ab” meaning now, which also in Vedic Sanskrit means water. The concept of “now” itself is therefore a fluid one, the right time for something to happen is in the moment when it actually happens, which makes perfect sense in a timeless world that was invented before the industrial revolution! It does sound much more spiritual and romantic, but does not necessarily work in the practical world. The problem is that the same concept of time exists even now in India, but as a wise auto rickshaw driver once told me, “it’s only a problem if you make it a problem.” I asked him what he meant by that and he replied, “expectation is the mother of all frustration. If you expect something to happen at a certain time and it does not, you will be frustrated. If you don’t have expectations, you will be happy!” I smiled at his wisdom, and gave him an extra tip for the lesson, even though by then I had arrived late for my appointment. 

My parents lived on road no.3 in Banjara hills, nice short name for a road, no complicated spelling when writing that address down for someone. The area of Banjara hills where we stayed was fairly affluent but just a mile down the road, the picture was very different. Past the park and the eye hospital lead to an area called Punjagutta, a shopping district with some residential buildings and lower income housing where a flyover had collapsed killing more than 20 people just a few months before I arrived. Many of them were laborers, who routinely work in unsafe conditions. I observed many laborers working on buildings with scaffolding made from bamboo and no safety harnesses. I also saw women who were often accompanied by minors, working in construction including breaking up concrete, something I was unaccustomed to in the West. 

The level of disparity between rich and poor shocked me at first, I saw such extremes of wealth and living conditions that it had the effect of re-calibrating my thinking.  For example, there is no social welfare system as we know in the West and people who are poor have to create their own work , beg or die. The choices one has in life are as brutal as they are simple and influences the conservative mentality that so many Indians have.

One day I observed a beggar for several hours who sat on the street with his bowl and beseeching passers-by for assistance telling them tales of the woe he had encountered on life’s journey. He approached two laborers who seemed to be a little better off than he was and interestingly, they chatted with him for a while and reciprocated with their own similar stories of woe. 

After a while a peanut vendor happened to pass him who he also started a similar conversation with. Rather than ignore him as so many others had, he stopped and talked to him for a good twenty minutes and at the end handed him a small parcel of freshly roasted peanuts. It was heart-warming to see and in my short observation, I noted that the people who had the most time to give the beggar were themselves not that far removed, economically at least, from his position. 

Another day, I saw a dead man lying in the street. It was an odd feeling to be going out for a walk and just encountering a body lying there on the ground without any warning. I assume he had just passed away from some unknown malady and lay were he had collapsed. I felt that I should do something but having not been in that situation ever before I had no idea what to do. Should I call an ambulance? Or the police?  I stood around and watched as other local people naturally gravitated to sorting out the situation- as much as death can be sorted out. He was obviously poor and did not have any family to bury or cremate him. It became apparent to me that he was at least known to some of the shopkeepers on the road. Within the space of an hour since I had encountered him, the local people covered him in a shroud and placed garlands of flowers on his corpse. Someone place a basket near his feet and passers-by gave money for his cremation. I talked to them for a while and they explained to me that we all will go one day, death is the great equalizer, so we all have to do something, right?

It was incredible to see that even though there was no welfare system for him, the society around naturally performed its civic responsibilities. In such a sad situation, It felt good that people were in tune with a natural level of responsibility beyond any imposed one. I felt saddened by many things I saw as well as elated and inspired and I then realized why Bollywood films are characterized by this emotional roller-coaster ride and heightened sense of melodrama. Particularly for the masses, they serve a function that people who live in this reality can relate to. It’s a tough life in India for most of the people who live there, over 300 million live in poverty, at least 11% of the 1.3 billion population live on less than a dollar a day. I was inspired by people I saw who could make a business out of the most simple of things just to survive and did so with a smile on their face. 

People smiled easily, I would just need a hint of a smile on my face to activate theirs, so ready were people to share pleasant feelings and emotions.

In stark contrast to the poverty, there was also opulence and extravagance from the latest models of Mercedes, porches and BMW's driving alongside carts pulled by bullocks or even by people. The buildings in the “Hi-Tech” city of Hyderabad look like they belong in a modern Western metropolis with fingerprint  scanners at the entrances and their carefully manicured gardens. These areas were direct evidence of the economic boom India has experienced along with the growing number of gated communities and security guards to protect their wealthy denizens. There are so many visual incongruities, such as these expensive hi-tech buildings right next to shanty settlements of homes made with tarpaulin and sticks. It’s hard not to muse on the yin and yang of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, and leads one to think about life’s meaning when the material world presents both its beauty and ugliness simultaneously.

I was fascinated by the fact that in India you can get virtually any kind of material goods from silk sarees to designer jeans. Textiles are in abundance you just need a guide to know where to go and buy it. There are so many markets and bazaars, you can get completely lost amongst the myriad artifacts. The cuisine in Hyderabad is so diverse, you can get any kind of food you want, including Chinese, Mexican, Thai and even Canadian sweet corn!

 

I ate mostly South-Indian dosas, idli and Hyderabadi biryani - the local specialty. I also saw many buildings and monuments that were testament to the riches the city once possessed. The Nizam of Hyderabad was once the richest man in the world. He is there on the Time magazine cover of 1937, proclaimed as such. Not that I think this is the pinnacle of achievement, rather that it is a reflection of how great civilizations come and go. We visited one of his palaces and witnessed its opulence and splendor, remnants of a bygone era.

There were always some kind of sounds or music on the streets virtually all the time. Somewhere you could hear the beating of a drum or an azhan or a musical festival. The architecture of the city was festooned with the signs of every culture and religion that had existed in India. I saw Mosques, Churches, temples of every variety and hue. I met people of every background there and the amazing thing is that despite their different philosophies of life and their own personal religious convictions, they all seemed to get along. Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Bhuddist faiths were all represented. 

Even the archaic monuments built centuries ago had places of worship for all, direct evidence of India's multi-religious past. Religion and spirituality are a big theme in India, The material life is put into perspective here as it seems small and two-dimensional in contrast to the multitude of other experiences the mind is constantly subjected to. I can completely understand the attraction India has for many who want to experience something different, beyond the usual humdrum aspects of living in the West. India is a real masala mix of old and new, rich and poor, the banal and the awe-inspiring.

From a personal perspective there is another dimension to all this. I always yearned for some deeper meaning to life and I knew that travelling would help to satisfy this proclivity. By going ‘back to where I came from’, I was also reconciling myself with a part of my identity. My family origins are Persian and Afghani as well as Indian, but that is the culture that the last few generations of my family had lived in. If I viewed India and its people negatively or positively, whether I took the trouble to understand them, It would be reflected in my own self-perception. 

If life is a journey, you can’t know where you are going if you don’t know
where you came from.