Submitted by Sara Sajer on the 2016 winter session program in India sponsored by the Department of English…
Everyday I would tell myself and about a half dozen unwitting peers, “you don’t get anything in life unless you’re aggressive.” If there were ever a space for properly applied aggression, it’s surprisingly not the streets of New York City, but Northern India. During my winter session 2016 study abroad program through six different Indian cities, I was struck by robust examples of life and resiliency. I could conceptualize little prior to arrival, a few images and story lines pieced together from movies and history books: generalized poverty, elephants, snake charmers, Ghandi, the Taj Mahal… Growing up in central Pennsylvania, I gravitated toward the natural wonders in my backyard as trees, creeks, state parks and farm land always seemed to be only an arm’s length away. Upon arrival in India however, I was immediately drawn to the anthropological richness, the patterns of human geography that were foreign and familiar to me. Indians interact with their space aggressively and it’s fascinating. There is poverty pitted against the landscape, but despite the destitution, I found no overarching attitude of misery. The people are poor, but they have purpose. India is extremely dirty, but people are constantly sweeping, accepting and rejecting and moving back and forth the base of grit that coats their lives. In operating a small salon or fruit stand, raising children, sewing garments, the meager prospect of improving their situations provides enough hope to keep a whole shopping district buzzing. It’s the listlessness and muteness seen in beggars that gives misery a chance to assert itself and those images of helplessness wrenched my heart. But ultimately, I saw tenacity in the tiny miracles of existence tucked in every hairpin turn on the mountain roads to Darjeeling and in every alleyway in Delhi. The curries were unforgivingly spicy and the culture of community was palpable and distinct as we ventured from place to place. India is a piece of art that gains its beauty from its firm grip on life, its struggle to hold on.
India showed me a new definition of balance. It taught me that normal is relative and ideas of symbiosis shift across culture. So many times I found myself bracing for utter destruction, but each time whether on the road, in a conversation, or in a teashop, it somehow all worked out. Daily life in an Indian town presented a strange sense of order, one that we would not even call conceivable in the United States. First, the skewed sense of equilibrium can be found in the architecture. Stacks of structures made of bamboo and cement, wood and tin jutted out at every angle; no square meter of space was wasted especially not in an urban area. The houses look like they could up and leave their foundations if you blew on them hard enough. They teeter precariously on the sides of mountains and crop up between the flowers and the gutters. Public space (not to mention wifi) is a great tragedy of the commons, but no one seems to complain. As for the traffic that snakes through these barely balanced buildings, it flows even when there are seven cars, three motorbikes, and a cow jockeying the width of a two-lane freeway. Though the congestion is constant, the chaos keeps moving to the cacophony of automobile horns; I didn’t see a single car accident in India.
In interpersonal interactions and business conversations, I learned to operate with ambiguity and to balance the unknown. During negotiation of any sorts (price of a sweater or debate over the time of a departure), Indians opt for the ambiguous head swivel. It is not a nod “yes” or a shake “no” but a grey, noncommittal motion that takes the place of a definite answer to a question. “Is 500 rupees enough?” “The train leaves in 10 minutes?” “Is your job suiting you well?” “Did you take the picture?” All these questions would be suspended with the ambiguous head swivel. The non-verbal communication can be found across every type of dyad and every topic of conversation. The gesture lends some breathing room, giving the speaker a longer opportunity to comb through his thoughts. It propagates loose schedules, flexible logistics and a sense of time that seems to be stretched or shrunken arbitrarily. The high context culture demands more patience in extracting information compared to our very overt low context culture in the States. As such, I learned more through keen observation than I did through explicit exchange of hard facts. I breathed in the odor of soot and curry and reveled in the serenity and scrappiness that is life in India.