Intrepid Ephemera: 04/01/2007

The author of "The Feminine Mistake" is coming as a guest speaker to work tomorrow. I'm interested to hear what she has to say - in spite of friends who juggle work/family daily, I can't yet wrap my own head around how, exactly, anyone can ever achieve any sort of reasonable balance (my parents' truly excellent solution - both teachers with summer vacations - unfortunately isn't available to most of the population).

Luckily I'm not currently subject to any urge for children, but I can imagine the anguish I'd feel if I were. Would I be willing to leave work for more than, say, three months? I doubt it. I get way too big a kick out of the adrenaline rush that comes with competition: for good projects, for promotion, for quarterly performance metrics, to get resources to get something done. I angle & fight for the respect of my teammates and I gloat like a proud mother (!) when someone I'm mentoring launches something exciting. I also really, really, really enjoy the conversation of adults. If I left all this behind, would I resent my kids for dragging me from it? Maybe. And don't tell me that the mothering instinct would kick in and save me from that - I've heard too many times that my biological clock would start ticking by the time I turned 28 to believe that feminine biology is destiny.

So where does that leave me? Wishing I knew of a clear way to fight for more work/life balance for all members of society, not just women, that's where. As long as the ability to juggle kids and a job is seen as a women's issue, we're all screwed, women and men together. I know way too many overworked male lawyers who are frantically jealous of the "mommy track" to believe anything different.

Note: photos with captions here - no, I am not including every photo in this blog post.

What do I actually know about India?

Very little; a two-week trip, largely spent in an office building, isn't long. But the flip side of business travel is that, though I didn't see as many places as I would as a tourist, I did talk to far more people than I would if I'd arrived without a corporate-sponsored goal.

This is going to be a very long post.

March 20: arrival in Hydrabad, after a 22+ hour flight from San Francisco. Photos: my room in the guesthouse (where all "expats" live, about 100 feet from the office building, and behind the same security gates), plus view from my window:

Notice the tent city in the last one, right next to the brand-spanking-new highrise.

Mar 20: office; sleep.

Mar 21: office; dinner at Sahib Sindh Sultan, a restaurant done up to look like a train car on the Orient Express. Food: amazing, and as you might expect, not like Indian food in the US. The power went out for a substantial amount of time, so the waiter brought us a saucer with birthday candles stuck onto it. This appears to be standard practice.

After dinner, I tried "paan," a kind of digestiv which is eaten, not drunk, made of betel nut leaves wrapped around something crunchy and powdery and sweet. It's based on roses - whole thing tasted interestingly of soap and/or hand lotion. Apparently the savory version of paan, as opposed to the sweet version I tried, is strong enough with betel (?) that it can actually get you high.

Expat cultural note: if you go out to dinner, you go in a car with a driver. The driver waits for you, but you bring him your leftovers - making sure to be sensitive to whether he is "veg" or "non-veg." Most restaurant menus are broken down the same way.

Mar 22: I finally get out of the office, and head to the local outdoor craft market, Shilparamam:

thanks to which, I finally felt like I was in India. It was beautiful, and I got there at a just-late-enough to be relaxed time of evening. A few sellers still had their stalls open, so I could see the woodcarvings and the embroidery. Something flowering in the trees smelled sweet, and there was a wide grassy lawn where people were just hanging out, relaxing at the end of the day.

Mar 23: office.

Mar 24-25 (weekend): up at 4:30am to catch the flight to Jaipur, along with my coworker J & his cousin M who was visiting from Taiwan. Saw the Hawa Mahal, with my first snake-charmer outside, as well as my first camels in traffic. I am amazed by the women in bright sarees, riding post on motorcycles with their husbands (?) driving and one or more children tucked in between the adults. The women always ride facing to the left, away from traffic. Woman+saree+children+man+motorcycle sums up India for me, but I never succeeded in taking a decent photo of this so-common form of travel.

A note on travel: everywhere I went, I went with a driver. In Jaipur, our driver was arranged for us by the company's head driver in Hyderabad. In India, this isn't a particularly luxurious thing to do - it's the only obvious solution to India's traffic, which is crazy enough that no non-local has any business driving in it (do a YouTube search for 'Hyderabad traffic').

On the way to Amber Fort we saw elephants returning from their morning tourist-bearing treks up to it:

And Amber Fort itself, which like the other forts I visited inspired many jokes about multiple wives from our guide:

A note on guides: in Europe and the US, I usually avoid guides as much as possible. In India, even the locals hire guides. Guidebooks, by contrast, are rare, and signs at monuments are non-existant. Unexpected side effect of my having spent two weeks travelling around with drivers and/or guides: I am now much better than I used to be at not being bossed around by people I've hired - as well as sightseeing at my own pace even when the guide has an agenda he's expecting me to follow.

The photo below shows the ceiling hooks in a room at Amber Fort. The hooks exactly match the hooks in the guesthouse's living room in downtown Hyderabad. The fort is hundreds of years old, but hanging-from-the-ceiling sofa technology obviously hasn't changed. I love this.

We then drove five plus hours to Agra, so we could get up early the next morning and visit the Taj Mahal:

which was cool. I know that's an understatement, but I suspect whatever else there is to say, someone else has already said. This is my "I was here" photo of the Taj's sparkling marble:

and the Taj reflected:

and the first women I saw in burkas:

(...the anti-feminist aspects of which I hadn't truly understood in my gut until I saw them, at which point it became so amazingly obvious that I have no good way to explain it - I mean, how do you explain why a particular word is spelled the way it is, or how you know what season we're about to have? It just is, that's how.).

After the Taj, we went to Fatahpur Sikri:

which is a deserted fort near the city of Agra & the Taj Mahal. It's at least as pretty, in a different way, as the Taj, and arguably more interesting: it was the seat of a ruler who took over a heck of a lot of territory, but also promoted religious tolerance to a degree the locals are still boasting about (he took wives equally from the Hindu, Christian, and Islamic faiths, and then decorated their rooms in motifs that mixed the three - also, he dispensed justice even-handedly, but that gets a lot less time talked about than the wives). It was eventually abandoned due to lack of water.

In another area of the site is a shrine to a holy man:

which is made of white marble, similar to the Taj. Hundreds of years later people still come here to pray - the shrine was packed. Like most religious sites in India, this one could only be visited without shoes. The temperature was over 100; after this, I carried socks with me to avoid burning my feet.

Then we drove back to Jaipur for our flight back to Hyderabad. On the way, I took this picture of a camel out the back window of our car:

Camels were everywhere, mostly hauling long logs, on the road between Jaipur and Agra.

March 26: back in Hyderabad. This is the pool for our apartment complex; note the contrast with the world beyond the wall:

March 26-30: days in the office, nights out, including an evening trip the India School of Business, shopping for Indian clothes with two of the women in the office, and dinner with one of the sub-teams, at a super-nice restaurant (Celebrations) in Bangalore Hills. This was the only time I ate outside in India (that's not a window, it's an opening in the wall, and there was no ceiling):

Cultural differences: this is the remote control for the air conditioner in my room. I didn't have one for the TV:

March 31: part of the team took me out to see Hyderabad itself. The view from Charminar of the street where "bangles" (bangle bracelets which Charminar is famous for in India) are sold:

and a cafe where we drank chai from tiny cups, with pastry on the side. People sit for hours here - sometimes two people over one cup of chai.

I also drank sugar cane juice and ate some kind of fruit whose name I don't remember, both delicious, both from street vendors - which resulted in one of the India team member's telling someone else, "she'll try anything!" about me. Which felt good, but really, with half a prescription left of Cipro and all the things that I so bravely (!) tried being vegetarian, how far wrong could I go?

Or maybe I just got lucky.

We finished the day with Golconda Fort, which was started in the 13th century and added to over the years:

and then dinner at Angeethi, where we entertained ourselves before our table was ready by pretending to push each other into this fake well:

and I had a hell of a hard time saying goodbye to people. I haven't written about the team much here, but they were amazing. Imagine meeting several dozen people who are all extremely glad you've come, who emphatically want you to like their country, and who are also some of the most sincere people you've ever met. In email, I resorted to saying, over and over, "thank you for making me feel so welcome," and I meant it every time - but it never seemed like quite enough.

April 1: my only day sightseeing on my own (well, ok, with driver, but he stayed in the car). I went to Birla Temple (Hindu), which I have no photos of because they don't let you take any, the Qtub Shai (sp?) tombs:

which were the bleakest thing I saw - dry death, unfiltered and unameliorated, and back to Golconda, since the day before we got there just in time for the evening "sound and light show" and so I hadn't been able to climb to the top:

From there, I headed back to the guesthouse, took a swim (my first and only) in the pool, finished up some work, went out to dinner with a few other expats at Peshawri (my favorite restaurant of the trip - why, why did I only make it there on my last day?!), and then to the airport and that 22+ hour flight home.

Favorite things: people. Never have I felt so welcome.

Least favorite things: lack of solitude. Between drivers, guides, the people who made us dinner at the guesthouse, and the expat culture (imagine perpetual backpackers, but as adults with laptops and quarterly corporate goals), the only time I spent alone was in my room at night. Would this be enough to keep me from going back? No, but I'm glad I spent as much time with the locals as I did - they were a lot easier to take than the expats. Somewhere in all the travelling I've done, I've gotten what you might call "eccentric" if you're a friend, or "cranky" if you're not. I travel for a lot of different reasons, but to the extent that I travel to "find myself" (what a silly phrase), I get real irritated real fast by people lurking in a servant role. For better or worse, that means I find solitude and self when I find anonymity: big cities, paired up with solitary treks in an urban or a national-park-type landscape. When I need to straighten out my soul it'll be the American West, or Europe.

All of which means I had a fascinating time. If or when I go back, I'll try to get work to pay for a business-class flight - and I'll spend the weekends on the places that looked so tempting this time around: the Golden Temple, Varanasi, Chennai....