Tag Archives: Delhi

did we ever enjoy ‘white privilege’?

Posted on July 5, 2010 by | 43 Comments

A reader name Gayatri recently emailed us this pointed question:

Had a question for you guys. Have you ever been out clubbing in Delhi or to a pub in the evening. Would they let you guys cut the queue and let you enter even if to the rest of the people waiting they’d say the club is full?? :) It kind of co-incides with the privileges to white-folk in India. If you guys have a story regarding – think it could be funny, especially with the humor you two have. :) Hope to see both of you in September!

We’d be lying if we didn’t admit skin-based advantages are bestowed on foreigners in India. Auto drivers, for instance, would hone in on us at the expense of everyone else waving their arms at them. (And they’d give us choice grumbles when we’d refuse to cut ahead of those who’d been bypassed their rightful ride.) The sidewalk chaiwallah near my office would always boil a fresh batch for me, even as he poured from a premade kettle for the factory workers who arrived the same time as I did. And while the guards at Saket Citywalk would grope us for poorly-hidden bombs just like every Indian shopper — as if Al Qaeda’s training manuals advised keeping their explosives in their front pockets — their hands always seemed to linger more tenderly with us.

Wait, that’s not a good thing.

Also, Al Qaeda always obeys signs. Image by Flickr user 3_second_memory.

So we don’t deny that white people are given deference in India. But Jenny and I will insist that we never actively took advantage of it. Especially when it came to queues.

In fact, there were many times when our foreign-ness made us easy beacons for queue abuse. Our American standards of personal space always meant three or four fellows could slip into queue in front of us between the moment our eyes began to blink and the moment the blink was completed. If we weren’t constantly crotch-checking the people ahead of us, we learned, we might as well be moving backwards.

Image by Flickr user Loulou H.

And there was certainly no advantage for us at tourist sites — we’d have to elbow our way up to the ticket counter just like everyone else, jamming our fistful of bills under the metal grating along with all the others, waving the sweet scent of sweaty rupees under the ticket taker’s nose until his eyes met ours and our transaction was complete.

We certainly could have bulldozed queues and hopped unrightful autos like the worst of the tourists. Such modern expressions of the Imperialist mindset are impassively tolerated by the citizens of our host country; Indians are far more polite to Western rudeness than we Westerners would be to such behavior back home. But Jenny and I saw ourselves as ambassadors, and we fashioned our queuing behavior accordingly.

In fact, we recall a time when our fellow back-of-the-queuers tried to invoke our “white privilege” for us. This was at the conclusion of our birdwatching trip to Bhatarpur, when we decided to catch the late afternoon train back to Delhi rather stay another night and leave as scheduled in the morning. Arriving at the train station, we dutifully joined the 20-person queue; but, being off the tourist track as we were (Bharatpur gets its share of Westerners, but most have arranged their tickets in advance), we were quickly noticed.

“Ticket Queue – Bharatpur Junction Railway Station – India” by Flickr user string_bass_dave. (Who isn’t me.)

“You please go,” said the man directly in front of us, gesturing to the head of the line. Other nearby members of the queue signaled their agreement. But Jenny and I shook our heads and smiled in polite refusal. They insisted again. We refused again. They gestured more adamantly, insisting that our ticketing needs outweighed theirs; we refused more theatrically, insisting that progressive values can be no better illustrated than via a multiracial ticket queue.

Our egalitarian insistence won the day. Although twenty minutes later, when we reached the window and discovered we’d been in the wrong line the whole time, we kinda wished it hadn’t.

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Incidentally, when Gayatri said, “Hope to see both of you in September!”, she was talking about our book release party. She knows about it because she’s on our mailing list (and following us on Twitter).

We’re expecting the big event about a month before the Commonwealth Games. We already know the official title, which we’ll reveal, along with the cover design, soon. (The title of our book is NOT “Our Delhi Struggle” — as we’ve mentioned before, we regret that name, and we’re not going to make the same mistake.)

Beyond Delhi, we’re hoping for release events in Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, and so on. You, dear reader, have direct influence in the matter: email us to join our mailing list, and then pledge in the comments below that you’ll attend an event in your city. Our publisher will surely take note.

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Posted in living in Delhi

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ideas for India’s future

Posted on May 12, 2010 by | 3 Comments

Jogging through the sweaty streets of Singapore with this talk on my iPod, I surprised the mynah birds with a few shouts of agreement to what Nandan Nilekani has to say in the video below. It’s well worth fifteen minutes of your time.

If you would rather read than listen, you can find a transcript here.

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Posted in thinking about delhi

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hot sweaty bribery

Posted on June 24, 2009 by | 9 Comments

Delhi is peppered with small parks — 18,000 of them, if The Hindu’s dubious figures are to be believed. Most of them are small community parks, where any open space is claimed by boys playing cricket and any secluded bench is occupied by young couples trying to escape Delhi’s incessantly prying eyes. But a few are big enough to appear as bright green splotches on the maps of Delhi that hang obligatorily in every expat’s living room. One of those is the Jahanpanah City Forest, adjacent to GK II.

In our time in Delhi, Jenny and I yearned for fresh air and open spaces. But despite the fact that Jahanpanah City Forest had both, we never returned to its 800 acres of scrub forest and meandering paths — not after the experience we had there on Jenny’s very first day in India, when I’d been in the country all of a week.

Only rookies like us would have entered the forest at all, seeing as it was a scorching August Saturday with the sun almost directly overhead, ensuring the trees alongside the path were unable to shade us. We each felt the sweat drip down our backs and refused to admit that this had been a mistake, that maybe we should have waited until the evening to go  hike. It didn’t improve things that we had no water, and it further didn’t improve things when we got a little lost, and any hope for the improvement of things became a forgone impossibility when the policeman appeared on his motorcycle and began to blackmail us.

“Park closed! Park closed!” he repeated menacingly, miming to us that he didn’t speak English but somehow finding words to explain that we had to get on his bike so he could take in to pay a 30,000 rupee fine for being in the park during closing time. Or, you know, we could pay him 5,000 rupees right then and there.

Panicking and terrified (I read Shantaram; there’s no way I’m going to Indian jail!), I called my landlord and asked him to speak to the cop. After a discussion, the phone was returned and my landlord apologized on behalf of his country. “This man is only trying to extort a bribe. I suggest you give him nothing.”

As our understanding of the situation finally clarified, and we started shuffling our feet and edging away, the policeman’s demeanor changed. His glowering was replaced by pleading. “Gift for policeman!” he begged, blocking our way, his eyes tearing up.

I was unsure about the consequences of ignoring him. I worried that not bribing a policeman might be an arrestable offense. And I was totally ignorant of the going rate for a bribe. So I opened my wallet and tentatively handed him 400 rupees.

Suddenly his English seemed to get better. “Please, ma’am,” he asked Jenny as the money disappeared into his pocket. “I beg of you. Double that!” She shook her head warily.

And then his demeanor changed again. He grinned broadly, gave first Jenny and then I a tremendous handshake, and pointed us down the proper path to return to GK II. He watched us to make sure we took the correct fork in the road, and waved happily as we walked down the path towards home.  I deeply regret not taking his picture; I’m sure he would have eagerly posed with us.

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Posted in living in Delhi

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a zoning violation

Posted on June 16, 2009 by | 1 Comment

The smell would appear suddenly every two to three weeks, billowing up the stairway from the basement of Jenny’s office building, each time making her think that something had gone terribly wrong and that evacuation of the office was imminent.

“Stench” is a better word than “smell”, Jenny tells me: these were terrible stenches for which Jenny had no frame of reference within an office environment. It wasn’t stagnant urine from improperly-plumbed urinals, as plagued my Gurgaon office’s stairwell; and it wasn’t rot from a refrigerator opened after weeks of forgotten festering lunches. It saturated all four floors of this nondescript four-story building; it crawled underneath her office door and stabbed at her nose while she worked.

But only Jenny seemed bothered. While she coughed and choked, everyone else went about their business.

One day, fed up from mouth breathing, Jenny made some enquiries. While the top four floors of her building were home to one of India’s best-known advertising agencies, the basement housed a distributor of raw and processed meat products. Among their clients, it was rumored, were many of the Subway franchises that had sprung up all around Delhi.

Which meant that the smell was meat-related. Whether it was meat being cooked, strips of flesh curing in the basement heat, or blood being burned off a killing floor, nobody knew; all anybody knew was that it was meat. Which made it all the more surprising that an office of vegetarian Hindus were so complacent about the awful airborne particles polluting their bodies by way of their nasal passages.

One day, on a day I happened to be with her, Jenny investigated. There was no smell this day, but she marched smartly down the stairs anyway, with me following mutely along. We entered into a small office area with a single desk, a solitary phone, and a man in a button-down shirt bent over some papers. Through a door on the right we saw a large room, a half-dozen workers sorting meat into plastic packages, a few red-stained rags on the ground, and a few cardboard boxes that were open to reveal more meat. One man was wiping at some red liquid pooled on the packages.

No refrigerators were in sight.

Jenny walked up to the man sitting at a desk: the one employee in the establishment not wearing meat-stained clothes. Behind us, the workers had noticed us, and had crowded around the doorway to watch.

“Hi!” Jenny said. “How are you! I work upstairs. I heard you sell meat. Do you sell meat?”

The man, who hadn’t seen her come in, looked up sharply. His mouth dropped open. This was a distribution point, obviously; customers were neither expected nor prepared for.

“I heard you sell meat to Subway,” Jenny continued. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” said the man. “No! I mean, can I help you?”

“Do you sell meat?” she paused. “Uh, I’m having a party.”

Behind us, somebody said something in Hindi, and a few guys laughed.

“Yes, chicken and pork products, ma’am. Salami. Pork chops. Sausages.”

“You sell to Subway?”

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss that.”

“Uh… do you deliver?”

“Yes.”

“OK! Thank you! I’ll let you know what we decide.”

“But – ” But Jenny was already leaving. I looked at her walking away, looked at the man staring after her, shrugged, and followed her upstairs into her company’s lobby—the owners of which, incidentally, were the one bribing the local authorities not to notice their four-story, fifty-employee violation of the local zoning laws.

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the loneliest walla III: the night watchman

Posted on June 5, 2009 by | 4 Comments

Here is my third essay in this series for The India Tube.

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The Loneliest Wallah (III): The Night Watchman
by Dave Prager
Originally published on The India Tube


“Up here!” I shout down to the street, waving my phone to get the attention of my party guests. I also get the attention of the neighborhood guard, who looks up from his post across from our flat. He sits next to our street’s iron gate, which is closed because it’s after eleven—the dangers of the Delhi night, you see, can be kept at bay by an unarmed seventeen-year-old guard with a whistle. Which is why this guy is hired by the neighborhood association to sit all night, every night, no matter how cold it may get.

My guests see me and wave back. They file out of their auto and past the guard and into my building. The guard watches the girls pass while I disappear back into the warm yellow light. Then he settles back in his seat, a cracked blue piece of weather-beaten plastic that once stood proudly in a hospital waiting room. He wraps his grey blanket tight against the cold wind, sits under the dim naked light bulb hanging from the tree, and waits for the opportunity to do his job.

His job consists of two tasks: closing the gate at eleven PM, and opening it when cars come by.

I come back to the balcony to guide more friends to the party. The guard has started a fire using scrap newspaper and plastic chai cups as fuel. I watch him stamp his feet and smell the toxic fumes and wonder if he knows they’re toxic. But it probably doesn’t matter to him, because it’s cold in Delhi in the winter, except for in my apartment, where the wine is flowing and the glasses are clinking and the sound of our laughter drifts over the guard’s head and into the night.

Some time later, I return to the balcony once more. The guard is sleeping, his head slumped left and his body cocooned tightly in the blanket, but not for long: my friend pulls his car to the gate and honks twice to rouse him. It’s well after two AM. A stray dog, sleeping nearby, doesn’t even look up.

The guard trudges to the gate. He opens it. He watches the shiny car glide past. He closes the gate. He wraps the blanket around his body. He trudges back to his seat.

Upstairs in my apartment, somebody turns the music louder.

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Posted in thinking about delhi

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the loneliest walla II: the bank guard

Posted on June 1, 2009 by | 5 Comments

Here’s my second article for the brand new blog/magazine/community called The India Tube.

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The Loneliest Wallah (II): The Bank Guard
by Dave Prager
Originally published on The India Tube

Last September and October, Delhi became darker and more disgusting. It was an invasion of leafhoppers: fly-esque creatures that feed on the paddy crop in the rural areas around Delhi. They’d been eating good, and heavy rains meant they were drinking good as well; and one day they took to the skies and headed towards Delhi by the billions with the singular goal of smashing themselves against bright lights until they died.

In Delhi’s glass-enclosed ATMs, garishly lit with white florescent to attract light-walleted passers-by, they became the only real company for the stoic and sleepless bank guards.

These guards’ posts became snow globes that someone had shaken (after replacing the snowflakes with squirming black insects). The poor guards stared without expression as bank customers franticly waved their arms to warn the pests off; but the guards didn’t sympathize for entomological discomfort lasting the duration of a single transaction when they were the ones sitting there all night in their florescent cages, the insects crawling on their heads, landing on their mustaches, mating and dying in the air they breathed while thousands more on the outside slammed themselves against the glass walls and fell into piles on the ground, little snowdrifts of black life now lifeless, waiting for the morning sweeper.

It could be worse than being an ATM guard. There is AC in these vestibules, which is nice. There is protection from the sun and the rain and the cold, which is nice. There are people to watch, which is nice.

Every so often a real sight to see comes through the door: like when our friend Trevor, a six-foot-tall black man with long black dreadlocks, wearing a skin-tight tank top, sashayed into our local Citibank ATM lobby on the first day of his visit with us. The guard stood and stared and walked forward for a closer look, as if in a trance, and stood next to Trevor and scrutinized his face for the duration of the transaction. But the sights are fleeting. And any company a guard may have lasts only as long as it takes the machine to validate a PIN.

The ATM guard: he exists because the sum total of the his labor and his cognitive capacity as a human being is valued to be slightly less than the cost of acquiring and installing a security camera. His job is to sit and watch men and women withdraw more money in one go than he might earn in a month.

And, while there are plenty of low-income workers in this city, but few are forced to earn their pay by watching other people count and pocket theirs.

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the loneliest walla I: the auto driver

Posted on May 25, 2009 by | 3 Comments

I’ve been doing some writing for a brand new blog/magazine/community called The India Tube. My first essay is now online. More to come!

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The Loneliest Wallah (I): The Auto Driver
by Dave Prager
Originally published on The India Tube

All the autorickshaws in Delhi appear to have their genesis in the same factory, for all are exactly identical. Before their labor-intensive customization. Variation comes in accouterments added by aesthetically-minded drivers: Shah Rukh and Kareena looking equally sultry in heart-shaped stickers on either side of the rear-view mirror, or life-sized cutouts of scandalously-clad heroines tucked behind the clear vinyl that protects the auto’s side panels and passenger seat from the sweat of a thousand sitters.

More than once I’ve been scared silly by the sudden appearance of a face when I turn my head to see what street I’m on: a starlet I didn’t notice is suddenly pursing her lips at me, a poster positioned there not to promote a movie but to keep a driver company while he spends the night,as auto drivers often do, on the side of the road, bare feet dangling outside, head resting comfortably on a fantasy’s two-dimensional lap.

Imagine if his loneliness was yours: you negotiate fares all day long, but you talk to no one at all. You try to meet a passenger’s eyes in your mirror, but all you see is a set-jaw profile looking anywhere but at you, or a steely glare warning you not look any more.

Confronted with the solitude of the service professional, you too would take refuge in Salman’s biceps or Priyanka’s neckline. Each of them would tell you what you want to hear, if only paper could talk; neither of them will ever ask you to put your eyes back on the road.

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two autos queuing for fuel

Posted on May 8, 2009 by | 3 Comments

IMG_8528

Nighttime at the CNG pumps: a sight we saw all too often because the route to our flat went right by the gas station. So close that we could practically feel our pillows on our weary heads, but too far for walking to make any sense (never mind the traffic and lack of sidewalks on Aurbindo Marg), all we could do is get out and watch. We can’t stay seated and doze — the fuel intake is hidden in a panel under our seat.

So we stand, and wait, and try not to fall asleep, and get stared at while we take pictures to pass the time.

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autorickshaws in Delhi: some practical advice

Posted on May 5, 2009 by | 33 Comments

The best advice we can give to anyone attempting to travel Delhi by autorickshaw is this: ignore the Lonely Planet. While the book usually offers good information, in this instance it fails utterly in its exhortation to only travel in autos that agree to use the meter. The official meter rate, fixed by the State Transport Authority at 4.5 rupees for every kilometer after the first, is less than half of what you can reasonably expect to pay.

Any auto driver who agrees to go by the meter is probably planning to take you from GK I to GK II via the Taj Mahal.

Because the meter is out of the question, every autorickshaw journey begins with fare negotiations. That’s easy to overcome if you know where you are, where you’re going, and the market equilibrium rate for getting there; but for our first few rides in Delhi, the fairness of our fare was entirely up to the honor of our driver, and how adept we were at fooling him into thinking we knew what we were doing.

We know now that no auto ride should ever cost more than 100 rupees, provided you’re sticking to South or Central Delhi. (Nobody knows how much it costs to go to North Delhi because, as far as I know, nobody has ever gone there.) I was not armed with that knowledge on my second day in Delhi, before Jenny had arrived, when I put my fledgling bargaining skills to the test and negotiated a ride from Connaught Place to GK II for 180 rupees, basking in pride during the entire ride in having talked the guy down from the 200 he quoted.

Any auto driver who finds a tourist that ignorant of the market values is going to try to push him for all he’s worth. When we reached my destination, I handed the driver two bills and asked for change. The driver turned around in his seat and started begging me to let him keep the whole 200. And I mean begging—pleading, moaning, eyes rolling and tearing, hands clasped in front of him as he invoked his gods and his children and his poverty and my wealth, all for that extra 20 rupees.

But I set my jaw and stood firm and got my change; and I felt proud that I hadn’t let the guy swindle me out of my hard-earned money. My first major test of my will in India, and I totally won.

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india and nepal say happy birthday dad

Posted on April 17, 2009 by | 8 Comments

Today is Dave’s Dad’s sixtieth birthday. Since we’ve known for a while that we would be in Asia during his big day, we decided to celebrate by asking everyone we met while traveling through India and Nepal last month to wish him happy birthday. Enjoy!

(And we know that the lyrics of Bilo Rani aren’t exactly what you’d sing to your papa, but 1) he doesn’t understand the lyrics and neither do we, and 2) it’s got a great beat. We asked our friends if they knew any Hindi songs that were actually about one’s father, and they suggested this slightly creepy piece. Creepiness begins at 0:30.)

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Posted in outside of Delhi

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