Update
After Jaipur, I returned to Delhi where I met up with some people from Bombay to attend a Supreme Court hearing about hawking zones in Bombay. It was quite an experience, because the legal system is very different here. All the lawyers wear black robes and the 40 or so of them that were petitioners in the case all crowded in front of the 3 judge panel. The judges didn't seem to know all of the details of the case, so they sort of mumbled their way through the case, while the lawyers shouted over one another pointing out facts of the case. Who knows if what they were saying was even correct. Eventually, the judges decided to postpone the case until January 16th because apparently some people hadn't received the proper paperwork. How anti-climactic.
I hated Delhi. I spent another day there meeting with hawkers. It is a huge sprawling capital city, with ridiculously wide roads and arguably the worst traffic in the world. I felt like we spent the entire day in teh car traveling, without really getting anywhere. Also, because it's so horizontal and sprawling, all the people are also spread out. Delhi is as horizontal as Bombay is vertical. So it seems like there are hardly any people on the street. Consequently, it's also notoriously bad for women. I was happy to be leaving.
From Delhi I took a train to Calcutta, which is on the east coast of the country, something like 3,000 miles from Bombay. There I was to spend 5 days with a very charismatic hawkers leader that I met at the Indian Social Forum. His name is Shaktiman Ghosh. Shaktiman means "powerful man" and is also the name of a powerful superhero character in India - kind of like the Indian superman. I went for an event on the 24th of November - the anniversary of a massive Calcutta-wide initiative to evict all the hawkers from the streets in the name of World Bank-pressured beautification. That was in 1995. On that first day 18 hawkers committed suicide at the prospect of not being able to provide for their families. But under the leadership of Shaktiman, the hawkers fought for something like 2 years. Sometimes it was like warfare: burning buses and defending themselves with sticks and clubs against police beatings. And since then the hawkers have only gained power. Now they have access to every street and they have few problems with the police because the unions are strong and work hard for the hawkers. Shaktiman eats, breathes, and lives hawkers' issues. He sleeps only 4 hours a night, and even then I imagine that he is dreaming ideologically. He comes from a family of freedom fighters... both his mother and father fought for Indian independence, and his father and uncle were both imprisoned for over a decade. Shaktiman first got involved with hawkers when he was about 15 and saw some police harassing some hawkers outside his school. At that time he was a student activist, so he encouraged teh hawkers to fight back and lay down in front of the police vans. Since that day the hawkers sort of elected them as their leader. Now he is 52. He has worked his entire life for hawkers, and never took a penny in payment from the unions. He lives incredibly modestly on the savings he earned working for one of the national banks. At that time he was probably one of the highest paid people in Calcutta. So he worked for a few years and put almost all the money away so that he could live on it and devote himself entirely to activism. Now if he needs some money he buys some stock, sells it in the evening and makes what he needs.
In the 5 days that I was in Calcutta, I spent almost all of my time with Shaktiman, staying up until 1 in the morning talking about life, love, and ideology. On the 24th, thousands of hawkers participated in a rally to the mayor's office. I think in an earlier journal entry I posted links to some photos of me that were put in the papers here. Here they are again:
http://cheryl.jdeutsch.com/CherylIndia1.pdf
http://cheryl.jdeutsch.com/CherylIndia2.pdf
I was very sad to leave Calcutta. Shaktiman's daughter is about my age and also into Gender Studies. We like a lot of the same authors. Her fiance also works for the hawkers' union and is a great guy. I felt like kindred spirits with everyone in Calcutta. In addition, the food in Calcutta is amazing. Bengal, where Calcutta is located, is known for its sweets, which might be the best in the world. Consequently, my hosts served me sweets at every meal. Some of my favorites are jelebi (bright orange spiral fried dough that is then dipped in sugar syrup... when you bite into it it tastes like you're eating fried sugar juice... yummm). Rasgulla is another bengal specialty: its soft spongy white balls in sugary syrup. When you bite to these the sweet syrup gushes out of the spongy balls. A similar sweet is gulab jamun, but these have a brownish color and a little bit different texture. Indian food is so varied and diverse that I could go on and on. I still haven't experienced even a fraction of all the amazing foods here.
Since coming back to Bombay, as I've written, I moved to a permament place, which I'm still enjoying very much. I do feel like I have some sort of regularity in my life, but that doesn't mean things have settled down exactly. There's always a thousand things going on here. Inspired by my visit to Calcutta, I think, I've become much more involved in the activist scene in Bombay. My research is coming along really well. I know most of the major players in the hawkers' unions, as well as a lot of smaller leaders. And I've gotten to interview a lot of hawkers in different areas of the city, as well as in Navi Mumbai, which is a satellite city of Bombay. There a friend and I have begun organizing hawkers as well. The situation with hawkers is so incredibly political in Bombay. The leaders all have egos, refuse to work together, and actually do very little for the very poor people that they represent. I inevitably have to take a position in this politics, as well, and just yesterday one of my allies was telling me that other leaders had been discouraging him from inviting me to meetings and such. There is a lot of corruption within these political spheres and within these unions, and they don't want someone poking around finding out too much. It's pretty thrilling, actually, to be considered a threat. Of course, to my face they are all smiles and warm words. Ha.
I'm also helping to launch a campaign against Wal Mart and the growth of corporate retail in India. Wal Mart has announced plans to enter India, in partnership with an INdian corporation, on August 15th - Independence Day. This, as well as other Indian-owned Wal Mart style retail chains that are popping up, pose a huge threat to India. The number one source of employment in the country is agriculture. Second is small retail. 98% of the country's retail is mom and pop style shops. Hawking is also a major source of employment. One Indian corporate, Reliance, has already started an American-style grocery chain: buying up farms and running them on a huge scale, investing in cold storage, making supply more efficient, and opening fancy air-conditioned stores where their prices actually compete with hawkers on the side walks. In this process, however, they employ far fewer people than work in the less efficient system of farming and hawking. What will small shop owners and hawkers do when they are beat out of the market by corporates? Hawking is already a last resort option for the poorest of the poor because it requires very little capital and no skill to start up. Corporatization thus poses a huge threat to the stability of India, as I see it. A better alternative is to allow Indians to lift themselves out of poverty, through self employment, saving, and good old fashioned hard work. That way, the profits that would be accumulated in teh hands of a few at the top of a corporate ladder instead remain in the hands of millions of small scale workers.
As I said, my days are all quite different, but a rough schedule goes something like this:
6:00 Wake up and go jogging in a nearby dairy colony with Dilip.
8:00 Household stuff like sweeping, washing the floor, cleaning the bathroom, washing clothes. I'm very much enjoying life without "time saving devices" like a washing machine. I wash my own clothes by hand and clean the floor with a rag on my hands and knees. You have no idea how exhausting these tasks are. Especially washing clothes. When you wash clothes by hand, your body becomes the agitation mechanism. Afterwards I'm always pleasantly exhausted.
9:30 Breakfast downstairs. (I pay the family downstairs to provide me with meals. I really lucked out in that they are from a part of the state where I think my favorite Indian food comes from: Maharashtra, right near Goa. The food is very fresh, fishaterian, with lots of healthy vegetables and pulses, and uses a lot of coconut juice in the cooking. They also make wonderful sweets.)
10:00 Usually my friend Amar stops by to say hello. His English is about equivalent to my Hindi, so speaking with him I usually get about 2 or 3 new words per day. Also, the family downstairs doesn't really speak English, so my Hindi is getting a lot of good practice.
12:30 Lunch.
Usually I either have to go out in the morning or after lunch for meetings or something. Sometimes the meetings aren't until the evening. In the evening if I'm bored I'll stop by the local community youth center, Joy Social Club, where there are always a slew of children doing their homework who I like to spend time with. Also, a lot of the friends I've made in the community stop by in the evenings on a regular basis, so I'm never lonely and practically never alone. It's a nice life, actually.
9:30 Dinner.
I've been learning a lot about Indian music. Dilip, especially, as well as my other friends, are into folk songs and old Hindi songs, as well as pop Bollywood music. We spend a lot of time at my place listening to Bollywood music on my computer and dancing. They are also teaching me old Hindo love songs, which are beautiful. I've never been very confident in my singing ability, but it's a skill I'm acquiring here, and wherever I have the chance to perform people are always shocked and thrilled that I can sing the songs that all Indians love.
Anyway, enough for now. Thanks to everyone who's been sending me postcards, and please keep them coming. I LOVE to receive mail from people, and I'm loving the postcards from different places. As of now I've received several from Florida, Kentucky, Buffalo, and Richmond.
I hated Delhi. I spent another day there meeting with hawkers. It is a huge sprawling capital city, with ridiculously wide roads and arguably the worst traffic in the world. I felt like we spent the entire day in teh car traveling, without really getting anywhere. Also, because it's so horizontal and sprawling, all the people are also spread out. Delhi is as horizontal as Bombay is vertical. So it seems like there are hardly any people on the street. Consequently, it's also notoriously bad for women. I was happy to be leaving.
From Delhi I took a train to Calcutta, which is on the east coast of the country, something like 3,000 miles from Bombay. There I was to spend 5 days with a very charismatic hawkers leader that I met at the Indian Social Forum. His name is Shaktiman Ghosh. Shaktiman means "powerful man" and is also the name of a powerful superhero character in India - kind of like the Indian superman. I went for an event on the 24th of November - the anniversary of a massive Calcutta-wide initiative to evict all the hawkers from the streets in the name of World Bank-pressured beautification. That was in 1995. On that first day 18 hawkers committed suicide at the prospect of not being able to provide for their families. But under the leadership of Shaktiman, the hawkers fought for something like 2 years. Sometimes it was like warfare: burning buses and defending themselves with sticks and clubs against police beatings. And since then the hawkers have only gained power. Now they have access to every street and they have few problems with the police because the unions are strong and work hard for the hawkers. Shaktiman eats, breathes, and lives hawkers' issues. He sleeps only 4 hours a night, and even then I imagine that he is dreaming ideologically. He comes from a family of freedom fighters... both his mother and father fought for Indian independence, and his father and uncle were both imprisoned for over a decade. Shaktiman first got involved with hawkers when he was about 15 and saw some police harassing some hawkers outside his school. At that time he was a student activist, so he encouraged teh hawkers to fight back and lay down in front of the police vans. Since that day the hawkers sort of elected them as their leader. Now he is 52. He has worked his entire life for hawkers, and never took a penny in payment from the unions. He lives incredibly modestly on the savings he earned working for one of the national banks. At that time he was probably one of the highest paid people in Calcutta. So he worked for a few years and put almost all the money away so that he could live on it and devote himself entirely to activism. Now if he needs some money he buys some stock, sells it in the evening and makes what he needs.
In the 5 days that I was in Calcutta, I spent almost all of my time with Shaktiman, staying up until 1 in the morning talking about life, love, and ideology. On the 24th, thousands of hawkers participated in a rally to the mayor's office. I think in an earlier journal entry I posted links to some photos of me that were put in the papers here. Here they are again:
http://cheryl.jdeutsch.com/CherylIndia1.pdf
http://cheryl.jdeutsch.com/CherylIndia2.pdf
I was very sad to leave Calcutta. Shaktiman's daughter is about my age and also into Gender Studies. We like a lot of the same authors. Her fiance also works for the hawkers' union and is a great guy. I felt like kindred spirits with everyone in Calcutta. In addition, the food in Calcutta is amazing. Bengal, where Calcutta is located, is known for its sweets, which might be the best in the world. Consequently, my hosts served me sweets at every meal. Some of my favorites are jelebi (bright orange spiral fried dough that is then dipped in sugar syrup... when you bite into it it tastes like you're eating fried sugar juice... yummm). Rasgulla is another bengal specialty: its soft spongy white balls in sugary syrup. When you bite to these the sweet syrup gushes out of the spongy balls. A similar sweet is gulab jamun, but these have a brownish color and a little bit different texture. Indian food is so varied and diverse that I could go on and on. I still haven't experienced even a fraction of all the amazing foods here.
Since coming back to Bombay, as I've written, I moved to a permament place, which I'm still enjoying very much. I do feel like I have some sort of regularity in my life, but that doesn't mean things have settled down exactly. There's always a thousand things going on here. Inspired by my visit to Calcutta, I think, I've become much more involved in the activist scene in Bombay. My research is coming along really well. I know most of the major players in the hawkers' unions, as well as a lot of smaller leaders. And I've gotten to interview a lot of hawkers in different areas of the city, as well as in Navi Mumbai, which is a satellite city of Bombay. There a friend and I have begun organizing hawkers as well. The situation with hawkers is so incredibly political in Bombay. The leaders all have egos, refuse to work together, and actually do very little for the very poor people that they represent. I inevitably have to take a position in this politics, as well, and just yesterday one of my allies was telling me that other leaders had been discouraging him from inviting me to meetings and such. There is a lot of corruption within these political spheres and within these unions, and they don't want someone poking around finding out too much. It's pretty thrilling, actually, to be considered a threat. Of course, to my face they are all smiles and warm words. Ha.
I'm also helping to launch a campaign against Wal Mart and the growth of corporate retail in India. Wal Mart has announced plans to enter India, in partnership with an INdian corporation, on August 15th - Independence Day. This, as well as other Indian-owned Wal Mart style retail chains that are popping up, pose a huge threat to India. The number one source of employment in the country is agriculture. Second is small retail. 98% of the country's retail is mom and pop style shops. Hawking is also a major source of employment. One Indian corporate, Reliance, has already started an American-style grocery chain: buying up farms and running them on a huge scale, investing in cold storage, making supply more efficient, and opening fancy air-conditioned stores where their prices actually compete with hawkers on the side walks. In this process, however, they employ far fewer people than work in the less efficient system of farming and hawking. What will small shop owners and hawkers do when they are beat out of the market by corporates? Hawking is already a last resort option for the poorest of the poor because it requires very little capital and no skill to start up. Corporatization thus poses a huge threat to the stability of India, as I see it. A better alternative is to allow Indians to lift themselves out of poverty, through self employment, saving, and good old fashioned hard work. That way, the profits that would be accumulated in teh hands of a few at the top of a corporate ladder instead remain in the hands of millions of small scale workers.
As I said, my days are all quite different, but a rough schedule goes something like this:
6:00 Wake up and go jogging in a nearby dairy colony with Dilip.
8:00 Household stuff like sweeping, washing the floor, cleaning the bathroom, washing clothes. I'm very much enjoying life without "time saving devices" like a washing machine. I wash my own clothes by hand and clean the floor with a rag on my hands and knees. You have no idea how exhausting these tasks are. Especially washing clothes. When you wash clothes by hand, your body becomes the agitation mechanism. Afterwards I'm always pleasantly exhausted.
9:30 Breakfast downstairs. (I pay the family downstairs to provide me with meals. I really lucked out in that they are from a part of the state where I think my favorite Indian food comes from: Maharashtra, right near Goa. The food is very fresh, fishaterian, with lots of healthy vegetables and pulses, and uses a lot of coconut juice in the cooking. They also make wonderful sweets.)
10:00 Usually my friend Amar stops by to say hello. His English is about equivalent to my Hindi, so speaking with him I usually get about 2 or 3 new words per day. Also, the family downstairs doesn't really speak English, so my Hindi is getting a lot of good practice.
12:30 Lunch.
Usually I either have to go out in the morning or after lunch for meetings or something. Sometimes the meetings aren't until the evening. In the evening if I'm bored I'll stop by the local community youth center, Joy Social Club, where there are always a slew of children doing their homework who I like to spend time with. Also, a lot of the friends I've made in the community stop by in the evenings on a regular basis, so I'm never lonely and practically never alone. It's a nice life, actually.
9:30 Dinner.
I've been learning a lot about Indian music. Dilip, especially, as well as my other friends, are into folk songs and old Hindi songs, as well as pop Bollywood music. We spend a lot of time at my place listening to Bollywood music on my computer and dancing. They are also teaching me old Hindo love songs, which are beautiful. I've never been very confident in my singing ability, but it's a skill I'm acquiring here, and wherever I have the chance to perform people are always shocked and thrilled that I can sing the songs that all Indians love.
Anyway, enough for now. Thanks to everyone who's been sending me postcards, and please keep them coming. I LOVE to receive mail from people, and I'm loving the postcards from different places. As of now I've received several from Florida, Kentucky, Buffalo, and Richmond.