Traveling (or not) in India

I feel ashamed, and a bit ticked off, that I have not traveled as I dreamed I would in this confusing, maddening, amazing country.  I will use my scapegoat excuse...my kids.  They are 5 and 8.  They will not eat Indian food, they need a bathroom every two hours, and I am just not keen on listening to the incessant "When are we going home?  I'm tired!!!"  I have resigned myself to the fact that we are NOT going to travel here.  No Taj Mahal.  No Goa.  No distant temples.  Damn!  I wanted to see so many things with them!  I am already planning, in my head, a return trip when the youngest turns 15 and will eat more than pasta, so we can see a few places.  In some ways I feel I am missing out.  In other ways...well...

I live in a wealthy gated community here in Bangalore.  This is by no means the *real* India.  Here they have sewer pipes, as opposed to slabs of granite covering stinking fetid trash strewn open water ditches, also known as "sidewalks" here in Bangalore.  There is no trash in this community.  When I take my daughter to school, however, trash abounds. Her building is next to a "recycling center" in Bangalore.  This means there are piles of plastic bags, plastic bottles, rubber hoses, cd's etc. Piles 20-30 feet high next door to my daughter's school.  I feel badly dropping her off every morning, but not because of the trash.  Trash is ever present here.  It is in the water, it is burned and it is in the air, it is strewn on the street for stray dogs and cows to pick through.  It is in every empty lot left in the city.  There does not seem to be any real strategy to getting rid of trash other than to throw it on the first bare patch of grass you see, or burn it.  As I said earlier, the trash is not what makes me feel badly when I drop my daughter off at school each day, it is the family that lives in the "recycling center" that grips my heart.  2 babies, scarcely clothed, toddle about.  The house is scrap metal held together I don't know how.  Trash is piled up on all sides of the place, even on the roof.  There are small pinprick holes in the side to let in some light.  This is actually not as bad as it gets in India.  Their house is made of metal, and they have a government sanctioned job paying out rupees to people who bring in recyclable material.  Down the road a piece, others are not so lucky.  They live in tarps, bound together to make tents.  I can't count all the tents in the community; there are just too many.

When I ask other families about traveling in India, I get mixed reviews.  Some love it.  Others say don't bother; the pollution is worse in other cities, so why spend the money on travel to "get away"?  To see a temple?  Temples are on every corner here.  To see the "real India"?  I walk out my gates and see that every day.  So no travel for me & mine.

Instead I have started volunteering at a government school, teaching English.  The kids sit on the floor.  They have 1 pencil each, and ready smiles.  I wear a saree once a week.  I love dressing up!  I point things out to my kids when I can; the stray dogs, the trash, the smiling kids.  I want them to remember the "real India", and hopefully they won't resent me later on for not dragging them to every historic sight in the land!  I still wish we could see a couple places here before we leave in 4 months, but unless the kids learn to like chiles and learn to hold it on long trips, it's just not going to happen!

"Do you have change?"

One of the funniest bits about being in India is the money.  Now, it's the basic base 10 system, so it should be very easy.  However, for some reason the comma is used in a different spot when you get into the really big numbers, and this sometimes causes me mild confusion.  Pick a site from the web after searching "rupee" and "lakh" and "crore".  You'll see what I mean.  A lakh is written as equal to 1,00,000 rupees.  So...is that 1 million or 100,000???  A crore is 1,00,00,000 rupees.  Is that a billion?  10 million?  100 million?  And then there are lacs, which sounds awfully similar to lakhs, but is worth a different amount.  Are you getting confused, too?  So when you see an advertisement on a billboard for "luxury apartments starting at only 3 lakh", you wonder if that's a good deal, or if things are getting REALLY expensive here!

So I will try to explain.  1 lakh is 100,000 rupees.  1 lac (sounds almost the same...really helps the confusion doesn't it?) is 1,000,000 rupees and 1 crore is 10,000,000 rupees.  I know, I know...why not save the word "crore" until you got to a billion?  My question, too.  Now you know those luxury apartments were starting at 300,000 rupees.  Is that a good deal?  Well, you have to do a couple a things to get an answer.  First, divide by 45 to get a dollar amount (we get about 45 rupees to the dollar right now).  Then, watch and see how they are made.  I don't care how much rebar is used in construction here.  I've seen the skeletal structures of too many unfinished buildings.  I wouldn't want to live in anything more than 2 floors!

Now I've gotten off topic (as I am prone to do) from my topic.  I wanted to tell you about the hilarious aspect of Indian culture that is shopping.  Not the haggling bit; that I'll write about another time.  Here I want to simply discuss change.  When you go shopping in the states, you give the cashier money, and if change is required you receive it.  End of story.  Not so in India.  Here, you will be asked ALWAYS...:Do you have change?"  Because for some mysterious reason, the cashier NEVER does.  No matter where you go.  This gets increasingly funny when you start to factor in little things like the ATM...which only dispenses 1000 rupee bills.  Now add to that the fact that nobody wants to GIVE you change...but they always ask for it.  Answer me this; if nobody will give change, how are you supposed to have any to give to the next guy who asks if you have change?  Eventually we learned to just answer "no, I do not have change".  Then it becomes interesting to see change appear.  Sometimes it is right in the till.  Other times the employees literally ask one another for the needed 36 or 158 rupees.  I always wonder how that works out at the end of the day.  Or they go to their boss who has some box of change hidden away somewhere. But I still have a hard time understanding how anyone can operate a business without change in the till!?  It used to drive me crazy, literally, but it has slowly dissolved into only a minor annoyance.

I'll be going to the grocery store later, with my 1000 rupee note from the ATM.  They may not have what I want in stock, and the produce may be of questionable quality, but I know I can count on one thing.  When I get to the cashier and hand her my money, she will look up at me and ask..."Do you have change?"

August 11, 2011 HIRED HELP

It has been nearly 1  1/2 months that we have been living in India now.  I am slowly adjusting to life here, but some things are still a puzzle to me!  For example; hired help.  Most people back home do not have hired help.  Not since our grandmothers' time, anyway, when people hired a mother's helper to assist for a short time around the house after children were born.  Some people back home might have a maid come once per week to do floors and bathrooms, and that's about it.  It's very different here.  Very nearly the first question asked of me upon arrival was "Do you have help yet?"  The reason for this seems to be that help is comparatively inexpensive here.  It costs between $120 and $300  per month for a maid/cook/nanny to come 6 days per week, 9 hours per day, depending upon experience, ability to speak English and your ability to negotiate wages!  At home, this kind of help would cost upwards of $2000 a month, so roughly 10 times what it costs here.  I have not availed myself of hired help yet, except for a driver, whom we must have as we are not allowed to drive here!  I think it has something to do with insurance and, as I mentioned in the previous blog, the state of driving here in Bangalore!  Now, I am not familiar with several aspects of having hired help, and add to that a few nuances of  Indian culture, and the situation is almost laughable.

Let me begin with our first driver.  Aside from being young and an aggressive driver, he was a player.  CONSTANTLY looking for a way to make a buck.  Now, prices in Bangalore have skyrocketed since the influx of western companies.  It was already crowded from the huge Indian Air Force presence here, and then add companies like Accenture, Target, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and IBM, and you've got real inflation going on.  Regular everyday workers have difficulty paying rent since prices have gone through the roof, so I can understand our driver's need to look for money where it can be found.  What I could not get past was the complete disregard for his job in the process, and his belief that he could get away with it.  In short, after dropping my husband off at work he was supposed to return to the house so I could go shopping or use the car as needed.  He returned alright...later and later every day. I'd wait 2 hours, 3 hours...with no food in the house and 2 hungry kids crying "I'm hungry!".  This was during my first week here.   No amount of "You must return to the house IMMEDIATELY" seemed to work.  I think he was using the car as a taxi.  It turns out he had a girlfriend, whom he said was looking for work.  I hired her, hoping it would cut down on the late arrivals.  Nope.  Then they just BOTH showed up later and later every day.  After they hadn't shown up one day 4 hours late, I was done.  I felt horrible letting his girlfriend go.  She was a sweetie.  Our next driver was GREAT...for 1 day, then he showed his true colors.  He drove so aggressively that our son got car sick.  After 4 days, we were assigned another driver.  He is the driver we have now.  He is older, drives carefully, and I really like him.  I still don't know how to treat "help", though.  I am too nice, and supposedly that leads to being taken advantage of..  Other western family's advice seems so cold: "You can never be nice to them.  Give an inch and they'll take a mile."  But these are people, trying to make a buck like anyone else.  I've worked for someone with that "treat underlings like crap" attitude and hated every second.  I certainly don't want to be the one doing that to someone else!

So I am thinking hard on getting "someone to help out".  The driver is not optional.  But a maid or cook would be.  Aside from freeing up my time (cleaning is constant here, to keep bugs at bay, and I spend HUGE amounts of time in the kitchen), doing for yourself is just not done here!  I constantly get funny looks from people when I sweep my front walk, water my plants, and take my kids to the park.  I can read the question in others' eyes..."Can't you afford help for that?"  So different from the states, where the eyes go up when someone DOES have help; the thinking being "WOW! You must be RICH!"  I'll keep you posted!

Well here we are in India.  We have been living here 4 weeks now and I believe I should have started this blog sooner.  I am quickly becoming used to many of the things that startled me to see the first 2 weeks.  The oddities that make visiting a new place so interesting are becoming commonplace to me now.  For example, the traffic!


My husband and I lived in New Jersey for a couple of years, and have always joked about drivers from that state lacking in manners and/or ability (no real offense meant to New Jersey drivers; we all know every state has its fair share of crazies on the road!).  I mention New Jersey drivers to illustrate the point that they seem tame in comparison to drivers in Bangalore.  The streets here are narrow, made for 1 car usually.  The larger roads, built recently, are made for 4 lanes of traffic, 2 lanes each direction.  Bangalore drivers somehow manage to squeeze 3 car widths into what should be 2.  They maneuver and honk CONSTANTLY.  They veer around pedestrians, scooters, motorcycles, autorickshaws, buses, trucks, and cows and slow down for the ever-present speed bumps that were randomly thrown in to control speed.  They turn when they have no business turning; with buses and trucks bearing down on them (and you, as their passenger!).  Yet somehow they make it work.  Rarely do I see an accident, or hear of road rage.  Sharing space is simply a part of being.  There is absolutely NO sense of entitlement when it comes to space on the roadways.  They just share it.  


Other sights on the roads that made me stare at first, but now seem commonplace, are families in auto rickshaws, or on scooters or motorcycles.  Apparently I wasted $150 on a car seat because people here get along just fine without them!  It is quite common to see families with young children riding in an open sided auto rickshaw.  Mom may or may or may not be holding onto their children while they stand 2 inches from the open edge of the vehicle.  Also often seen are families of 3 and 4 riding a scooter or motorcycle.  Dad drives, Mom rides behind holding baby, and the older child rides between Mom and dad.  I think it was the absolute trust on the women's faces that got to me the most when I would see that.  They had no doubt about getting to their destination safely, even as their husband maneuvered the motorcycle between 2 large trucks.  Maybe I misinterpreted the look.  Perhaps it was resignation.  After all, if you can afford motorized transport instead of walking, you take it.  Being a pedestrian in Bangalore is not something I want to be very often.


As I have already described in some detail, traffic in the city in India is overwhelming.  Imagine being a pedestrian when there are so many vehicles on the road there isn't an inch to spare!  Now, there are sidewalks in India.  But infrastructure maintenance here is not the same as in the U.S.  If something under the sidewalk needs to be worked on, they may very well tear up a 20 foot span of walkway...and never replace it.  So pedestrians very often need to venture into the road...amid the horrendous traffic.  Once again, though, it just works.  Like the cows, vehicles just go around them.  The most difficult thing to watch in heavy traffic is pedestrians trying to cross the street, especially if they are mothers with young children.  But vehicles do slow down to let them cross, just as vehicles slow down to let other vehicles cross.  There are few traffic lights here, so traffic, motorized or not, makes and follows some unwritten code of conduct which seems mainly to consist of the basic tenet "take it when you can get it, but be careful of others in the process".  Not a bad rule.