January 28, 2020 – Insta-Reflections (Part 1)

I don’t know what time it is. I’m wearing my Garmin and its clock is tied to my phone which is currently in airplane mode. I don’t know where we are. Every seat back entertainment system in sight isb’t working. I don’t know who is around me because this flight left Delhi at 3 AM local and is en route to Beijing. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, most people are wearing masks… including all of the flight crew. I have a mask I bought for the air quality in India… and I never used it there (though perhaps could have in Delhi). I am also unable to get comfortable and sleep so the world is a fuzzy haze of delusional non-sleep.

It’s been a strange trip… and while I saw a lot of things in a short amount of time, I barely saw anything at all that the vast nation of India has to offer. And I do mean offer. There’s a stereotype that India is a dirty, downtrodden place. And while that can be true (as it can also be true of, say, Hollywood, CA, USA, facing a homelessness crisis the likes I’ve never seen before), India also is a place of great beauty, history, and tenacity. This is the republic that wore down the British Empire through acts of non-violence.

But this is also the republic that currently is in danger of failing as we all seem to be the world over. A campaign to strip Muslims of India citizenship is an offense to the very idea of democracy; it is the stuff of nightmarish, totalitarian dystopias.

The disparity between rich and poor in India isn’t just a gap, it’s a chasm that can swallow hope and lives. I saw a ridiculous excess of wealth, be it a multi-billion dollar high rise in Mumbai for a single family or the splashes of gold leaf and jewels bedecking temples and holy shrines. And I’ve seen the smallest of rooms, floors cracking, walls crumbling, housing a family of five, six, ten. And those rooms were stacked on top of each other in a hyperactive kid’s illogical logic of interlocking LEGOs.

I have no insights really, a big, bold statement that can sum up “India” or “my enlightenment,” the latter because I’m not sure I’m markedly different than when I first arrived in India. I’m still uncomfortable photographing squalor or people in hardships. I would see tourists snapping photos of beggars and people lined up for free food at the temples. When I was given a tour of the temple’s kitchen, however, I was more than happy to take photos, to show humanity working toward helping fellow men and women.

I’ve been thinking a lot about photography in general. A lot of people were trying to get shots of themselves with nobody else around at various sites and monuments (The Taj Mahal, for example). I can appreciate the desire to make it seem like you had this perfect moment alone with the place but to me that feels like a misframing. Not for other people – everybody is entitled to pursue their own preferred method. But I kinda like seeing other people in the background of my photos. It shows I think a more realistic view of what it was like in the moment, a context of what is and what isn’t. It also helps provide scale, again, supremely important when you’re looking at something as overwhelming as the Taj Mahal. But there’s more to it than just that – those people that pop up in my personal photos? They each have their own stories to tell; I may be in the background of their snapshots. And this isn’t because I hope some day Lisabeth Salander tracks me down to get my digital photos in order to prove somebody was or was not where they claimed to be in a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo spin-off. It’s because as someone fascinated with stories, I like to imagine the thousands of stories happening concurrently with my own snapshot. In that way, it’s about both context and scale – I’m just one part of a larger panorama, and those people are just a small part of my self-centered universe.

We have landed in Beijing and it’s a cluster. We have to fill out health forms stating if we have any flu like symptoms, if we’ve been to Wuhan in the last 10 days, where we can be reached for the next ten days, etc. And this is just for my transiting in the airport to catch my connecting flight. I’d ballpark it at 100% of the staff and 80% of the passengers are all wearing masks. Hell, even I am. I look like a DC Comics’ Bane children’s Halloween costume. It’s actually kinda scary … not my mask and my woefully inept Bane impression (I can Tom Hardy mumble with the best of them), but scary seeing this outbreak thing like we’d see in a sci-fi horror movie.

Scott Joplin plays over the PA system and I’m reminded of my initial reaction to the Wuhan closure – I wondered if this wasn’t just a ploy by the Chinese to crack down on their populations, to force protesters off the streets in Hong Kong out of “health concerns,” for locking down cities that may be trouble spots. In the last 4 yours I’ve grown increasingly cynical and distrustful of sweeping government actions curtailing movements, freedoms, and ideals both internationally and domestically. This is the way of the world at the moment.

I’m actually not worried about contracting the virus or anything of the sort… but it doesn’t hurt to rock the breathing mask as an added precaution. When in China, do as the Chinese do, yeah? But it all feels a bit… panicky, knee-jerk reactionary. Absolutely, it needs to be dealt with in a systematic and intelligent way… but at lot of quarantine and containment is virtually impossible in this day and age of global travel… and given our current state of play in climate change, maybe it doesn’t matter what we do anyway.

This is all a bit dark and morose which is odd coming at the end of the trip like this… but maybe that was the spiritual awakening I took from India. It’s a tough world and we make the best of it.

My driver Budhiman had a saying as he took us around and we would fight our way through Tuk Tuk traffic jams or water buffalo herds or down narrow streets:

“No worry, no hurry… no chicken curry.”

I don’t exactly know what that means but it seems funny every time he said it. A few days into the trip, he added another line:

“No worry, no hurry… no chicken curry. Only Whiskey. And Vodka.”

I’m not sure what the Hindi words are for “let the good times roll” but I think that’s where this was heading.

This all is a very first-blush, sleep deprived rambling of my immediate impressions of India. There is a lot to process… and a lot of photos to try and sort through. Over the coming days, I’ll look to post the entries I wrote on the road and maybe add a few things here and there. But for now, I need to board my flight and get back to the US of A.

In the pursuit of self-actualization, I felt removed and distant from the world and its concerns.  It’s time to go home.