Why I live in India.
Melissa A. Bell -
Wednesday, September 02, 2009 1:15 PM
Okay, it took me slightly longer than a day, Jose, my apologies.
(For those not intimately engaged in our comment conversation, Jose, a reader on this blog, asked why I came to India. Something tells me he would prefer to ask why the heck haven’t I left yet—and he’d be happy to show me the door—but, as is his way, he was very polite.)
I think about this question—why India?—a lot because I get asked it a lot. I’m home in California now and no one who lives here, in this seemingly perfect little beach town, really understands the appeal of living somewhere it takes 24 hours on a plane to reach. And that isn’t right next to the ocean. And that doesn’t have Starbucks lattes on every corner.
But I left this town when I was 18 and I kept moving, almost every year, until I wound up in India where for some reason I’ve been for three years. So maybe the question isn’t so much why I came. But why I stayed.
After all, I came for the simple reason of procrastination. I did not want to get a job. My journalism school offered a program where, after graduation, you could go work abroad for an extra semester. I had already lived in Europe, so I said that I would apply for the program so long as they could place me in any country not in Europe or North America. That was the extent of my planning ahead.
They offered me Cambodia and India. India seemed sprawling, unknown, and also more present on the world stage, journalistically speaking. But Cambodia has beautiful beaches. It was a roll of the dice.
I wound up at the Hindustan Times with Aditya Sinha as my editor. It’s probably his fault more than anyone else’s that I stayed. He didn’t really know what to do with this naïve white girl that showed up in his office one day. Plus he’s got a strange sense of humor. Rather than have me hovering over him at the office, he sent me off in the care of Mayank Tewari, one of his most, well, insane-in-the-best-possible-sort-of-way reporters. I followed him around the city eating roti with Afghan refugees and singing late into the night with Sufi saints.
One evening, Aditya and the rest of his team introduced me to Old Monk. I got to know it very well. Then he told me to head off early the next morning to Old Delhi to navigate the crowded streets for ten hours in the middle of June. I spent the next evening in the hospital attached to an IV drip.
Eventually he started to suspect I would pretty much follow any of his directions. He tested this hypothesis by suggesting I go cover the sex scandal in Kashmir, a suggestion my graduate school strictly forbid. I wound up a few days later in Srinigar floating on Dal Lake, confounded by the world around me.
I was in love. It was a beautiful, messy, strange, constantly in-flux place. But when my internship ended, I headed home.
Once back in the US, Raju Narisetti, the former editor of Mint, gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse: come back to India and help launch a national newspaper with the financial backing to support it’s growth.
In the US, in case you’ve somehow managed to miss all the moaning and groaning of the US media, the newspaper has been dying for some time. Most financial backers are loath to support established, successful city papers. A person would be locked in the loony house if she attempted to try and start a new one. (And three years ago this was even truer than it is today. Now there is an intriguing revolution in the US media, with innovation and creativity pouring in as people try to create new ways to present journalism. But that’s neither here nor there.)
I wasn’t sure I should come back. I thought I should keep working in the US, put down roots, become a productive member of society—that old song and dance. But, at the end of the day, I had a pretty cool chance to experiment in the profession I love.
I stayed the second time around. Mint thought they were going to be rid of me after six months. But once I stopped walking around with the “whoa, look how crazy this country is” blinders on, I started seeing the country for what it is--and couldn't leave.
Part of it was a realization that it was not just my industry that was expanding like crazy. I had heard the growth story before I came. But it was an all-together new thing to experience the stark difference between a country stagnating and a country exploding. At that time the US was a country rife with apathy. I believe that more than anything else led my country in disastrous directions. People just weren’t excited about things. Even worse, people didn’t care. It was all about keeping to the status quo. In India, people cared. People wanted. People were fighting and experimenting and trying. You walked around and the air felt rife with possibility. It seemed that new companies, new ideas, new art, new music were stumbling and jumbling their way out into the world in every direction. It was a pretty addictive feeling to be in a place that felt so alive.
But there are other reasons too. India has something I’ve never known: a deep, palpable history. I remember visiting the campus of what would eventually become my university at Georgetown in Washington, D. C. I became enraptured with its main building, a gothic stone structure with a perfect clock tower pointing into the sky. It was so OLD. So rich! It was built in 1879. You take a wrong turn in India and you stumble onto a tomb of a man who died 500 years before the first stone was ever laid at Georgetown.
And likely the biggest reason why I’ve stayed in India, and why so many people probably do: it seems endless. Each May as the sweet quiet nights of winter disappear like a snap and the crushing blow of summer arrives, I say, “I’m leaving. I know this place. I don't need to live here anymore. I need to go find out about the rest of the world.” But I don't move. I know nothing about the place, even three years later. And the rest of the world is in India too.
Even the things that drive me crazy about the place is too often missing in the US. Take, for example, my invasive, nosy, argumentative landlord. She is guarding over the home her husband built next door to the homes his two brothers built 70 years ago. The home her children grew up in. The home her grandchildren left for college. The sense of family, unity, and community exists in degrees in the U.S., but nowhere as intensely as it does in India.
And slowly, wonderfully, India’s burrowed under my skin. I have people who love me who live there. And people I love live there. When I’m away I miss the morning crows on my roof, wandering Hauz Khas at dusk, sitting on my balcony late into the night as wedding fireworks light up the sky.
I don’t know how long I’ll live there. I suppose only until next May. I also suppose I might be saying that for a few more years at least.