India's Son Preference

　　India's son preference is actually better described as a daughter dis-preference. The latest India census data found only 927 girls for every thousand boys nationwide. India is in the center of an epidemic of female feticide, and, strangely, modern technology is to blame. When ultrasounds became available in the 1980s, "doctors" opened private clinics all over rural India that advertised sex-determination tests——a miracle solution to the perennial desire for sons. Low-income villagers were encouraged to take their fate into their own hands and abort the fetus if it was female.

　　The UN says two thousand girls are aborted every day now in India. In some parts of the country, there's such shortage of marriage-age girls that families are forced to share the same wife among several men or import brides from other states. I reported from one village in eastern India where every other household had a paro, or outside bride. Sex-selective abortion is now a crime in India. But although doctors can be imprisoned for revealing the gender of a fetus, they'll offer hints after an ultrasound instead. Tehy will say, "Your child will be beautiful like Lakshmi," if it's a girl, or they'll make a V sign for victory if it's a boy.

　　……

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P225
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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Besides Dowries

　　Radha's worry wasn't whether the girl was ready; it was how to fund the wedding. It had never crossed her mind to plan an event within her means. If she was to secure for her daughter an alliance that would get her out of the slums, she expected that she would have to meet the groom's family's highest standards for the nuptials. Wedding are, in general, the biggest lifetime expense for Indians of all income groups. Middle-class Hindu weddings mean a guest list tipping into the thousands and two full weeks of religion rituals, parties, and dinners——in other words, lifelong debt. In today's India of conspicuous spending and Bollywood glitz, the richest grooms arrive at their weddings in helicopters; their banquets feature extravagant flourishes such as spurting chocolate fountains. Indians spend an average of thirty-two thousand dollars on a wedding. That's seven thousand dollars more than the average American spends, even though Indians earn only 10 percent of the American per capita income.

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P197
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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Why Should I Talk to You?

　　I'd recently returned to Delhi from covering the Indian Ocean tsunami and its aftermath. When the quake hit, the day after Christmas, I'd abandoned my family vacation, deaf to my mother's pleas, and taken the first flight out to Sri Lanka, where the death toll was rapidly rising. Sri Lanka is a tiny teardrop-shaped island nation off the southern coast of India, and the tsunami had turned it inside out. Along the southern coast, train tracks were twisted up into tree branches like a roller coaster gone wrong. A woman's nightgown fluttered like a pink flag above a fisherman's leveled shack. The bloated, stinking carcasses of buffalo floated in ocean lagoons. In the relief camps, everyone was drunk on moonshine.

　　"Why should I talk to you? My whole family is dead. What can you give me?" the fishermen would ask.

　　I'd give them the stock journalist answer——that hearing their story could help influence the U.S. government to send more aid. There was truth to this reasoning, but it felt like a cheap lie. After weeks of reporting the disaster, I'd started to lose faith in the very mission of journalism. In a hotel bar in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, my journalist friends talked about where the "sexiest" part of the story was. What they meant was where the most bodies were. I felt as though we were all competing with one another to squeeze painful tales out of as many victims as we could find and get the grisliest stories first.

　　In one relief camp, my driver——who doubled as my translator, to save money——helped me interview a man who's lost everyone except for one lanky preteen daughter, who crept over to me as I talked to him and put her in my lap. I stayed stroking her hair long after I finished talking to her father, even though my driver had been agitating that we had to find somewhere to stay for the night before it got dark. When she sat up, my jeans were damp from her tears. I gave her money, even though I knew I shouldn't since I planned to use her father's interview on the radio. In spite of the intimacy of that moment, I can't even picture her face anymore. It has run together with all the other lyrical, brokenhearted Sri Lankan faces.

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P186~187
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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They Who Fueled the Fast Expanding Economy

　　Some forty millions Indians are illegal squatters in bustees. They are the underside if the new India, the migrant workers who fuel the fast expanding economy. The Indian government never built low-income housing for its rural migrants, as did the United States, Europe, and, more recently, China. Instead, immigrants from the hinterlands rely on city slumlords, who pay off local politicians to protect the slums. The politicians allow the shantytowns to stay standing because that guarantees them the votes of the inhabitants and protect their careers. It's a perfect circle of corruption, at least until the politician is voted out of power. The the city comes in with bulldozers.

　　This time, the Supreme Court had ordered all "riverbed encroachments" to be cleared, in an effort to save Yamuna from further pollution. Ten thousands of people were expected to be moved out of their shanties on the Yamuna Pustha, the embankment of the river. Radha had a flicker of hope in a rumor she'd heard that Delhi government was allotting alternate land, far outside the city, to jhuggi owners who could produce their paperwork. The idea of trying to negotiate India's opaque officialdom was deeply intimidating to Radha, though. With neither formal education nor street smarts, she found it a challenge just to get around the city on a normal day. Radha couldn't tell time, so she had to rely on the height of the sun in the sky, and it was often blocked by buildings or smog. She couldn't read numbers, so I made calls for her from my home phone. She always asked someone on the street which bus to board; she couldn't identify the bus routes from the signs.

　　……

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P146~147
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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Simmer First Boil Later

　　“My mother always said that getting into a relationship is like heating water: First simmer, then boil. The only way to be sure is to marry first and wait for love to come later. Americans have it backward—you expect the water to come to a boil first. When the relationship cools down, you’re disappointed, and you break it off.”

　　This bit of metaphorical wisdom gave me a pause. I was relived when the Subway delivery boy arrived with our sandwiches. We sank onto cushions on the living room floor to eat, and I was silent for a while, thinking over what she'd said. When I first moved to India, I'd felt a classic American revulsion for arranged marriage. The lack of choice made it seem loveless; the emphasis on the caste and dowry seemed crass and monetary; the classified marriage ads on the Sunday papers read like a spooky, parent-sanctioned meat market. I couldn't fathom the idea of my mother picking my mate for me. and it seemed fundamentally unfair that the girl had to abandon her independence and her past to enter the next stage of life./

　　A couple of years in India had soften my views. For one thing, I'd realized that India is scarcely alone in its interest in aligning the backgrounds of married couples. Statistic about U.S. marriage show that the vast majority of people choose a mate whose income, group, race, and education match their own. When I thought about it, most of my boyfriends had mirrored my race and socioeconomics status. I'd been raised to think　I should find a partner whose experience and tastes matched my own, so that I wouldn't have to compromise my essential self.

　　"What will you do if he wants to watch sports all the time and you want to listen to jazz?" I remember my mother saying. "You'll have to spend your life in different rooms. How awful."

　　I'd focused my efforts on searching for someone whose beliefs lined up with my own, and I'd chosen men who were, in fact, too much like me. If Benjamin was emotionally distant and independent to an extreme, he was no more so than I. We were perfect example of the "boil first simmer later" model. I think I must have read too much of John Keats's poetry as a teenager, because I seriously believed that a romanticized idea of love was the highest pinnacle of human relationships. Issues such as timing, life goals, and even monogamy all seemed pedestrian.

　　Talking to Geeta made me wonder whether I might have something to learn from Indian marriage after all. She'd grown up believing that it wouldn't matter if she and her husband had different likes and dislikes; it was in any case a wife's duty to adjust to her husband's preferences and fit in with his family. Although that sounded a bit much, I had to acknowledge that there was something to be said for compromise. If my boyfriend was openhearted and caring, it might not matter whether his political views or taste in clothing perfectly matched my own. Maybe a little simmering wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P139~140
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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Deciding Who They Would Marry

　　My friend Kalpana, a newspaper columnist in Mumbai, told me once about a speech she had given to a group of students at a women's college. She's been asked to talk to them about the ways women's lives were changing in India and instead found herself talking about all the things that have stayed the same. Kalpana asked the students to biggest issue in their lives; they all said marriage. Then she asked for show of hands from those who would be responsible for deciding who they would marry, and none of the women stirred. When she asked how many wanted to be able to make that decision, all the hands flew into the air. The experience stuck with her.

　　"It's a terribly frustrating time for young women," she said. "they're allowed to make all kinds of choices that previous generations of women couldn't make in India——what they will study, where they will work, where they will live. And yet, when it comes to the most important decision of their lives, their parents don't trust them with it. It's like they're only partly allowed to enter the real world."

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P133
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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By Taste and Smell

　　Parvati had little in common with Rahda other than her preference for traditional home-cooked vegetarian food. She and Vijay would happily "take whiskey" at the Delhi Press Club, but rarely would they eat there, because they considered restaurant food inferior in quality and cleanliness. Parvati went to extremes to keep globalization out of her kitchen. Like Radha, she shunned store-bought and packaged ingredients. She made her own yogurt out of fresh milk, and chapati out of wheat she bought in bulk; vegetables she prepared were all fresh and locally grown. Her kitchen was a low-tech and traditional as Radha's: She cooked exclusively out of three tin pots and no electric mixers or processors.

　　Parvati was also particular about doing the cooking herself——she only occasionally outsourced sous-chef duties to her part-time maid. She never used a cookbook; she'd memorized dishes by watching her mother as a child. And yet each of the North Indian dishes she made——lentil dals, bean dishes, vegetable curries——required half a dozen spices to achieve a subtle complexity of flavors. Even though she used the same spices night after night, somehow each dish tasted different from each other. She'd begin by roasting them in a pan, then grind them with a mortar and pestle; she'd fry them in specific order to achieve right blend of flavors. Parvati measured in pinches, handfuls, and lidfuls and seasoned the dishes instinctively, by taste and smell.

　　……

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P93~94
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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Delhi Press Club

　　The Delhi Press Club, Vijay's favored drinking joint, attracts a rather less exclusive crowd: Indian journalists, almost all of them male and as hard-drinking, chain-smoking, and cuss-mouthed as American newspapermen of the 1950s. They throng the bar in crumpled button-downs, tossing back whiskeys and handfuls of spicy fried Bombay mix, and trying to best one another with tales of political scandal. The place is windowless, run-down, and raucous, with TV sets blaring Hindi news channels. When I walked in, a half-beat of silence fell across the smoky room as a number of the men paused to take note of the unlikely sight of a feringhee girl in their midst. I was worth just that——a glance——before they returned to their stories.

　　I wandered outside to the patio and Vijay in the falling dusk. He was with the only other woman in the bar, whom I took to be Parvati. She was wearing a white salwar kameez, a wool shawl pulled around her shoulders against the late October chill. Her makeup was the traditional kind that Geeta disdained for Western-style colored eye shadow and lip gloss. For centuries, Indian women have lined their eyes with dramatic black kohl and painted a black or red bindi dot on their foreheads——women from upper-caste maharanis to 1930s Bollywood heroines. Parvati was dressed like a pious virgin, and yet, lined up on the table in front of her were a pack of Gold Flakes cigarettes, a bottle of soda water, and a shot of amber-colored whiskey.

　　Vijay introduced her with a grand sweep of his hand. She was one of Delhi's best political reporters and one of the few women who's been asked to join the press club, he boasted, then added, "She also really cares about issues, which is unusual among most of the journalist choots you see in here." Vijay's words slurred together boozily, and his English was peppered with Hindi profanities that he must have restrained himself from using during our interview; I soon learned that Hindi curses are an essential accessory among the Delhi Press Club set.

　　……

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P75~76
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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Language Imperialism

　　Although Parvati's father had learned English in high school, her mother's education had ended in the fifth grade, when she was expected to prepare for marriage by mastering domestic skills. You wouldn't know it from educated middle-class circles in Delhi and Mumbai, but fewer than a third of Indians speak English. There are twenty-one other official languages in India, not to mentioned 844 officially recognized dialects and thousands of other unofficial ones.

　　English was, of course, the language of the British colonialists, but Indians English words to communicate with foreign traders as far back as seventeenth century. They spoke a pidgin dialect known as Firangi, which was the same root as feringhee. During the independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi called the English language a symbol of colonialism, even going so far as to say, "To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them." But when India's leaders proposed Hindi as an alternative, South India politicians denounced that, too, as "language imperialism". Because Hindi has never been spoken in South India, choosing India's official language was the single greatest controversy in the writing of the Indian constitution. Since no single tongue could satisfy India's heterogeneity, Hindi was named the "official language of the union" with English to be used for "official purposes of the union."

　　Today, English is spoken in the courts and financial markets. It is much more than bureaucratic babu-speak, though; it is the language of those who aspire to a better life. Like many lower-middle-class Indians, Parvati had spoken her local dialect at home and learned Hindi at school. English was her third language, and it was only with persistence that she became fluent. For many Indians, the effect of the fractured language policy is that they end up speaking multiple dialects badly.

　　Judging people's speech is a quick way to take a measure of their class and caste in India. If you can't tell their upbringing from their clothes or occupations, you can tell from how strongly accented their Hindi or English is. Both Radha and Maneesh spoke vernacular Hindi speckled with only the occasional word of English, though they both longed to be familiar with the tongue that they associated with well-paid jobs in the private sector. Of course, neither of my maids could afford to send their children to private schools, so they had resigned their children to the limits of the Hindi language.

　　The Hindi speaker's world may be one of smaller job horizons, but it is far from restrictive when it comes to culture: It's the tongue of politics, Bollywood, cricket, and religion. Parvati's mother lived a full life inside the language, avidly consuming Hindi news shows, magazines, and books. She was closed off from fully half of her daughter's experience, though, because Parvati worked for an English-language paper and spoke the sassy urban patois of Hinglish——delivering most of the information in English and the punch lines and curses in Hindi.

　　……

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P65
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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Bollywood stayed Bollywood

　　In India, the movies mean Bollywood, the film industry whose name conflates Hollywood with Bombay, where the first Hindi-language film was made. Even after Bombay was renamed Mumbai in an effort to free the city of its colonial legacy, Bollywood stayed Bollywood. It churns out at least two hundred films a year, each costing less than a million dollars——a sixth of the average price tag of a Hollywood film. Profilic, popular, song-filled, and sentimental, Bollywood films almost always swoon over the three-hour mark. As a result, they all have intermissions, during which theater concession stands rake it in selling spicy veggie burgers, samosas, and "American snacks" such as caramel popcorn.

　　Movie soundtracks are Bollywood's best promotional tool. In the weeks before a bid studio release, music videos of the songs take over TV channels. The songs are recorded by army unseen "play back singers" but associated in perpetuity with the actors who have lip-synched them. I'd hear Geeta humming a new film tune, and later that day, Joginder's cell phone would announce itself with the same song. India's star culture is even more obsessive than our own. Hollywood has the celebrity website TMZ, but in India, Bollywood gossip isn't relegated to the niche media: it is often a top story on the nightly news. Many movie stars have actual, real-life shrines erected to them, and when they are not literally being worshiped, their faces everywhere, from well-produced TV ads for toothpaste to hand-painted movie billboards on rural unpaved roads.

　　Bollywood's biggest romantic hero, Shah Rukh Khan, is best known as "King Khan", though Geeta preferred to refer to him by the less obsequious nickname "SRK". He's produced a stunning five dozen films over his career of almost twenty years. When he was named one of Newsweek's fifty most powerful people in the world, the Indian media treated it like a national accomplishment; when he was invited to present a Golden Globe Award, Indian announcers said it spoke to the country's growing might; when he was detained at Newark airport in 2009, presumably because of his Muslim last name, the TV channels called it a "national humiliation".

　　……

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P52~53
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2

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