Kill Bill, Vol. India

This week, our marketing has been focused in the village of Chirawa, a town about 30 minutes away from Bagar. We have been extremely successful here- in the past couple of days, we have collected over 300 names, and the registration hotline has been ringing non-stop with job-seekers. Today was our second day in Chirawa, and we set up camp near the market place and bus station, under a nice shady tree. Throughout the entire morning and afternoon, we had crowds of men swarming around us, registering, or asking questions, or simply wanting to see what exactly was up. The morning was fairly uneventful. Harsh, Pankaj, Deepak and I were marketing, and there was the usual ogling and unnecessary remarks about me and my American/girl-ness. Overall though, it was calm at sea, and there was no reason to think the rest of the day would be otherwise.

OR WOULD IT. Sometime around 4, when the sanity gods were on a rest break, and the rest of the world was happily enjoying a couple of Mai Tai cocktails on the beach, all hell broke loose in Chirawa. And by all hell I mean two incidents that left me with an extremely unpleasant taste in my mouth, one of those "What the....?" moments that question your decision to leave the comfy confines of reality television and hamburgers. The afternoon became rather Quinton Tarantino all of a sudden, so let's use that as our theme here, shall we?

Kill Bill Vol. 1:
I was standing behind the table with Harsh, handing out some business cards, when an older gentleman ambled over. By which I mean stumbled over; this 65 year-old was clearly inebriated. He came and stood near the table, asked some questions that I obviously couldn't understand (language barrier+slurring=unlikely deciphering). Harsh was put off by him, and kept telling me to step away and sit down. The thing was though, this man wasn't acting inappropriately. Sure, public drunkeness was definitely being committed, but he wasn't talking louder or asking more questions than the next one, and he hadn't even stared at me! For this I quite liked him. As I was explaining to Harsh that everything was fine, a stretched-out police officer strode over, all puffed up in his tan uniform and matching medals. With one hand twirling his moustache, the other arm reached out and yanked the older man by his collar, pulling him into the street. By this point, a rather large crowd had formed, anticipating some sort of "necessary action". I couldn't really hear anything that was going on, but the old man was in no way resisting arrest (although nothing close to an arrest was being made), nor was he making any effort to come back to the Mobile Naukri table. Clearly none of this mattered to Colonel Mustard, as he began to hit this old man, first slapping him across the face, which knocked his glasses clear off, and then punching his arms.

I felt like the police officer had just punched me in the stomach. I couldn't believe my eyes. Here, in the largest democracy on Earth, in a country that was born out of a non-violence movement, a people that idolize Gandhi-ji, a police officer was blatently assaulting a man who had committed nothing that merited physical violence. I was more shocked by the fact that people were laughing! No one but me seemed the least bit upset at humanity. The sad part is, police brutality is a huge problem in India. While this doesn't constitue a violation of human rights as we might see (the guy obviously wasn't being tortured), it's still a serious problem in the governance of India. When you have police officers who are so puffed up on their own government-given testosterone, how can you expect a society to run without issues of corruption and violence? What kinds of conditions do these police officers in low-income villages work in, that make them think the best way to solve the problem of a public nuisance is to turn them into a punching bag? Human Rights Watch came out with a 118-page report on police brutality in India in 2009, titled "Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police", and I urge any of my readers interested in this topic to read it. A synopsis is available here.

Kill Bill Vol 2.:

So after that debauchery, I thought things might, you know, not be so freaking crazy. Ha! What fun would that be? Once again, I am back at my stomping grounds (handing out cards behind the table) while Meg is walking through a small gathering of people, also handing out cards. All of a sudden, she comes back to the table in a huff. Some creepy dude grabbed her arm, asked for her number, and insisted several times that she "come with him." For some reason, she declined his oh so charming offer, and came and stood by me. Meg is not the one to mess with, she is full of sass and spice, and I think that had she more amino acids in her body, laser beams might have shot out of her eyes at this man. And what a man he was! A strapping 5 foot nothing, rather pudgy around the middle, ill-fitting (why is this so common here?!) pants and shirt, and that terrible tendancy to always have one hand grabbing his crotch. Yes sir, it's still there, no need to keep checking. I think he took Meg's cold dismissal as an invitation to hang out with the Mobile Naukri interns, because he took a seat near Siler and initiated the most bizarre conversation I have ever had relayed to me. This guy spoke great English and it went a little something like this:
Creeper: "You are very lonely here."
Siler: "What...No?"
Creeper: "No you came all the way from America, you are very lonely. You have no friends."
Siler: "I have friends! Meg and Sarah and Harsh and Pankaj and Deepak...I am not lonely!"
Creeper: "You have cuts on your hands and arms?"
Siler :"Excuse me?"
Creeper: "You should come to my house, no one will cut you there."
Siler: "I'm just gonna....go...now."

Siler came and stood by me and Meg. I could feel the clammy breath of desperation on my back as the creepy dude came closer to me. He called out for my attention. "Nope, not happening," I thought and did some sort of athletic maneuver to remove myself from the situation. What was wrong with this guy? He still wouldn't go away! Pankaj then came over and Meg told him what had happened. It took Pankaj less than thirty seconds to walk over to the guy, utter some harsh Hindi, and banish him from the table. Sort of. The guy ended up walking a bit down the street, only to talk to the police officer from Vol. 1. Don't you love when weird people find each other, it's like when someone realized that goat cheese and beets were a delicious combination. The creepy man continues to stare at us, and proceeds to take out his mobile phone to snap a couple of sniper-esque shots of us handing out Mobile Naukri business cards.

At this point, it was getting really uncomfortable, so we packed up everything and walked it down a couple of blocks to the institute where we are storing our things for the week. Sahil is friends with the director, so we went to his office (up two flights of stairs) and sat down. We were talking to him about our day, when all of a sudden we looked up and THE CREEPY DUDE WAS STANDING IN THE DOORWAY. Nails on a chalkboard, the Jaws theme song, and creaking bicycle wheels all played in my head at once. The end was near. We were all going to die at in this office in Chirawa at the hands of the creepiest man ever to grace this world. Oh, but I forgot, we have Pankaj on our side. In a heartbeat, Pankaj had one hand on the guy's collarbone, one pressure point away from a snapped bone. He yelled at him for a while and then pushed him out of the office and to the stairs. We thought the guy had left, but Pankaj looked over the balcony and he was still standing outside of the building. Pankaj rallied the troops (Deepak) and the two men went downstairs and "taught this guy a lesson." Then they came back up and we drank chai, no big deal.

I felt equally upset about this incident. I think that this man was mentally disturbed; there was no way any sane person wouldn't pick up on those painfully obvious social cues. I was upset that he had touched Meg though, and made all of us feel extremely uncomfortable. All this violence and aggression in the span of a few short hours was a side of India that I had never experienced before, nor gave any thought to. It doesn't change my opinion on India, nor the people that I have met, but it does make India seem like less of a magical, spiritual place. Human nature is not cultural; people are messed up everywhere in the world. It was a terrible way to be reminded of this, though.