(Blank) You India

I moved back to the United States in June 2018 after nearly 6.5 years in India. If you’re more inclined to accuracy, I was a resident of India for 2,313 days. To be fair, during these years I was fortunate enough to spend months-long breaks in the United States visiting family, and by nature of the work I was a part of weeks and months at a stretch in countries throughout Africa and Asia. Even still, that is an inordinately long period of time and waaaaaaay longer than I had ever imagined I’d be able to live in (on?) the subcontinent.

I have spent the months since my return to the United States getting reacclimated to my home country. It’s been an insanely busy and stressful period of transition, with family weddings and emergencies, re-engagements with friends and loved ones, travel aplenty, and no small portion of reverse culture shock to come to terms with. Many times I feel like Red from Shawshank Redemption marveling at the speed of life and the truly incredible changes that America has gone through since last I lived within her borders; other times I feel like Brooks and wonder if all the change and underlying miasma is a bit too much and consider a return to what is known out there in the ether, if far away and full of its own stresses. All the while, though, there has been a tug at the back of my mind, not too dissimilar from that nagging feeling one gets when they fear they’ve forgotten something important like turning off the stove or paying a bill on time. Only this time, for me, it has been writing this post.

I know without any sense of hyperbole or lack of humility that being able to articulate myself in written form is one of the talents I was lucky enough to be born with. Like a true Irishman, I am also a bit wracked by guilt for not doing enough to develop this talent, opting instead to just wing it. I paradoxically both love to write and loathe it; it’s a torturous experience each time, if cathartic, as I never had any capacity for fiction or poetry or satire: my lone ability is in presenting my reality in uncomfortable earnestness and honesty. Even this is something that took a great deal of effort and consternation to arrive at, but now in comes in waves and with it a compulsion to put pen to paper and share it, warts and all, with others, whether they like it or not. Like Adam Sandler’s Wedding Singer, this is my microphone and you will listen to every word I say.

Writing is brutal. It’s a vicious act of vulnerability that is imbued with a tempestuous torrent of emotional highs and lows. It’s a nagging thing: like paying your taxes or visiting the dentist, you know it’s good for you and important to do, but damn if it’s not insufferable in the moment. Writing about my time in India has been like Poe’s “Telltale Heart”, knocking away at the corners of my mind letting me know it will not, and should not, go away. It’s also my Schrodinger’s Cat as it opens up the undeniable reality that this most formative chapter of my life is over. Despite the contradictory feeling that I had been there forever and my time there had only just begun, this missive means goodbye to that incredible time and place. I take solace in the Suessian proverb, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”, but the salve it provides is fleeting.

In all fairness, I’m not one of these Indiaphile’s who sees only good things from the country. Quite the contrary, and those closest to me whilst there with attest to this, I was rather vocal in the things that displeased me about the place, which were not few. The title of this post is a bit of a nod to that, as I vacillated between five-letter (i.e., “thank”) and four-letter (i.e., well, use your imagination) words to convey my feelings. I guess this is indicative of the conflicting feelings that a place as diverse and unique as India leaves one with.

Part of this was due to the work I was so blessed to be able to contribute to, which by and large leaned towards “social impact” in manifold sectors (e.g., water and sanitation, financial inclusion, education) throughout some pretty harsh contexts. Truth be told, though, it’s also due to a fundamental cynicism that discolors my worldview, even if this is somewhat tempered by an inclination towards conflict that fuels my desire to stand up to injustices and side with the underdog. That said, one significant change that I credit to my time in India is an underlying appreciation for the good things I encounter in everyday life now, irrespective of size or significance: a sunset, a smile; a hot shower, a cold beer; a close snuggle, a distant laugh.

We of means and comfort are inordinately lucky for the stations we have in life. We have won a cosmic lottery of sorts to be blessed with the abundance we have, even if that’s just a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. I’ve had people caution me that these postulations border on sanctimony, but I could care less. After having the great opportunities I have had to engage with people in some of the world’s most challenging contexts and settings, that truth is one I am not afraid to pick a fight over. If we all appreciated that which we have, and by this I mean the practical if intangibles of love and health, the world would be a better place, we would engage with each other in more meaningful and empathic ways, and the toxicity of our dialogue in person and online would wane; that much I believe is true.

These are the lessons, as seemingly rose-colored and naive as they are, that my Indian adventure gifted to me. Perhaps I’ll feel differently as time wears on and I adjust to life back in the “real world”, but I don’t think so. I can really only say this through the lens of my own experience, but I’ll roll the dice and extrapolate a bit when I say that I firmly believe a prolonged and sustained immersion in a culture vastly different from your own, alone, far from home, and in places you’d never imagine or hope to find yourself will lend itself to a seismic, positive shift in your worldview and the manner in which you see others as well as yourself.

When I moved to India, I was a mess personally. I’d just gotten out of a long, difficult relationship (whose challenges were largely, if not exclusively, caused by my own actions) after sacrificing a successful, financially-rewarding career in the United States. I had very little support from my loved ones with respect to continuing pursuit of my dream of living abroad and working in a socially conscious, “development” capacity. I had very little money to speak of, and had only the barest of worldly possessions to my name. All signs were pointing to an attempted return to my previous life in the States, a thought which terrified me as I knew it would not be where my heart was; I’d be settling, and joining the legions of compatriots dragging themselves day-in and day-out to a job that offered little more than the financial wherewithal to consume the material artefacts that promise satisfaction and happiness, but fail to deliver. I’d be knowingly selling my soul and I knew doing so would be devastating.

In this oh-so-cheerful climate, an incredible thing happened: a small design research firm in India took a chance on me, and brought me to the other side of the world to steward the communications mandate for a sanitation initiative they were leading in the country’s urban slums. They knew me as much as I knew them, which is to say not at all, yet here both sides were betting on catching lightning in a bottle. They offered a 6-month contract to start, and I gladly accepted though with the warning that I was genuinely concerned I’d be able to last that long. And so it was, that on a fateful day in February 2012 I boarded a one-way flight to India, alone and a bit terrified, if excited, to see what the other side of the world had in store for me.

My first few years were spent working on a sanitation initiative seeking to provide a viable alternative to the failed approaches afflicting India’s urban slums. The country is far-and-away the worst when it comes to open defecation (i.e., having to use the outdoors to answer nature’s call do to a lack of alternatives) with over half of the country forced into this dehumanizing practice. This translates to upwards of 600 million people open defecating on a daily basis there, nearly double the population of the United States. This was the project that brought me to India, and I knew I’d be spending a great deal of time in the slums documenting daily life and seeking to develop a level of empathy by experiencing a bit of the people’s realities there. There was a certain level of romanticism ascribed to what would inevitably be an overwhelmingly challenging experience when a world away in America. This dissolved fairly quickly when I was actually there in-country and making my first visits to the communities we would be working with and for.

I remember going back to my hotel room after the first visit to a slum and breaking down a bit, completely blown away by the fact that such realities were experienced by so many people the world over. I remember a palpable sense of embarrassment washing over me as I reflected on just how outrageously fortunate I truly was to have experienced the life I’d led up until that point. The complaints I had, the injuries I’d felt I’d suffered, and the injustices of my own life paled to such a grotesque degree it would’ve been hilarious if it wasn’t so profoundly unfair. Selfishly, and in retrospect, these early experiences planted the seed for what would blossom into a much-needed perspective around my need to appreciate all the wonderful things in my own life; boy, did I have a lot to learn, and what amazing teachers I would be blessed with having throughout my entire time in India and throughout the world’s emerging markets I’d come to be blessed with visiting.

Early on it became important to expand upon the efforts to build empathy for the people we were working with to the greatest degree possible. God only knows how or why we were allowed to do this, but a few of my colleagues and I got approval to stay with a family in one of the slums. We ended up making a short documentary about the experience called 3 Pounds of Rice, the title of which is a nod to the near disturbing amount of food that our hosts fed us. I cannot articulate well enough the impact that this stay had on me, but to say it was transformative is putting it very lightly. I was blown away at the generosity of the folks we met, and the grace with which they carry themselves despite the significant challenges inherent to the context they live in.

This project did not go well. At all. What was intended to be a 20-month timeline languished for well over 3.5 years before our team finished our work, and it continues to this day. This is perhaps a great indicator for the challenges endemic to the sector there, and the impact that reality has on people at the forefront of the challenge is significant. I ended up taking over as project manager and, as such, spent around 15 months living and working in one of the host cities. My time there was frustrating to say the least: the apathy of supposed project partners in the government and elsewhere was shocking and it would’ve been easy to throw in the towel and give up. After all, who am I in the grand scheme of things? I’m not Indian, so why suffer needlessly if the effort and emotion I was putting into my daily efforts was not reciprocated?

I think of these times as a critical crossroads in not just my experience in India, but in life, generally speaking. These questions haunted my mind daily and on more than one occasion they damn near won out. It’s difficult to articulate the fundamental shift that took place as there wasn’t one particular moment to zero in on and identify as the time that things changed. However, it was during these struggles that I reflected and introspected a bit. My life up until this point was a meandering series of events culminating in a point in which I needed to decide to run away or dig in, the classic fight or flight scenario. I realized that, much to my chagrin, my life had been repetitive: though contexts and scenarios changed, and sometimes drastically at that, the end result was always me throwing in the towel and giving up. I always hoped that “the next time” would prove out to be better; I didn’t fully understand that there is never a scenario in which everything was perfect or ideal; that irrespective of where I was or what I was doing there would be times of struggle; and that this was not only normal, but good.

I have come to learn, thanks to my time in India, that life is paradoxically simple and profound; it is a state of constant choosing. I had always chosen to see running away as a valid option. In the midst of this maddening sanitation project, amongst people experiencing a daily reality I couldn’t even imagine persevering through, and in the face of abject apathy, I came to appreciate that taking a stand for something, even up against insurmountable odds and inevitable, possibly catastrophic failure, is a much more important choice. Devil be damned, I was going to choose to stand with the people fighting the good fight and take a few swings myself.

Fair enough, there is a certain arrogance in what I was doing in India. After all, who the hell am I? What gives me the right or makes me think that I could do any different? There are many more qualified people in the world that could do a better job, or at least that’s the fear: that someone better than I would have avoided the pitfalls and maybe been more successful. What I came to believe, and what was a bit of a driving mantra throughout all the projects that I was privileged to work on is that what set me apart, and therefore made me qualified, was not only the willingness to try but to do so with a spirit of empathy and compassion for the people we worked with.

During my time in India, I worked in slums, refugee camps, conflict zones, and with people from all walks of life. I made a point of volunteering for the “worst”: no matter what the project was, I wanted to go to the most challenging location, to be responsible for the most challenging work, and to interact with the most challenging people, whether they be clients, colleagues, or people in-context. My colleagues took a chance on me: they provided me an opportunity to succeed and make a difference in the world by believing in me and allowing me to try what I thought was best, even if it meant failing. That was a profound experience. I had never been very confident in myself prior to moving to India, but the faith that others put in me changed that considerably. There is an inordinate amount of pressure and stress working in the social impact space: you will undoubtedly make a significant impact, but what is uncertain is whether or not that impact will be positive. I like to think that my colleagues saw that I understood the gravity of that reality and that inspired them to trust in me.

What is so challenging about India is that it is a complicated, interconnected series of paradoxes: you will see the worst of humanity in the most beautiful settings, urban blight set amongst verdant and pristine parks, absolute affluence abutting abject absence, pure love permeating a heart entrenched in hate and mistrust. This manifests on a personal level too. There were times in which I was made to feel like an unwelcome outsider, but also loved and cherished. Over time, though, the latter tended to win out with those closest to me. My colleagues became friends and then family. The hardest part about saying goodbye to India is that distance doesn’t blunt that love, it just makes it more poignant and yearning.

What is inordinately difficult about spending such a long time living overseas, especially in a context so diametrically opposite of the one I grew up in, is that I am very limited in who I can engage with to talk about the experience. Those who have not risked such an existence simply do not, and cannot, understand what it is like. In my 6+ years in India, I fell in love and had my heart broken with someone of a totally different culture, struggled to assimilate and carved out a meaningful life, experienced the worst of humanity and witnessed pure grace, railed against the chaos and accepted it as the norm, cowered in fear of the unknown and sought ought ever-more terrifying challenges to prove my mettle; I went to India a confused, immature child and came out man of principles and dignity. None of this would’ve been possible without the opportunities that crazy country presented, and that which my Indian family allowed me to capitalize on with them for so long.

I have been “home” in America for around 4 months now. I am settled into a new job in a small city in the South. I have a nice house with a big yard; a car. I go to the grocery store, and shop at the local Target. I run on pristine roads and sidewalks. I share good times with great new friends. I walk through neighborhoods full of folks that look just like me and return their friendly smiles and waves with my own. It is scary how easy it is to slide into a new reality, to get caught up in the everyday grind of a place. But thoughts of India are never too far away. I think of the insanity inherent in my decision to move there, the risks I took to attempt it, the leap of faith that my family nee colleagues took to welcome me into their lives, the highs and lows that we encountered throughout amazing projects that took us all over the world, and the million-and-one moments we shared together, celebrating life and the good fortune we had to be with each other.

Mainly though, I think of the snapshots in time: of the hers and hims, of the uses and thems, of the heres and theres; the million little parts whose sum was so significant and substantial. I think of this country that I once claimed to hate so much, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to repay it and my family there for so profoundly and positively changing my life.