India Journal: Day 7/8

Day 7
We didn’t do anything directly medicine-related today—just an invitation to a morning scholarship awarding ceremony by the IMRC, aka the Sahayata Trust. I noticed something interesting though: many more girls than boys. All of the women were traditional niqaabis and were from conservative families. Yet, despite the restrictions, there were more of them receiving college aid than the boys. We’ve come a long way, I suppose.

Day 8
We spent the day at the offices of LifeSpring Hospitals. They are a group of private hospitals that specialize in maternity care. They, according ot their manifesto, fill the gap b/w high-end hospitals and gov’t hospitals. We’re going to be helping them ostensibly promote their hospital with a medical camp on the outskirts of Hyderabad.
There were a few things that struck me: Although they have good intentions, LifeSpring is still a corporate hospital. And the first aim of an enterprise is to make money, not treat people. What good would I be doing volunteering for a corporate enterprise?
I came here to help Indian Muslims and learn about Indian healthcare. So far, I’ve learned that India has an admirable philosophy—that everyone needs care, and deserves care. But they lack the means. The United States has the exact opposite situation. Ironic, indeed.

Chance and Change

I’m taking a break from uploading my India Journal entries (don’t worry, they’ll be back), to meditate on one of my favorite subjects: change.

Health reform (or lack thereof) has been dominating the headlines. Right-wing nutjobs have been spewing bullshit at townhall meetings. Obama is struggling to reiterate his message, and some people (like myself) who are following the debate closely are literally hitting our heads on the wall.

I remember the heady days of the Obama campaign. We were at the end of 8 years of a Son-of-Bush made nightmare, and desparate for change. As in, government that actually did shit for the people, instead of pumping billions of dollars into a crapshoot war.

But I digress.

Mainly, I’m looking at the state of affairs in the country, and wondering just how possible meaningful change is. Then i’m reminded that it is a painful, long, and bloody business: It took a whole generation to roll back legally-backed segregation and racism. And many, many people died in the process.

To go on a slight tangent: how much does chance figure into the possibility of change? I am someone who has grown up believing that we make our own destinies–that nothing happens out of thin air, we must be the engines of change in our own lives. You, not anyone else, makes things happen. But lately I’ve come to realize that chance–fate–or cosmic occurences, if you will, guide our lives to a huge degree. Could it be that the idea that we have our lives fully under control a myth? In that, we exercise whatever small power we can over what is a largely chance-driven enterprise?

Whether we’re talking about health care reform, or the civil rights movement, or graduating from college or getting married–major moments of change seem perplexing. Whether it’s on a societal level or the very personal, we cannot fathom why, or why not, things happen.

Perhaps we can understand these occurences as having elements of both. Life is full of chance and randomness, and we are presented with choices. Perhaps this is where we exercise our agency- we make choices. Barack Obama was fated to be the first black Senator since reconstruction. When the chance came for him to consider running for President, he made a choice. I found myself applying to medical school-something that was equal parts fate and agency, I made choices of where to apply. Where I got in–well, that was fate. And to go full circle, health care reform: it was fated to arrive during this tumultuous political milieu: now we see what choices our representatives will make.

I like to think that in the cosmic order of things, we human beings have some say in how our lives unfold. And fate- well, that is something beyond our comprehension.

India Journal: Day 5/6

Today was our first day in Hyderabad. We spent the previous day traveling—aI realized that India has done a pretty damn good job of improving its airports to impress foreigners. Finding out where we were staying in Hyderabad, however, was a whole other adventure. The first place we considered was pretty…unsatisfactory. As in, no electricity. The second was a penthouse owned by a program-mates family. Needless to say, we ended up in the penthouse.

India has that upstairs-downstairs quality that is not really seen in America—richness and poverty in extremes, often side by side. Our experience has been no different so far. History coexists with modernity, equality with inequality. The gift of this trip is perhaps the ability to truly see India for ourselves.

Day 6- we got have our first “actual” medical volunteer experience. We were at Princess Durru Shehwar Hospital, which was founded in the name of the daughter in law of the last Nizam (ruler) of Hyderabad. The Hospital serves Muslim patients, and is located smack in the middle of the Old City of Hyderabad. We spent the day shadowing the very Hyderabadi-uncle like doctors of DSH. The most vivid experience had to be our visit to the Ob/Gyn outpatient clinic. We sat in on an appointment with Dr. Z, an elderly lady physician. The patient was a young Muslim woman who came in ostensibly for an Gyn checkup. The doctor started explaining the situation to us in English (which the patient didn’t understand) and it turned out that eh woman wanted a late-term abortion. She’d gotten pregnant, was apparently hiding it from her family.

In conservative Muslim culture, pre-marital sex is unacceptable. What was shocking was that this girl was one of the hundreds, and that her case was quite common. What drives these women to hide their pregnancies and then to decide so late to abort? What kind of society and what restrictions to these women live within that offers them so little solace or choice? Abortion late-term is not permissible according to the common interpretation of Islamic law. But reality and scripture or two very different things. The doctor, herself a Muslim woman, had to make that choice between her faith and social obligation. I wonder when I may be called on to do the same.

India Journal: Day 4

This was day 3 of me still being a tourist in India. And today was probably the most cheesy-tourist type of day to date. We woke up early in the morning to board a huge tourist bus along with the other students to Agra.

The ride itself was unremarkable. What was truly special was the scenery. The Indian countryside was
beautiful. Green fields, trees and ponds with villages scattered in between. After the urban ugliness of parts of New Delhi, the contrast with the lushness of rural Haryana was startling. The true beauty of India isn’t in the cities—it is out there. The journey through Agra, and into the Taj Mahal was pretty disturbing. The poverty of Agra, and the beggars that immediately latched onto us was pretty intense. I told one of the other students—that giving beggars money was useless. “The work for crooks who maim them so they can beg—give to a charity instead.” There was a little boy half bent over, begging for money. It killed me to ignore him, but I had to harden myself to it.

The Taj itself? Pictures don’t do it justice. It made me proud in a way—That India’s representative symbol would a monument to the beauty of Islamic culture. It was an interesting epiphany—to make that connection of my personal history to Indian history. We went to Agra Fort afterwards—the nerve center of the Mughal empire, the residence of kings. It was quite a moment—to walk to halls that the most powerful men and women of the Mughal Empire walked. I had a conversation with one of the nieces of the guy who had organized our bus tour. We were talking about how as an American born Indian, one has a feeling of foreign-yet-not-quite foreign: of not quite belonging, yet familiar to India. Her response—“Look around—do you have anything in common with these people?”

Well-yes?

Bloodwise, an ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) is an Indian. Genetically, nothing about me is different. But my entire life, from birth to 24 years, was in America. One wonders: what are you really? A product of your genetics or of your environment? Or in an American desi’s case: Not quite both?
Tomorrow, Hyderabad. The real deal.

India Journal, Day 3

Today started in 1329 and ended in 2009. We spent the day touring Delhi, looking at monuments of Muslim past. Lal Qila, or the Red Fort, was first up. It was definitely spectacular, a remnant of the awesome power of the Mughal Empire. Jama Masjid, was a ways away—the largest Masjid in India, accomdating more than 25,000 people. It was amazing to just be there—perhaps one of the most important places in the socio-political consciousness of Indian Muslims. I distinctly remember walking through a pair of metal detectors at the entrance, thinking, who is this meant to protect—us (the Muslims) or everyone else?

Jama Masjid was a special place. I prayed there, for my safety and success on this trip, and for the well being of my family. While at Humayun’s tomb further away, I took the chance to visit the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, the founder the Sufi order my family belongs to. We were led there by a random elderly Muslim man on the street, who led us through to the shrine. It was almost luck that we made it in at all.

It felt weird to be touring Delhi in an air-conditioned van—stepping out only to see the sights. From my vantage point inside, I was disengaged from the noise, sweat and smell of the street. We ended the day at the Metropoliitan, a state-of the art high end mall, which was populated filthy rich Delhi-ites shopping at stores that I could find in a local American mall. It was pretty entertaining to be a sweaty, tired American desi in a wrinkled, dusty salwar kameez—the shopkeepers had no idea what the hell was going on!

Two common themes are starting to emerge—the theme of past and present Muslim history. Ironically, today the Indian government released a report indicting several high level Hindu extremist leaders in the destruction of the Babri Masjid, one of India’s oldest Muslim sites, 17 years ago. My thought: maybe this means that the pendulum is swinging the other way. The fact remains: Muslims are disproportionately poor and discriminated against in all levels of society.

The second theme is that I am learning as must about the people whom I sharing this trip with as I am about India. Each person has a unique history and a unique reason why he/she is here. Family, politics, a desire to further one’s career, or to discover roots. It’s all there.
Tomorrow, the Taj Mahal. Onward!

India Journal, Day 1/2

First off: ridiculously long flight. Twenty four hours on a plane will make you all sorts of crazy. It’s been awhile since I’ve traveled with what is essentially a huge group of strangers. But, as I’ve observed many times over my life so far, traveling together has a way of bringing people closer in a very unique way. I sat next to one of program mates and we essentially had a 17-hour conversation about everything from dating and marriage to politics. Additionally, traveling makes you realize just how damn big our planet is, and how far our parents traveled from home.

Fast forward to landing in India. We arrived around 6 AM, our internal clocks screwed up in all sorts of ways. We left the airport and began our journey in Delhi. The difference, the sense of being dropped into the “other side of the mirror” was immediate. Children running naked underneath the freeways. The spraypainted Hindi political slogans on the walls. The incessant noise. I had seen it before—but this time, I was without my parents, unshielded from the homeland. It was funny, I’ve never thanked God for the Urdu I was fortunate to have learned as a kid, because I used an enormous amount of it today. Small victories made me proud—ordering food in Urdu on my own, directing an auto-rickshaw, talking to shopkeepers. I’m betting on it improving as I go along!

It’s a strange feeling to be here—foreign yet not foreign, fear tempered with a bit of confidence. I feel, strangely, that I’m going to have to use every bit of my knowledge gained from traveling elsewhere in the one place I thought I’d need it the least—India, the homeland.
Tomorrow we’re off to see Delhi. Jama Masjid awaits. Stay tuned.