Bollywood and Bicycle Rickshaws

In the United States cinemas are democratic. You go to the movies, queue, buy a ticket and hustle off to find the best seats you can with a large bag of popcorn and frighteningly proportioned slurpee of some unnatural color. Not so in India. On Tuesday night I went to see The Joker  which now competes with Chasing Liberty for the worst movie I ever paid to watch (although the former experience was hugely enjoyable, unlike the latter). The adventure begins at the box office where the consumer gets to pick between 4 ticket prices, ranging from the cheapest seats where one’s eyeballs practically brush the screen to VIP boxes with fans. Since we were the only women waiting to watch the movie, I and my two friends opted for the VIP box ($2 dollars per seat) in the hopes that we would be harassed less with some solid marble between us and the rest of the theater. (This worked admirably well until a man started quizzing my French friend on the capitals of the various countries of the world and she started responding. Who knew ‘What is the capital of Finland’ could work as a pickup line?) We walked through a metal detector, got patted down by a woman to ensure we were carrying no knives, guns, explosives and had our bags searched for food items. The cigarette packets in my friends’ purses elicited two ‘Oh My God Ma’am!’s from the women scrounging through our belongings (it’s taboo for Indian women to smoke, although many men smoke.)

I will spare you the details of The Joker- think E.T. meets Bollywood with a lot of melodramatic homecoming scenes and a spineless heroine. I’ll simply add that I found the movie shockingly easy to understand despite the lack of subtitles and English. Indians have  commonly described the cinema to me as an escape from reality for most, hence its hugely popular draw, and The Joker was certainly an escape from reality.

Unlike most travelers in Delhi, I have not spent my time sightseeing or eating in expensive restaurants known to give even the most cautious traveler fits of Delhi belly. Instead, I have been seeking out women’s organizations with which I can conduct my research, and two of them have taken me on several eye-opening trips already. One organization runs a community radio station in Mewat, a district in Haryana, the state to the north of Delhi. I have visited Haryana twice; once I remained in the radio station and met local reporters, but the other time I went to a local school and visited a village. The school, considered a ‘private’ school by U.S. standards because students must pay to attend, runs from 7am until 2pm and consists of a series of concrete rooms in which students sit cross-legged on the floor chanting their lessons back at their teachers. The school consists almost entirely of boys as girls do not usually attend school in Haryana; most young girls stay home, help cook/clean/wash and spend the rest of their days looking after siblings, collecting fodder for cattle, and wandering around the village ‘doing nothing’ as one social worker described it to me. When I asked her what was needed to get the girls into schools she said that the schools must be nicer than the girls homes, there must be toilets for girls (often there are not), and their families must be willing to excuse them from helping with the household chores. One of the striking things I noticed walking around the village was the children’s teeth- not only crooked or missing, but rotting, stained and broken. The social worker explained to me that although cows abound in Haryana, villagers are too poor to drink the milk themselves and must sell it to supplement their incomes.

India is the worst G20 Country for women– it ranks below Saudi Arabia in terms of women’s rights. While Indian women might seem to have excellent rights nominally- for example Indian women aren’t supposed to be married legally before they are 21- in reality the laws on paper rarely get enforced; 45% of Indian women are married before they are 18 years old. Another organization that I am working with runs a women’s resource center in a poor Muslim community in Southeast Delhi. Today, the organization held a large event in which the Minister for the Environment donated an electrically powered ‘green’ autorickshaw to a woman driver. It was a huge event and drew lots of press and locals to the scene. When the tent first started filling up women sat on one side of the main aisle, men sat on the other and children sat on the floor in front of the stage. However, as more and more men and male members of the press corps started showing up, women got kicked out of their seats and had to join the children on the floor. As the minister presented the keys to the green rickshaw to the woman driver, there were only 3 women remaining in over 100 chairs in the entire tent, and this at an event to celebrate the empowerment and economic independence gained by one woman in the same community.

Consistently I run into seemingly small occurrences like the above that stop me in the middle of my tasks and make me remember the enormity of the struggles that poor women here face daily. However, I also witness moments of extraordinary progress and hope. For example, while observing the meeting of a ‘self help group’- a microfinance group comprised entirely of women- I saw an illiterate woman trying to figure out where the records keeper had printed her name on a document. Her daughter leaned over her shoulder and pointed to the line where she should place her signature. The other women asked for the daughter’s help, and one by one she pointed to the spots on the document next to their respective names where they needed to affix their signatures.

India is a country of breath-taking contradictions like daughters showing their mothers where to place their signatures and herders driving cows along the streets of IT cities that house GE, Toyota, Ernst & Young and Samsung. I myself am a walking contradiction right now- an American woman dressed in khakis and a kurta, the long Indian tunic that most women wear in summer months here, which has become my daily wear. It’s confusing, often frustrating, and always exhilarating.