I am back in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England, just like the narrator in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s “English August”) for a week. It feels about the same as when I left the place four months ago to go to India, but I had an intense experience of culture shock in the London airport. All those gleaming aisles and fancy stores and nicely laid out boards indicating where to go to get food or catch your flight — it seemed too ordered, too rational to me. Everything was there for a purpose, there was a higher power that had made a plan for our stay in Heathrow and we humans either had to conform to that higher power or suffer in silence. Nothing in India is ever organized in such a Cartesian grid, where everything has a place (or to be more precise, where nothing is out of place). Its in London that I realized that I have gotten used to the organic structure of Bangalore in the last four months. Was it Galbraith who said that its a functioning anarchy? I think that’s what it might appear to a Westerner, but I think its because they are so used to their order being transparent. I think we like our order to be a hidden, so that it never becomes a commandment, never a dictatorship of the intellect. Our order (or orders, as in being told what to do or not to do) is open ended, capable of revision and in the worst case scenario, retractible. That may seem like anarchy, but I think it reflects the open-endedness of life.
The Identity Politics of International Travel.
The Identity Politics of International…
The Identity Politics of International Travel.
I am back in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England, just like the narrator in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s “English August”) for a week. It feels about the same as when I left the place four months ago to go to India, but I had an intense experience of culture shock in the London airport. All those gleaming aisles and fancy stores and nicely laid out boards indicating where to go to get food or catch your flight — it seemed too ordered, too rational to me. Everything was there for a purpose, there was a higher power that had made a plan for our stay in Heathrow and we humans either had to conform to that higher power or suffer in silence. Nothing in India is ever organized in such a Cartesian grid, where everything has a place (or to be more precise, where nothing is out of place). Its in London that I realized that I have gotten used to the organic structure of Bangalore in the last four months. Was it Galbraith who said that its a functioning anarchy? I think that’s what it might appear to a Westerner, but I think its because they are so used to their order being transparent. I think we like our order to be a hidden, so that it never becomes a commandment, never a dictatorship of the intellect. Our order (or orders, as in being told what to do or not to do) is open ended, capable of revision and in the worst case scenario, retractible. That may seem like anarchy, but I think it reflects the open-endedness of life.