Daniel Parecki

Nothing you read, and nothing anyone can tell you will prepare you for culture shock. You feel alien in a place where everyone else seems comfortable. You feel like an outsider intruding on people’s personal lives. You have no grounding, nothing you can rest you worries upon. If something goes wrong, you are essentially alone. There is no home waiting for you at the end of the day, no familiar faces you can put your faith in. It’s a little like a camping trip where everything goes wrong, except you cannot pack your things up and go home. You are stuck in the wilderness forced to figure out how to survive on your own.
Having Casey Krolczyk along for the ride is great. After 49 hours of travel time stepping out of the airport into a hot, humid, and smelly New Delhi and seeing a familiar face was a relief. The flight was supposed to be 25 hours total, but the second plane to Newark was late so I had to wait an extra 24 hours to catch the next flight to Delhi. One of Casey’s friend’s aunts in Delhi took in Casey and me. What a trip, still under jet lag and we dive into a busy city. The streets just outside of Milli’s house were narrow and dirty. Malviya Nagar, the neighborhood we stayed in seemed a little like a dirtier San Francisco. Most people lived in narrow flats in tall buildings. People hang their clothes on lines strung between their third floor balconies. Stray dogs with ratty fur roam the streets with this odd happy and oblivious look on their faces. They don’t seem to see the garbage piled in heaps on the side of the road. They don’t seem to see the people rooting through the garbage looking for pieces of metal and plastic. They don’t seem to see the girl who distorts her face and body to muster scraps from a street vendor who might pity her.
Milli’s fiancée, Deepak, showed us around the city the next day. Deepak took us on the subway to see a famous Hindu temple. The subway system seemed to be a replica of San Francisco’s BART system. You buy a blue token at the ticket counter and put on as much as you need. At the entrance to the platform you place the token over a sensor and the shields open up for you. You drop the coin in at your final destination. On the subway they reserve the front two cars for only women. This doesn’t seem to be an act of segregation that you may expect people in Saudi Arabia to do. Deepak says the separate cars are for the women’s safety so they don’t get harassed on the train. Women are allowed to sit anywhere on the train, but men cannot go into the women’s cars.

Regarding my last post:

http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/a57e22a0790e012ee3c400163e41dd5b

While running through a park the other day I came across a not alarming, but mildly depressing scene. The play structure was empty save for a 4 year old girl and her mother. The child was climbing up and down the poles and ladders and her mother hovered close to her watching her every move. What happened to the saying: “It takes a village to run a family?” While it is not necessary to ramble and complain about the way parents can be over protective of the children, or about the way that kids do not seem to play in large groups together while not in school, it does seem practical to propose a novel solution to the idea.

It would be an interesting experiment to build a community of homes organized with the intention of child rearing. Developers constantly throw up homes of such density that the inhabitants could walk around the entire block on the second floor using only open windows as a means of transport. A little rearrangement of these houses could open up stretches of land between houses that kids could play on. Communal areas could be planned in these areas so that kids have more than black asphalt to run on. In addition, a neighborhood agreement could be made to help facilitate communal child rearing. If kids could be given a safe area to play in they would need little parent supervision. Parents could foster a cultural norm in the area that in their free time children go outside to play with the neighborhood kids. If families with young children moved to these areas with the intention of collective child rearing higher quality playtime might develop to contrast with what I saw that day at the park.