Mirrors and Razors and Kites, Oh My

Perhaps traveling in India strains because it defies; from one moment to he next a pattern you thought you saw is broken and another is freshly created to await its certain demise. In SE Asia, one walks through Buddhism and a somehwat homogeneic culture. It's easier to see an illusion of understanding in Indochina. Perhaps in just such a way, India is a better place to study the world. Particularly, that is, the modern world. The integrating world. The world where Washington fears Calcutta's cheap labor more than Japan's exquisite vehicles. The world where Friedman's Golden Arches symbolize more than corporations, but rather progress.

The world where the notion that every McDonald's is the same is blown to oblivion as you walk through a door on Mirza Ismail Road near the old city of Jaipur to find a beefless menu and to order yourself a Chicken Maharaja Mac and a Paneer Salsa Wrap. Maybe economic globalization allows Ron McDonald to hug kids in India, but it doesn't let him trample their lives. People here won't eat beef just because Ray Croc cooked it quickly. They won't waste ketchup packets here just becasuet their US counterparts huck them with the garbage (there's a bin for re-use), and they won't destroy their health just so they can get food faster. After all, ALL food in India is fast, and most of it greasier than McDonald's.

So if there's one lesson to learn from the McCurry Griddle, it's that the US for all its individualist rhetoric needs to cease blaming the corporations for its ills. Stop seeing "Supersize Me" to vent its rage, and instead turn its eyes inwards. McDonald's menu, service, speed, nutrition is not a scalpel for society, but simply a reflection of it. Perhaps, even, it is among the clearest windows to see the revelation that people will choose (and enjoy) oppression and that people don't know what they want as they profess to. After all, capitalism is a system built to allow just such a choice to oppress yourself... just that when people veer down that path they blame the system rather than themselves.

This particular society provides many-a-lesson in duality, as yesterday afternoon when we were invited to a rooftop in the old city, where the thousands of sunday-afternoon kites were flying high. The sky, though polluted, was filled with blues, yellows, reds of flying diamonds spinning circles, diving and swerving through the struggling-to-be-blue-sky. As Jenny's face lit up at their sight like a child at a chocolate bar, I was explained the names of the forts and temples on the surrounding brown hilltops. Then, as when you find out that the monkeys at the zoo aren't playing but fighting to the death, we found out about the war over our heads. The kites, it turns out, twist and curve not in artistic prowess, but in attempts to destroy others. Glass-shards in their cords, they cut the lines that both tether others to the ground and allow them to fly higher and higher. The winners fight on while losers drift earthwards to the hands of new owners.

But of course we recognize the true harmony of the seemingly malicious game in bringing together literally thousands of participants for a friendly afternoon contest to build community. In fact, every person we spoke to expressed unbridled excitement for the "Kite Festival," still a month away, when the sun is said to be hidden behind soaring geometries of warfare. So we sat, enjoyed, and even partook in the spectacle with our newfound friends and a few glasses of whiskey and water; and marvelled at the beauty of simplicity in this world while the interiors of the Rajasthani forts surrounding remained unseen by our eyes.