Emergent Systems
In which we make presentations and take pictures
The full series of posts from my India trip can be read here.
When Chris first mentioned Hyderabad in his explanation for not being able to meet me in Sweden, it rang a bell because I had just heard the name of this city only a few weeks prior, in an Internationalisation meeting at the University. I felt like we had a campus there, or some other key activity was happening. As it turns out, nothing was actually happening in Hyderabad and what I had heard was one colleague talking about different options for recruitment. The University was, however, interested in having an event in the city, because it hadn't held one there before and having someone from the UK come and speak to University agents, who helped Indian students get into universities overseas, and potential students, would be valuable, something we were trying to do in general: be more present in emerging markets.
On Sunday, I did presentations in the hotel conference room, talking through someone else's slides and trying to answer questions about the University. I gave the same presentation twice and the second time was better. Discussing theories of change, I talked about how when you cross the road in India, you can't have a plan, you must find yourself a part of the emergent system that is the road. You have to take into account everything that is happening, or rather, you have to become an actor in the system and let everything else act as well. You need to be a native part of the system, a predictable actor and if you can do that, then you can be safe as you cross the road. It was the sort of expertise you have after one day in a country.
The events were okay, in the end. After the second presentation, a student made a comment about how she thought I was going to tie together the presentation to be about moving to the UK, something I thought I had done. It didn’t seem to really matter: what they were more interested in was how cold it was going to be. I assured them it generally wasn't cold enough inside in the UK that you needed to wear a coat, but that didn't offer the sort of comfort I had hoped. We discussed the Birmingham bankruptcy which apparently made the news there and then train tickets and then all of them seemed to just want to eat, excited to meet others who were taking this adventure to the UK with them. I loitered for a few minutes and then said goodbye to our staff member from Mumbai who had come to organise everything and went up to my room and sat watching Indian soap operas.
I checked out on Monday morning, planning to move at the end of the day to the much cheaper hotel where Gusztáv had been staying. I argued briefly with the desk about whether I needed to pay for the taxi pickup from Friday morning. They had, after all, sent a plate of sweets and an apology note, as well as calling me while I was in the bathroom the day before, something I remembered well because I didn't need to get up to answer the phone as there was a phone next to the toilet. I was finally absolved of the obligation and they apologised again. He didn't even have a uniform, I stressed, feeling ridiculous for saying it, but annoyed enough to bring it up again.
I left my bag and went outside to stand in front of the hotel and wait for Gusztáv to appear, which he did, in a tuk-tuk. We had a cup of coffee to plot our week and then took another tuk-tuk to Golconda Fort, fifty minutes away, the app said. The tuk-tuk came on Uber and we, Gusztáv and I, climbed into the back and were immediately swept up in the flow of traffic, the feeling of being in a constantly moving body of people surrounded by, or on, machines. Gusztáv was adamant that this was safer than it looked and that he had seen no crashes, something he repeated on several occasions, and I tried to share his optimism, but having seen dead bodies near motorbikes in Malaysia, I didn't entirely believe this. Gusztáv said that Chris had been curious how we would get on as I was occasionally quite a tense person, while Gusztáv was much more laid back. Chris had also told him about some of the problems I was having in my life and how these had been long-standing, how I’d married and had children quite young, and I talked without stopping until we arrived, about all the knots in my life I was trying to untangle.
The fort was a magnificent structure, rising out of the city and you could clap at the bottom of the hill and that clap could be heard at the top in the citadel. We did this when we arrived, and then sat on a bench to read the digital guide, while a large, middle-aged man with a moustache circled us for a while and then sat down next to us, before eventually asking his wife to take a picture of us together, and we had her take a picture of us as well on my phone. We climbed to the top of the Citadel, feeling as though it was hot, but not that hot, and a man came up beside us as we walked to ask where we were from. Gusztáv said Hungary and I said England, and he announced that he was living in America in Texas in Dallas and had come to visit his family, but his family did not want to climb to the top so he was climbing alone. We got to the first waystation on the way up, to take a series of pictures and he left us.
November in Hyderabad, we had been told, is not a high season for tourists and most of the festive time had passed. I looked around for a while for other white people and there were hardly any, only in the places I expected them, like breakfast at the hotel and then sometimes on the streets. We saw a family at a temple, white people that looked like they were from Europe, not America, and they smiled at us and we smiled back, like we were sharing some common understanding of how out of place we felt. We were stopped by a group of boys walking through a shrine in the fort, and they asked where we were from. We asked them to tell us about the god in the shrine and then to show us how to pray, and Gusztáv and I agreed to pray for Chris and our wives.
Halfway down from the top, we stopped to rest and we started to get asked for pictures again, from boys, and then a couple, and then one friend with another friend, and then a family and we decided we needed to move on, to get away before things got more hectic. We made our way through the rest of the fort, to the baths, and then under the baths where there were bats, the whole time talking about our lives, our families, and how things in this country seemed to us with our different cultural lenses.
On the way back to the hotel, we called another tuk-tuk and were immediately caught in traffic fully for the first time, a car overheating on the side of the road, other tuk-tuks with girls coming from school in niqab, and boys on motorbikes. We waited and waited and the driver finally said School and with that frame it was clear that school was letting out and we were waiting for everyone to be picked up and taken away. We waited and then everything broke free again, all of the people and machines moving together and widening and narrowing with the street and with the other machines and people crossing the road.
Tuesday morning, the next day, we had breakfast at the hotel, sambar and dosa and two slices of bread with conserve, but decidedly less fresh than the five-star hotel and no army of servers watching over with loving care. We set out to the university to meet with departments that Gusztáv had emailed out of the blue, asking if they wanted to meet us. The first professor, in the Department of Anthropology, was late and we were ushered into his office by another man, and we sat there laughing and joking about the whole thing, how the trip was going to be a lot like this, sitting around trying to figure out what to do. Finally, the professor came, apologising a bit but also saying he hadn't realised the meeting had been confirmed. Gusztáv showed him the email where he said they would meet and he pretended to look at it before shrugging it off. We talked about Gusztáv's interests in farming and supply chains and different men from the department, all men, came into the office and talked to us about their various interests in farming or social issues and then left. After an hour or so, we finally said goodbye, we had to put our slides together for another talk we were giving at another place, the Institute for Rural Development, later in the day, and thanked them for their time.
We made our way back outside and sat at a plastic table near a cart selling coffee and tea and looked through the slides on the computer, but as we were working, there was a fight between a pack of feral dogs and at the centre, a male and female stuck together. The other males were circling them and they were all viciously snarling and barking and we stopped our work on the presentation to watch this and comment on the different ways you could interpret it. Gusztáv was surprised when I said I’d never seen this and went on to explain in some detail what was happening and I had both the urge to watch and see what would happen, and to look away.
We went back into the University building and had another meeting with the head of sociology and talked a bit about the connection between religion and the rural world of India and how such a big country worked, the man saying at one point, every Indian is basically Hindu, the ones that have converted are still basically Hindu. He took us to lunch and we ate more curry and rice and roti and after he left us in the foyer of the department, the car from the Institute for Rural Development arrived to take us away.
The Institute was set on a massive campus of government offices to the south of the city, about forty minutes by car from where we were. A man with a moustache met us and took us to a large, darkly lit room and I tried to gather who it was that we were supposed to be presenting to and how the relationship had come about. Another woman came in, an erudite professor who told us she had two PhDs, and looked at us sceptically, before explaining that we would be giving our presentation to a group of MA students studying at the centre. They ushered us into another room and the students were already sitting there, expectantly. The computer wouldn't connect to the projector and the sound didn't come on, so Gusztáv moved his presentation to the classroom computer and had a student watch him advance through his slides on his laptop and follow along advancing them on the classroom computer, remarkably seamlessly. After about ten minutes, a man appeared pushing a rolling cart of plates with cakes and samosas on them and distributed them to everyone in the room, taking no real regard for Gusztáv presenting and the man who met us initially made motions to me, every time our eyes met, that I should eat some of the bright orange cake. I smiled and finally took a couple of bites of the samosas assuming they were vegetarian and I wouldn't have to spit them out awkwardly while everyone watched. Thankfully, they were and everyone else tucked in, making mostly good comments.
After about forty minutes, the presentation was passed over to me and I did my best to tie in the work I did in community organising to rural development and the students listened and nodded along politely and asked questions and then it was five, and they thanked us for coming by presenting us with gifts, a kind of woodcutting of a peacock in a picture frame. They wanted pictures of us accepting these woodcuttings and then we all piled out of the room to the front of the building where we all stood in front of a statue of Gandhi, the father of the nation, the woman who was leading the event said. After some polite talking about all the things we could have done if we had more time, the car was called and WhatsApp numbers exchanged and Gusztáv and I were driven off into the cool evening.
I said in my talk to university agents and then to students in my talk on Sunday that there are two kinds of change: planned and emergent. How do you plan to cross the road? I asked, What is the five-step process, and everyone laughed because of course there is no process for crossing the road. Chris says, walk at a steady speed and don't look behind you. Gusztáv, once trying to beat the cars coming off a stoplight, sped up, and then said, My city brain kicked in, because in the cities in Europe and the US, this is what you would do, but it is probably worse to run, you need to stop almost entirely, slow down, so everyone can honk their horns to let you know they’re coming and they will avoid you if you avoid them.
We checked out of the second hotel the next morning — the young manager was relentlessly helpful, even as the accommodation lacked things like a real window or hot water. He gave Gusztáv a phone card and offered to pay for things that Gusztáv couldn’t pay for on his phone and gave recommendations. He was only 20, and small, but with a full moustache and bobbled his head to each request, Everything is okay. We thanked him profusely, promising to come back for our last night, before we flew out of Hyderabad at the end of the month. We took our big backpacker backpacks with us out to see the temple we wanted to see, though I worried, trying to not worry, about getting to the airport on time to catch our next flight to the south, to Kerala where we were headed. We decided to take another tuk-tuk out to Birla Mandir, a temple made of white stone that grew up out of the hill.
We arrived at the teple right before noon, just as it was closing for two hours in the early afternoon, but they seemed to still be letting people in, so we dropped our bags and mobile phones in a small building at the bottom of the hill, with aggressive signs saying what you can and can't do and telling you NO TIPPING the staff. I then immediately saw someone tip the man taking the shoes, and I said to Gusztáv that this 'No Tips/No tipping' message almost implied the opposite like you are expected to tip, the same way a sign on a cab that said 'This is a safe taxi' made me immediately think that it was not a safe taxi.
The temple shone in the sun with white energy and as we climbed up, we stopped at each of the gods' statues and a young woman started talking to us, telling us the names of each of the gods, and Gustav asked, What do you pray to this god for? What is the thing he does? and she said, Anything, with the same conversation happening at the next two statues. We decided this was not especially useful and picked up the pace to get some distance between us and made our way to the very top, where two priests, shirtless, were ringing bells and chanting for people at the rail of the shrine, and collecting tips. I walked away until I saw Gusztáv taking the holy water and thought, I want that too, and did what I thought I saw other people doing, pouring it from their hands over their heads, but it slipped out and ended up running uncerminoiously down the front of my shirt.
We left and got our bags and walked down a narrow street off the hill, stopping for Gusztáv to buy tea and find anklets for his daughters without success and headed out away from the temple to see what else there was before we ran out of time. Gusztáv whistled loudly to show me that this is how he calls his kids, and the loud whistle startled a family who looked back initially annoyed but then became excited when they saw us, asking all the same questions: where are you from, why are you here, can we get a selfie with kids. Their two kids looked at us awkwardly and their parents arranged them, and Gusztáv because he was laidback and not stressed out like me, picked the smallest one up after asking if it was okay and told them he has kids and Stephen here from England has three daughters. Their parents took our picture with their phone and then took my phone to take a picture for us as well.
We walked for a while to find an ATM, but with our bags, I felt like we were standing out too much, like the tourists that we were. We walked until we found an old theme park where we thought there would be food, but there wasn't. Gusztáv paid 20 rupees for each of us to enter, sensing, I think, that I didn't really want it go in, but he had wanted to see the water up close, to see if it smelled like all the other bodies of water he'd come across so far. The theme park felt like the start of a Ghibli film where perhaps something magical might happen in another world, but in this one, everything was old and run down, the physical artefact of an economy where people had money at some point and an interest in spending it there, on rides for children and a man, a fortune teller, who would tell your fortune.
People had said to us that India is rich in human resource, a way of describing people that made me uncomfortable initially, and then which I seemed to accept as the truth after a few days. In Birmingham, we don't have the population to stock theme parks that don't make money and where old men can tell one or two fortunes a day for a few hundred rupees and survive. In India, you can pay someone to do almost anything for almost no money. The tuk-tuk journeys were incredibly cheap, how they could drive us for forty minutes for 200 rupees was beyond both of our abilities to make the maths work. How is that possible. And then you could use Uber, which was even cheaper and more reliable, a car or tuk-tuk to take you anywhere with just a couple of taps.
The tuk-tuk drivers were relentless when we waited outside our restaurant after eating and getting ready to leave for the airport. They wanted to offer us something, to haggle. I'm sorry, we said, we’ve ordered a taxi already. They didn't stop. Gusztáv spoke to them in Hungarian, and they found that amusing and the haggling stopped. Another man came up to haggle with us and the two that had already stopped him, told him we were waiting for a cab. Now they were our allies, looking at my phone to see where the driver was and pointing on the map and then at the road. Then, Selfie, as one of them wanted a photo with us. Finally, the Uber driver came around the bend and they all stood around, watching us, and like that, we disappeared.