School Day

Having stayed in Delhi for over two months now, my daily life has started to develop a routine. Everyday life in the city is still a series of micro-adventures and even though my life has started to develop some daily recurrent patterns, it is still far from humdrum.

Since I'm a hopeless night owl, I usually tend to sleep late. The day starts somewhere between 10 o'clock and noon by sparking up the caffeine binge to get the system in operation again. Before finding a coffee maker, waking up was even more of a chore, now at least I have the equipment to prepare the daily fix of my drug of choice. After system is restored, I trod down from my room past the yawning and napping guards to the streets. Here's where the day starts rolling.

Near the hostel is a rickshaw stand where all the rickshaw-wallahs loiter around gossiping, smoking beedis and touting customers by aggressively patting the rickshaw seat whenever a potential one walks by. Although I prefer walking, sometimes laziness prevails. Before climbing into a rickshaw, one has to always go through the usual ordeal of bargaining with the wallah, who is usually tempted to test his chances in overpricing an unsuspecting gora, which is usually double the amount an Indian person would need to pay. After the negotiation,which usually ends with a frown combined with the trademark Indian head wobble, the wallah jumps on his seat and steers the rickshaw to the chaos that is Indian traffic.

As I mentioned in my first post of this blog, moving around in Indian traffic is an art of crafty dodging of all manner of vehicles and creatures. The rickshaw-wallahs seems to have mastered this skill into near perfection. Rolling down the street towards my college, a series of encounters challenge the wallah's hierarchical position in the pecking order of traffic. Size determines where you stand. A pack of street dogs run along the rickshaw barking wildly as it has seemed to intrude their turf. A gigantic truck that looks like a prop from a Mad Max movie honks with a somewhat unfittingly chipper and melodious horn and speeds past our rickshaw nearly sending it to the gutter. Nearing the college, the intersection is blocked as among the cars, mopeds and auto-rickshaws, an elephant is standing with a banner wrapped around to it advertising an anti-smoking campaign that Delhi University is promoting to stop smoking on the campus area. Thinking nothing of it, our rider steers his vehicle nonchanantly through the disarray to the college gates. I wipe the cold sweat off my forehead, jump off and reward a dauntless rider with 20 rupees (0,34 euros) and a "dhan'yavād"!

The guard at the college gate looks at me suspiciously and asks for identification. I give him my student card, reminding him that I was here also yesterday and the before that and that I also then showed my ID card. However, it seems that to him all white people look alike.

Right now I'm studying at the Ramjas College of Delhi university, where i'm taking some classes in economics. Although I'm a linguist, mostly interested in the global spread and variety of the English language, I figured I could avail the university's opportunities to raise my awareness on global affairs while killing time trying to come up with a potential PhD topic and studying Hindi. Furthermore, spending a semester with Indian undergraduate economics students gives me an excellent grass roots perspective on the present and future of the Indian society. The classroom serves as a kind of a microcosm.

The lecturer enters the classroom and almost even before putting his backback on the table starts spraying the blackboard with graphs, equations and economic jargon while swinging from side to side trying to catch the half empty classroom's attention. Meanwhile the students are slowly drifting to their seats. Most of them do not seem too interested in the teacher's ramblings, some stare out the window with their iPods on, others are reading John Grisham and Ken Follett novels or chatting with their classmates, the few in the front row are actually listening. To many, the classes seem to be more like a forum to meet friends than an actual place of learning. This was confirmed by one classmate, who said that nobody really listens to the teacher, everybody studies at home and just comes to class to get attendance marks.

The teacher disrupts his monologue every now and then and catches some of the students by surprise by asking a question, to which the students usually answer surprisingly effortlessly, but their answers are always almost by default disregarded as inadequate or completely wrong by the teacher. "First of all, you're completely wrong..." "I don't know what your problem is but what you just said makes no sense whatsoever...", yet the ones that are listening persevere and keep trying.

This goes on for a while. At some point comes the daily power cut, ceiling fans stop rotating and the room becomes a sauna within minutes. The teacher opens the windows, exposing the classroom to the noise of the students loitering in the hallway playing the latest Bollywood hits and ringtones from their mobiles. Rivalled by the noise coming from the hall, the teacher raises his voice and picks up the pace and is now firing the class room with 200 words a minute on the wonders of the Hecksher-Olin theory and comparative advantage on free market economies. He keeps running between the blackboard drawing new graphs and the hallway telling the kids to get lost, while the students in the front row keep following his movements back and forth, making the classroom look like a tennis game audience.

Capturing the teacher in action was difficult, as he was constantly on the move.

Class is disrupted again by a random student who marches in with a couple of guys who seem to be his homeboys to promote himself as a candidate for the upcoming student elections. He spits out a fervent five minute manifesto on how excellent a candidate he'd make and how he is going to shape the future of student politics. The students seem even less interested in him than the teacher. The guy disappears with his posse as quickly as he appeared, targeting the next classroom for similar treatment.

The class continues and the teacher loads another clip of economic theory for his listeners while at the same time running back and forth in the room, as if trying to catch everybody's attention by addressing everybody personally. While doing this he almost stumbles on a sleeping street dog coiled in the classroom corner. For a few passing seconds he stares blankly at the dog, who is now staring back with apparent indignation that someone dared to disturb its nap. "A dog...", mutters the teacher, and gets back to explaining the intricacies of the ricardian model.

The dog didn't seem too enthusiastic about my photographing.

The class ends and the teacher calls out the student's names, to which everybody answers with a "Yes, Sir!".
Outside the classroom I am stopped by two girls who tell me they are doing a survey for the Hindustani Times  on beauty ideals. Thus I am coerced to answer questions about shaving chest hair, using hair gel and bleaching one's skin, which apparently is rather common among Indian girls, as a fairer complexion is highly desired and seen as more beautiful. By being short and diplomatic in my answers, I try to squirm out of the rather awkward situation.

Making my way out of the college gate to the street, I am once again greeted by an army of rickshaw-wallahs with their mantra-like sales pitch "Yes, Sir? Hello, Sir! Metro Metro?!"

Babus

One of the most profound legacies that the British rule left in the Indian subcontinent after their departure since India's independence, was the full blown bureaucratic network, that laid the basis of Indian public administration up to this day. Over the course of years the system has mutated into a strange Chimera of archaic, rigid bureaucratic conventions in the rapidly changing Indian society. This framework has permeated itself to all levels of administrative work in India evoking pure dread in anyone who may have to take care of any formal matters. I had heard warning tales on how hours of queuing, obtaining certificates, signatures, stamps and other obscure documents, depending on the moods of the clerk responsible, put your patience into an ultimate test. However, I had always thought of these anecdotes to be slightly exaggerated. Unfortunately they did not fall short in accuracy.

The machinery is run by an armada of clerks, sometimes called babus, which is a formerly derogatory term referring to Indian civil servants working for the British Empire, and would later to be used to refer to any Indian administrator buried behind his/her mountains of papers and office supplies. These are men and women equipped with an unflappable sense of authority and self-importance. Having passed the highly competitive civil service examination and granted a job for life in a government office, they have terminally entered a world where reality and validity of things are determined by certificates, stamps, signatures, fee slips and other obscure documents. It seems that to these people, things do not exist if they haven't been validated through emblems and stamps from other authorities first.

The army of babus is a perfect reflection of the idiosyncratic nature of the Indian society. These people may work with machine-like precision and meticulousness, but at the same time the whole system itself seems to be a heavy burden for the society to run smoothly. Despite the leaps and bounds of progress India has made since its economic liberalisation in the 90's, the vast public sector, with all its somewhat outdated intricacies and complexities may be one of the key reasons, why India still has some of the economic and social issues it has today.  The legacy of colonial public administration combined with socialist economic policies right after India's independence created a trundling behemoth of bureaucracy that still leaves its stamps and signatures to the Indian society. The concept of a babu is a product of this.

Dealing with babus is, unfortunately, a necessary evil, if one wishes to become regarded as a proper resident of Delhi. One ordeal that a student has to go through is to apply for accommodation in a student hostel, which of course involves dealing with the hostel office - a haven of babudom.

After a month in Gwyer Hall, the international office had promised us affordable student accommodation in the campus area from the International Student House. The only catch was that we had to take care of the application ourselves. Thus, as my contract in Gwyer Hall was expiring, I had to take the bull by its horns and sharpen my pencils for another stack of forms to fill. Outside the office, I was greeted by a huddled mass of international and Indian students with their own stacks of passport copies, letters of admission and passport size photos. Indian bureaucrats seem to have an obsession on passport-sized photos, as every single document must be equipped with one. It's not valid if it does not have your face on it. 

I knew I had already been admitted to the hostel and now all I needed to do was to pay the deposit and a the rent for the first two months. Pushing my way through the crowd, I entered from the heat of the sweaty noon to a freeze of the air-conditioned bureau. Two men were hunched over their desks with enormous piles of files, forms, notebooks, stamps and other apparel. A young boy was serving chai to the clerks, carefully trying to place the cups to the clerks' desks without touching the papers. The men acknowledged the boy's gestures with a chorus of grunts. Without knowing whom to turn to, I randomly picked one desk on the corner where the other was meticulously studying a ledger about the size of the clerk himself - a small man with massive eyebrows,a greasy combover, face frozen in a constant frown, chest hair bursting from his shirt collar. After standing in front of the man's desk for a few minutes, without him paying the slightest attention to me, I finally opened my mouth and asked whether I could pay the deposit and the rent for the first two months. As I was clearly disrupting the clerk's routine, his eyebrow started twitching:

Me: I would like to pay the deposit and the rent...

Clerk: Aff....Affidavit?!

Me: Umm....No, I wanted to pay the deposit...

Clerk: You have the Affidavit?!

Me: No..?

Clerk: You come back, one hour! (pointing to his colleague's desk)

The man turned back to his ledger. Confused by what had just happened, I decided that it might be best to come back later. An hour later I returned to the office and went to the desk I had been pointed towards. The man behind was going through the applicants' papers with robotic precision. As I had already been admitted to the hostel, I thought that the rest of the application process was only about paying the required fees. It soon became clear to me that I was assuming too much. The clerk handed me a stack of papers, all of which had to be filled out duly and attached with the proper signatures, stamps and of course, passport size photographs. After submitting them my application, a letter of admission from the university, a student exchange certificate from my home university, a copy of my passport, a copy of my visa and three passport-size photos, they still demanded me to fill out and submit:

- A hostel membership card 

- A membership application to a health center nearby

- An affidavit stating that I will not engage in an act of ragging

- An affidavit from a parent/guardian/embassy stating that I will not engage in an act of ragging, stamped and    signed by an official from the Finnish embassy

- Three passport-size photos

The affidavits were apparently part of Delhi University's anti-ragging campaign (see the post "Snapshots"), which for the locals may be a serious thing, but obviously I was not going to go all the way to the other side of Delhi to pay a fee to obtain a signature for a paper that confirms that I will not bully my fellow residents in the hostel, that was out of the question. Instead, me and Dan, who was with me in the office, decided to circumvent the trouble by taking advantage of the vague definition of "guardian". Hence, my official guardian in India became Mr.Daniel Gregson from England. I handed the filled out forms to the clerk, who studied them for a good while thus increasing the suspense whether my scam was going to backfire. He stared at Dan's smudgy signature for a while, and asked who he was, to which I innocently replied "my guardian". The man looked at me askingly, shrugged and moved on the next application, which was Dan's. It did not seem to bother him that he had just read Dan's name in my application as the guardian and was now studying an application of a person of the exact same name and nationality. Either western names and faces look all the same to him, or the clerk could have not cared less what was in the papers. Finally, the clerk closed our applications to a folder and told us to go buy a lock for the room door and then come back to show it to him.

This was merely a tip of the iceberg of the bureaucratic ordeals one has to go through to get things sorted here. Most of the formal matters I have had to take care of here have involved endless form filling, signatures on every side of paper, stamps of all colours, shapes and sizes, certificates, passport copies, visa copies, affidavits, fee slips, dodgy signatures and vague information given and, of course, an indefinite number of passport-sized photos.