In love with LED

Kolkata takes words and leaves them trembling, colourless.  It seems pointless to try.  And yet…

In the dark from the airport, bikes swoop and stutter and our driver keeps his finger in a frantic staccato on the high beam- a stabbing language of light that seems both aggressive and somehow regal.  Our progress from airport to city is marked in bursts of light and sound.

In the bleak industrial wasteland of new construction and old dreams that mark both sides of the road, everything is garlanded in neon.  Everything is held together, it appears, with sticks and hope and fairy lights.  Above what must surely be vast slum entrances, tiny globes flicker in strings of orange and blue and red; huge arches lit with light and the faces of gods rear up from alleys and lead nowhere; dogs and children scrabble beneath strings of flashing jewels. 

Kolkata is in love with LED.

The contrast leaves you reeling because the city, at first glance, is falling apart.  Everything is patched together and the skeletons show plain: buildings, dogs and even, you imagine, people themselves.  Through the streets, relatively quiet at midnight, bikes rush with men and women three astride; rickshaws both pedal- powered and motorised; trucks monolithic and colourful; children and dogs and chickens.  From the pavement rises the steam of cooking pots; the lights from hundreds of tiny roadside shacks selling soft drink and electrical goods.  Leering from the darkness- half finished buildings in hulking concrete; tiny dwellings in cloth and stick and god knows what.  Skeletons.

I take it all in from the backseat of the four wheel drive, holding Brydie close and a sick bag even closer.  Earlier, half way through the four hour flight from Singapore, deep in 3am sleep, she sits up shuddering, eye lids jerking.  The vice-like grip of nausea only relents ten minutes after we land at Kolkata Airport when she vomits into the specially-packed sick bags with foolproof lock away top.  Heaps better than the clip- lock bags we pioneered in Bangkok. It’s a new personal best.  Ten minutes in the country and she’s thrown up already.  As in Cambodia and Fiji, the upside is that her near-comatose state gets us through Customs in a big hurry.  Five minutes from our hotel, Brydie throws up again and immediately feels better.

Our hotel is in an alley where people are crouching around a low stove cooking something, accompanied by dogs.  The air is full of the sounds of car horns, even at this hour.  We follow Bron and Akino into the lobby- register carvings, wooden stairwells, cool marble floors.  We stumble into single beds in two rooms across the hall from one another on the third floor.  Brydie sleeps fully clothed.  There are threadbare blankets, bottom sheets, one towel.  A TV and a fridge.  It’s after 6am Sydney time when sleep claims us to the frantic whirr of a fan.

It’s birdsong that wakes me, 6am local time.  Birdsong, and I can hardly believe it.  White light reaches a finger in under the curtain above my head.  Jem sleeps.  I put my feet onto cold tiles, investigate the view from the bathroom window through an elegant and rusted curled grille.  Galvanised iron roof tops, garbage, the smell of heat and car fumes and something cooking. Washing hangs from windows.

Early morning unfolds:  cold shower in stuttering spray; choosing clothes that are  modest but don’t give away too much to the promise of a heat that already hangs heavy on the skin; hard boiled eggs and toast with jam and bright orange juice sniffed suspiciously.  Jem is waning already, Brydie bright with relief from the night before.  We stick our heads out into the alley- bikes and trucks in a growing cacophony of noise, a ‘sidewalk café’ ladling something out to passersby, the fast-walk of colourfully dressed locals and men in long trousers and sandals. Optimistic dogs that Brydie eyes with friendly compassion. 

“I like India!” she announces gamely, taking my hand in her own as we head back down the alley to the hotel in search of breakfast, and I could just about scoop her up and cover her with kisses.   

Cradling water bottles, we load into two vehicles; a mini bus and a jeep and head into the funk and fume that is 9am Kolkata traffic.  Brydie and Mum are in the jeep- the rest of us in the bus.  The noise and spectacle of the city fills me with that same utterly bewildering sensation of conflict and energy and exhilaration and despair I sensed in Phnom Penh.  It leaves me all colours and reeling.  I leave the photography to Dad.

It sprawls, it leans, it crowds, it smells, it shoots gap toothed smiles and weaves crazily in and out,  pressing in against the windows.  There are green spaces and white domed palaces in the distances; bridges and buses spilling people from roof tops; a child holding a baby in his arms threading his ways between rickshaws; bikes swaying elegantly through traffic with casual passengers at crazy angles; billboards and roadside shanties and everything held together with the frailest, boldest of hopes.   Every single face, flashing by the window upturned, downcast, meeting your eyes for just a moment- every single face a story you’d hardly dare to read, even if you knew the language.  In the background, above all else there are horns.  Honk if you love Jesus.  Honk if you don’t.  Just honk.  Just honk.

Tonight we are curled beneath an orange double mosquito net with bright red roses on it, like being inside our own special hot house.  Jem thinks it’s elegant.  A fan stirs the air above us.  We’re in two rooms at either end of a corridor upstairs in the school house, with a school room in between.  A mural of Madagascar and some Disney Princesses grace one of the walls. 

“Disney/Pixar,”  says Doug.  “Bringing the world together.”

Durgapur feels rural, although we’ve not seen much of it yet.  St Michel’s Compound, where we’re staying, is tucked away on a back street, a ‘campus’ of sorts minus its children because they’re on school holidays.  It caters for children from the nearby slums; it boards students and has a multi-faith and peace centre.  We’ve eaten with the staff- two meals which for Brydie consisted entirely of rice.  Could be a long week for the little one. A bright green gecko, whom Jem has named Gerrard, watches me from the wall above the bed. 

Tomorrow, a two and a half hour trip to Sarenga, a tribal area north of here.  My little troopers are game and exhausted, grinning stoically in the heat and the humidity and the uncertainty of strangers and the utter chaos of the landscape.  Tomorrow they’ll come face to face with people for the first time.  Tomorrow ‘the other’ comes close.  

India... Well that'll be an experience!

“India!  Well that’ll be an experience!”

It’s the most common reaction we get whenever we tell people where we’re headed.  With a few exceptions, as far as I can tell it seems to be pretty much code for “Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?”

People who’ve already travelled to amazing India often tell us we’ll love it- the people and the place will get into our bloodstream and we’ll be back, they reckon.  Some of those who haven’t been there- probably conjuring up the familiar and stereotypical image of chaos and poverty and corruption and insanely passionate cricketers- fumble for words and come up with ‘an experience.’  I guess it's just safe to say the reaction is mixed.  But either way- people go for the word 'experience'.

And I kinda like the fact that they’re choosing to concentrate their efforts in this realm.

It makes me wonder what ‘an experience’ is and how we have one.  The fact is, there are thirteen of us embarking on this adventure together and while we’re all following the same itinerary-checking into a hotel in Kolkata overnight, loading up a mini bus to travel two hours north to an industrial city, Durgapur, where we’ll stay with the local church and visit education and health projects, then heading back to mosey around in Kolkata and Delhi- we’ll all be having totally different experiences. 

It’s not just the material things that’ll be different for us- who enjoys the food, who ends up sitting next to Brydie and her 9 stuffed animals on the bus.  It’s how we interpret the raw material we’re faced with.  And it’s the interpretation I’m interested in.  After all, some people travel the world and are changed forever.  Others come home and buy a new flatscreen.

Why is that?  Seems to me that our own personal filters determine what kind of picture of the world we come away with.  Think of Instagram- that fabulous little photo app I’ve become so fond of.  Take a raw picture- you can think of that as the ‘way things actually are’ or the experience we’re all having together.  Already, of course, in taking the picture we’ve made a number of decisions about where to focus, what to crop in and out, how much to zoom.  It’s exactly the same in life depending on what parts of our experiences we choose to dwell on.   Do we focus on the comedy or the tragedy?  The boredom or the chaos?  The creativity or the frustration?

On top of that apply a filter- more light, less light, different tones.  Add a frame.  What we come away with is the same picture, but cast differently depending on the choices and mood of the person doing the creating.

In real life, our filters are our backgrounds, past experiences, temperaments, values and expectations.  All these things mean that we’re already changing the picture even as we’re walking into it to be part of it.  Jem and Brydie, embarking on this great adventure, already have some pre-conceived ideas about things like poverty, the ideal way to react to vomit, ‘helping’ and India itself.  But they hardly know they hold these ideas- they're born of experiences and conversations they’ve had with family and friends since they were old enough to talk.  Their different personalities pre-dispose them to either warm to this experience or to shy away from it.  And their different personalities pre-dispose them to deal with their feelings in different ways. 

I’m reminded of that quote from the Torah:  “We don’t see the world as it is.  We see the world as we are.”  Any experience we have is a combination of our personality, our expectations, our values- our own special, hardly-noticed spin.

Just recently I realised that I literally wear ‘rose coloured’ glasses.  A pair of migraine busting super-polarised dark brown tinted Ray-bans, they seldom leave my face and give the world a very pleasant rosy hue.  Sunsets look amazing through their lens.  (Poles in the underground Station at St James, on the other hand, look like nothing much, which is how you can get painfully up-close-and-personal with them if you’re running for a train.) 

My literal lenses pretty much mirror my philosophical lens, which is a nice little coincidence: optimist with realist leanings.  How did I get that way?  Who knows.  Genes.  Early life experiences.  Decisions that have reinforced my way of seeing the world…  What’s your lens?

Anyway, we’re on the flight to Singapore, and I’ve got on the glasses because my head has been pole-axing all morning.  I’m a little tanked up on painkillers, Coke and some very tasty roasted peanuts, courtesy of Singapore Airlines.  We’re on the top deck of the 787 or whatever combination of numbers it is that flies the double-decker.  Beside me, Jem, Brydie and Doug are glued to screens and giggling quietly every now and then.  Across the aisle, mum and dad are also engrossed.

To tell the truth, I’ve felt a little anxious at times about dragging my entire family into the unknown, beset as we are at every turn with people raising their eyebrows and dangling the sceptre of Deli belly and humidity and heat and electricity cuts and poverty and and and…  I understand the concerns.  I also think about the opportunities and resent some of the stereotypes.  But for me, the experience isn’t just about ‘teaching my children how lucky they are’ or ‘seeing how the other half live’ or 'being inspired' or anything else that’s entirely about us. 

It’s more about making a connection, as feeble and shortlived as that will inevitably be.  And hoping that somehow that’s a connection that will continue to unwind in ways I haven’t yet figured out, for all of us, at both ends, beyond the couple of short days we’ll be together.  Connections are complicated; maybe they take years to bear fruit; maybe they’re in the mind and the heart as well as in the physical realm…  And they’re not always comfortable.  They change us.  They change others.  

Okay, to be honest I don’t know exactly what kind of experience I’m hoping for.  But it's something along those lines. Does that sound a bit rose coloured? Given we’re all coming at this from different places, it probably is.

Guess we’ll wait and see. 

Misogyny killed my speechwriting career

Okay so by now we all know that if you look up the definition of misogynist, you’ll find that strictly speaking it’s a person who hates women.  Sure, I’m not usually a stickler for the dictionary definition, but in this case it might be a bit important?  It seems to me that a misogynist is more than a person who has outdated, sexist or at times offensive views about women, or who has doubts about a woman’s capacity to lead.  It’s a person who actually hates women.  For that reason, I’m one of those people who’s not all that comfortable with the label being applied to Tony Abbott.  I think he probably has a right to roll his eyes when he’s accused of holding this attitude ‘every day, in every way.’  I mean, seriously? 

Not that I feel any sympathy for him.  In choosing to relentlessly accuse Prime Minister Gillard of being a liar, and standing by signs like ‘bitch’ and ‘witch’ he and his Government have also chosen to use language in a way that strips it of much of its meaning.  When you hype language to this extent, labelling people with terms that hold so much emotional baggage and neatly assassinate entire characters in one fell swoop, something happens not only to the person, but to language itself. 

You’re left with nothing to use in situations where language really could communicate something serious.

And that bothers me.

Take places around the world where people actually are the victims of serious hatred, arguably gender based.   Or where people genuinely can’t be trusted, about anything.   In Afghanistan a fourteen year old school girl is shot because she wants to pursue education for herself and other girls.  The Taliban opposes this, arguably motivated by the desire to hold women and girls captive in poverty and ignorance, which may or may not amount to sheer hatred of women but which certainly manifests itself in very evil behaviour toward them.  If Malala recovers, and continues her quest to liberate her sisters, the Taliban say they’ll target her again. 

Is this an example of misogyny?  How does it compare to Abbott’s behaviour?  What language are we left with to describe the Taliban if we’re throwing around the term misogyny to describe Mr Abbott?

For mine, Tony Abbott and others like him say things that are offensive, sexist and sometimes just plain stupid.  Abbott’s ideas about the roles of women and men seem outdated to me, although they’re certainly shared by many people who are deeply respectful of women in other ways.  But a hater of women, every day and in every way?  In my opinion, that’s just not realistic.

I’m glad that Julia Gillard spoke out against the fact that she’s been maligned by people who should be using language in ways that are more fitting of intelligent debate.  The ongoing comments about her as a woman and recent statements about her father are off-the-scale offensive. But I’m not sure that protesting against the use of inaccurate and offensive language by returning it was a good tactic, understandable as it might have been at the time.

Can we not just take a deep breath here?  To me, it’s depressing that our desire to make a point pushes us to use more and more hyperbole.  Hyperbole just strips language of its power.  It makes us two-dimensional cut out characters who don’t stop to consider all the reasons why people say and do the things they do.  Politics makes people play games with power, but we don’t all need to get in on the act.  We seem all too willing to write people off with a simple label, no matter what side of the bench we sit.  (And sure, I’m as guilty as anyone.  It’s often really quite fun.)

I guess I can’t help but think there’s a lot of genuine evil in this world.  If we absolutely must distil people down to one word adjectives, why don’t we save words packed with invective like ‘hatred’ for where they’re really needed?  At least then they’d retain some of their power. 

Tony Abbott doesn’t inherently hate women.  And Julia Gillard isn’t inherently a liar.  They’re actually probably both reasonably decent people who in their variously human and flawed ways probably have a lot more in common than they realise.  

Damn.  I’d make such a boring political speechwriter. 

The secret to unhappiness

A couple of weeks ago I read an article that suggested that the source of human unhappiness was comparison.  When we compare our bodies, our spouses, our incomes, our jobs, our(insert your own subject) with others, we almost always find them wanting and then we feel unhappy.  On the other hand, if we refrain from setting people and events in a wider context, but just take them on their own merits, we’re more likely to be happy with what we have.

Fair enough, I thought at the time.  Better not to make comparisons.   *Must remember to avoid that in the future.

Recently I had an experience that brought this idea home with horrible clarity.  For about six weeks, it appeared that some benevolent hand had turned off the pain switch in my brain.  No reason.  Utterly bewildering.  In more than 25 years, it’s never happened before to the same extent.  And it was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.

Life was unbelievably easy.  I got up in the morning without pain, and I went to bed at night without pain.  My painkiller count went from 4-6 a day to virtually nothing, I worked and played and slept in a bit of a euphoric daze.  And I told only a few people because it was a wildcard that couldn’t possibly last.  Could it…?

It didn’t.  The pain is back. 

The comparison between life with constant pain and life without it is shocking.  And since returning to status quo, I have felt unhappy.  Deeply unhappy.  Sad not only to be in pain, but also because I now know what it’s like to be without it.

Yes, comparison is a cause of deep unhappiness.  Point proved.

So keeping one’s head down and looking straight ahead is the way to go, then?  Is ignorance bliss?  For millions of people living in poverty- better for them that they never know what they’re missing out on?

Naturally, no sooner had I decided from experience that yes, comparison is the source of all human misery and it should be avoided at all costs than I felt compelled to analyse it a bit further. 

Because of course it’s not possible to lead lives where we can avoid comparison.  We’re surrounded by it.  When you’re single, you’re bound to be seated next to a necking couple on the train.  When your own career is going down the toilet, it’s inevitable that your best friend will get the $50K bonus, and if you’re feeling like a beached whale the only person you’ll ever be seated next to at your School Reunion is the Back To School Class of ’89 ShowGirl.

So it's unrealistic to think we can avoid making comparisons. Yet comparisons so often make us unhappy. What’s the solution?

Comparisons show up two things- difference and deficiency.  One is genuinely a problem- the other not so much.  Confusing the two is probably where a lot of the unhappiness lies. When you live or work with someone, it’s easy to compare your own communication styles and decide that your partner or colleague is deeply deficient in some area when perhaps it’s just a different way of communicating.  When you travel overseas it’s easy enough to compare cultures and decide that certain features are deficiencies when again, they may just be differences.  When your child becomes a teenager and their character appears to change beyond all recognition, again it’s probably tempting to decide that they’ve become deficient- but again, perhaps it’s just a difference that can be adjusted to. 

Deficient, or just different?

Of course there are comparisons that highlight genuine deficiencies.  Compare the percentage of girls who attend high school in Australia (99%) to the number of girls who attend school in Pakistan (29%) and you come up with a deficiency.  A white middle class man growing up on the North Shore of Sydney is likely to live almost 30 years longer than an Aboriginal man growing up in a remote area of Australia.  And there are times when relationships and characters and careers are clearly deficient too.  Probably not as often as we think, but when the deficiencies are genuine and we can see a better model at work, we should be motivated to work toward change.  In some cases if we don’t make the comparisons, we don’t see the extent of the need.   And change never takes place.

But what about those things that fall into the category of deficiencies that we may be powerless to change?  These are the disappointments.  At times, of course, there’s just going to be a huge gulf between what we want and what we get, a gulf that endless comparison can only make more painful.  I’m single and I want to be married with children. I’m strapped for cash and I’d prefer to be heading on a Caribbean cruise.  I’m married with children, strapped for cash and I’d prefer to be single and heading on a Caribbean cruise…   I have pain and it sucks. 

Well, what can I say?  Life is disappointing.  We don’t get what we want.  But that’s not what defines us.  The secret to being unhappy is dwelling on what we don’t have rather than on what we do.   The secret to being unhappy is feeling as though we got ripped off in the great game of life and we deserved better and everybody else won the hand.  Actually, they probably didn’t.  Surprisingly enough, a lot of people probably feel a bit the same quite a lot of the time.  And we all just get on with it, and concentrate on what we’ve got, and what we love, and hope for the best, and hang on. 

We change what we can and live with what we can’t.

Making comparisons is inevitable.  It’s what we do with the information that determines how happy we are. 

Leaving it late

It's great how travel reveals things about a person, even before they go anywhere.

Case in point:  yet again, the process of going overseas reveals that I'm not gifted with forms.  Of any kind.  I'd go so far as to say that I'm crap with forms, in fact.  So I put off filling them in, and the end result is that while we're due to leave in six days, Jem, Brydie and I have no visas.  Up until four days ago, I didn't have a passport either.  It's getting to the point where I'm feeling a little bit alarmed about it all, to be honest.

Of course, colleagues more knowing than I am assure me it'll be fine and I'm sure it will be.  The average turnaround for an Indian visa is 2-3 working days (five at the most), and I've been counting on that being the case all along.  Still, that moment in the Visa office when a very well groomed, helpful young man informed me that my 'husband's signature does not match his passport signature, unfortunately, and this will hold up your children's application...' was not my finest hour.

Approximately how long might this delay be, I enquired calmly, while adrenaline like a wild beast went coursing through my veins and I momentarily forgot my own name.  Ah well, the well-groomed helpful young man told me thoughtfully, that would be hard to say, but five working days at the longest... and when was I hoping to travel?

"In five working days, actually..."

Possibly smelling my adrenaline, he did a workaround.  And I'm sure that the visas will arrive in time.

But it begs the question- why do I put things off?  Why does anyone?  Especially when the stakes are high- ie you may not be able to leave the country if you don't fill in the forms leaving adequate time to lodge them?  In the back of my head, I was doing the numbers and reassuring myself that all was well, but really, was the idea of printing the details of my children's births, their non-existent occupations and my own phone number (albeit in triplicate) such a horrifying thought that I needed to push it so close to our time of departure?  Actually I don't think it was filling in the forms that was the problem.  It was the niggly nailing down of certain other details.  It was completion.  Perhaps that's the problem.  Perhaps I have a COMPLETION problem. No time for the psychology of that, but I return to the question:  why do we put things off?

I don't know the answer to that.  But I bet I do it again.  And therein lies the mystery, don't you think?  Wouldn't you imagine that someone as reasonably highly evolved and dare I say intelligent as myself might learn a lesson from the stress of a close call and pick up their act?  (I mean, assuming we actually make it onto the plane...  I'll keep you posted).

What's the answer to procrastination?  Why do we leave it late when we know it has to be done sooner or later?  Insights?  Tips?  Professional therapists numbers?