This April, on an absurdly hot day in Northern India, I stood outside the comfortable confines of an air-conditioned hotel to observe the thrilling spectacle of the road, its relentless momentum rushed by like a torrent which is always the same and always a shock. You see entire families ride by on an insubstantial motorcycle, open buses full of women in saris of vibrant colors, the indifference of lean street dogs, lethargic cows, old men straining on vintage bicycles and the controlled chaos of life and death, or at least injury, before your eyes. There was a feeling of euphoria being back here and I felt fearless but also faced uncertainty whether to jump into the fray and swim or to passively stand on the sidewalk, an onlooker. Aware of this unhappy metaphor, like so many of us, fearing it could be the central one in our lives, I decided not to dwell on it, to harbor any self recrimination.
There were plenty of offers from tuk-tuk drivers lingering nearby to sweep me up but I had no specific destination in mind. I was just a tourist and made this known by the conspicuously large camera I carried and took photographs of the distressed walls or sometimes of torn posters that bemused on lookers. Finally I pointed it at a young women in a red sari crossing the treacherous road confidently and with elegance. In doing so I found myself the focus of attention, the drama of the street had shifted and I was the target of real anger from an old women. I will never know what she shouted at me with such vehemence but perhaps I can guess; who has the vulgarity and bad taste to take a photograph of a women without her permission?
I scuttled away before there was more of a scene. I noticed some of younger people were amused, they know how we behave, like we own the world and care nothing about anyone else’s privacy especially a young woman in the flower of her youth in her spotless outfit and sultry walk across a dust blown street. As I write I find myself scrolling through the photographs on my phone where I’m struck again by her poise, the assurance of her worth, while I’m only focused on the visual ambiguity of elegance surrounded by the dirt and chaos of the road. I ran back into the safety of the hotel and the slightly patronizing security guards who haven’t witnessed my shame and so didn’t have the opportunity to reprimand me although I knew with some certainty they would relish the opportunity.
I reflected once I have settled down in my room some of the roots of my affection for India, it doesn’t just probe and engulf your sense’s but forces reconsideration your established world views. The encounter was a reminder that it’s a country of faiths and ardent believers of rituals and manners, on the surface it might appear disorderly but there is rigidity in its societal behavior. There is a clue to the importance of religion from the moment you fill in the visa application; a list of faiths that few westerners have ever encountered, many home grown, and I smiled to myself when I saw there was no room for an atheism or agnosticism and so became a reluctant Christian for the purposes of bureaucracy and categorization.
But it is a different, more modern form of faith that concerns me. I was in Mumbai to visit a small group of people employed during the Covid period to fix a problem in the USA and I had built strong relationships with them without ever meeting in person. And so it was a largely joyous occasion to be together physically at last. During a conversation with the teams leader I was asked a question that surprised me “Is the USA now a fading world power?” presented to me a hopefulness, a yearning even, that almost begged me to concur.
In India the printed daily newspaper available in the hotel feels sadly cynical with a pro-government and conservative narrative that could have been composed from any low ranking official. Younger people read online and have access to US based institutions such as CNN and don’t know quite what to believe. I took a cautious response and told him truthfully that in my opinion its global status was diminished only a little by Trump but seeing the shadow of disappointment on his face decided not to pursue this further. It was a surprising question as he had previously displayed high sensitivity to any matter that could be considered controversial and in my frequent conversations I had established that he was aware of the propaganda that exists in the news we all consume. I allowed it to affect me personally, spending the majority of my adult life in the USA, I’m liberated from the prejudices of my left leaning contemporaries in Europe, and I was not angry just saddened that so many people are heartened by a decline in US power.
The question lingered with me when I took the flight down the spine of the continent to the southern Chennai, a place I have visited several times. Our office is said to be in a prestigious location and looking down from one of the windows I could see flawless white birds with wide wings and impossibly thin legs, miniature dinosaurs, sometimes solitary and at others in large flocks in a lake which borders a major garbage heap. We were hostage to the complex smell of this heap depending on the strength and direction of the wind. It carried with it teenage memories of a metalworking class at school, an exclusively masculine affair, where steel is filed, bent and burnt combined with another memory around the same time in my life of a solitary walk in the woods pursued by the unmistakable scent of a dead animal. It was omnipresent, a textile of decay. Late one evening it encircled the roof top of a luxury hotel where there was a large celebratory dinner and we all made efforts to ignore the unwelcome guest, but the food was already tiresome for my taste, although delicious, repetition dampens my eagerness to please my hosts, and instead spent my time looking at the sun going down, tamed at that hour, a pale pink haze slipping below the horizon with the certain knowledge that it will return eight or nine hours later with a new ferocity burning angrily through the lace curtains of the hotel room.
Sunday was a lazy, aimless day so I hired a driver paying him by the hour to take me around the city. He was suspicious of my lack of enthusiasm, wanted a destination and sought some purpose from me, so I reluctantly visited a Christian Church, a Hindu Temple, but really all I wanted was to be in the noise and drama of the road, to be part of the discordant symphony of car and motorcycle horns and be close enough to the other speeding vehicles that I could reach out and touch them. Eventually we agreed to go to the beach, empty in the morning as what would be the point of lying on a beach in this heat? the concession stands were Edwardian looking hand trucks with large wooden wheels allowing them to be moved across the fine sand. Most were faded and blasted by sun, sand and rain but had once been painted bright carnival colors by hand and the resulting distress was a joy to photograph and occupied me for several hours to the visible annoyance of my driver. He had pointed out the wooden tables heaped with silver forms, some still moving, whatever the men caught that morning and pointed excitedly at a pair of elderly Europeans shopping saying “foreigners!” unaware of any irony. Closer to the edge of the Ocean there was a mess of fishing boats strewn with tarpaulin sheets, makeshift shelter on land. As I approached I became aware that this was where the fishermen and their families lived, it felt intrusive to go closer towards their encampments and I didn’t want to disrupt the intimacy as I could already hear children’s voices above the roar of the waves.
I started to compose what the true answer should have been and it has taken a few months now, and several other countries, to formulate. I thought about it, for example, when visited by three handsome and prosperous women from Aspen shorty after coming back to New York. It was a pleasant, unusually warm and humid evening so early in the summer. They were pleasant company and more fun after a first round of cocktails but I needed to suppress my views due to the unsettling combination of privilege and unhappiness where every circuitous conversation led to a destination of complaint and wrongdoing, this new American plague of victim hood. We discussed the news that Finland had again been stated as being the happiest country in the world and the apparent contradiction of my own perception, based on brief experience, of it being a frozen, dark landscape for much of the year. The explanation is surprising at first; the Finns apparently have low, or at least realistic, expectations from life. I wanted to expand this theme with my three wealthy guests and perhaps even share some of my photographs of India where poor families are waiting for buses in the scorching heat, dirt and humidity, in what we would undoubtedly term as a “slum”, but instead are visibly happy and content but it felt inappropriate in such company, I cannot become that kind of moralizer and instead was happy to volunteer to pick up our pizza order and walked out onto the purple neon of midtown, to the pent-up hum of the cars waiting to cross over the bridge to Queens and beyond, to the sidewalks full of New Yorker’s in their summer outfits, a new sexiness in the streets which lifted my mood.
Three weeks later I was on the move again back to Europe occasionally thinking about economic metrics such as GDP, unemployment rates, interest rates, deficits, defence spending etc. but they seem to be a little irrelevant to most of us. An answer of sorts came to me on the first night of arriving in Barcelona in a predictably stylish, fashionably illegal loft where a Swedish designer informed us that she was moving her business out of Spain because of the bureaucracy. She loved the country but complained about its bondage to petty taxes and over administration. It was strange to be there eating delicious local food overlooking the wide panorama of the city with its familiar landmarks and a strange yellow cloud formed by lasers which announced, a little embarrassingly, a third night’s sold-out performance by Coldplay, talking about the mundane matters of small business challenges.
There are some conversations that seem to scream “over-entitlement”; when I was growing up it was house price rises in London, these days it seems to be where should we live? Our friends told us that they had recently decided to relocate to London to be closer to the center of creativity in Europe. I steered the conversation westward and the virtues of Los Angeles making the argument that if our roles were reversed it is where I would take a dynamic business, aware that this same dialogue has happened continually for about 150 years or more. My case for America is uncomplicated; for all its faults it continually attracts the most talented people in the creative world, those who are most ambitious in business or science, those who want to express themselves without governmental interference. But I don’t know why I dwelt so much on my Indian colleagues question, do I really care if the USA has lost its influence as a world power? In my mind the opposite feels true, the main reason that the USA is perceived by some to be in decline is its very openness to debate issues in the public square. Its mistakes and failures are on view to the world without filter or fear of retribution. The incessant warfare between opposing parties is what gives democracy its vitality and you simply need to experience the opposite to understand its value.
jnmanson 