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I am writing this from my hotel room in Bangalore India. It is nearly 6pm local time or 7:30am back home. This is my second day here. I arrived early yesterday morning so I’m still dealing with jet lag though that hasn’t been as bad as I expected.

Getting here involved three flights. DC->London, London->Mumbai and Mumbai->Bangalore. For some reason none of the more direct options (e.g. DC->Frankfurt, Frankfurt->Bangalore) were available for me probably due to the time of day I was leaving. After going through this I can wholeheartedly recommend not traveling through Mumbai. I nearly missed my connecting flight because of getting bad directions. It seems that if people don’t know the answer they make one up.

They also like bureaucracy. I went through security where my baggage was x-rayed and I was screened with a magnetic wand. I then walked 75 feet to exit the building to get on the shuttle to the plane where the same exact process was repeated. I’m not sure how things could have changed in that short distance but that’s the way it worked.

Bangalore itself is….interesting. It’s a very dirty city and certainly not a designed one. Roads go off in any particular direction and I’m not sure I’ve seen any road go in a really straight line for any distance. Navigating through traffic seems to be an adventure. Lanes seem to be a suggestion rather than a rule and traffic signals seem be if not ignored then freely abused. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone use a turn signal here. Horns are frequently used for various things from “I’m passing you” to “I’m annoyed with you”. It makes Boston traffic seem tame by comparison. At least in Boston you don’t have to worry about avoiding cows that might be wandering in the middle of the road.

Poverty coexists with high rise modern buildings. The area where the hotel is is in a gated community that would fit in with any American suburb, but just outside the gate is the free-for-all of Bangalore. Almost every available spot to hold a sign has one. The shops for the most part seem small and fairly poor. We certainly have our share of poverty at home but here it’s more exposed. At home we seem to confine our poverty to ghettos. Here it seems all mixed together.

The place is also crowded. Someone told us 24 million people live in Bangalore though the websites say around 7 million. Either way, I feel like I met most of them yesterday. It’s hard to find any public place that isn’t occupied. At least I didn’t see one yesterday. As crowded as northern Virginia has become it’s still spacious by Bangalore standards.

Yesterday, when sightseeing, a lot of those people seemed to be staring at me. It wasn’t threatening and children were a lot more likely to be blatant about it than adults. But, westerners aren’t very common here and we do stand out in a crowd. The stares weren’t aggressive, simply curious. Still, it felt a bit like I was under a microscope.

Putting all those things together, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable wandering around Bangalore alone. It would be incredibly easy to get lost and since you can’t visually distinguish safe from unsafe neighborhoods (or at least I can’t), it would be far too easy to end up in someplace better off avoided.

It’s clear that human labor isn’t valued the same way as it is at home. From the number of doormen, elevator button pushers and other jobs, it’s clear that cheap labor is readily available. I guess that means that the difference between the lowest wage jobs and the highest wage jobs is much higher here than at home. Because of that, there are people to do jobs that I, raised to do many things for myself, am content to do myself. I even feel a little odd having someone do that for me. Having a driver hurriedly hop out of a car to open the door for me or having someone push an elevator button. It almost feels uncomfortable to be waited on like that. But, it’s their job and so I try to let them do their job.

One job that seems to be fairly common is begging. And westerners are prime targets. At Bull Temple, we were aggressively pursued by a pack of kids. We had been warned not to give them anything or we would be even more aggressively pursued but it was hard to ignore them and I felt like I should have done something.

The weather has been hot but not horribly so. It’s humid but again not terribly bad. We’re close to monsoon season and it rained heavily for an hour or so last night.

The food has been good, but I have to keep reminding myself to stay away from fruit. The hotel says they purify their water but the warning was to stay away from any water that wasn’t from a sealed bottle unless it has been boiled. The warning even specifically included hotels that said they purified their water because the fruit and vegetables they buy probably have come from sources that didn’t have purified water and so the danger still exists. For the record, it’s hard to not use the sink tap when brushing my teeth. Instead I have to reach for the glass if bottled water and somehow it just isn’t as satisfying.

I did get some photos yesterday but not as many as I’d hoped. I probably won’t get to look at them in any detail until I return home. I’m hoping to get some more but I don’t know how much opportunity will present itself.

In the meantime, I’m trying to get adjusted to local time and soak in as much of the place as I can.

Where’s Rod Serling when you need him?

I think I’d much prefer to live in the Twilight Zone than the Hell of a Thousand Malfunctions that is my living space.

In the last few months, the following items have failed:

• garbage disposal
• bathroom wall tile
• dryer
• computer

I can sort of understand three of the failures. The condo is over 20 years old and I suspect that the appliances date back to its origins.

The computer, though old by computer standards at seven years, was not that old. I wouldn’t want it to run photoshop, but it was an adequate web server for a low traffic site like mine.

Actually, it was almost worse. Though the dryer hadn’t totally failed it was taking a long time to actually dry anything of any bulk. I decided that it was best to replace both the washer and dryer even though the washer showed no symptoms of having problems. When the old washer was removed, there was black sludge on the floor underneath it. It had been silently leaking oil and was probably very close to a major breakdown.

When the guy from Sears came to install the new garbage disposal, he first, of course, removed the old one. It broke off in his hands and also appeared to have been on the brink of a catastrophic failure.

My refrigerator and dishwasher are the same age and I can’t help wondering what they have in store for me. The good news is that it’s nice to have a working garbage disposal and a single load of laundry no longer takes an entire evening.

I just hope nothing else breaks before I get to it…

I survived the Thanksgiving holiday and weekend and hope everyone else did. Now the Christmas shopping season is officially upon us and I suppose it’s time to face that again.

In movie news:

Alexander: don’t bother
Kinsey: do bother

Alexander was long, boring and generally a waste of time. Kinsey was interesting and quite good.

Here’s a basic, good old fashioned rant for you.

I had an eye doctor appointment today and it was in an office building in Tysons Corner. As I pulled into the lot for the building, I was immediately met with signs saying that visitors had to park in the garage. The garage is, of course, pay parking. I didn’t think to ask the receptionist in the office whether they had a parking stamp or some other way to validate it. And, the parking was only $2 (which brings visions of a parking attendant chasing my car yelling, “I want my $2!”).

But it strikes me as wrong to put up an office building and then demand that anyone who comes to visit your building pay for the privilege of parking there. After all, if you have to visit the building then you have to park there. Forcing visitors into pay parking strikes me as a distinct lack of ethics.

Compared to the ethical judgment of a president who starts wars based on lies and fabrications it may not be too big, but it still bugs me.

I mentioned in my review of Guns, Germs and Steel that I saw a blog entry in my future because of some thoughts that triggered as I was reading it. Today appears to be the day for those thoughts to find expression in ones and zeros.

One of the questions that occurred to me was why some societies suddenly flourish and then appear to either stagnate and are then surpassed by other societies. Of course, to have this discussion at all, we have to agree on what it means to flourish and stagnate and how we measure or rank societies.

I’m not smart enough to answer that, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to let that stop me since I’m already into my third paragraph. So, I guess I’ll have to wing it. To my mind, flourishing, in a societal sense, means that a society is open to innovation and that it becomes a model to other societies. It is a society that is more inclusive that those which surround it.

I don’t know if historically I have a leg to stand on, but let’s look at some history. Any historians out there can tell me how badly I failed to pay attention in social studies class.

China, according to Jarred, author of GG&S, was quite technologically advanced compared to Europe until approximately 1400. However, China turned its back on technological innovation and was ultimately exceeded in technological advancement by Europe. China was choked by a rigid bureaucracy that stifled change.

America, from around 1880-1960 was admired by much of the world. Much technical and social innovation flowed from the
US to the rest of the world.

In the last 20 years however, the open nature of America has begun to close itself. Many in our society resist technical innovation. And many others seek to close off our society and define rigid boundaries.

I’m not drawing any conclusions but it sure sounds like there are at least some major parallels to 15th century China.

Note that I’m not saying one society is necessarily superior to another simply that one flourishes relative to another in influence or power or wealth.

America is certainly at the height of its military power but our moral leadership seems suspect. We seem to be trying to turn the clock back to a rigid right vs. wrong outlook that, in reality, never existed in the past.

America is so full of diverse ethnic groups and is so young, historically speaking, that the concept of an ethnic American doesn’t really exist. We certainly have cultural Americans but those Americans come from many different ethnic backgrounds. We don’t all share the same religion. We have Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindi, Buddhists, atheists and probably many others within our boundaries. Vast numbers of Americans speak English as a second language.

It seems to me that we benefit more from this diversity than we do from trying to discourage or prevent it.

Social conservatism seem to me to really be a dislike and mistrust of differentness. We don’t want Gays here. We don’t want that Mosque in our neighborhood. You can’t marry that Jew. Those Catholics are no good. Irish can’t live in this part of town. Blacks can’t ride in the front of the bus.

We’ve worked so hard as a culture to overcome that and yet some would not only stop that progress but turn it back.

I’m not suggesting that we all have to like each other though really there isn’t any reason why we couldn’t so long as we all agree that the others have a right to be here and to live their lives as they desire.

What happens if this wave of social conservatism achieves so much power that it can’t be stopped?

Civil rights will slowly be eroded for every group that is not part of the group in power. Think I’m wrong? Look at the last election. Eleven more states amended their state constitutions to prohibit same-sex marriage. Affirmative action programs have come under attack. These programs aren’t perfect but they do attempt to fix a problem that our own close-mindedness created. Until we can replace it with something better we shouldn’t try to dismantle it.

Once that happens, those capable of leaving the country will. Those seeking to leave their own countries for a better life will look elsewhere. American will bleed it’s talent away because it was too short sighted to realize what it had.

Those seeking to innovate will find places where innovation is admired and not censured. We are already in danger of leading edge medical research moving out of the country because social conservatives call it wrong.

Not to suggest that there aren’t ethical questions to be answered in all of this. But it’s sheer hubris to assume that you have all the answers when there are at least as many people who disagree.

Many have predicted the decline of America before and so far they’ve all been wrong. I hope they continue to be. But, if we continue this turn to the right, we are going to isolate ourselves diplomatically and socially from the rest of the world. And while military might can certainly destroy, it is not very good at holding (just look at Iraq or the Soviets in Afghanistan).

Wow, I sound pretty pessimistic, don’t i? I’m not, truly, but I see that as a worst case scenario. There is a myth that things tend to change slowly and gradually but most times, major changes happen suddenly and they tend to be traumatic. We may be seeing this conservative backlash because so much change has happened. Change can be hard to take. But if we don’t change then we stagnate. And history is full of the corpses of societies that turned their back on progress.

Ok, enough pomposity for one day.