I have never been blindly enamoured of the
US, although I have visited it a number of times. As a writer in the last five years and before
that when I was working with a multinational.
I am not a great fan of the US foreign policy. In one of the first plays
I wrote, the protagonist starts one of his monologues with, ‘America has gone
to war today. The world’s most powerful nation is preparing to drop bombs on
scurrying children.’
However, every time I have come to the
country, I have been genuinely overwhelmed by the hospitality and generosity of
the Americans I have met. They have by far been the nicest people I have known
in my life. Leaving me alone and giving me my space when I need it and at the
same time being there when I crave for company. That can be the best gift a
writer or an artist can ever receive.
Today it was the turn of a gentleman I had
never met before to appear in my life and change it for the better. There are some people who make me touch
genuine humility and he turned out to be one of them.
Peter Oresick is a poet and a professor of
creative writing in one of the well known colleges in Pittsburgh. He has also worked as the head of a
publishing house and as the chief editor of a literary magazine in the past. I
was introduced to him over email by one of his ex-students. He wrote back
saying not only would he spend time with me answering my questions but he will be happy to take me around
the city and the places I need to visit for my research. To say I was
pleasantly surprised by his offer would be an understatement.
My friends know I don’t even drive back
home in Bangalore. Relying on cabs and autos to take me all over the city, so
forget driving in another country where even the rules are different. I am sure
even if I tried, I won’t be able to reach anywhere. And that’s likely to be my
greatest challenge for the next seven months.
I am not good at waiting for buses either.
Five minutes of waiting and I end up telling myself, I will take a cab, never
mind the expense. I will economize on something else. I am sharing all this to
communicate how grateful I am if someone offers to drive me around.
Peter was exceptionally generous not only
with his car but also with his time. He drove me to almost all the spots where
monumental events had unfolded over the two hundred years of American history.
The day was cold to begin with but warmed by his generosity, the sun came up
and it turned out to be one of nicest mornings to be outdoors, since I have
arrived here.
By the time we headed for lunch, I had
dropped my inhibitions enough to ask Peter why he had set aside nearly one day
to take me around the city. I had learnt by then that apart from his job and
his writing, he is also a painter. I couldn’t stop thinking about what his wife
and three grown up sons would make of him dedicating almost a day to a stranger
he had never met before.
His response completely disarmed me. He
said he has travelled to quite a few countries and his hosts have taken the
trouble to show him their cities and in his own way he was trying to repay them
for what they had done for him. I resolved at that moment to do my bit when I
get back home for anyone I know who has come down from another country and
occasionally feels a little lost.
The tour of the city proved to be
educational in more ways than one. Two of the localities we drove through were
Homestead and Braddock. Once the hub of industrial activity, these were
thriving communities until the mid 80s when the steel companies closed down,
rendering thousands of workers unemployed. Parts of these localities continue
to resemble a ghost town and those that still have people in them have turned
into rough neighbourhoods. But I was pleasantly surprised to see how clean the
roads were even in these parts.
The New York Times article that has got the
world thinking of Bangalore as a city drowning in its trash, mentions Kalpana
Kar getting frustrated at a neighbour whose servant goes and dumps the trash on
the road despite her asking him not to. And I am sure Kar lives in one of the
most affluent localities of Bangalore. So I guess the one thing we need to
learn from the Americans and practice is cleanliness. It is humiliating to land in a foreign country and discover that for the residents here, the city you
live in is identified with filth and dirt. Especially when you know that it’s
not some evil propaganda but the truth.
One of the spots that we stopped at was
where one of the earliest industrial strikes in history took place. This was at Homestead in 1892. Henry Clay
Frick tried to break the strike by hiring an army of goons to attack the
strikers who had laid siege of the factory. The strike ended badly for both the
parties. The striking workers had to cave in eventually and Frick was forever
painted as the ugliest robber baron of all time.
I kept on wondering why standing at that
spot I got the feeling of déjà vu. It occurred to me much later that the story
sounded similar to something I had read about a few months ago.
I don’t know whether the Henry Clay Frick
story has a moral for all Indians. But it certainly does for a particular automobile
giant with one of its plants in Haryana.
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