10 years after India

Contemplating the residue of a grand adventure

Ten years ago this week I was in India. India the country! Halfway across the world! It was a tremendous experience, and it was also responsible for the only taste of virality I’ve ever had in my life - but I’ll take India over virality any day. 

In 2013, the PR firm that I worked for offered select employees the opportunity to spend time working in another country. As one of the firm’s internal communication professionals, I had spent years partnering with people from our various international offices - I was responsible for soliciting news and content from these locations to tie us more tightly together as a global company. I argued in my application that spending face time with some of these folks would strengthen their connection to the mother ship and help me better understand what they wanted to hear from our corporate offices. 

For my application video, I had Hope take dozens of photos of me pulling all sorts of faces, which I cut out and paired with little paper dolls to add to various vintage maps. The video itself seems to be lost to history, but here are some of the stills: 

I was gunning for China or Brazil, but when I was accepted they sent me to India. Which was great, because I had already been there, and I loved it!

My first trip to India, in 2008, was through a friend group centered around Hope’s job at the time. Two of them had gotten married in the U.S. but decided to celebrate their first anniversary by holding a kind of make-up wedding with the groom’s family in Delhi. We and a third couple were invited along for the ride. 

That first trip was one of my few true life-changing experiences. The farthest from home I’d ever been was France, which has more in common with the U.S. than not. Visiting India was the first time I’d experienced such sprawling cities, such diversity of terrain, such disparity of wealth. We stayed for a week with our friend’s family and saw firsthand how a well-off multigenerational family lived together in the same home. I’d never been in a house with servants before - and, in a related twist, I’d never eaten home cooking so good. We then spent a second week traveling with our friend’s parents in a chartered bus to Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) and Jaipur, traversing the rocky landscape of Rajasthan and learning all sorts of lessons about class inequality along the way.¹ We ended the trip with a few days in the beach resort of Goa, where we stayed at a bed and breakfast run by expatriate British siblings that would have made an excellent setting for a murder mystery. For all of the sobering socioeconomic revelations, I loved so much about the country that I was thrilled by the idea of going back. 

The second trip, in 2014, was an equally amazing but very different experience. Traveling for business meant that I had to work while I was there, but in the end there was plenty of room for exploration and serendipity. I was expected to generate lots of content to justify the trip, so I joined Instagram right before leaving. The most fateful decision I made, though, was to set aside time each evening to draw a cartoon summing up an observation, event, or activity from the day. 

As I’ve mentioned before, about the only reason I go into Facebook these days is to look at my memories and see what sort of garbage I posted in years past. It’s a time capsule of my life as a parent, my creative output, and various other life experiences. This year, I found myself tracking my India trip day by day, reviewing the cartoons I posted and the photos I shared and remembering what it was like to be over there. 

Looking back, one of the things that stands out is the fact that this was far and away the longest I’d been away from home on my own. It was only a couple of weeks, but, aside from a handful of shorter work trips, every other time I’d traveled had been in the company of my family or with Hope. It was bewildering to be out in the world by myself, and, though the cartoons mostly downplay it, I was extremely anxious about the whole thing. My hosts were wonderful, of course, but they had their own lives to live, and I spent a fair amount of time alone, wondering how I’d ended up there.

My first week was spent in Mumbai, an overflowing hotbox of a city that I’d wanted to visit ever since taking a class on Salman Rushdie during college. I only got to taste the smallest sliver of what it had to offer, since I mostly went back and forth between the hotel, the office, and the tourist activities organized by my Mumbai colleagues. That said, I was lucky enough to be there at the same time as another visiting colleague in the same program, and the highlight of the trip for me was when the two of us broke off on our own to visit the Chor Bazaar or “Thieves’ Market” before taking an hours-long walk down Marine Drive along the coast, observing the people and sights. Activities like that remain my favorite part of visiting any city, and I’m still grateful I had the opportunity to experience it in Mumbai. 

The second week of my trip I took off to visit two additional cities. I only spent a couple of days in Bangalore, and I wish I could have experienced more. The final destination, Delhi, was a city I’d seen before, and I was happy to pay a friendly visit to my friend’s family after meeting them six years earlier. Unfortunately, on this final leg of the trip I became sick, probably due in part to the relentless pace and constant moving. (On neither trip did I encounter the famous “Delhi belly,” thankfully.) I didn’t write about this in my cartoons, but my Delhi colleagues insisted on sending me around in a car to do some sightseeing, and I was just miserable the entire time - especially when the car kept pulling into tourist trap shopping centers where the driver no doubt got a kickback, and I had to keep pleading with him to just drive me back to the hotel. An inauspicious ending to an otherwise wonderful adventure. 

I received a lot of great feedback on my cartoons, but it took me a whole year to pull them into a single Medium post that tied them together with a narrative of my trip. I was not prepared for the response. 

Readers from India were very taken with the idea of an American making observations on their culture, and hundreds of people immediately began commenting and sharing. Somehow this brought the story to the attention of a guy who was supervising sponsored content for Marriott, and he offered to pay me a generous sum if I agreed to let them put branding on my post and feature it in a Marriott online publication. Um, sure! 

From there things got a little weird. Multiple publications in India picked it up, including a print piece in the Hindustan Times, which my friend’s family sent me a hard copy of.

Unfortunately, one of the publications that picked it up was Buzzfeed, which stripped out all the explanatory prose and turned it into a listicle with snarky titles that got a lot of heat from readers as being insensitive and racist. But for everyone who lobbed abuse at me,² there was someone like the young aspiring cartoonist who sent me first (and only) fan art: 

These memories are fun, but also bittersweet, because I’m pretty sure I’ll never make it back to India. For a few years I was all in on the idea of returning as a family, but things had already begun to change. Narendra Modi was elected prime minister two months after I left, sending the country on a sharp rightward turn; America followed two years later, and the world started to seem like a more hostile and dangerous place. I gradually lost touch with most of my Indian contacts, as agency turnover there is high and most of them started working for competitors; after the ensuing collapse of social media, I would barely know how to reach most of them. And significantly, when you’re not staying with a friend’s relatives or having your office foot the bill, traveling halfway around the world is an expensive proposition. My work life is much smaller than it was 10 years ago - which is great for the most part, but also doesn’t allow for the level of professional opportunity I had while working for a global firm. And the truth is, though my home may be one of history’s greatest cities, but I’m still a homebody. I’m not quite intrepid enough to hop hemispheres without someone urging me to take the leap.

But a deeper melancholy arises from my embarrassment about who I used to be back in those happy-go-lucky, pre-pandemic days. The cartoons seem crude and glib to me now, more like something from my teens than my late 30s. Part of the gag was that I was positioning myself as a starry-eyed yokel - but the joke was on me, because that’s exactly what I was. I tried to approach the situation with humility and humor, but as my personal limitations become etched more boldly with age, I can’t see past the negative space of my own ignorance and solipsism, qualities that are still very much with me today.

I may have been insufferable 10 years ago, but these days I’m just differently insufferable. I’ve fully settled into my role as a middle-aged crank. I realize this is my third post in two months dedicated to looking back on a personal anniversary of some sort. So here I sit, flipping through my virtual photo album from the safety of my armchair, reminiscing about the crazy times I had when I was young. And the greatest satisfaction comes from regaling them to you as if they harbor some sort of secret profundity. But look, it’s just some stuff that happened to me. It’s life! You have yours too! It keeps going until it doesn’t. So here’s to the next adventure - may it be small but satisfying. 

1. For instance, the young helper of the bus driver was only ever referred to as “Boy,” and he slept in the trunk while the rest of us stayed in hotels. 

2. I will say, one of my favorite comments was when one reader said that “someone from India should go and do this to America” where “everyone has long, stupid names like Blahblahsky.” Yes, do it! And please call me Blahblahsky from now.