The guidebooks try to be polite about it, but they don’t have many compliments for Bangalore. They have to admit it’s not great for temples or monuments or palaces. But they hasten to note that it’s clean! And wealthy! If Lonely Planet were about Victorian ladies instead of cities, Bangalore’s fluency in French and skill at the pianoforte would be discussed extensively.
This city has been gentler to me than I’d been told to expect. There is dizzying traffic and choking smog, but it’s navigable. There is horrible poverty and software-driven wealth — authors of Medium posts about San Francisco’s spiritual destruction via Google Shuttle will find much to like — but so far my heart is only being broken once every ten miles or so. The taxi drivers don’t seem to see enough tourists to know how to properly gouge us. And gastrointestinally, I am at the part of the cartoon where the coyote opens a clenched eye and begins to chuckle nervously, thinking the bomb must be a dud.
So I’m not as overwhelmed as I might be. But the experience has still been satisfyingly foreign.
I finished rereading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel shortly after landing, and this passage seemed about right:
They had been recommended to a hotel in Shoemaker-street which belonged to a Mr Prideaux, a Cornishman. Mr Prideaux’s guests were almost all British officers who had just returned to Portugal from England or who were waiting for ships to take them on leave of absence. It was Mr Prideaux’s intention that during their stay at his hotel the officers should feel as much at home as possible. In this he was only partly successful. Do whatsoever he might, Mr Prideaux found that Portugal continually intruded itself upon the notice of his guests. The wallpaper and furnishings of the hotel might all have been brought originally from London, but a Portuguese sun had shone on them for five years and faded them in a peculiarly Portuguese manner. Mr Prideaux might instruct the cook to prepare an English bill of fare but the cook was Portuguese and there was always more pepper and oil in the dishes than the guests expected. Even the guests’ boots had a faintly Portuguese air after the Portuguese bootboy had blacked them.
I think this unavoidable, insistent foreignness can be illuminating. There are layers to the effect.
In the old days, before anyone knew what yeast was, styles of beer came from specific places. The critters in the air and the minerals in the water determined the options available to a brewer. That pilsners came from Pilsen was an immutable feature of the world, not just clever coordination by the Pilsen Chamber of Commerce.
Maybe foreignness begins with these biological conditions. They’re no more detectable by a tourist like myself than they were to medieval brewers (although I’m told I would certainly come to notice something if I drank the tap water). But they’re real and they must shape the environment surrounding me.
Those contrasts make me begin to wonder about how I’ve been shaped by similar forces at home. Sometimes, at the gym, I’ll work out next to someone and notice that their sweat smells of berbere. It’s a physical manifestation of how saturated they are by their culture.
Of course I can only detect this because my own culture is different. I’m no less steeped. Supposedly when Westerners first came to Japan, the islanders couldn’t bear the visitors’ stink. “They smell[ed] of butter and fat.” I wonder what I’m suffused with; what I smell like to the people here. Even my friends say that Subway stores smell awful, which is worrying.
The opportunity to reflect on these contrasts is what I like I like about travel (communication technology’s erosion of the case for sightseeing is hugely underconsidered). But these contrasts are growing duller, aren’t they? It’s banal to lament the homogenizing effect of global commerce. I wouldn’t want to claim there’s anything principled about my supercilious yuppie dismay at the prospect of a Bangalore Baskin-Robbins.
But the larger phenomenon seems real enough. How distinctive can a global set of cultures remain when their TV producers are all ripping each other off at internet speed?
Conscientious citizens of the universe will already be familiar with the wikipedia article about its heat death:
From the Big Bang through the present day and well into the future, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to be concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium and objects can do physical work.
Why can anything happen at all? Because there’s more of something in one place than another. Charge, pressure, heat — any one of them out of equilibrium, and it’s able to be harnessed for work as it seeks balance.
It’s tempting to apply this metaphor to society: imagining that the diffusion of concentrated idiosyncrasy is the only means by which cultural invention can be pushed to an acceptable pace. The transmutation of African-American musical traditions into pop genres; the adoption of anime tropes by American filmmakers; the dizzyingly reciprocating cross-pollination that produced the Gangnam Style fad single; fusion cuisine.
Is cosmopolitanism another word for entropy? Is a Diplo mixtape analogous to an exploding oil tanker? This is not a cheerful idea — it’s a prediction of eventual globalized monotony and stagnation — but it does seem compatible with Kurt Andersen’s ideas about postmodern exhaustion.
And it could serve as a framework for understanding which parts of globalization we should resent. If cultural distinctiveness is a resource we spend it should be spent on worthwhile pursuits rather than on selling hamburgers and cola; just as we should burn petroleum to empower humanity rather than to power larger SUVs.
Admittedly, this idea is also compatible with an ugly primitivism. I don’t mean to do that. I don’t want to be tempted into imagining that India (or any place else) is some sort of wellspring of authenticity; its colonial history makes that idea laughable. Besides, it seems impolite to insist that other societies act as cures for our neuroses.
But if I squint I can imagine India as an engine, doing fascinating things as it burns away the divisions between east and west and other places beside. I wonder if it will ever run out of fuel.
