Where mud and cell phones meet

Water rises slowly in the Sarnath market, trickling in branched rivulets to slowly fill slices of track cut by thin rickshaw wheels. Shortly after it has begun, the rain is folded haphazardly into the dirt and manure left by slowly trudging bulls as they pull their heavy loads behind them. The mixture creates a deeply colored, foul sludge that quickly falls into place lining the creases between my toes. And yet the rickshaws continue to pounce through the mess, buried at times up to their axles in the muck. People crowd under the awnings of their store fronts while the less fortunate, like the women sitting cross-legged on the side of the road as they rotate their ears of corn over charcoal fires, simply pull their shawls a bit lower.

Yet we are happy for the rain for with it comes an end to the draught that has been hanging here with the eastern border of Uttar Pradesh. The rain brings an end to the nagging worries of barren fields come harvest time in December. I’ve only been here a week, and yet I know that it’s great that we now have the rain and the harvest and the the happiness and what not, but in the mean time half of the vendors’ marketing area is turning to sludge and my feet are still covered in bull crap.

I found this late afternoon trudge to the market to be strangely symbolic of the irony that surrounds village life here in India, that being a rejoicing in the same things that end up hurting us. Take, for example, the general store in little Sarnath where we have been staying. It’s a small storefront, just two counters really, that sells soap, toilet paper, single-use packets of laundry detergent and shampoo, and some assorted chips and biscuit cookies. Stacked next to these basic items, however, are about 12 to 15 different models of cell phones with every option from cameras to Internet capability that you would find gracing the display cases of the Verizon kiosk at your local mall. One thing I quickly realized is that most everyone owns one, too. From the slim university student practicing his English on me at the bus stop to the old and whiskered food peddler badgering me to buy things from his cart that couldn’t possibly qualify as the kind of "safe food" I am encouraged to stick with in my travel guide, you never know when that jingle will begin and someone will have to take a call.

High-tech cellular telephones in a country where the average income is still less than a dollar per day, in a place where it’s likely that its owner is still sleeping every night with nothing more than a blanket between him and the concrete floor, if he’s fortunate enough to have concrete, that is. You can hardly blame people for this, of course. Technology is attractive and I will be the first to admit that I, myself, am slightly infatuated with certain brands and advancements. Why should these people be any less excited about it? There are people in India, however, who can very much afford cell phones. In a city south of here called Bangalore, lattes flow freely as young businessmen and women gather for a post-work brew at the local Starbucks or for a treat at the downtown Baskin Robbins. It is said that being in upscale Bangalore is virtually indistinguishable from being on a Manhattan street corner. Bangalore is the technology center of India, the kind of place that houses the incomes which jack up the national average to its still-meager perch.

It seems to me that the obsession with technology like cellphones in these smaller, more modest villages is simply the runoff from more developed places like Bangalore, or perhaps a desire to ride along side the West that they know from movies and episodes of Friends. To me, it seems like these villages are like a child trying to walk around in his father’s oversized shoes. As soon as he begins to run, the shoes cause him to fall on his face. As India rejoices in these new conveniences, it seems to forget about its more basic needs, finding a way to dispose of it trash that sits in heaps on the side of the road, perhaps. Or how about establishing the kind of social infrastructure that would create a way for all its children to receive at least a basic education, the only hope if India wants to begin pecking away at its inexcusable illiteracy rate (just 61 percent, or near a half billion people not being able to read or write by age 15), the figure is even worse for women only.

On the way back to our guest house the rain had stopped, giving me a chance to lift my eyes and consider the landscape. The fields already seemed more alive, the shower having settled their previously dusty state and the sprouts of okra had perked back up to attention. This all pleased me somewhat more than I would have guessed, getting this taste of greenery when I had become so accustomed to bland, dry browns. And so I rode along on the rickshaw with a smile on my face, forgetting almost completely for that sweet moment about the crap stuck between my toes.