The life you make.
Young men walk the streets balancing 8 cups of tea on a tray which translates to, what? Forty minutes of tea preparation? They are likely bringing the tea to a nearby guest house for the host family or to a nearby shop for the staff. The tea is served in real cups, not plastic cups. At any given time there must be thousands of cups being hand-washed and hand-dried and hand-filled and re-filled. No pressing a button and checking Instagram while waiting for the K-cup of chai flavored tea to brew. Thousands of people preparing chai for thousands of people drinking chai, three times a day or more. This behind-the-scenes, incessant tea service culture is fascinating to me.
About a week later, I needed to take in a pair of pants. The waistline was tricky, because the pants had sort of a stylish flap, cut at an angle across the front. It can be tough to tailor something asymmetrically. The next day, when I went to pick up the pants, the tailor wanted me to try them on to make sure they fit. I could see that he had done the front flap perfectly -- even though he had to alter the shape of the flap, he had a design eye and had kept the look and feel of the style in tact -- so I told him I was sure they were perfect and I didn't need to try them on. But as I was paying him, I thought to myself, damn, this man just found a pretty ingenious solution for a tricky tailoring job, and he probably wants to see the fruits of his labor. So I tried them on. They fit like a glove. But even better than the fit was the look on the tailor's face. The pride of a job well done.
Arrangements are made by people, not computers. Everyone knows everyone. “I’ll call a guy.”
And all it takes is a look up in the cities and villages here to see rooftops and balconies spangled with brightly-colored, hand-washed, line-drying laundry.
In Leh, a woman sat in a tent outside beading hundreds of bracelets. $1 bracelets for sale.
In Varanasi, where I currently am, a little boy is in the Ganga river, bathing his family's buffalo. Like, the entire buffalo is in the river, and the little boy is washing its head and ears with soap. Both the boy and the buffalo appear to be smiling.
No elevators. No dishwashers. No sensors.
No microwaves. No screens everywhere.
No key card security systems. No swiping anything.
TAP: "keep backing it up, Driver." TOOOOT-TOOT-TOOT of the horn to mean, "I'm on your left." TOOT-TOOT-TOOOOT, TOOT-TOOT-TOOT-TOOOOT of the horn to mean, "we're barreling around this curve and if you don't get to one side, we'll probably hit you!" The pattern in the chaos.
while machinery is missing literally, it is very much present metaphorically. If the definition of machinery is "several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task," well then my friends the machinery by which this part of the world runs is one of the most impressive I've ever seen. There are collectively understood rules and behaviors and signals and formulas. There is a shared understanding of processes and values. A kind of mechanical system that is in its own right solid and sound, even if it runs on people and not machines.