47 Aerogrammes: A Passage through India 1969-1970

By Frank J. Young

“Scratch a cynic, and you will find a disappointed idealist.”

George Carlin’s insightful observation accurately described Frank Young on the day of his high school graduation in 1968. Growing up in the small San Joaquin Valley town of Modesto, California, his view of the world was the one he wished it to be rather than the one that existed outside his community. That would change dramatically on a sultry evening in 1969 when he set foot in India.

With Bangalore as the backdrop, 47 Aerogrammes charts Frank’s journey in a remarkable country that would shape this nineteen-year-old’s view of the world and change him in ways he could never have imagined. Landing in Calcutta in September 1969 with sixty-two other classmates from Callison College in Stockton, California, he quickly confronted the reality he would face over the next nine months: how does one break free from one’s comfort zone and adapt to a culture that bears little resemblance to your home 8700 miles away? In countless encounters with people and places as he crisscrossed the Indian subcontinent, his passage through India became his passage to adulthood. From the generosity of strangers in cities and villages, to unctuous bureaucrats, to an orthodox Brahmin family who demonstrated that parental love speaks the same language in any culture, his year in India transformed him in ways neither friends nor family back home would recognize. But his biggest revelation came four decades later upon landing in New Delhi as a foreign service officer on assignment in India for the US Agency for International Development: the transformation had never stopped. Through journals, letters and photographs taken a half century ago, this book takes the reader through Frank’s many adventures where at the end of the day, “In India, anything is possible.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662457470

Book preview

Chapter 1

Looking Back: Why India?

Final journal entry: June 1970, Modesto, California (a week after arriving at home)

If there be a heaven on earth, it is this… It is this… It is this…

So proclaimed the Muslim emperors of their domain on the subcontinent of India. It was their way, I believe, of describing a nation, a culture, and a people that represent the fusion of so many glorious yesterdays and so many unknown tomorrows.

Sitting in my bedroom in my parents’ home, barely one week after returning from eight months living in Bangalore, India, I still find answering the question What is India? too bewildering. My parents and friends keep asking me about my experience, but I have yet to form a satisfying answer. Rereading my letters home and the journals kept during my stay are still the disconnected dots in a map that I cannot yet see.

For me, India at the beginning of the 1970s is an unusual composite of the best—and the worst—of three score centuries of human civilization; it is a hundred generations of a people learning to live with a conqueror; it is a hundred thousand villages that have yet to be conquered by twentieth-century technology; it is a democracy and a member of the prestigious atomic club; it is a caste system and an economy built on the plow and the soil; it is a civilization six thousand years old; and, it is a searcher’s last great adventure.

One might ask, "What isn’t India?" Because every statement one can make about this country can be proven both right and wrong if you look hard enough. India, as I discovered, coins harmony and paradox from a single currency.

I was nineteen when I left Stockton, California, last August for my new home in Bangalore, India. As a college sophomore attending a small liberal arts college—Callison College at Stockton’s University of the Pacific—I was about to launch myself (along with sixty-two of my classmates) into an adventure that had no story line. As I reflect now on that just-completed year, I am finding it exceedingly difficult to describe my experience to friends and family without being misunderstood. It is as if the story of that year is still without a plot and certainly without an ending.

India is a country that is easy to ignore because it sits on the other side of the planet. Though it faces severe economic and political challenges, India has tried to steer clear of taking sides between East and West and has resisted the presence of most huge American corporations to invest there. This seems difficult for Americans to comprehend because our worldview demands either we place a country among the group of capitalist democracies that support our foreign policy and political ideology, or we assign it to the socialist states that believe just the opposite. Nonalignment is perceived as the inability to get on the right side of history. This simplistic view leaves little room for understanding a country which chooses to chart a middle course. America, after all, is still embroiled in a deeply divisive war in Southeast Asia, making it hard for us to respect countries that do not openly support our cause.

My parents—like most people, I suppose—resist what they do not understand. This made it tricky to convince them to let me spend my second year of university at Callison’s campus in the relatively remote town of Bangalore in South India. But I was not prepared for reactions by family and friends from the moment I walked off the plane in San Francisco a few weeks ago.

The conversations always follow the same pattern. When I try to explain to anyone with more than thirty seconds to listen what India was really like, the responses range from argumentative to stony indifference. If I tell people what they want to hear (i.e., paint a portrait of India that reinforces their condescending stereotype of the country), I know I am sacrificing the truth. If I tell the truth, the whole truth, I am implying that their knowledge and perhaps perception of the world beyond our borders is flawed and limited. It is too easy to come off as condescending and preachy.

This hurts the listener’s pride, and I lose my audience. I soon realize that whatever problems I had communicating with people in India about America are minor compared to explaining my year in India to friends and neighbors at home.

So how was India? my girlfriend’s father, Ralph, asked me, putting down his can of Hamm’s beer and offering a firm handshake.

My folks and I were on a Sunday-afternoon visit to her parents’ farm outside Hilmar, just south of Modesto. Ralph was not the first person to ask me that question. So I tried to gauge whether he was really interested or felt compelled to ask out of politeness.

Well, it was fine and didn’t hurt a bit, I answered with palpable sarcasm.

In the week or so since returning home, I have been asked this question so many times that a cynical fatigue is setting in. I have no better answer than the one I gave Diana’s father. Perhaps my flippant comment would lighten the mood so I could follow up with a more serious, thoughtful response if he chuckled.

He did not take the bait. His interest turned to a timelier topic.

Bob, do you think the Giants will be at .500 before the all-star break? I can’t stand to see them behind the Dodgers.

My stepfather, Bob, took the bait, and the conversation quickly shifted to the National League West. My girlfriend’s mother, Grace—who had prepared one of her stellar, superabundant meals—could not resist commenting on my gaunt frame, the result of a fifty-five–pound weight loss that was the product of almost eight months of chronic dysentery.

Did I tell you, Gracie? my mom interjected. The other day, Frankie was at Angelo’s Market at McHenry Village with his grandmother, and he blacked out in the cereal aisle. I mean, he didn’t pass out or anything, just stood staring at the cereal boxes mumbling to himself. The store manager had to ask him if he was all right or needed a doctor. He’s having a hard time, I guess. But he’s back home where he belongs.

I cringed.

Well, Frankie, Grace declared, we’ll help you recover some of that weight with good old-fashioned home cooking.

By now, I realized I had lost control of the events and conversation that Sunday afternoon. Instead of curiosity about what I had seen and learned while abroad, the day had become a pity session all about me and the hardships I had endured the past year.

Diana, my girlfriend, could see the pain and embarrassment in my eyes. I wanted to steal away behind the barn with her because I thought she would be a better listener. So after Sunday dinner, we slipped out of the house. We sat on a bale of hay, and I started talking. I must have sounded like a rambling lunatic, judging from the increasingly glassy expression in her eyes. It seems I was having no more success bringing her into my experiences of the past year than I had with her parents.

Multiply that afternoon by a dozen other attempts to talk about my year in India to anyone who asked, and it’s clear that I don’t have the blueprint yet to describe it, at least not in thirty-second sound bites that will hold people’s interest. I sense that the best way tell other people about my year in India requires boiling it down from grand observations to anecdotes about what it is like to live as a foreigner in a country with pervasive poverty, yet possessing a richness of culture and history that is as powerful as its economic situation is dire.

As I try to describe how people in India live and what it is like to experience it from within, I struggle to give it an angle that I think people want to hear. That is where language and presentation fail me. The more I try to simplify it, the more I eliminate the nuances and complexities. The more I try to describe how India is meeting the challenge of providing for its people, the more I leave the listener wanting to believe just the opposite.

I want to describe the country’s struggle to succeed as a prosperous democracy in a way that is credible and validates my experience in the eyes of others. But the judgments from family and friends are often uncompromisingly harsh. Because most Indians have not achieved the totems of middle-class success—house, car, refrigerator, air conditioners, a private phone line, disposable diapers—people quickly assume that Indians just don’t work hard enough to provide their families a better life. I point out that there are upper-class families in India’s cities who can afford such items. But the rejoinder is Are these wealthy Indians the only ones who work hard and want a better life for their children?

I find that these conversations rarely put me on the winning side of the argument. Describing what life is like in India is sort of like describing what it is like to ski if you have never seen snow. It is not easy to convince other people that our standard of living is the exception to the rule, not the rule itself. Is the American middle-class standard of living the benchmark for judging another people? While lack of clean water, decent shelter, electricity, the ability to read, or access to good health care are conditions to abhor, it did not make India inferior as a culture or a society.

An Indian professor from Bangalore University’s economics department, Job Thomas, painted a stark picture for us in his first economics lecture to our class after we arrived in Bangalore. Before the mid–nineteenth century, India was as prosperous (if not more so) as Europe. Dr. Thomas said that what we see today as Indian poverty is the product of colonial domination, a traditional caste system that hampers economic mobility, and poor government policies that squandered over $2.5 billion in reserves, much of it in British IOUs from World War II—a princely sum in 1947.

While on one level I could accept this analysis, it was not sufficient to explain why such poverty persists and why the country should not implode because of it. I needed another explanation. Statistics were not up to the task, and I became more inclined to think that the poverty I saw in India is a state of mind first and a physical one second. The crushing effects of poverty should make people unhappy and unsatisfied. And if they are not unhappy and are not willing to take risks to break out of their situation, it is a daunting task to convince them otherwise. As the Peace Corps in India has found out, it is no easy task to persuade an Indian villager—who may view the wealth of others as assigned, not earned—to accept the idea that life can improve through one’s own effort. And that the risk of doing so is worth it.

Yet understanding the Indian perspective toward poverty perplexes me even now. In village after village, small town after small town, I encountered people living in deplorable conditions by our standards, with so little to their name that I could barely fathom why they smiled or why they welcomed me into their midst. It cannot be that they are content with their lot in life; maybe they accept what they have because people adjust and cope if the struggle to achieve something better has become too great. They may want more, but they may not expect more, at least not yet.

I tell friends stories about how in villages people generously offered me, as a foreign visitor, tea, sweets, and delicacies that did not reflect their daily diet or personal affluence. I was a visitor, and it was out of a measure of curiosity combined with pride that my hosts wanted to share with me simple pleasures they would typically consider luxuries.

It played out differently with the beggars who loitered at the outside gates of the hostel-like Shilton Hotel in Bangalore where our student group lived. Our beggars worked our neighborhood as their territory. They treated every encounter with us as a sort of game, a kabuki dance of wails and outstretched hands, honed over time through contacts with scores of foreigners before us. They knew they might gain little from our almost-daily engagements but were happy nonetheless to play the game and respect our decision most of the time not to part with a few paisa.

There seems to be a public attitude in India that links poverty to the country’s struggle for self-reliance. To me, this assigns luck, or lack of it, as the reason for an individual’s or family’s economic fate. It is tempting to judge India’s government and politicians harshly, accusing them of using self-reliance as an excuse for the country’s inability to provide basic needs for all its people. It elevates a romanticized vision of the noble peasant and relieves India’s small well-to-do class of the outrage that might have pushed political elites to take hard decisions.

But is the problem only India’s to solve? How does the United States and the West rationalize living in prosperity alongside the soul-crushing deprivation that prevails in India and the less-developed world? Two different realities coexisting. But is it conceivable that Indians living in thousands of villages that lack enough of life’s basic necessities have wants, desires, and hopes for themselves and their children that differ from ours?

The India I experienced brought all this into sharper focus but failed to yield a satisfying explanation. I started to think about India as occupying a parallel universe where standards of living are simply different. But there’s that pesky question of why. It is easier to say that differences between cultures and societies are the reason why some countries modernize more quickly than others. Isn’t that why stereotypes are so easy to tolerate? Labels are undemanding, but they plant your opinions on firm ground. Things you cannot label are difficult to describe and tend to be forgotten.

Ironically, the more I try to describe my year in India to friends who will give me more than a few minutes’ attention, the more I find myself relying on labels to explain (and defend) India’s shortcomings.

That, I discovered, was my entry point for culture shock. Although I experienced culture shock in varying degrees during my time in India, as I settle back into life in America, it is clobbering me like a runaway train hitting a flimsy gate. Living in privileged surroundings in the Shilton Hotel in Bangalore, I realized just how much I had adapted (and shed) some of what I had considered my most basic American needs: TV, telephones, air-conditioning, space, and privacy. It took me a while to understand that what I considered basic living conditions at the Shilton were relative luxury to most Indians. Even the right to speak my mind was not acceptable behavior outside the Shilton’s moldy, mustard-colored walls.

Over time, often through awkward mistakes and embarrassing behavior, I acclimated my physical and emotional needs to my environment. Maybe not perfectly but enough to satisfy the strict values of my host country. In retrospect, that was the easy part. Returning to America, flipping back to the way it was before I left was like trying to unring a bell. Culture shock has been the product of my reentry into America, not my year in India. That is what has made it so hard to describe to friends and family what this incredible year in India was all about. It is all so personal and intimate.

So I have decided to write it down. It is the only way to chronicle a journey yet unfinished, through a maddening, exhilarating, and incredibly unique year of discovery about India and about myself. It was a year that tapped in me an unknown and unexpected affection for a culture and people I am still trying to understand, and brought to the surface a deep, intense frustration with American culture.

Even now, June 1970, barely a few months removed from Bangalore, I wonder whether I learned more about myself as an American over the last year than I learned about India. I think I now understand why travelers keep diaries; putting their observations down on paper enhances understanding about the places they visit and about their own countries.

E. M. Forster titled his great novel A Passage to India. For me, it was a passage through India.

*****

I recall the excitement and anxiety of preparing to leave for India as if it were yesterday. We were each limited to forty-four pounds of luggage, so packing for almost a year abroad meant exercising scientific precision in deciding what to bring. What I brought with me had to last the year; Care packages from home would be few due to Indian import restrictions, the expense of shipping, and the length of time it would take to get from the United States to Bangalore.

Apart from sufficient underwear, socks, and good shoes, I insisted on bringing what was necessary to record the year on film. I had saved up to buy a camera during a stopover in Tokyo. I knew that Kodak film in India might be triple the price than in the United States, so I purchased thirty-seven rolls of Ektachrome slide film from our local Long’s drugstore. To avoid using up my weight allowance, I stuffed the pockets of a heavy coat with film canisters. Wearing the coat, I looked a like a mama bear storing up fat for the winter.

If I had a good plan to organize my luggage, I was less adept at organizing my expectations for the year ahead. Ours would be the second college-sophomore group from Callison College to travel to India for an academic year. Freshman year had been a screening process to determine who among us was ready for the India experience. We were pressed to think about why we wanted to be part of the Bangalore