In Which Virginia Leaves the Apartment and I Neglect to Beat Her

When we moved into our apartment, the landlord only gave us one key. Maybe he expected Virginia to stay put. On a related note, I just read a paper about gender politics in Tamil Nadu, where 30.7% of female respondents stated that a man is justified in beating his wife if she leaves the home without telling him where she is going. In any case, VA doesn't fit into this 30.7%, and I don't beat, justified or not, so we needed an extra key. I asked my buddy to look around.

A few days later, he reported to me that he had found some "chabi-walas" down on Boring Rd. "chabi" means key and "wala" loosely means guy in the service sector (it's a fun suffix to throw around). I used to be a chabi-wala at ole DG Ace Hardware in SRQ during high school; it was one of my favorite tasks because it meant finding the right blank to match then lining up the keys on the machine, so it was like solving a puzzle, and I was good at cutting those grooves, so the customers were always satisfied. I was expecting this set-up here, because Patna does have a number of modern stores, and the key-cutting machines at Ace were not that sophisticated. Instead we found three guys squatting on the sidewalk. They were literally using an anvil and filers to chisel the grooves one-by-one, and instead of using blanks, they were modifying old discarded keys. The copies were surprisingly expensive - as much as they cost in the US: three copies for Rs. 300 (about $6.50). It took the chabi-wala about half an hour what I used to do in half a minute.

The next day I needed some maps, so I went with my buddy on the back of his motorcycle to the university district near Gandhi Maidan, next to the Maurya Hotel where we had stayed our first week in Patna. There are like a million bookstores down there, all exclusively selling textbooks. Eventually we found a vendor on a backstreet who sold decent maps of all Bihar districts for about $0.50 each. The area was crammed with people, especially young people, several of whom thought it was totally cool that Jeff McManus was visiting from the States (at least, they all stared at me and three guys even came up to shake my hand - but it may just have because I'm white). A group of students were holding a protest against the current state administration, apparently comparing the Chief Minister with Hitler, who incidentally has a surprising number of admirers in India, though I think it in this instance the comparison was meant to be negative. (When I say Hitler has a surprising number of admirers, I am of course not referring to the swatiskas that are found all over India as a symbol of wealth and good luck, as well as being incorporated into the State of Bihar logo; this symbol was co-opted by the Nazis, though the Western stigma never impacted its prominence in Indian religious tradition).

I have to be careful talking about politics in a semi-public forum, since the voters education projects that I am working on are strictly non-partisan and use only the most objective information in their designs. But Bihar politics, which shape the life of the state and are coming to shape my own life as well, are too darn interesting to omit from this blog. Indian administrative government is broadly divided into bureaucratic and legislative branches, and within the legislative branch there are three main levels and like a million sub-levels that no one really understands. What is understood even less are the responsibilities of the various levels of government. These responsibilities change all the time so there are few books or papers on the subject, everyone that we talk to has a different understanding of the system, and everything that is written in the law books differs from everything that we hear which differs from everything that we see.

Virginia's project deals with one of the oldest but also one of the newest forms of government: the Panchayati Raj, a system for decentralized rural self-government that existed implicitly for centuries and was reawakened by Gandhi and codified by the parliament in 1993. On the other hand, my projects focus on the State Assembly, and specifically the elected members of the legislative assembly, or MLAs. There are 243 MLAs in Bihar, elected once every 5 years from 243 assembly constituencies (ACs) in the state. Most MLAs represent a political party, and many political parties unfortunately represent a caste or caste group. There are a few national parties that play a role in elections in every state, like Congress and BJP, but there are also regional parties that exist in just a few states and will regularly form and break alliances with national parties to gain popularity. In Bihar, the main political parties are JD(U), which is the ruling party, and RJD, which was the party of the previous administration and is the primary opposition party. The face of JD(U) is Nitish Kumar, who is currently the Chief Minister (CM) of Bihar, the highest post in the state, and the face of RJD is Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was Chief Minister for much of the 1990s and (by proxy) the early 2000s.

MLAs here are, on average, scoundrels and wastrels. They are bad in most states, but especially in Bihar. They literally have fistfights on a regular basis with their opponents on the assembly floor. They will also literally murder each other, not even by using hired guns, but by actually doing the deed themselves. Many of them have serious criminal charges pending against them, such as rape, kidnapping, drug trafficking, and inciting riots, and several have won elections while campaigning from jail. One of our main questions in our governance projects is: why is this happening? India is the world's largest democracy. Why do they put up with such poor representatives when they have such a huge talent pool to draw from? And what effects do corrupt politics have on the growth and development of the state?

While we were in the university district, observing some of these protests, we decided to hang posters around Patna University for project assistants. As previously mentioned, VA and I are as helpless as puppy dogs whose leg counts are inversely proportional to their adorability profiles. Though we are practicing our Hindi, I still have some difficulty having high-level debates about governance and corruption, let alone trying to tell the garbage man that I really really want my mail.

As we were hanging one of our posters, a beggar with a small child approached me, not a rare sight in Patna but also not as common as in larger tourist destinations like Delhi or Agra. I've thought about this situation a lot before, and I've researched the arguments for and against giving to beggars. I also realize that the situation here is very different from the States, where the panhandler has a whole other set of characteristics than the beggar does here, some of which strengthen the argument for giving and some of which weaken it. But, supposing you were approached by a beggar here, what would you do? More specifically, what would you do if you did what you considered to be your most informed and moral choice, that is, what an ideal you would do?