Money can’t buy us love

Expense Account, Mint

One of the first things you notice about New Haven, home to Yale University, once the senses have taken their fill of freshly brewing coffee, the natty boutiques and the buzzing bars, are the people who rummage through dustbins and ask you for some change. Adding to the feel of big-city crime in this tiny (population 130,000) seaside city halfway between the Big Apple and Boston are the notices in the mail from the university and the police that warn about dangers of walking alone after dark. That crime and poverty are twins in urban areas I know from Delhi, but to see the homeless rummage through bins, take a sip out of a bottle in the trash can to get at that last elusive drop, in a country known for its wealth, is part of my culture shock. Of course, I get over the other shock of constantly trying to enter shuttles and cars from the “wrong” side. The feeling of living in a bubble, as a member of the urban mass affluent in Delhi, persists with me. Across the globe. In a country with a per capita income 46 times mine. But one in six is poor in the US. That things are broken in the US is clear. But the work to reinvent is on as well. I am discovering this at Yale.

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Expense Account, Mint

It’s been three weeks since I left home. Three weeks since I stitched together another reality in a different country, with different people using Skype and Gtalk as a way to keep the thread of my other reality going. Three weeks that saw two natural disaster events in the US—an earthquake that I did not feel because the bus was trundling around a bend. And a hurricane that left New Haven, Connecticut, largely untouched though Fox News did try its very best to panic those not panicked. I found myself filling water and buying candles after watching the panic-stricken anchors. Three weeks that had India emerge from middle-class stupor, a hunger strike, partly erudite debates in a Parliament that worked on a Saturday into uncharted territory where nobody really knows what will happen next—the existing rules look fuzzy. And three weeks at the end of which, the world is pretty much where it was when I stepped off it for a while.

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