Really, it doesn’t make much sense. For a comfort food to have that powerful an effect it seems like it would have to be something with deep rooted emotional ties. I didn’t grow up eating Korean food, and didn’t even try it until I was hanging out in Champaign. Of course, every time I had it there I was with my best friend Zeevus, and maybe that’s where I built the association.

Zeevus was dating a very cool Korean girl from Chicago at the time. Her parents had recently had a serious talk with her about who she could date. They had decided that they had been a bit closed minded about the whole thing, now that she was growing up in the U.S., and it might be OK for her to date someone Chinese, as well as Korean, although certainly not anyone Vietnamese. To this day I assume they never even heard about Zeevus.

The work days in India were exhausting physically and, often, emotionally. By the time we returned to the house where we were staying, it was cold and dark. We stumbled in and sat shivering around a small table topped with a variety of white covered bowls. I loved the anticipation of that moment. There was a magic to the unveiling, lifting the lids one by one to peek inside. I would pick up the first to uncover a stack of hot, fresh rotis. I could feel myself getting warmer just smelling them. The next would be dahl, spicy and dark. Mixed with rice, the lentils were just firm enough to be really satisfying. Next I’d pull open the carrot subzi. This was a mixture of dark, orange carrots particular to India and a variety of other vegetables. Sometimes there would be reita, a yogurt mixed with garlic. Dessert would be sweet noodles or, the best, carrot halva.

Every day we had essentially the same food. While the Americans who were with us grew anxious about this around day two, I left six weeks later dreadfully sad to leave it behind. Those meals where my only time to pause and reflect on what was happening to us every day. I became very close to Zeet and Zameet and often the three of us would spend the later part of those meals talking and connecting over what had happened that day. Sometimes we would just sit and eat and that was wonderful too. The warm food pushed back the chill and the company cleared my head and made me feel close to them and to this place.

Now whenever I’m feeling pressured or behind the curve I crave it. I want one of those warm rotis in my left hand and a spoonful of dahl in my right to balance me out. I’ve been to every Indian restaurant I can find and none of them is quite right. I have a new soul food and it’s thousands of miles away. I’ve started trying to cook my own with little success, and so I can only lie awake at night and dream of it.

Click on images to find the credited photographers on Flickr.

Despite the limited set of requirements he’d used to select his bride, they were actually quite a cute couple. He went home early whenever he could and couldn’t wait to see her. We all went out to dinner a number of times and they were forever telling in-jokes and pausing to giggle with each other. I started thinking again about arranged marriage.

Zeet and Zameet, our fearless director and producer, were also a couple. They were married quite young during a mad sequence of events wherein he started teaching a youth group just to get a chance to talk to her, she was almost killed in a car wreck, and in a groggy haze of pain meds at the hospital she said, “Why are you here? You hardly know me! If you’re so in love with me, fine, marry me.” He of course replied, “yes” immediately and, dumbstruck, she responded with, “Wait, what just happened?” He spent the next year helping her learn to walk again, a feat the doctors didn’t believe was possible. Of course, they didn’t think she would live either. She now runs for exercise and they’ve been happily married all of their adult lives.

Of course, that’s a great story. But the fairy tale version isn’t the most interesting, it’s what happened next. They began fighting, having various issues that are naturally born of close proximity to in-laws and the limited relationship toolset of youth. Things got so bad that she moved out. Despite this, they each knew that they had to stick by their vows. They weren’t going to quit the marriage they had agreed to. They struggled though, learned from the process, and today are like chocolate and peanut butter.

These two examples confirmed something for me that I’ve been wondering for a long time. How much does it really matter who we choose to marry? I’m beginning to believe that, given a resolve to work things out, people are capable of crafting relationships that evolve and merge because they have to. Perhaps our ability to pick and choose, along with the relative ease of divorce, is actually hampering us and making life more difficult. (This, of course, discounts abuse, addiction, and other such factors.)

Barry Schwartz and Dan Gilbert both have excellent TED talk videos (and, I believe, books) that discuss the counterintuitive reality of choice. Humans are actually happier given fewer options, or when they are stuck with a choice they’ve made.

I’ve almost married several times, once going so far as to be engaged to a wonderful woman. I think my exes are much better off without me but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love them dearly. One of the big factors in the eventual breakups was my unwillingness to be ready to have children. While the idea of having to focus on children horrifies me now, I know deep down that if I were forced to have them I would find my own happiness in that world. I know myself well enough to know that I can find ways to be happy in almost any environment. Would I be as happy driving rush hour traffic to bring a toddler to school as I am running through fields in India? Right now I don’t think so, but of course I’ve made myself happy in my current life already, and the hormones that kick in during child rearing aren’t in effect. Maybe I would be.

One of the many unique components of our house was a full sized pipe organ my parents scavenged from an old church. (Actually, I believe the first organ they got had already been scavenged and they picked it up off of a guy who was building a house himself.) The console sat on the floor below me, but the pipes were right next to my room. My mother would practice as I lay in bed, the soothing sound of air blasting through massive metal whistles coaxing me to sleep.

All told these adventures crafted some handy life skills. I can sleep through any kind of chaos and noise. My favorite way to crash is in the middle of a raging party or listening to someone learning to play the piano for the first time. When I was on a documentary crew and had to sleep on the floor of a trailer so tragic dogs refused to stay with us, we all rolled up in sound blankets like human burritos and I was happily dozing in no time.

Then I arrived in China. Weishi and I were picked up at the airport by a massive exuberant family who tossed us into cars and got us back to the apartment. We were surrounded by laughter and fed incredibly delicious dumplings that they had been cooking all day and then, suddenly, everyone was gone. The apartment fell instantly silent and there we were. Despite all of the love, I felt strangely uneasy and I couldn’t quite figure out why. I stepped out onto the balcony and looked around. Something about the place, as quiet and peaceful as it was despite being in the center of Beijing, made me very nervous. Then I discovered the switches.

The buildings around me were simple blocks of grey cement. Birthed during the communist era, they were not unlike low income housing projects. It suddenly occurred to me that if I was in a similar environment in Chicago when I grew up, I would have to worry about being shot. Here in China, however, this was just how everyone lived. Somewhere in my chest the first contextual interpretation switch popped and I relaxed immediately. Moments later the second switch, this one for “camping mode”, made the general level of cleanliness and lack of sophisticated tools fall right into place. The boiled water bucket bath was a luxury compared to cold river water. A pile of blankets is all I really needed. The tension lifted, clearing my eyes to see all of the magic that was China for the remainder of my visit.

By the time I reached India these switches had become so loose and fluid that I didn’t even hear them snap. I brought a sleeping bag and my own lights and supplies and was perfectly content hand washing my clothes or sleeping without heat. Oddly, I’ve even come to relish the challenges of living in different ways. It was only once the second camera crew arrived, however, that I realized how far I had come and how privileged I was. They were completely unprepared for the environment and were so caught up in their struggle to deal with the lack of Taco Bell, Starbucks coffee on demand and hot showers that they spent the majority of their trip blinded to the wonders around them.

So I have to give another couple of bonus points for my whacky upbringing. I hope my sister subjects her kids to more of the same. I’ll certainly do my part to make sure that whenever they come to visit me, I’ll be sure to clear off the floor and set up a drum kit in the corner.

The last time I remember having that experience was climbing out of a minivan as my parents dropped me off for my first year of college. Despite being the birthplace of the HAL 9000, the University of Illinois is buried in miles and miles of corn fields. That day the wind was blowing up from the south and my dad and I shared a moment of mutual understanding. It felt like home already.

While I myself grew up in the sterile confines of the Chicago suburbs, my dad spent all of his early years on a dairy farm in Mantua, Ohio. My sisters and I spent many summers back on that same farm, climbing over mountains of hay bales and feeling the giant sandpaper cow tongues lick feed from our hands. The first vehicle I ever drove was a tractor. The second was a motorcycle that I used to tear up bean fields for every hour of sunlight I was given. The farm had its own gasoline tank and so I could roll up, fill the tank, grab a sandwich and head back out. Somehow those bits of farm life, mysterious and magical adventures, put a little bit of silage in my blood forever.

My family moved into a new house in a new town when I was in fourth grade. I remember having the bizarre experience of recognizing every kid from my old school in the body of someone at the new. As one big guy held my arms back and two others took turns punching me, I was thinking, “wait, I know you!” The guy holding my arms was identical to a friend of mine back home, and only a month before I had been sitting on the twin of the guy who was now punching me. They dressed and talked a little differently, but I quickly became convinced that the world was, in fact, a stage play put on for me by a limited assortment of actors who changed faces whenever I changed sets.

My experience in the Punjab countryside was the same. The women wore silken scarves and the men had turbans the brilliant yellow of mustard flowers or the deep green of the wheat fields. They had darker skin and spoke in a language I was only beginning to understand, but despite all of that I knew them for who they were: the same actors I’d met years ago around the farm in Mantua, Ohio. I could see it in the way everyone waved at me from their ox-drawn carts. Replacing the tractors with carts wasn’t enough to disguise their familiar smiles. They were just as quick to offer me a ride, take a moment to pause from hard physical labor to laugh at me, or teach me how to eat sugar cane.

As a kid I watched my dad explain his physics research to a room full of curious older farmers. They reclined and relaxed around the room, but listened intently to everything he said. Now I was welcomed into people’s homes to tell them about America and my equipment and experiences in exactly the same way. Even the houses felt familiar to me somehow. They were built of brick and cement instead of wood, and there were often cows living in courtyards, but the general relaxed bustle of the place and the extended family that filled them made me feel right at home.

Our few commonalities are so often more powerful than the many things that make us different. I dated a Chinese woman for more than four years who, like me, was the child of nerds. Despite her having grown up in Beijing, this fact made us far more culturally compatible that I was with most American women. I never felt any experience of culture shock in those Indian fields of papaya and farmers until Americans joined us, one of whom was from LA. The shock of experiencing such a radically different view on people, cultural sensitivity and life itself was incredibly intense and proved, once again, that home is not a place– it’s a way of being.

The Scale

When we started out we would enter a small village and go to the house of a fatherless family to interview them. We would then walk across the street to the next house, and perhaps two houses down to the next. Often there were 50-60 suicides in a village, even within the same household.

The suicides themselves are the result of intense economic pressures due to a variety of governmental policies, unchecked industrialization and the so-called green revolution.

Stadiums and Water Rights

While I was there I heard it said that India may be one of the largest democracies in the world, but it is also the most corrupt. Votes are easily bought and sold. I heard firsthand from a man who was offered a literal chest full of cash to push a campaign. I met another who kept the Mercedes he was given as a souvenir. Keep in mind that in this country, while they are becoming much more common, a high end Mercedes is still like having a rocket ship in your back yard.

During my morning walks in the countryside I would occasionally wander over to a huge pink stadium that had been dropped like a giant child’s forgotten toy in the center of the otherwise green and level fields that surrounded us. I thought at first that it was a Kubaddi or Cricket field. There were high bleachers on two sides, modern showers, locker rooms, and weight rooms that were all locked. Our host explained that the complex had been built by a campaigning politician seeking local votes. It was pitched as a place for children to play. In order to maximize the voter impact, it was placed in between several villages. This made it just far enough away from all of them that it was, quite literally, never used.

Given this kind of concern for the people that elected them, it is not surprising that government leaders sold off Punjab’s water to the desert areas of neighboring Rajistan. We saw massive canals sucking water away en-masse. In the years that followed, Punjab became drier and drier. Apparently the clouds of dust we experienced there were, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon. Farmers can no longer count on the once plentiful existing water to grow crops, and have been forced to dig wells, buy pumps, and then buy fuel for those pumps, thus increasing their costs.

The Green Revolution

In an attempt to feed its ever exploding population, in the mid 70s India implemented the Green Revolution. They began using genetically modified seeds which produced much higher yields, but in turn required significantly more water. These new crops also required pesticides and chemical fertilizers that, while greatly increasing cancer rates, also greatly increased farmer cost.

Unchecked Industrialization

We visited a large river so thick with pollution that it was dark and stank so badly we had difficulty being near it. Periodically this particular river overflows its banks and kills off all of the crops in the surrounding area. There are no rights, insurance, or protection of any kind. The farmer is simply SOL.

Price Controls

Using India’s large population of poor as justification, the Indian government has fixed prices for wheat and other crops. With these artificially lowered returns and an ever-increasing input cost, the Indian farmers are effectively being forced to subsidize India’s poor population and are thus steadily being impoverished themselves.

Loan Sharks

Enter the money lenders or, more accurately, loan sharks. These gentlemen offer the farmers the loans they need to survive when a crop fails, a family member gets sick, or they need to buy more fertilizer or seeds. They regularly charge between 40% and 60% interest. When the farmers cannot make payments these men often become aggressive, illegally taking land and property, often stripping the farmers of their means of ever paying off the loans. Most of these village farmers are not educated enough to know their rights or understand the nature of the interest they are paying. The loan sharks threaten and harass them. They verbally and (I believe) physically abuse the women of the family.

Ultimately some combination of the harassment and loss of hope and dignity cause these men to give up and either drink pesticide, jump in front of trains or burn themselves alive. Their families are left behind with the debts and without a primary breadwinner. It is not uncommon for the older male children who must then take on these burdens to themselves commit suicide.

When I asked whether the men worried about the children that they left behind, I was told that the common response was, “god will take care of them”.

In America we have forgotten to honor our craftsmen. We look down on people who do things like paint, hang drywall, garden, and repair cars. Having seen a pro hang drywall, there is nothing like it. They can eyeball a spot, slice a board and hang it in seconds. The tailor in India took a few of my measurements and, without a pattern, to my custom specifications, sewed up a pile of shirts with a hand cranked sewing machine and a giant pair of brass handled scissors. It took him all of a day. I believe this kind of skill deserves respect, and he was certainly proud of what he could do. I would love to see more of that here.

One village family decided to make me a blanket from scratch while I was there. I learned how to do everything from pulling cotton out of its shell, to spinning thread, to dying and, finally, weaving. I saw some beautiful work that they had done and asked them if they ever sold these things to raise money. They were confused, and couldn’t understand why anyone would pay for something that they could make themselves. Everyone knew how to make their own mungies, blankets, clothes and food.

For similar reasons no one ever went out to eat. In the whole region we found only two places that could be called restaurants. One was essentially a bar that served food to its all-male all-drunken clientele. It was only when we became regulars that they cleaned up, put out napkins, and really went all out with the food. The second was a little vegetarian place that actually managed to be somewhat of a family establishment. Surprisingly we saw women and children there. They also managed some seriously tasty food including south Indian dishes like huge, wonderfully spicy masala dosas. Rounded off with a bit of kulfi ice cream, this became one of my favorite meals outside the havella where we stayed.

Here in America if the space between cars is wasteful, the space inside is worse. I’ve seen a Volkswagen microbus head out with a mere 6-7 people inside. In India I’ve seen that many hanging from the back of the same Volkswagen doing 65 mph on the highway!

And the circling! When you miss a turn in India, you just back that sucker up. Even if it’s a full sized bus full of people. Especially if it’s a full sized bus. They’re harder to turn. You’ll do fine as long as you keep a hammer foot on the brake and have someone hanging out the side shouting, “chal chal chal chal!” (Go go go go!)

Oh sure, we lost a rearview mirror off of the side of the bus, but you can always rip one off of the other side and bolt it on. We scraped off the side of another truck once too but since there’s no insurance, you just shout and wave your fist at the other driver and move on.

My favorite two-part sign on the side of a public bus literally overflowing with people, whose arms and heads protruded from every window orifice, was “Dear God”… “Save Us”.

The Selection Process

Choosing which families and which children would end up part of the project was physically and emotionally taxing. The children were so appealing and their stories so intriguing, and yet each initial interview was over with so quickly. Worse yet, each was immediately followed by a hasty exodus to the little truck and another long, rough ride hunched over my gear in the back. I felt terrible about the people we left, tears in their eyes, vanishing behind us in the dust as we ran from village to village. Gina, our anthropologist, was particularly effected by this procedure and I tried to assure her that once we made our choices we would be able to invest real time.

Dharvinder

It was in one of these early interviews that I met Dharvinder. His father had committed suicide by drinking pesticide a mere month and a half before we walked through his door, cameras in hand. He was the oldest child, somewhere around fourteen to sixteen years old. Most of the people we met had no idea how old they were and birthdays were general markers like, “the mangos were ripe” or, “we were harvesting wheat”. He was quiet and polite during the interview but as we asked questions about his father he began struggling to maintain his composure. Something about the way he stood, trying so hard to be strong, and yet still very clearly a kid, really got to me. I could feel the weight of his new responsibility as he stood beside his mother, grandmother, and adopted sister. At last, against his will, tears made their way out into the open and, after turning away several times, he ran behind a wall to collect himself before returning to try to finish the interview. That image of him stays with me even now: his blue knit hat tight around his head and turned at a slight angle, his back straight, standing firm against the world with only his moist eyes to betray him.

Sher and Salma

In another house we met two children who’s mother had left them after their father had, I believe, hung himself. In this case the mother had not wanted to leave her children. She remarried and, as is the tradition there, went to live with her new family. The family did not want anything to do with her existing children and refused to allow her to see them. She called them on the sly for a while, even making a few trips to see them, but was discovered and stopped in some way that was unclear. This left Sher and Salma alone with their grandmother.

As it turns out, this was one hell of a grandmother. Beeji (grandma) as we called her, was feisty, upbeat and set a tone for these kids that beamed through their smiles and kept their heads high. Like so many of the others we met, they went hungry any number of times and had little more than their tiny two room brick and mud house, but they maintained excellent grades in school, worked hard, and Sher was one of the best English speakers in the group. (I say this because the focus of education there seems to be reading, writing, math, and English.)

This old woman walked a huge distance to the kids’ school every week to speak with their principal and spent her days spinning thread from cotton by hand. She was happy to try to teach me, despite my clumsy fingers, and only laughed at me when she couldn’t help it. I have rarely in my life met someone so truely and vibrantly alive. She said it was because she drank milk.

I want to talk about all of the families, my experiences meeting them and all of our interactions, but it dawns on me that at some point I’d be writing the documentary out shot by shot here in my blog. Suffice it to say that we heard a lot of difficult stories and met some amazing people in the search process alone.

Despite spending as much time as I have around my nephews and niece and the various Burner children that are flickering to light like tiny candle flames all across Austin, I still don’t seem to have as much of a grasp of how to interact with them as I did when I was a teenaged babysitter. Most of my discomfort comes with having to be a disciplinarian, or trying to understand the expectations of the adults watching me interact. Learning to not only deal with children, but love them, was one of the many transformative elements of this experience for me.

The Lens

Everything that’s been said about the safety of looking through a camera lens is true. A nice little filter, it serves both to make the image I am viewing more abstract, as well as take my focus from the subject being viewed and turn it towards how that subject is being framed or lit. Never was this distance more striking than in Punjab where I was looking through that filter at people fresh from extreme personal tragedy. After the first few interviews I forced myself to look up regularly and take a moment to soak in the reality of the situation, to feel the tears and the averted eyes. I was still new to the environment itself and had very little time to process my surroundings let alone the people standing before me.

The first few days of interviews were quick and intense. We captured the essence of the stories and then jumped quickly to the next location and began again. It was physically and emotionally challenging but, again, the camera helped give me some distance. Then came the first day of workshops.

Workshops

We brought 14 children from 6 different families who had lost a father to suicide to the estate where we had set up camp. The day was filled with new experiences for them. They played on swings and a slide, most for the first time in their lives. I had to stop the camera and show them how to use the teeter-totter before their butts turned blue from the alternating “wham! wham!” of the seats hitting the ground. I showed them how to use their legs like springs through a combination of miming and handwaving, much to their delight.

Of course the camera itself was a fascinating new experience, and they wanted to look through it and play with it. It was hard to convince them that I wasn’t there to be played with too, especially being a gorrah (white person) and having a strange little braid (ghuttini) coming out of the top of my head. I managed to keep them at bay for the most part, and they resorted to performing for the camera until I turned away enough that they gave up and became themselves.

That evening, after a long day, we were waiting for a driver to pick up the remaining kids. The sun had long departed and my camera was put away leaving me defenseless. We started having Jasbir and Gursev sing songs they knew and somehow, inexplicably, they managed to turn it into an excuse to teach me Punjabi. I’m not even sure how it happened, but suddenly I was surrounded by little kids sitting on my lap, wrapped around my shoulders, and peering at my notebook as I wrote out each number they taught me.

Ironically the group included two of the very boys, Gurpreet and Jagtar, I had thought would be the hardest to deal with. Outside they ignored adults and frequently ran off to find new ways to injure themselves. Now they were both intensely focused and very sincere as they repeated each number for me and gently corrected my pronunciation, nodding and grinning as I got it right. In that moment, due to some combination of feeling their physical affection, uninhibited trust, and sincerity, something inside me snapped and I saw them in an entirely new way.

Each time I went to see the families the familiarity and trust grew. The kids would shout, “Meester Kai!” until at last I responded with a sharp look or two, finally breaking out in a crazy gesture or wild dance move that brought waves of laughter. I would then return to what I was doing as though nothing had happened and they would eagerly try again.

On the bus ride into Delhi the bus, despite bouncing harshly over endless ruts and potholes and careening from left to right at the most inopportune moments, became an irresistible dance space. With Punjabi Bhungra music blasting from the speakers and the bus’s red, green and blue interior lights ablaze, the kids took turns spinning and bouncing in the aisles and, inevitably, dragging me from my seat to join them. Over time little Jagtar (the youngest boy) began singing quietly with me and the older Jagtar and his brother Gurpreet started cuddling up next to me as the night grew late and the bouncing bus lulled them into sleep.

When we reached our final destination, the golden temple in Amritsar, Gurpreet held my hand whenever I wasn’t holding the camera. This is a kid with no parents but for his 12 year old sister. Through some natural encoding in all of us he found me as a father figure and trusted me. He dragged me to see the giant goldfish. He babbled incoherently about everything around us. He insisted that he was, “the UNDERTAKER!”

There were definitely other kids that I connected with. We taught everyone to sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in English and Sher insisted that I sit with him until he had it down perfectly. His sister Salma hassled me endlessly and was first to insist that I take the dance floor. Naresh was the oldest and experienced the biggest transformation. He came into his own as a leader for the children, slipping smoothly from comedian and playmate to confident speaker. I feel certain that he will become a powerful voice for and to his community.

Leaving

It was so difficult to leave, and harder to imagine that I might not see some of these kids again. Worse still, I can’t be there to protect them from what will inevitably confront them as they continue to fight their way through a world for which they are under-prepared and stripped of defenses. I think the confidence they gained from this trip has great potential to get them moving in the right direction to take control of their lives but the abysmal education available to them and the sheer difficulty of getting enough to eat will be hard to overcome. I will be sending support money through a local activist who has been working on these issues for many years. I will also be sending them letters that they may one day be able to read in their english classes, along with recordings of my children’s songs and photos of my life in Austin. I still have no interest in having children of my own, but maybe I just picked up a few more nieces and nephews.

I think if anything I am re-affirmed in my belief that play is the highest form of human achievement. Play is all you have left when you are going hungry and everything’s been taken from you. It’s what gives us dignity, and hope, and makes life worth living.

My perspective shift has more to do with things that are not play. There are so many things that people take seriously, that cause them to worry, panic, or become irritated or furious, and none of them include having a roof, food, living parent or basic freedom. As a wise banner borne by clowns once read, “Life is too Important to be taken Seriously”.