Everybody’s Talkin’

Today’s the day after the Super Bowl, and I’m in Jagannath Puri on the east coast of India on the Bay of Bengal. No one here watches the Super Bowl. They do say “Hari Bol” (chant the names of God), though.

We’ve been out of the USA for almost four months. We missed the whole commercial buildup for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and Valentine’s Day. I forgot there even was such a thing as the Super Bowl until a few weeks ago, when I started feeling the first symptoms of homesickness in the form of random memories. “Gosh, I’d like to watch the Super Bowl,” I thought, but I don’t even know who was playing and even if I did what possible difference could it make?

So when I first went to type the words “Super Bowl,” my fingers automatically hit the keys for Super Bol instead, which much better describes what’s going on around us.

I wish I could explain exactly how life is different here than the life I see in the States. Not too many people have televisions here for one. When we hear that, as Americans, we tend to think, “Oh, they’re deprived! How unfortunate! How backward! How desolate and poverty-stricken they must be!”

But you know what I see here? People talking to each other. It’s a huge, nonstop social scene. The streets are full of people walking and talking to each other. In their homes, they’re talking to each other and/or chanting Hare Krishna or something similar. They’re sitting on benches outside of tea stalls, walking arm in arm down crowded alleyways, standing around the waterpumps, in front of roadside shops, or just standing in the street, and they’re all talking to one another, laughing, shouting, dancing, and dodging bicycle and scooter traffic.

The people I see here haven’t lost the art of communication. Nobody’s planted in front of the television with blank expressions on their faces, oblivious to those around them. They know each other, they touch each other, they understand each other.

In our house, when I was growing up, the TV was almost always on, and I was almost always watching it. I absorbed the sitcoms and cartoons and televised sporting events and brutally chopped-up televised movies. Conversations took a back seat to “whatever someone was watching.” Some of my earliest impressions of human behavior were not from watching actual human behavior but from watching actors performing rehearsed lines written by other people, with the ultimate aim of selling cars, alcohol, breakfast cereals, laundry soap, and dog food.

I remember before we had television. We played cards and talked to each other. Neighbors and family would come over to visit. I’d hear the grownups talking for hours, and laughing, shouting. People would come over for dinner, unannounced, no problem. They’d stay and talk, tell stories, tell jokes, until the sky went dark and the crickets were chirping and the fireflies flashed outside the windows. They’d sit around bonfires and talk. Then we got television and it was all over.