Prolouge

While I was writing about my Peace Corps experiences, I opened a door that took me directly back to Kolar. There I was again, a young man fixing Jeeps and compressors, eating rice and sambar with my fingers, and learning about another culture and some things about myself.

It didn’t take long to get used to the cyclical rhythm of Kolar’s days. I got up with the sun, worked under it, and slept when it set. There wasn’t much for  me to do in the long, sparsely lit nights where the only entertainment consisted of an occasional four-reel movie in Hindi or Kannada that could be more like a punishment than a pleasure.

Most of the time, Mike Lipman and I ate dinner and talked a while. Before going to bed, I usually read or wrote letters on the thin aerograms that were convenient, but always too small for everything I wanted to say. 

My mother had saved the letters I sent to her in a shoebox in chronological order. After she passed away, one of my brothers sent them to me. The elastic bands that held them were frayed and the paper was fragile and faded, but not the memories that clung to the pages. They were full of my wide-eyed recollections of the intricacies and quirks of the Indian culture and the hospitality of the people who lived in its isolated villages. In one, I described the contrast of a tawny bullock yoked to a crude wooden cart lumbering past the workshop while I repaired our drilling machinery.

My “Scenes from Kolar” were inspired by the contents of the shoebox and from a stack of spiral notebooks that I’ve filled with my reflections and musings over the years. All the exotic scenes I described seemed normal then, probably because I had a youthful infatuation with India, and like anyone who is infatuated, didn’t notice its flaws.

A recurring thought I have when I look back on my time in India is that Peace Corps life seems less adventurous today. Volunteers were time travelers on a crooked trail with only the rough sketch that we got in training to guide us. We learned as we went along. Tele-communication, computer engineers and internet programmers have made modern volunteer’s lives easier, but much poorer than ours. Before the mobile revolution, there were no immediate links to the world outside of Kolar.

I remember that airmail could take weeks both ways, sea mail months, and the nearest telephone might have been in the Kolar Post Office or in Bangalore. Today our cell phones and laptops are so interwoven with our daily lives, that if their batteries go dead or there is no service, it feels like a vital part of us is missing.

Back then, we were on our own and didn’t have instant access to a super highway of information and entertainment. We worked out our own problems whenever we were challenged by the unruly flux of the day’s events, culture shock, or just homesickness.

Peace Corps volunteers came to Kolar as ambassadors of change. What we didn’t realize was that change was a slow process, and in the end, India would change us much more than we changed it.

I’d like to think that we gave back more than we took and in some way touched the hearts of the people we met and interacted with, as they touched ours. 

Was my time as a Peace Corps volunteer a coming of age? Perhaps. Was it a pivotal time in my life? Definitely.

Nyköping, Sweden, on a snowy February morning, 2020