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Sideways nominated for "Best Travel & Outdoors Book of 2011" on Goodreads. Click here to vote...
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With a journalist's attention to detail and the ability to traverse politics, history and pop culture, Kennedy provides valuable insight into a country that is too often simplified by Western writers --The Sydney Sun-Herald
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Part memoir, part in-depth reporting about women's lives in a very foreign culture, this first book by a young NPR reporter closely examines the lives of six women - some of them privileged, some very poor.
Its title - Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India - refers to the modest way in which Indian women are expected to sit on the back of scooters and motorcycles. And indeed, the place Miranda finds, through the lives of her employees and friends, is a complex and traditional place. Women now have more choice than ever before in India when it comes to education and work, yet few are allowed to make what may be the most important decision in their lives: who they will marry.
Visit "The Characters" page to read more.
The Australian Edition, called Searching For Women Who Drink Whiskey , is on sale May 2, 2011.
Chinese, Korean, and Dutch translations all coming soon.
For five years, Miranda Kennedy reported from across South Asia for National Public Radio and American Public Media's Marketplace Radio. From her base in New Delhi, she covered the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other major stories across Asia, including the Asian tsunami, the Kashmiri insurgency in the mountains on the India-Pakistan border, and the Tamil Tiger separatist movement in Sri Lanka.
She wrote extensively about women, caste, and globalization in India, and her stories have appeared in publications like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation and Slate Magazine. Before she moved to India, Miranda was a magazine editor and a public radio reporter in New York, where she covered the September 11 attacks. On returning to the US, she moved to Washington D.C. to work as an editor at National Public Radio's Morning Edition.
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When I first met Geeta, I was making a half-hearted attempt to bargain with Ram, the neighborhood fruit seller, known as the "veg and fruit wallah" in Hinglish - the urban Indian dialect that is a combination of English and Hindi words. Ram almost always ripped me off for his wares, because I didn't have the hardnosed bargaining skills of Indian housewives. Geeta did, though. She accosted Ram and forced him to bring his prices down for me. That moment set us on a path of friendship that would last for many years.
Geeta was full of fascinating contradictions. She liked to call herself a "modern girl." I thought of her as "the virgin in a miniskirt" because she worked in a job in public relations and "dressed Western," as she'd put it, but she still wanted to have an arranged marriage. For years, I watched as Geeta's parents guided her through the process of finding a husband "the arranged way." During the years I knew her, she met a steady stream of "boys," as unmarried guys are called in Indian English, through her parents' friends and classified ads her father put in the Sunday newspapers. Eventually she turned to the online matrimonial industry, as do tens of millions of other young Indians.
Indian marital web sites seem as though they'd allow the modern-minded Indian middle class to skirt strict marriage traditions, but caste and class always have a role to play in Indian marriage. And although Geeta wanted to break some of those rules, she found it much more difficult in practice.
A boy selling chips and tobacco at a Delhi roadside tobacco stand
Before I explain this photograph, I should describe what makes Parvati so remarkable. My whiskey-drinking friend broke almost all the rules that have been laid out for women in India. She was raised in a small town, but you would never guess it from her behavior. When I first started hanging out with Parvati, I found myself constantly amazed by her. She consistently refused to be intimidated by social expectation.a
Parvati is a journalist with one of India's top English language papers, and she is happiest when she is charging into the office of some government minister to accuse him of small-time corruption. She smokes and drinks in public. She curses rapidly and regularly in Hindi. She also has a boyfriend, Vijay, who she has no intention of marrying. She is pretty much totally disinterested in children--almost unheard-of in India, the land of the exploding population--and has no intention of having any, in spite of what she calls "the great Indian childbearing obsession."
One of my most memorable early experiences with Parvati was at a roadside stall like the one pictured here. This is how I describe it in the book: more
Radha, my proud, illiterate Brahmin maid, never lets me forget her high-caste origins. She reminds me whenever she can that her birth makes her preternaturally higher than Maneesh, my other part-time servant, who collectz the garbage in the neighborhood.
Unlike Maneesh, who mostly tries to ignore her low caste, Radha celebrated her Brahiminical superiority at every chance she had. When her oldest daughter, Pushpa, turned 16, Radha decided that it was time to marry her off, even if it meant pulling her out of school. And for Radha, what mattered most about the match was that she find her daughter a boy of equal caste status. Radha lives in the other India, the one that middle-class, globalized people call "backwards."
Radha stars in this long excerpt from Sideways On A Scooter: more
I hired Maneesh because I was informed that it was not acceptable for my high-caste servant, Radha to take out the garbage in Delhi--let alone for me to do it myself.
Maneesh showed up one morning in a grubby and wrinkled salwar kameez, a sure sign of someone on the bottom rung, since India's ubiquitous press wallahs charge only a rupee - about two U.S. cents - to iron a piece of clothing with their antiquated coal-fired appliances.
I learned that Maneesh supports her drunk husband and two sons by doing the job she inherited from her ancestors. She is an "untouchable," lower than the lowest rung on the caste system--literally, an outcaste. Collecting garbage, cleaning bathrooms, and mopping the floors are the only jobs most Indians will hire her to do. Over the years that she worked for me, I watched Maneesh square her shoulders as she endured some of the greatest sadness anyone could bear. And yet she was almost always chirpy. I came to look forward to her midmorning ring of the bell. We'd linger and chat in the doorway after she cleaned up the cat litter and carried off my garbage in a plastic bag.
Azmat is the most dutiful employee of the Fitness Circle, the little women-only gym that had popped up in the basement of a building in my neighborhood. She had been hired to clean the place, but soon became its leading publicity maven.
Azmat loved the opportunities for socializing that the gym provided her. Young, and from a fairly conservative low-income Muslim family, it wasn't acceptable for Azmat to socialize in a mixed gender crowd. The gym was different though: the sign outside demarcated it "Ladies Only." Her job there also helped her earn money to put toward her dowry - the money or goods that women in India are expected to bring to the groom's family in marriage.
When I joined the gym, I was immediately charmed by Azmat's gregarious manner. Azmat's English was as bad as my Hindi; we practiced our languages on one another. In the book, I describe my first impressions of Azmat this way: more
Usha, the yoga trainer at the Fitness Circle, had been hired after a fruitless search for an experienced female trainer. Her classes were not what I expected in the land that gave birth to yoga: there were no sun salutations or vinyasas, just plenty of deep breathing. The ladies loved her class because it was easy.
Gyms are still a solidly middle-class enterprise in India, and that was not Usha's world. Her mother had given birth to twelve children at home on her string cot. Only half of Usha's siblings had survived past infanthood - which, some sociologists say, partly accounts for why Indian women used to have so many children. Like most women her time, Usha's mother had never visited a "ladies' doctor" (as gynecologists are called in India) and never had a checkup during her pregnancies. She eventually died in childbirth, as do almost a hundred thousand women every year in India.
By the time Usha came of age, her family had no money for her dowry. They were forced to lower their sights. Her husband search turned into a comedy of errors. This is one of the funniest stories Usha told me about it: more
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