These Bombay Shores

My friends and I sit silently on the edge of a park in Bombay as dusk turns to night, our faces turned toward the wild grey sea. Today the wind is rough and cool, and if you hold completely still you can actually feel where it meets the hot city air. 

I watch the waves below me -- following one at a time as they crest and break on the jagged rocks. Beyond the water is an arching bridge and skyscrapers illuminated in yellow light. A cluster of women in black hijabs gossip on the stone wall on one side of us, and determined joggers turn their faces toward the breeze as they make their rounds. Elderly couples saunter by in comfortable silence, their hands clasped behind their backs. I hear no one.

Everything, suddenly, feels like home. Like Clearwater Beach at night with my best friends, and the dock that stretches into the Anclote River behind my parents' house. Like watching the Potomac ebb under the M St. bridge in D.C.; that one quiet spot along the Arno in Florence. The rivers and oceans and seas flow into each other and I could be sitting on any of their shores, just belonging. And I'm not the only one.

The other day I met a traveler en route to Brazil at a cafe in Bandra — a soft-mannered guy with kind eyes and a stubbly beard. He had spent the day taking photos in the hot sun and we drank coconut water and jaggery coffee and talked about where we had been. After sharing a few adventures the talk turned to Bombay and the city's chaotic grace. There was something magical here, a quiet sort of humanity living among the fishermen's nooks and bustling Dharavi market and lover's perches on Bandstand. He took a sip of his coffee and said, "I have this theory that living on the water is good for the soul.” 

I smiled because nothing is coincidence. This is the same theory I've held for a while, created with my toes in the ocean: the idea that people must live on the water, or amid the mountains, or in the desert -- anything vast and natural and divine -- to feel truly happy. That without something expansive and beyond our grasp for reference, it is far too easy to slip into our minds and think the reality we've created is the only thing that exists. 

Out here on the edge of the sea, with the wind in my hair and the rush of water drowning out millions of voices, I  have no doubt that there is more. I feel like one of the rocks on the shore, at the mercy of the sun and waves and stars. And for now this city is as much home as anywhere in the world could be. 

What It Takes To Open Your Wallet

From the days when I carried around a UNICEF box during Halloween as a kid, to buying a Street Sense from the same homeless guy each week, the act of donating money, and collecting donations, has always proved confounding. There are so many things to care about, but no way to reach them all. And there's always the added confusion of accountability and impact.

But a recent 'fundraiser' made me realize what it takes to have someone actually donate their hard-earned cash, and do it with joy. The lessons I took away from the experience also fit perfectly with what I learned from Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard, which I'm kind of obsessed with this year.

A college friend of mine sent out a private Facebook invite to a group of maybe 50 people, asking us to give a monetary gift for another friend's birthday so that he could travel to a sacred spot that was significant in both his personal life and ongoing study of religion.

The response was immediate: people were posting that they had donated, and urging their friends to join in. It was personal, sweet, and a kind of instant community built around our mutual respect for him and this trip. I'm not close friends with this guy, but I donated a small amount of money with no hesitation.

Within a few days the goal was not only reached, but surpassed, and the friend who had organized the whole thing put up a glorious video of the birthday boy's reaction to the posts, messages and money for the trip. It was warm and fuzzy to the nth degree.

Having seen the beauty and efficiency of this process, I started to identify what made this different than all the Save the Children campaigns we pass by every day, at the grocery story, or the Facebook posts about friends running for cancer. 

1) The goal was clearly defined. We knew exactly where our money was going, and who would be using it. Trying to put a dollar amount on top of a huge initiative like women's empowerment doesn't exactly give you a picture, or too much confidence, that your small contribution could make a difference. In this case you knew exactly how much you could impact the situation.

2) The outreach was targeted, limited and relevant. You know spectator's syndrome? Where everyone in a crowd sees someone get hurt by doesn't do anything about it because they diffuse responsibility? I feel like that's how it is with some campaigns. My friend was smart enough to make a closed group that included only people he knew had some sort of attachment or emotion connected to the 'cause'. When there are a limited number of people, they know they have to rise up to the occasion.

3) Emotional connection. Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, attracted lots of attention when he decided to suddenly support gay marriage after his son, Will, came out. A lot of times it takes that moment of humanization -- that friend with cancer, the sweet rescue dog, to feel the weight of a cause. In this case, it was a friend that makes it so easy to love and respect him because of his quietly passionate way of living. The connection was immediate, so the reaction was too.

4) End game. Seeing our friends face light up was more than enough pay back for the donation. But even if you give selflessly, without needing a return on your investment, that moment is so fulfilling and necessary to come full circle. Some organizations have tried to do that by providing pictures of the child you are supporting, but it needs to be stronger, and more consistent. It can't be a one way street.

So, anyhow, this is my recipe for how to make people give you money. In a world with such stark differences in resources, maybe this will help someone.

No News Is Good News

I've got a lot of causes. I want to save the earth and the women of the earth. I want equal rights for all sexual orientations, races, religions and Avatars (kidding). I want animals to be treated well and tummies to be full. And I want my mountains topped, rivers pure and government transparent.

Somehow this makes me an idealist and a liberal and all sorts of labels synonymous to a sensitive softie. But it also might be a direct correlation to the amount of news I've been consuming.

How can you NOT have a lot of causes reading/watching the news? Not just these days, all days. No news out there is good news. There's always someone being shot, suppressed, jailed. There's uncontainable oil, unregulated big business, uncapped spending.

So for a while I thought the answer was to run around trying to protest everything and get things fixed and get mad at people. Now I think its this: 1)be empowered enough to help in your capacity 2) look for happy news.

There are enough people helping, nurturing, thriving, to fill a newspaper. We hear of the naughty priests, but never about the ones who inspire entire congregations. For every car crash, there are tons prevented by cautious drivers. There's deforestation, but classrooms are building greenhouses and planting gardens.

To make it easier, some friends and I have been talking about launching a Web site or at least some kind of news feed that is all good news all the time. So yeah, the sea turtles are choking on BP's mistake -- but there's got to be something good happening there too. And I'm going to find it.

On Being Cliché

Watching New York, I Love You, I observed myself labeling some story lines as overused, trite-- New Yorkers in cabs, New Yorkers obsessed with sex, New Yorkers.

Cliché is possibly the most popular word in creative writing workshops, and the most useless. When somebody writes about a meet-cute, or a suicide, or a teen pregnancy -- how ridiculous, how contrived, make these people seem real.

Or I've heard news stories being turned down by editors because who wants to read about another kid who triumphed over the odds of the ghetto, or an immigrant adapting to a cold America?

I even hear of people being called cliché. Because they are Indians who want to be doctors, black guys who want to be ball players, poets who want to be...poets.

But then a short story lands in my hands. And it is simple, and it is a love story, and the girl is emotional and the guy distant, and I secretly breathe relief that I can put down my pen and analyzing and just read.

Or I find an article tucked in the folds of The Washington Post, and it's about an athlete who can't see, and I'll cry, right there on the metro, in the morning, when everybody is machine-like and giving annoyed glances to anyone speaking.

The idea that every story -- on paper, in film, in paint, set to music -- should spontaneously appear and be unlike anything before, is twisted. If we can Reduce Reuse Recycle our trash, we can definitely be inspired by the artists before us.

If Annie Proulx had been scared to add to the stack of love stories, we wouldn't have "Brokeback Mountain" (in Close Range), and if Bob Dylan really minded, we wouldn't have ten versions of "All Along the Watchtower".

By the time an idea travels through one person's cauliflower maze of a brain, it will never be the same as when it entered. So here is my vote for free reign of your art -- and as many Romeo and Juliet's as you can possibly imagine.