Saturday: Denial

It's August 1. The night before we had sent off the first draft of our case study to the Delhi central office and presented our findings to the Orissa state office. So this was the day that we could finally celebrate after surrendering our minds to the intricacies of planning and monitoring units for seven weeks straight.

The day started off with a lovely brunch at our supervisor's home, and then my coworkers and I went off for afternoon drinks. Our destination was a place called Far Pavilion, which is a restaurant with an enclosed outdoor garden from where you cab lay back and sip inexpensive drinks. I had never been there before but it came highly recommended.

As it so happened, the garden was closed during the afternoon so we headed to the indoor bar. The inside was dully-lit, decorated in a faux Italian style with Michelangelo-inspired depictions of women on the walls. We took our seats in the corner and briefly took notice that once again we were the only females in a drinking establishment.

And this is when things took a turn for the worse. First the waiter came by and suggested that we sit in the restaurant next door. Somewhat confused, we got up ready to comply with the suggestion, but when we entered the restaurant, the lights were off, there was no A/C, and there was only one person inside - the waiter. This wasn't the sort of festive atmosphere that we were looking for. When we pointed out these obvious short-comings, the waiter said that we could return to the bar but he thought the restaurant would be a more pleasant place for women. We thanked him for his perspective and made our way back to the bar.

As it turns out, the management was not as open to us sitting at the bar as the waiter led us to believe. We attempted to seat ourselves in the bar and were denied. The next fifteen minutes were marked by heated conversations until it became clear that this bar was not willing to serve us because we were women.

At the time, I was of two minds about this. One mind was telling me that I was in a different culture, and as such I was subject to their way of doing things. But then seeing how irate my Indian co-worker had become, I realized that deferring to cultural relativism isn't necessarily the right thing to do. At that moment, I saw that I was in the middle of a struggle - the struggle in India of young women fighting for their rights to be treated the same way as men. I saw in my co-worker that it was not enough to walk away and say that we wouldn't spend our money there. This was an opportunity to make an argument - to change minds. That day she showed me that even in a place you don't call home, you cannot accept being treated as a second class citizen.

And as an American girl in India, all I can say in response is "I'll drink to that."