A Brown Man in Russia E-Book

Vijay Menon

• Herausgeber: Glagoslav Publications B.V. (N)
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 248

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A Brown Man in Russia describes the fantastical travels of a young, colored American traveler as he backpacks across Russia in the middle of winter via the Trans-Siberian. The book is a hybrid between the curmudgeonly travelogues of Paul Theroux and the philosophical works of Robert Pirsig. Styled in the vein of Hofstadter, the author lays out a series of absurd, but true stories followed by a deeper rumination on what they mean and why they matter. Each chapter presents a vivid anecdote from the perspective of the fumbling traveler and concludes with a deeper lesson to be gleaned. For those who recognize the discordant nature of our world in a time ripe for demagoguery and for those who want to make it better, the book is an all too welcome antidote. It explores the current global climate of despair over differences and outputs a very different message – one of hope and shared understanding. At times surreal, at times inappropriate, at times hilarious, and at times deeply human, A Brown Man in Russia is a reminder to those who feel marginalized, hopeless, or endlessly divided that harmony is achievable even in the most unlikely of places. 

Leseprobe

A Brown Man in Russia

Lessons Learned on the Trans-Siberian

Vijay Menon

A Brown Man in Russia

Lessons Learned on the Trans-Siberian

by Vijay Menon

Edited by John Amor and Ksenia Papazova

Publishers Maxim Hodak &Max Mendor

© 2018, Vijay Menon

© 2018, Glagoslav Publications

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 978-1-91141-477-3 (Ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

About the Author

Chapter 1: Why so serious?

Lesson

Chapter 2: You are a lottery ticket

Lesson

Chapter 3: No limits

Lesson

Chapter 4: You mad?

Lesson

Chapter 5: Optimizing the grab bag

Lesson

Chapter 6: The spirit of the law

Lesson

Chapter 7: Who decides what is offensive?

Lesson

Chapter 8: Head on a swivel

Lesson

Chapter 9: Keep it trill

Lesson

Chapter 10: Solo star

Lesson

Chapter 11: Do the right thing

Lesson

Chapter 12: Laughing at you or with you?

Lesson

Chapter 13: Try > Succeed

Lesson

Chapter 14: To belong

Lesson

Chapter 15: Embracing curiosity

Lesson

Chapter 16: On multi-dimensionality

Lesson

Chapter 17: Think like a child

Lesson

Chapter 18: Pay it forward

Lesson

Chapter 19: The golden rule of travel

Lesson

Chapter 20: Enter the portal

Lesson

Chapter 21: Question, question, question

Lesson

Chapter 22: Do you

Lesson

Acknowledgements

Photos

Thank you for purchasing this book

Glagoslav Publications Catalogue

About the Author

Vijay Menon is an American author, statistician, and backpacker. His TED talk, Lessons Learned on the Trans-Siberian, garnered acclaim as he described his unique experiences traveling through Russia as a person of color. This culminated in his debut novel, A Brown Man in Russia, in which he provides a lens into a Siberian winter from the perspective of a total outsider and relates subsequent lessons. In addition to Russia, Vijay has traveled to more than 50 countries in six continents over the past five years ranging from Zimbabwe to Taiwan. He graduated with dual degrees in Statistics and Economics from Duke University. Vijay has been published in the Economist, is a Duke Debate champion, and had his winning submission on global sustainability forwarded to President Barack Obama's desk by the United Nations following their national essay contest. Prior to entering the tech industry, he worked on the Battery 500 project at IBM, performed mass spectrometry research to discover cancer biomarkers at UC Davis, helped implement micro-consignment for entrepreneurs in Guatemala, and served as a low latency data analyst for teams in the National Basketball Association. Vijay currently resides in Silicon Valley working at Scribd, the Netflix for books, as the senior product manager lead having previously completed stints at both Microsoft and Dropbox.

Chapter 1: Why so serious?

December 13, 2013

London, England → Moscow, Russia

When I was a child, my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas. It took no time for me to respond — I requested the Nintendo 64 game Banjo-Kazooie. 

I woke up on Christmas morning with a distinct feeling of anticipation in my gut. I sprinted downstairs at the crack of dawn and fidgeted impatiently by the tree, eagerly waiting for my parents to rouse. After a seemingly interminable wait, they finally emerged. 

“Go ahead,” my mom offered. “Open it.” 

The words seemed so sweet at the time. Tearing apart the wrapping paper, I felt a surge of dopamine as I pulled out my prize. Lo and behold, what was in my hands? 

A National GeographicAtlas.

“Ah,” my mom offered with faux remorse. “Looks like Santa was unable to pick up Banjo-Kazooie this time around.” My face dropped, as my Dad offered a consolatory, “Maybe next year?”

And in that moment, Santa Claus was dead to five-year-old me. 

The bitterness of that event is not lost on me, but time has mostly dissipated the raw wounds of December 25, 1998. In its place, a countervailing emotion began to incubate — namely, one of appreciation. 

Because on that day, my parents inculcated upon me an unconditional love for travel that has carried with me throughout my life. 

As I grew up, I became fascinated by learning more about the world around me. I read voraciously, becoming enamored with trivia and Geography Bees*. I hauled around a tub of global facts supplemented by recent article clippings from the Economist, devised spontaneous lists of top-ten vacation destinations à la Conde Nast, and proudly announced my ambitions to aspire to future ambassadorship. 

All the while, I had never so much as set foot in neighboring Canada. 

So though I could rattle off the name of each world capital with relative ease — including all three of South Africa’s — I always felt as a child that actually visiting them was somehow out of reach. 

As I entered adolescence, however, that misplaced belief slowly melted away. Tinkering on the Internet, I developed a penchant for travel hacking — scraping error fares, spotting the best routes, and snagging the cheapest flight deals. For the first time in my life, the pages on the Atlas began to come to life. 

And I explored the world — one flight at a time.

It started small at the onset. But the real turning point was a solitary trip to Guatemala the summer after my freshman year of college at Duke University, living with a host family and sponsoring micro-consignment for local entrepreneurs. 

Upon my return, I recall for the first time experiencing a sensation distinctly different than anything I had ever encountered before. Rather than refreshed and rejuvenated, I felt strangely unfulfilled and unsettled — like I didn’t quite want to be back. 

My exploratory itch had become insatiable, and I hungered for more. 

Nay. 

I demanded it.

Fast forward to the summer of 2013. 

That June, as I lounged in my grandparents’ residence in Calicut, India for a week before starting a new job at Microsoft, an ineluctable idea planted itself inside my head. I couldn’t tell you where it came from, or how it first appeared — only that it was there and that I couldn’t stop ruminating on it. 

Mongolian Christmas. 

Fifteen years to the day of my most crushing childhood disappointment, I felt an irrepressible desire to find myself in the country that I had first learned about in my initially unappreciated but now cherished National GeographicAtlas. And so an innocent Google search morphed into hours spent on Seat61.com**, and an incipient idea soon transformed into a burning desire. 

Over a quick Skype call, I pitched my plan to the only people I knew would immediately be receptive — my Duke roommate Jeremy and our fellow classmate Avi. 

The two made ideal travel partners, albeit for different reasons. Jeremy, a Knoxville-bred man, possessed not only the appearance but also the qualities of a 19th century frontiersman — intrepid and gritty, with a gnarly red beard to match. Avi, on the other hand, retained an unbelievably laid-back nature that belied his fast-paced Jersey roots — so much so that one could be forgiven for wondering whether he could more aptly be described as carefree or careless. 

“The Trans-Siberian Railway? Mongolian Christmas? Say no more.” 

It was unanimous. We were going to take the train across Russia, through the Siberian tundra, and down into the ancestral home of the Khans. And we were going to do it smack in the heart of winter.

I wish I could provide a more cogent explanation for why this notion of a trip through Siberia took hold of my mind — an all-encompassing story that explains this strange desire and wraps it up nicely in a bow-tied package. 

But to contrive a reason would be to deceive. 

So rather than lie, I borrow the terse, but sufficient words of John Howard Griffin from his 1959 novel Black Like Me.

“I decided I would do this***.” 

And just like that, I was on the runway of snowy Domodedovo Airport in Moscow in December 2013. 

As I shuffled out of the terminal towards border control, I fretted the warped lost-in-translation world into which I was entering. I stepped towards a waving customs agent wearing a fine fur hat and grinned sheepishly, hoping desperately to avoid questioning so as to obscure my ignominious ignorance of the Russian language. 

As she flipped to page one of my passport, the woman behind the desk began to laugh uproariously. 

And so it began. Already? What have I done?

Cackling, the lady pointed down at the passport picture and then looked up at my face.

“You?” she asked with a smirk of incredulity sketched upon her visage.

“That’s me!” I wanted to yell. 

But I remained quiet and smiled as the woman scanned back and forth, trying to reconcile the commonality between the antiquated passport photo and the person standing in front of her. 

At this point, a bit of table-setting is in order. My passport picture was taken when I was a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore. At the time, I had flat, combed hair — the metaphorical epitomization of my constricted living circumstances. When I went to college, I grew out my hair — not as a result of any well-formulated plan, but simply on account of not knowing where to find a barbershop and not wishing to spend any money on it. After a few months, I realized for the first time that my hair is naturally curly and that it settles into a miniature afro without any real maintenance. 

I dug the look, and so I’ve kept it — in its various iterations — ever since. But the picture of me in that passport and of me today are sharply in contrast, even to those who know me quite well. So I couldn’t help but laugh along as the customs lady put her bewilderment on full display at the counter.

Unable to make a determination for herself, she motioned over for some other border control agents to join. Before I knew it, I was the center of a burgeoning commotion comprising five separate Russian officials cramped uncomfortably inside a small customs booth. 

Those five sets of heads bobbed up and down from the passport to my face, trying to visualize whether I truly was the same person or if I was some sort of impostor — an existential threat. After all, I’ll be honest. It doesn’t take much typecasting for me to fit the stereotype****. 

Eventually, though, concern gave way to laughter — and finally acceptance. 

The lady in the fur hat nodded in acknowledgement, mercifully motioned for the other officials to exit the crowded booth, and stamped me through the gate. 

My time in Russia had begun. 

Dobro pozhalovat’! 

Welcome!

* Ah yes, the stuff of nerds. Almost three million 4th to 8th graders competed in the 2017 iteration of the annual competition. If you knew that the Kunlun Mountains lay between the Taklimakan Desert and the Tibetan Plateau, you could have been crowned champion yourself.

** The Internet’s pre-eminent source on anything and everything train travel related.

*** A key tenet to life – stop seeking external validation!

**** And the Transportation Security Agency in America seems to agree! Lowlights of airport travel for me include having a “Te Quiero Mama” candle brought from Guatemala for my mother smashed in half in Los Angeles because it “look[ed] like a vessel for illegal contraband”, having my afro patted down and searched by an agent with a single white glove in front of the rest of my half-aghast, half-entertained college debate team en route to a tournament in New York City, and being questioned alone for twenty minutes in a back room in Orlando en route to Puerto Rico because it seemed “suspicious” that I was travelling alone – never mind that I was actually with three friends who had yet to arrive at the airport.

Lesson

Like any other human being, I am a mixed bag of character traits — some good, many bad. Every day is an opportunity to improve. But if there is one trait that I can single out as the most invaluable component of my life, it has to be the ability to not take myself too seriously.

To laugh at myself. 

Whether it be the day that I wore my polo shirt inside out to work, the occasion that I pulled out a plastic fork at a Chinese restaurant, or the time that I confidently stated a three-point revenue solution to my CEO before going on to forget the third entirely, I would not be able to get through life were it not for my liberal application of self-deprecating humor. 

Take, for instance, my experience at customs. 

I am convinced that my reaction expedited my entry into Russia, if not ensured it. The fact that I laughed along with the customs lady rather than launching into a fiery rant of indignation helped turn a potentially combative situation into a friendly one. 

I have faced similar situations in various other forays abroad. For instance, I was once nearly denied entry into Nigeria when I forgot to bring along a required immunizations card. When asked where the form was, I joked that it was flown away by a dengue fever carrying mosquito. The woman at customs laughed, asked for the real explanation — which was simply that I had forgotten to bring it but was indeed immunized — and then let me through. 

Moreover, self-deprecation got me into South Africa on an entirely separate occasion where I should legally have been denied. When my passport was filled with too many visas for the agent at border control to allow me in, I joked that she could either stamp on my endorsements page or suffer through a week with me. She chose the former — and to this day, my passport bears a stray stamp from O. R. Tambo International Airport on an entirely random page. 

I have observed the benefits of not taking oneself too seriously not only firsthand, but also via observation. Having worked in technology for several years, I have encountered all sorts of leaders — from engineering managers to business VPs. 

The best leaders are uniformly those who make you feel empowered to treat them as peers. They go out of their way to make you feel at ease, demonstrate the humility to admit what they don’t know, joke with you, inspire you to be yourself, and motivate you to produce your best work. And, invariably, they have a flip mode that they activate only when necessary. 

When they are serious, you know it. And you get it done for them. 

These leaders are the type to attract and retain the top talent. And the culture they espouse undergirds Silicon Valley — arguably the most laid back and yet most productive workspace in human history. 

Conversely, the worst leaders have always been the ones who make the fatal error of taking themselves too seriously. 

You know the type. 

The ones who avoid asking questions for fear of looking foolish. The ones who need the center chair at the meeting table. The ones who cannot laugh at themselves. 

They are the ones who poison the well for all others around them. And ultimately, if they are not dealt with, their cancer metastasizes to the point that an otherwise unassailable company can fail by virtue of outsized leadership ego alone.

When situations come up in life that can be uncomfortable or potentially embarrassing, we are presented with a stark choice. We can be stiff, angry, and irritable in a shambolic display of defending our proverbial manhood. Or we can laugh, embrace the absurdity of the situation, and let it roll off of our shoulders. 

Carl Sagan has made a career out of reminding us of our own insignificance* — but somehow, someway, some of us will never get the message to stop taking ourselves so damn seriously. 

While I may never fully comprehend the Cosmos, I will always take the core lesson of the cosmic perspective to heart. 

* In sharing an iconic photo of Earth as a miniscule speck on the surface of a voluminous galaxy, Sagan once famously posited that “our posturings, our imagined self-importance…are challenged by [the pale blue dot].”

Chapter 2: You are a lottery ticket

December 13, 2013

Moscow, Russia

It is difficult to come to grips with reality until you are fully immersed in the moment. 

Such was the case as I stumbled through Domodedovo Airport, arriving at the unpleasant realization that I simply was not adequately prepared — neither emotionally nor physically — for this trip. 

Not for the weather, nor for the culture, nor for the language — let alone for getting to the hostel.

In fairness, this is often my natural state. While so-called experts relentlessly sing the praises of preparedness, I have always prided myself on possessing a certain level of familiarity — comfort, even — with ambiguity. 

There are manifold explanations for this, some reasonable and others more questionable. 

On the sensible side, one must admit a certain cathartic effect that being plopped into an unfamiliar circumstance and getting away unscathed has on the human psyche. And so I thrived in impromptu speaking and parliamentary debate in high school and college — forums where preparation had no effect on outcomes and where success was exclusively a matter of do or die. 

Perhaps more dubiously, another reason that I preferred the unencumbered route of non-preparedness was to shield myself from the disappointment that over-preparedness so often brings. Some of the most crushing defeats of my life have been in circumstances when I felt poised and ready, only to subsequently fall flat. Conversely, the greatest victories have often been the ones I least expect.

And so, I gradually convinced myself that preparation itself was overrated. At best, you succeed and it feels that much better because you didn’t envisage it. At worst, you fail — but at least you could honestly say that you expected just as much. 

I have a tendency to be this way. 

In a family of worrywarts, my mother often chastised me for my ostensible lack of caring. It’s not that I enjoyed tormenting her. Rather, I just never saw the point in worrying. As Epictetus opined in The Art of Living, the key to a happy life is to ignore events that exist outside of one’s control.

The logical flaw, nonetheless, was that these specific circumstances — the set of conditions I found myself facing in this unfriendly, foreign airport — had not been outside of my control. I had read about Russia. I knew that learning the Cyrillic script would be a boon in my travels around the country. And yet I had willingly chosen to blithely ignore this advice.

In my previous backpacking experiences, I had relied upon someone knowing English — generally, the folks under thirty — to bail me out. But in Russia, things seemed slightly different. 

Put simply, I had been lazy. And no amount of mental sophistry was going to save me now. 

Here’s what I knew. I needed to get to a hostel called Gallina’s Flat. I also had a street address written in Cyrillic that, to my untrained eye, may just as well have been inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphics. And I did not have a cellular or Internet connection. Armed only with these two items, I proceeded out of the airport and attempted to track down Gallina’s pad. 

Stepping outside of the double doors, I was met with a blast of cold air like I had never felt before. Hailing from California, I faltered in the face of this icy front. At college in North Carolina, I was the one who frolicked outside taking pictures and throwing snowballs during the occasional light dusting, while the pretentious Northeasterners querulously mumbled derisively about “those West Coast kids.” 

But this — this was a whole different ballgame. One that would unequivocally legitimize my snow induced curiosity, and likely have the New Yorkers galloping about as well. 

All I wanted to do now was board a train to the city and submit myself to its glorious indoor warmth. 

Alas, I had no conception of how to purchase a ticket or find out which trains went where. After about five minutes of mildly panicked pacing back and forth on the outdoor platform, I noticed a carriage pulling up. Faced with a choice between doodling outside in the cold any longer and hopping onto a random train — potentially to nowhere — I chose the latter. 

In my mind, I made some rough estimations. Generally airports are somewhere between thirty to sixty minutes outside of the city, so I should give this train half an hour before I started to scan vociferously for signs of city life. Of course, there was always the possibility that I had hopped on a train headed the opposite direction — outside of the city. But given the alternative of waiting outside in the freezing cold to figure that out, I judged that this coin toss was a worthy gambit indeed. 

With each passing face on the train, I made the same stereotypical judgments that others likely foisted upon me. “She looks,” for instance, “like a city slicker. I must be on the right train.” 

To what degree these estimates were guided by blind hope rather than intellect, I couldn’t say for certain. At any rate, it was far too much for comfort. 

Approximately half an hour into the ride, though, my fears were allayed, if ever so slightly. Signs of town began to come into view. 

Comparing my hieroglyphic directions to the signage, it appeared that I had arrived by pure chance at the correct subway station. But while I breathed a figurative sigh of relief upon miraculously clearing the first hurdle of my journey, I hardly realized in the moment that my woes were just beginning. 

As I looked to leave the subway, it dawned on me, somewhat tragicomically, that I did not know the Russian word for “exit.”

“No matter,” I assumed. “I’ll just follow the crowd of people to the nearest escalator and depart.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite so easy. A bit of context is in order. 

The Moscow subway system is a modern marvel. It is the deepest underground subway system in the world. Indeed, sitting on the escalator from top to bottom generally takes between three and five minutes — it’s that deep. Throw into play an intricate transfer system, multiple train lines, and not even a rudimentary understanding of the Russian language, and you had me — an indescribably lost individual with no means of human communication, let alone Internet or telecommunications access. 

Again, I began to resort to heuristics. I looked desperately for a person of color — someone I assumed could likely speak English and help me out. It did not work, if only for the reason that there were no other people of color. 

I walked up to station managers and police officers, feebly offering the word “exit?” Cold and unhelpful eyes stared back at me. 

For an interminable amount of time, I wandered through the station — up a dizzying array of escalators and back down again, following streams of Muscovites who all seemed to be making transit connections rather than heading home. The only solace was in the fact that here, deep underground, I was shielded from the cold. 

After over an hour of perambulation, my efforts finally bore some fruit. I emerged, by chance, from the depths of Moscow’s subway into the city. Never had I been happier to be greeted by gale force winds and piercing snow. But there was precious little time to rejoice. It was time to conquer stage three — navigating from the underground subway system to Gallina’s Flat. 

This was no quotidian task. I was dealing with cold like I had never experienced. Moreover, I had never walked on frozen pavement before. Every few steps I stumbled, unaware of even the basics, like how to identify and sidestep black ice. 

After much duress, I finally reached a location that I believed to be Gallina’s Flat. But when I entered the dilapidated parking lot, I could not locate appropriate signage, let alone a phone to buzz. I wandered outside again, disenchanted and alone, as the curtain of darkness began to descend upon Moscow.

As I stumbled up and down the street in vain pursuit of the place, I finally slipped and fell hard on my tailbone, letting out a guttural shout of frustration. At this moment, a shopkeeper who had been observing me roaming the street came out of his shop and asked, “Hostel?” 

“Yes,” I nodded vociferously, warming heavily to my first human contact since the border examination at the airport.

He pointed at a broken-down door with a rusted button. I raced over to push it, and a welcome voice came over the intercom — that of my friend Avi. 

“Yo, man! You here?”

Instantly, my worries dissipated and my regrets seeped away. 

In spite of those initial trials and tribulations, I had arrived.

Lesson

My Dad once joked, paraphrasing Earl Wilson, that “if you think nobody cares about you, try not paying your bills for a month.” I believed him, so I’ve never fully gone through with testing the hypothesis. 

But that first day in Russia truly encapsulated a moment when my own insignificance dawned upon me. Nobody in this country cared if I found my way to Gallina’s Flat or not. And why would they? 

You will never truly be able to feel the abject despair of what it is like to be homeless without actually being so. But if you ever wish to grock some semblance of understanding of what your less fortunate peers go through each night, get a one-way ticket to a country that speaks little to no English, leave your phone behind, and exit the airport with a backpack and no destination in mind. 

I’ve often thought about the disconnect between what we stand for outwardly and what we practice in reality. The person that will castigate you for absent-mindedly throwing the recyclable water bottle into the garbage bin is the same person that will blithely walk by a homeless woman begging for a dollar for her child.

Everyone needs to experience the feeling of helplessness to learn the importance of empathy. 

I often think about how lucky my life was — to be born in America (chances 1 in 300), in California (chances 1 in 10), as a male (1 in 2), to two parents (1 in 2), in an upper-class income bracket (1 in 10). I started life with, at minimum, a 1 in 120,000 advantage. And it still took the momentary discomfort induced by an unfamiliarity with culture and climate to reflect on and acknowledge my duty to help others. 

Peter Thiel opines in Zero to One that “you are not a lottery ticket.” Margaret Thatcher once famously stated that her rise to fame was exclusively the result of work ethic and nothing else. We’ve all heard the basic premise before. If you try hard, you will achieve your dreams. 

It’s a neat motivational tool and a feel-good soundbite. But have you ever noticed how it’s only the ones who make it that are preaching the line? 

I, for one, happen to disagree with Mr. Thiel and Mrs. Thatcher. In no way is this a denigration of their respective accomplishments. Both achieved remarkable success in their lives, and that was undoubtedly largely a result of incredibly hard work, passion, and determination. 

But let’s be honest — there are millions of people who work as hard as Mr. Thiel and Mrs. Thatcher. And hundreds of thousands of them are paid a pittance for what they do.

One may counter that success is a function not only of hard work, but of concomitantly intelligent decisions. Mr. Thiel and Mrs. Thatcher combined the two — hence, they deserve to make more than someone who engages in manual labor for a living. And again, I will not disagree — the two likely combined legendary dedication and sheer brilliance to attain exalted status. 

But let’s play a thought experiment. 

Imagine Margaret Thatcher was born in Somalia and Peter Thiel was born in North Korea — rather than in Great Britain and in Germany, respectively. Do we really think that Mrs. Thatcher would rise to Prime Ministership and that Peter Thiel would go on to found PayPal? Not in their wildest dreams. 

In fact, you would almost undoubtedly never have heard of either of them.

Thiel and Thatcher are products of many things — old-fashioned hard work, incredible planning, devotion to detail, ingenuity, and attention to craft. But to deny that they are also the products of luck is dishonest. 

It is, more pointedly, insidious. 

It does a gross disservice to society. And frankly, we should start to reject the motif of hard work alone begetting appropriate desert wherever and whenever we hear it*.

The Walton family — consisting of six members of the family of the founder of Walmart — owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of all Americans, denizens of the richest nation state the planet has ever seen. Just eight men — including the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Carlos Slim — possess more money than half of the world’s population. 

Think about that for a second.