Things I've Become Acclimated to....

A short list of things I have become almost completely used to....

1. Power outages at very inopportune times.
2. Flies hovering around my favorite eating establishments, eating establishments that typically lack four walls anyways.
3. Diarrhea.
4. Stares of all kinds from the local Lucknovites--haunting stares, friendly stares, sexual stares, awkward stares, etc.
   
5. The toilet not being able to flush several consecutive times.
6. Bucket showers.
7. Cold bucket showers.
8. Cycle rickshaws.
9. Going about my day and speaking Hindi/Urdu to make things happen.
10. Going about my day and having no one understand my English.
11. Feeling isolated from the Western world.
12. Noise. Constant noise, usually from the street.
13. Always having bug bites of some sort on me somewhere.
14. Beggars. And that one really bothers me--that I've become almost callous to it, but it happens.
15. Vegetarian Indian food.
16. Chai. :)
17. Wearing a dupatta (scarf) whenever out in public.
18. Insane amounts of heat everyday. Why, darling, 105 is the new 85.
19. Color. Everywhere. :)
20. Functioning on Indian time. I may never be on time again for anything... ever ;).
21. Being able to eat like a king for $3-$4.
22. KULFI.
23. Not being able to read most signs.

My Most Recent "The World is Small" Moment

This was a pretty big "The World is a Small Place" moment for me....

Several years ago, I was in the Florida Keys with my family, and at the resort where we stay, they always have an interesting assortment of books that have been read, left, and reread by countless people on holiday and what-not.

Anyways, when I was about 14 or 15, I read Bloodlines by Sidney Sheldon, and it was probably the smuttiest book I had ever read at that point, and it may still be the smuttiest book I have ever read. Don't get me wrong--it was scandalous, yes, but it was a good read, and I could have done far worse in terms of sheer scandalousness.

But I digress.

So I read this book and later lent it to a friend, and I haven't seen it in person or anywhere in years.

Years.

Well, I was in a coffee shop near my new home (that's another story for another blog) the other day, and I SAW IT ON THEIR BOOKSHELF.

I SAW MY BOOK THAT I HAVE ALWAYS REMEMBERED AND HAVE SEEN NOWHERE ELSE IN YEARS IN A RANDOM COFFEE SHOP IN THE MIDDLE OF LUCKNOW, INDIA.

And while I know that it would be virtually impossible for it to be the exact copy I read, it certainly looked identical to the one I read-- well worn, same edition, etc.

The world is a very small place, my friends.

Kal

The phrase "kal milengue" is used for "See you tomorrow" in Urdu.

Interestingly, "kal" is both the word for yesterday and tomorrow.

And when yesterday and tomorrow are the same, then today is the only thing that matters.

(I am such a cheeseball. Apologies.)

Musings

Tomorrow, a Tuesday, is the last day of school for the week because of the Institute's midsummer break. :) This makes for a very delighted me. I'm headed out late tomorrow night to Nainital and then on to Corbett National Park. Nainital is supposed to be lovely--it's located at this point where the foothills of the Himalayas meet with a lake. Should be absolutely beautiful. And then Corbett is a tiger refuge, and our goal there is go on an a-watching safari while riding on the backs of elephants. Hopefully, my next posts will be able to relay traveling stories.

Classes, however, are going rather well. I started the program knowing absolutely nothing--literally, nothing. I had to learn "hello" ("adab" or "aadab"), "thank you" ("shukriya"), and other entry level vocabulary during the first few days. I also had to learn the non-Roman alphabet, as the Urdu alphabet is derived from Persian and Arabic, and how to form words. Urdu is also written right to left and has no true vowels. And, just to complicate things a little more, the way sentences are structured is COMPLETELY different than in English or French, the other languages I've studied.

Anyways, but what is EXCITING is that TODAY we learned simple past and past habitual verb tense, and this is in addition to learning about nouns, adjectives, postpositions, imperatives, interrogatives, and the present habitual tense, and tomorrow, we're learning the future tense.
And while I'm certainly not able to hold a coherent conversation with a native Urdu speaker, I feel like I've learned so much since arriving here, and that's a really gratifying feeling.

Other than that, not much is new. My nose might be infected, but I'm treating it and trying to keep it from causing me to take my nose ring out. :S I've become really attached to my pierced nose.

Weekend Review

FRIDAY.

Saw Transformers in Hindi. Couldn't understand a thing.
Went to a going away party for an AIIS student at Royal Cafe and ate a TON of meat, i.e. butter chicken, chicken biryani, mutton, etc. and the best naan ever. We have a theory that more protein makes us feel better, thus, when we go out to dinner, we overindulge in our love for meat as every other meal is vegetarian.
Followed dinner up with a stop by Mint and enjoyed some giggles with the girls before ending up at McDonalds and then home.
Very good evening indeed.

SATURDAY.

The Institute organized a field trip for us to a Sufi shrine a short distance outside of Lucknow. Sufism is a mystical form of Islam more focused upon the ideas of love and unity than upon some of the structure and regimentation of the other forms of Islam. It's extremely fascinating. Sufism claims to have emerged at the same time as the main forms of Islam, Sunni and Shia'a did, and it boasts major populations in countries like India, Turkey, and Senegal, among others.
While we were at the shrine, we were able to listen to kivali performed by some Sufi men inside one of the shrines. With beating drums and deep rhythmic vocals, it was one of the coolest things I have ever heard in my life.
In the middle of our trip to the shrine, we went to someone's home for kebabs and mangoes. Kebabs here are grilled and spiced mutton, and whether it's lamb or goat, we don't know. But, regardless, it is ridiculously greasy, especially when served with bread the consistency of greasy tortilla chips. We joke that we sweated off the greasiness while at the shrine....
Came home. Took a nap.
Saturday night, I went to a friend's birthday party. While consuming all the staples of an American party, we connected iPods to portable speakers and spent an evening on a rooftop beneath a few scattered stars and a brilliant moon. :)

SUNDAY.

Spent a slow morning catching up on correspondence and FB messaging friends.
Our hostess came up to see us for the FIRST TIME IN ALMOST A MONTH after having been absent for that time and after having received quite the scolding from the Institute for neglecting her hosting duties. We aren't placing too much faith in her, and I am of the opinion that the fewer points of contact, the better. I really don't trust her that much.
Lunch was butter chicken and naan with Aqilah and Azim at the Indian Coffee House, my new favorite hang-out.
Spent the early part of the afternoon solo in Cafe Coffee Day before I was spotted by Jameel. We relocated back to the Indian Coffee House and were joined later by Steven, Lars, and Lars's former host brother. I got minimal work done, but I read about 30 pages in my book (In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce) and had a great time watching a rainy afternoon pass over coffee.
Ate dinner with Aqilah and Cayley back at the apartment and ran an errand with Cayley to Saharaganj just after dinner.

And now, I think I will go to bed.

Au revoir et bon nuit!

White, Light, Dark: Color in India

It's a very strange thing to be white and in India. Very strange indeed.

Recently, I was out one evening on a walk with two friends of South Asian descent (one Pakistani, the other Indian), and one of them asked me what it's like to be stared at all the time and how I was dealing with it.

I replied that India does strange things to my ego. On one hand, being stared at so much makes you feel like you're "cool" or something--or, as one friend phrased it, "like you are royalty." And it's really true that it in some ways it overinflates your ego. But then, on the other hand, when you don't know much of any predominant language, you feel quite worthless. Literally. Not being able to communicate with people on their terms is really frustrating.

After having said these things to two South Asian friends with advanced language skills, the conversation abruptly changed course, and I hoped I had not said something cocky or insensitive, but I had also tried to articulate feelings that they've never had. I'm in a country where I will always, always, always speak with an accent and I will never, ever, ever be able to go incognito, and for that, I'm envious of my friends who are more easily able to blend in and avoid awkward stares and unwanted attention.

And that's not to say it's all awful. This evening, I walked to a mall with Cayley so she could use an ATM, and a little girl stopped me and wanted to talk. She was 8 years old and with her father and younger sister, and I got down to her level and tried to speak with her as much as possible. We exchanged names, and I told her that her English was good, that I'm studying Urdu and that my Urdu isn't very good. She was so sweet and polite, and she held my hand while we talked, and in this really strange way, I felt like Princess Di. That sounds so egotistical and a little bit awful, I know, but that's the best way to describe it.

Something that drives me absolutely crazy is that all over--in magazines, at the mall, everywhere--there are so many advertisements and posters and photos where the models are Caucasian. WHY? This makes literally no sense to me: This is INDIA. Be proud of who you are, where you come from, your history, your background, and what you look like. You are who you are, and Indians are beautiful. I think it's completely ridiculous that white skin seems to trump dark skin--COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY RIDICULOUS. The whole issue seems so eerily postcolonialist.

And, along those same lines, there's a product available at Big Bazaar (read: K-Mart with food) called Fair & Lovely, or something to that effect, and it's a skin lightening lotion.

A SKIN TONE LIGHTENER.

Things like that blow my mind.

I feel like India, and specifically its women, has been told that West is beautiful and variations on that aren't, and it's really too bad. I've seen a few Indian films since arriving in Lucknow, i.e. a grand total of three, but in each of those films, the female leads have very, very light brown skin. It seems too intentional to be coincidental.

I hope this rant makes sense to someone else. It's very perplexing to be somewhere where the standard of beauty seems to tell Indian women specifically that they need to look Western in order to be deemed attractive in their own culture. It's complete ludicrousness.

Convinced

I've become really passionate about India over the past few years, and this has only been highlighted and further developed by my past and present experiences here.

Right now, I'm reading In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce (2007), and this book has encapsulated several of the reasons why I find India so fascinating and why I believe that India will continue to be a big part of my life well into the future.

Below are some excerpts from the book:

• "...India in the twenty-first century remains home to more than a third of the world's chronically malnourished children as defined by the United Nations, and has an average life expectancy and literacy rate that lag pitifully behind many developing countries, most glaringly China. Roughly 750 million of India's 1.1 billion people continue to live in villages, almost half of which lack access to all-weather roads, and countless numbers of which (India has 680,000 villages) are not within reach of effective primary health-care centers or well-functioning elementary schools. Almost half of India's women do not know how to read or write, and a large proportion of those who are technically literate can do little more than sign their name" (9).
• Referring to the rural agriculturalists: "The average landholding is just half an acre, barely enough to feed the family and very rarely enough to produce a surplus for the market....By 2001 more than a third of India's rural households depended on nonfarm income for their livelihoods" (44).
• "Less than 10 percent of India's dauntingly large labor force is employed in the formal economy, which Indians call the 'organized sector.' That means that fewer than 40 million people, out of a total of 470 million workers, have job security in any meaningful sense. It means that only about 35 million Indians pay any kind of income tax, a low proportion by the standards of other developing countries" (47).
• "Because of its strong and large university system, India's scientific and technical capacity is ranked third in the world, behind the United States and Japan but ahead of China. In contrast to India, China has spent a much higher share of its budget on elementary schools for people at the bottom of the ladder. India produces abotu 1 million engineering graduates every year, compared to fewer than 100,000 in both the United States and Europe. Yet India's literacy rate is only 65 percent. China's is almost 90 percent" (51).
• "...Uttar Pradesh [the province where I am studying Urdu]...is home to 8 percent of the world's poorest people..."(60).
• "[Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister from 1984-1991] estimated that 85 percent of all development spending in India was pocketed by bureaucrats" (78).
• "Higher rates of economic growth have contributed to a steady reduction in poverty: the proportion of Indians living below the official poverty line fell from more than 40 percent of the population in the 1980s to just under 26 percent by 2001, But that still means that in 2006 almost 300 million Indians can never be sure where their next meal will come from. They also live with the probability that more than one of their children will die from an easily preventable waterborne disease. Almost a million Indian infants die of diarrhea every year" (80).
• "India spends less on primary health care as a proportion of gross domestic product than does almost any other developing country" (80-81).
• Concerning corruption in the judicial branch: "Many of the judges are quite openly available for hire to fix cases in exchange for cash in the knowledge that it is almost impossible to dislodge them from their posts.... To remove a judge from the Supreme Court, you need a two-thirds majority of votes in parliament, the same margin as needed to amend the constitution. It has never happened" (93).
• Concerning inefficency in the judicial branch: "But perhaps the biggest problem is the gigantic backlog of suits in India, which in 2006 amounted to 27 million cases. At the current rate at which India's courts wade through proceedings, it would take more than three hundred years to clear the judicial backlog" (93). Furthermore, "Almost $75 billion is tied up in legal disputes. This would amount to roughly 10 percent of India's gross domestic product in 2006" (94). Backlog in the courts is thus a detrimental economic cost.
• "Almost 100 of Indias 545 members of parliament in New Delhi have 'criminal backgrounds,' which means that have been indicted for one or more crimes, but not convicted. Once they are elected, it is virtually impossible to convict them, which is one of their main incentives for entering politics in the first place" (117). Moreover, "Of the almost one hundred alleged parliamentary criminals, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh [the province in which I'm staying] account for by far the largest share" (118).