Ted's Excellent Adventure

The End

2011-05-19T18:04:00.001-07:00

Right now it's very early in the morning, and I can't sleep, so I thought I'd write this up. It's all just too weird. It's too much to wrap my head around. It's all over. I've invested more than a year and a half into making all of this happen, and it's done. Kaput. Terminated. Bas. While the finals days were stuffed with farewells and things like that, it can't help but feel like a whimper rather than a bang.

Going home - that is to say, being able to see my family and friends for the first time in far too long - is pretty much the most exciting thing that's happened to me since I went to India. But there was so much momentum heading to this moment two weeks ago. Where did it go? Suddenly I just feel weird. I'm actually kind of disappointed that I'm not happier. I think when I get to the airport and see my fantastic family waiting there for me, all of this strangeness will be forgotten. Still.

What's the deal? I guess I'm much sadder to leave than I thought I would. This surprises me. I've developed a lot affectionate memories with this place, but a lot of really difficult ones too. This was not an easy year. It got easier, but I had so many frustrating setbacks and difficulties. I had months and months of extreme self-doubt. I pulled out and got better at being a person living in India, but still, it was rough.

Maybe it's the investment. How can I spend so much time (which feels like so little time) working for something and then have it just end? It's just weird. Everything I've been doing and preparing for over the last 18 months is finished. The real question now is this - what did I achieve with all of this? I don't know. I have some ideas, but I can't really answer that question right now.

Every once in a while I would think about what I could write, in summation, about this year once it came to the end. I guess there's no way I could have written it until I actually got here. I never suspected I would feel this uncomfortable with something I've spent so much time looking forward to.

As it was when I left, it's not what is coming ahead, but what I'm leaving behind that gives me trouble. I was deeply excited and intrigued by coming to India when I left, but I was a train wreck. Saying goodbye to all of my friends and family was one of the most painful things I've ever done. It's the same thing right now.

I have a lot of hope. I remember when I finally said goodbye to my parents at the Minneapolis Airport, and I got on that plane, I suddenly felt really good. The anticipation of the future, the new opportunities overwhelmed me. And while admittedly, Northfield isn't exactly something new, the future beckons. It's not just this immediate, already assured-to-be-awesome summer (I have some big plans) - it's the happily looming idea of college. It's the idea of continuing to become an adult. To continue enjoying life with my old friends and to make new ones. To get to know my family even better. To eat beef. And finally, hopefully, to reconcile all of the complex thoughts and memories that have come out of this year. There's no doubt in my mind that I've accomplished something here, but I still have a very vague idea of what exactly it is. I guess, as they said back at orientation, this really is a three year process.

This has ended on a more indecisive note than I thought it would, and suddenly I'm worried about reverse culture shock. Maybe my memories have fooled me. Maybe the US isn't all that it's cracked up to be. It's the little things that get you - I remember when I went back to the US in October, the stairs in my house just didn't feel right. I HAVE made this place my home. The US won't feel like home right away. It's not immediately familiar anymore. That's worrying, but also kind of exciting - the excitement of rediscovery.

I don't really know what else to say. It's not very ceremonious or reflective or decisive, but this is the natural time to KO my blog. The exchange is over, and I gotta wrap my head around that. I'll be back here. That much I know. But it's time to go home.

I liked writing this blog. Travel writing is something I've really enjoyed, so maybe I'll look into doing that in the future, like Bill Bryson. To any future exchange students who might be reading this, I offer some advice - say yes to everything that comes your way (within reason, obviously), and enjoy it. It might feel like it's going really slowly, even at the halfway point, but it's not not.

So that's it. I want to offer sincere thanks to all of you for being there this year, even by just taking a look at this every once in a while. It was a tough year on a lot of different levels, some of which I'm only discovering right now. But it was, and is, reassuring to know that there are folks in my corner. To all Rotarians - I want to thank you for what you do, and for offering all of us this amazing experience. We couldn't get this anywhere else.

I can't wait to reconnect with all of you. I've missed home terribly, and once I snap out of this funk, I know I'm going to have a fantastic summer. And I anticipate that this Saturday, which, in a happy coincidence is also my birthday, will be pretty much the best day ever.

I also anticipate the day I come back to India, whenever it does come. It's kind of exciting to suddenly feel like you can be at home in two places. I love that I haven't even begun to discover the things that I've gotten out of this. I have so much excitement for so many aspects of the future. This truly was a worthwhile and excellent adventure.

The End is Nigh

2011-05-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

There are 18 days left today, and at this late stage, I'm not ashamed to be counting down. I think the closer one is to home, from either direction, the more one thinks of it and misses it. As these last months have winded down, thoughts of my home, my family, my friends, and America in general have been pervading my mind. It wasn't like this as much in the middle, except perhaps around Christmas. And while generally speaking, I'm sad to finish my India journey, I'm far more excited than unhappy. It's just not very pleasant right now - you can learn to at least be mentally prepared for the heat here, but you never enjoy it. Days of 105+ degrees are no fun. I'm going to be the second-to-last student from my district to leave. Many of them are already gone. There's a sense of decisive momentum heading towards the end at this point, and I'm as swept up in it as anyone could be.

In this desire to blast through things and get them over with, I've lost all drive to finish recounting what I've done, and I don't think anybody much cares anyways. Additionally, things have gotten busier with Rotary farewells, making preparations for my departure, and my own goodbyes. Nonetheless, I set a task for myself, and even if I'm the only looking at what I wrote, I know that I will probably appreciate this when I look back in a few months, or a few years, or whenever. There are three things left - short stops on the tour, Holi (the best festival not named Diwali), and my recent visits to India's grandest cities, Mumbai and New Delhi. I'm starting this on May 2nd - the goal is to have it posted by Friday the 6th. I'll do the tour here, the rest of it next week, and then I'll probably put something together two or three days before I leave.

The Taj Mahal

So we went to the Taj Mahal, which is located in the city of Agra. The Taj Mahal, of course, needs no introduction - it is one of the most recognizable edifices in the world. The effect of the Taj Mahal, with all of the hype surrounding it, is pretty stunning. We got up at about 6 to see it, because the crowds get pretty nuts later in the day, and we had a long drive ahead of us. Even though we sort of beat the crowd, it was still very busy, and we had to stand in line to get through security, which was tight by the way. The line was totally worth it, because I found a fellow Minnesotan in India! This was the first time this has happened. I was stoked.

It does take your breath away - when you pass through the surrounding complex, you eventually come to a big, old gate that is pretty impressive in itself. And then you look through it, and there it is, almost like a picture in the distance. There's something about the color and type of stone that was used in the Taj Mahal that makes it seems kind of hazy and mystical. It's pretty fantastic.

Unfortunately for us, it was raining (which is unbelievable - it NEVER rains in India at this time of year), but that didn't really pose much of a problem. The Taj Mahal is gorgeous and breathtaking, and in person it absolutely lives up to it's hype. There aren't even very many annoying hawkers in the area. There are many reasons why everyone should come to India - the Taj Mahal is decidedly one of them.
Dharamshala

We also went to Delhi, but I'll talk about Delhi later. Dharamshala is the general name for a collective of small villages located at the roots of the Himalayas. I don't mean to overstate things (although I going to do just that), but this was something like my favorite place ever. By far the most difficult things to deal with in a big city in India, for me personally, have been the noise, bustling activity, and the lack of surrounding natural beauty. Dharamshala is a magnificent antithesis to Surat (which I should mention that I do not loathe or anything, but it does present some difficulties for me). I mean, the Himalayas are RIGHT THERE. You see them for hours driving from the nearest train station to the town we were staying in.

Besides the striking, overwhelming visual of the world's most famous mountain chain in the background, the various small villages are small but cluttered, and generally clean. Although there are certainly pleasant hotels, cafes, homes and restaurants to be found in the area, it is not an especially developed zone. The roads aren't great, and you're always right next door to the mountains, and there are thick forests covering the area. We were not at all prepared for the climate. We should have been, probably, because once you get up to the mountains, it's obviously cold, and we knew where we were going on the trip. So we had to go into town and buy winter gear right away. There wasn't snow in the village, but it was still pretty cold, kind of MN November temperatures, though I don't have any statistics to back that conjecture up.

Our hotel was located in a village with nothing but a bunch of small houses. There was a larger town, McLeod Ganj, located about a half hour's walk through the woods away from the hotel. Besides it's hilarious Scottish/Indian name, McLeod Ganj is an awesome village with a bunch of fine restaurants, cafes, and markets. We actually had quite a need to peruse these markets, since we were all without proper winter wear. It is also a fascinating cross section of peoples. There are Indians in this part of the country, but not many. Cold is not appreciated by most people here, which I can understand, though I disagree. There is also a minority of curious ex-pats and a handful of tourists there. You meet the coolest people here. We met this guy from Cincinnati, a retired inner-city English teacher who had come here to live out his days. We also met a girl from New York state, about 24 or 25, who had left America after completing college to become a Tibetan pop star. I'm not even kidding. She showed us videos and a sizable Facebook fan club.

Tibet is the predominant influencing cultural factor in Dharamsala. I would say at least 70% of the population, if not more, is made up of displaced Tibetans. This is a whole new culture for me. I know next to nothing about Tibet, other than that they are fighting for independence from China and that the Dalai Lama is their political leader. He would live there if his government wasn't exiled. Guess where he lives now? McLeod Ganj. We went to his main temple, the Tsuglag Khang.

I don't really mean to get political here, but talking to some of these Tibetans, you hear horrible, incredible stories about the atrocities committed against their peoples by the Chinese government. There was a guy who walks around with hand in a sling - it was shot and he had to escape, crossing the mountains into Dharamshala without any surgery on the arm. It's dead now, he can't use it. There are people who have no idea where their sons and daughters are. The American/Tibetan pop star was once captured by the Chinese for taking part in a peaceful protest (fortunately, she had a contingency plan with the American embassy to keep her out of prison for too long). If there were ever people who don't deserve this kind of persecution, it's the Tibetans. They are the most friendly, peaceful people you could possibly meet. I am very behind the Free Tibet movement now.

Through the retired American teacher that we met, we found this young Tibetan man named Gyeltsin, who had, in a typical Dharamshala story, escaped to India over the Himalayas. He told us that they had to only move at night so the Chinese wouldn't see them. Imagine crossing the Himalayas, of all places, in these circumstances. Incredible story. Anyways, he took us up to a Tibetan school in a village further up the mountain and showed us a traditional Tibetan culture show, with music, singing and dancing.

The way we had found this guy was from asking the American if he knew anyone that could take us on a hike. Gyeltsin was the guy. So the next day, he took myself and six others on a hike. The plan was to go to the snow line, but once we got there, we decided to keep going. It gets to be basically a winter scene very quickly. This was not an easy hike - it took us almost an entire day to get up and down, and it was physically taxing. This was a Himalaya that we were climbing - perhaps an outer, baby Himalaya, but a Himalaya nonetheless. Beyond that I finally got my snow fix, this was pretty much the best thing ever. I've been craving this kind of raw, outdoorsy adventure the whole year, and while it was just a taste of the Himalayas, it was still enough for me. I know for a fact that sometime in my life I will come back and explore this part of the world more closely. It's like no place I've ever been.

At no other time this year was it more apparent to me how incredibly diverse the cultures, peoples, and climates are in India. Within the two-week stretch, I rode a camel into a vast desert and I hiked up one of the baby Himalayas in a blizzard. Best trip ever.

Bits

2011-04-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

I have several topics today.

The Rotary Conference

This was back in January, and it's not that notable, but I totally forgot about it back in the day. I don't know how big the district conference is back home, since I'm not really involved with Rotary beyond this IYE thing, but it's a big deal in India. All of the Rotarians have spent a lot time preparing and thinking about the conference. We were instructed to do a fairly extensive presentation. We had to learn dances to three popular Bollywood songs, don ridiculous costumes, and perfect a complicated catwalk routine.

In preparation for the dances, all of the exchange students in our district came to Surat. We all went to a dance studio for about 8 hours a day, training and practicing for the show. This wasn't my favorite part of the exchange. I was not born to be a dancer. But we eventually got it down. The performance didn't actually go all that well, but all of it ended up being pretty entertaining. It's a good memory, that's for sure. I'm am sorry to Logan and Lukas, if you're reading this, because you aren't in this picture, but this is the only one I have.

Another House Move

I hate moving because I'm not great with change. But at this point I've learned to go into them with an optimistic heart, because they always end up going well. I was unhappy to leave the warm and friendly Kachiwala family, but my new family is actually a really good fit for me. In some ways it's the most familiar sort of family setup. My parents, Sachin and Sumita Shah, have two children, Niralee and Anirudh. Anirudh is 15 or 16 and is on a Rotary Youth Exchange to Germany this year. Niralee is 21 and studies in Mumbai. So most of the time it's just me, Sachin and Sumita. But in actuality, it's mostly just me. This suits me just fine - the freedom of coming and going, having a key, and having more space reminds me of my life back in the US. I wouldn't say that the Shahs are better or worse than either of my two previous families. But they've all been really good fits - I've been lucky with the families - and the Shahs are no exception. Every family has been noticeably different, in terms of family structure, housing situations, location, and day-to-day schedule, and this, I think, has been immensely valuable. The most wonderful and most difficult thing about India is the incredible diversity of the place. Even within a relatively small sample size such as the city of Surat, I've met people with hugely varying worldviews and lifestyles. And there are so many different varieties. As I said, this makes living in India fascinating, but it also makes full comprehension of the place a constantly moving target. It's hard to adapt because there are so many contradictory, immensely different things going on right next to each other. My goal for a long time now has been to understand India as best as I can, and I've reached the conclusion that 10 months is probably too short a time to accomplish this. Sachin and Sumita agree with me on this point - the complexity of India, that is. Of course, all that this means is that I'll have to come back sometime and work on this some more later in life, which I have no problem with.

Rajastan

In Rajastan, we visited three places - Jaisalmer, which I already mentioned, Jodhpur, and Jaipur. We went to Jodhpur after Jaisalemer. Jodhpur is known as the Blue City. Take a gander.

I'm not sure exactly why all of the houses are painted blue. I recall the tour guide saying that it was initially religious, and it later just became tradition, but I can't remember the specific reasons. The Wikipedia page seems to have been written by people with limited command of basic sentence structure, and the brain trust at Yahoo! Answers tells me that it is "so that nobody comes and paints the city red." I suppose this will remain a mystery until I find someone who can give me the answer.

We only spent a night in Jodhpur, in which we visited a fort one afternoon and another fort in the morning. This isn't as boring as it sounds. This was a fort-heavy trip, I will admit, but I kind of like forts, and really the tours are never boring. India is just so constantly interesting and funny that if you're moving around like this, it's never dull. Additionally, we all have a good time together (myself and the other exchange students, I mean). It's always fun. Having said that, the forts were just forts, and I don't remember history or information about each of them specifically, so a couple pictures should certainly suffice.

Jaipur was our next destination. Jaipur is known as the Pink City, again for reasons unknown. But in Jaipur, they take their Pinkness very seriously. There is one district of town where the buildings are not allowed to be any color but pink. Our time here also featured a fort (surprise, surprise). We also saw a collection of very large astronomical instruments. I have not explained that very well - back in the day, the Jaipur region had a king who was a very accomplished astronomer. He set aside a garden to build massive sundials and similar instuments. This place was cool - all of these tools have an aesthetic simplicity that makes the place extremely attractive to just be in, but if you hear their use explained, you would find that they are very complicated and rather brilliant. Sometimes I marvel at the genius of these ancient guys without all of our modern scientific tools.

These two destinations don't merit an awful lot of description, so I'm going to talk a little bit about Rajasthan and Rajasthani culture. It is in Rajasthan that I found an India closest to the one I had imagined. It's contained in a rather stark desert ecosystem, but there are some elevated parts of it as well - there's a very aged mountain chain in the south, as well as some of the foothills of the Himalayas in the north.

Rajasthan is so named because it is the place where the effects and remnants of the British Raj can be felt most obviously. Its history, however, dates much further back. As a bit of a history junkie, I was interested to find that the people of the Indus Valley Civilization, a mysterious group credited with being among the first true civilizations, were partially based in Rajasthan. Throughout India's long history, it was largely ruled by a number of squabbling warrior tribes, the Gurjars (who are the forerunners of the Gujaratis that inhabit my own state) being the most long-lasting and powerful. It's always been a war-torn area. Besides the internal conflict, Rajastan acted as a bulwark against various Muslim invaders for many centuries. Eventually the Mughals, who were pretty good conquerors, took control of Northern India. There are forts all over the place, commanding geographic rule over vast regions, which are a constant reminder of the region's violent history. It is primarily an agricultural and pastoral economy, much more so than any part of India I've been to.

I would say that Rajasthan seemed to be the most traditional part of India that I've yet been to. The whole of India has a strong oral tradition, often expressed through singing and dancing, but Rajasthan's is distinctive. People are generally dressed more traditionally than they are in most of the other parts of India that I've seen. The big cities (Jodhpur and Jaipur are the biggest) are touristy but not cosmopolitan. They also celebrate festivals with zeal and have a lovely, colorful artistic tradition.

I suppose I missed a week in my plan that I set out in the second-to-last post, but that's ok. Time is going faster than I thought. While it is true that the heat has significantly lessened my desires to be active, there are more things going on in my day-to-day life than I thought there would be. Among other things, I joined a gym in an effort to fill up my evenings before dinner, and it's been really solid. It's way too hot to run outside anymore, at any time of day, and also Surat is probably the worst running city I've ever set foot in, so this was a good idea. There's only about a month left at this point, but hopefully I'll get back into shape a bit before I return to the US.

The exchange students are slowly leaving, one by one, which I don't enjoy. I'm one of the very last to leave from my district. I'll be fine without them, of course, but I'm going to miss them a lot. In a country as tough to adapt to as India (and there's no denying, India's one of the tougher options on the list), we didn't confine our friendships and social lives to each other, but I really relied on all of them for support. Goodbyes are rough. The end of this might not be easy as I thought it would be.

If any of you are interested in cricket.

2011-04-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=110329/Cricket An ESPN reporter by the name of Wright Thompson travels to India in an attempt to try and understand the sport of cricket. His focus is less on the finer points of the game than on the complex and interdependant relationship between cricket, Indian culture, and cricket's God, Sachin Tendulkar. This article requires a fairly sizable time commitment, especially by ESPN article standards, but it's one of the best pieces of sports writing I've ever read -engaging and very entertaining. Not only does it give you a terrific sense of cricket, but it gives you a terrific sense of India, period. If you've got some time on your hands and you want any sense of what is going on in India right now, this is a must-read.

Jaisalmer and the Thar Desert

2011-03-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

A post a week. Seven or eight weeks, I think. If I can do this (and barring what will hopefully pan out to be a week-long trip to New Delhi, I ought to), I should be able to acceptably summarize my remaining experiences, to my standards.

It sure is a strange feeling to be so close to the end, and it's different than it was when I left in the first place. I was very sad to leave the States, and especially to cut off what felt like my symbolic last summer (though I have since realized that it will be anything but). At the same time, I was absurdly excited for my exchange.

This time, I am again absurdly excited to get to my destination - the allure of a steady carnivorous diet, being able to drive myself again, and seeing my friends and family again is mighty enticing. They told us at the beginning that we would most certainly have a greater appreciation of our home when we left. I have definitely noticed a much greater sense of American and Minnesotan pride in myself than I used to have. The United States may have a lot of work to do, but what country doesn't? I love my country, my home and almost all of the people in it, and I miss the hell out of it.

I have much more complicated feelings about the place, or rather, the experience, that I am leaving behind. To be perfectly clear about India, I adore it and most of the people in it. I know that I gave it a lot of crap over the early posts, and while my critiques hold somewhat true, having seen more of India and the vibrant culture, I have an unadulterated love of the place. Part of the problem was that there were just a couple things about Surat that did not sit well with the type of person that I personally am. Mainly, the high population density. Surat is not nearly the biggest city in India, but it is definitely one of the most crowded. This is partly a geographic issue - it's pushed up against the sea, and the way that it's been organized, it's not really in a position to expand in any direction but into the ocean. So it's packed. I have always had difficulty with the constant crowds and traffic. Most of India is loud, but Surat can be particularly piercing. I value my own time and peace - it's why I go for runs in the dead of night in the U.S. There's really no escape from the lights and crowds in Surat. I've gotten used to this in Surat, but I haven't liked it.

To go along with this city life, this means that there aren't very many nice outdoor places. This is not an India problem or a Surat problem. This means that I am not a city person. I love a big city for like two or three weeks. But I operate best in a place like Northfield, where you have everything you need and plenty of people, but that is full of natural beauty. I'm sure that this is just a product of me being where I'm from - everybody is - but quiet streets, open parks, and woods and fields are more important to me than high-rise buildings. A lot of big cities can offer a nice balance - actually Minneapolis, what with all of those lakes, is a great example. Surat doesn't happen to. These little things kind of eat away at me on a daily basis.

These daily irritations spilled over and put me in an early bad mood, but having gotten around and seen more and more of India, I've realized just how special it is. The North Tour was the kicker. It is an absolute must for everyone to see India in their lifetime. You can really find everything here. There are spectacular, cultural cities, and a wide variety of them. There is nearly every single kind of natural habitat and climate imaginable - in the space of two weeks, I rode a camel into a vast, windswept desert, and climbed to the top of one of the baby Himalayas in a blizzard. There is incredible food, and a huge variety of food. There are amazing festivals. There are great, hospitable people folks, who are nearly always friendly despite the incredibly vast differences in thinking between India and the West. The chai is delicious. You have to see this place. I'm called back to my mood of over a year ago, when I was first applying for the exchange and I was deliriously intoxicated with the idea of India. All this time later, having experienced more of the country, with all of its wretched flaws and all of it's untouchable glory, I am again spellbound, but in a much richer, more honest way. I cannot wait to come back here.

Having said that, I have gotten to the point in my life in India where there is a limit to what I can do. I want to travel and see every inch of it, I want to take power-life hardcore ashram courses. This isn't easy to do right now. We don't have an awful lot of independence, and besides, it's summer. I think it is difficult for you guys to contemplate just how much activity ceases in India in the summer. It's not like anything specifically stops, other than school, but things just don't happen. I don't know how to describe it. I'm just not doing very much right now, and I'm restless. The most immediate option for release is to return to the US and work and go to college. There's a strong chance that, for reasons out of my control, I will accomplish much less than I have been in the next seven or eight weeks. I know that when the time comes to leave, I'll be sad to go, but I'll be itching to go home as well. It's hard to say what the next two months are going to be like, other than hot.

On that indecisive note, let's go to Rajastan.

I've already talked too much in this post, so I'll talk about Rajastan and Rajastani culture a little more in the next post. Our first destination, after a train ride and a lengthy bus trip, was Jaisalmer, also known as the "Golden City". One can see why.

Jaisalmer is not as populated as I thought it would be - only about 75,000 people live there. It's not common to find developed places this small in India - I suppose it's mostly tourist places. It is certainly a very tourist-oriented city, but as I've mentioned before, you often find the most traditional lifestyles in the tourist places. We had an interesting encounter with a new bride in one of the twisty, winding roads of the city. She was dressed in a full traditional saree with many piercings. She spoke excellent English, which indicates a good education, but she was nonetheless given the very strange job of sitting outside all day and greeting people for the 30 days after her marriage. I'd never heard of this before. You learn something new every day in India.

Even just walking around the narrow alleys of Jaisalmer is entertaining, but there's also this gigantic, sandstone fort that overlooks the whole city. It's pretty awesome, kind of a mini-community in it's own right. It's stuffed with quirky little shops, interesting architecture, tasty restaurants, and awesome panoramic views of the city and the surrounding desert. In a trip that was laden with old military forts, this was easily the most memorable of them all.

After visiting the sights in Jaisalmer, we had a chance to really get into the desert. There are these resorts in the desert where they put you up in tents that are all around a common, built-up camp, but are really all out in the sand. We also took a camal ride out into the sand dunes and were able to see a beautiful desert sunset. Also, we got to wear badass turbans. As you can see, they are extremely stylish. Apologies to Lukas for picking a picture that has him not looking at the camera.

The desert safari was too short - only a couple hours - but the sunset over the dunes was unfathomably gorgeous. Also, riding camels is an experience in itself. The night was fun too - we played cards well into the night, and back at the camp we were served up a delicious dinner and treated to a traditional dance show by a couple of very entertaining cross-dressing dancers. There seems to be an occasional penchant in traditional Indian culture for having dudes dress up as exotic women. I'm not sure exactly what is behind it. This reminds me of the way that in Shakespearean times, female parts were performed by men, but that certainly seems outdated for these days.

I will close with some facial hair and a nice group photo. This curious man, who we encountered in Jaisalmer, has the sort of moustache that most men with facial hair can only dream of.

The Heat and the Cricket World Cup

2011-03-20T22:32:00.000-07:00

Before I move on to giving you far too much detail about my travels in the northern part of India, I'm going to talk about a couple things that impact my life a little bit more directly as of right now.

The Weather
The nice thing about Indian weather is that it's predictable. I was a little surprised that the news never features the weather and that the paper simply includes a miniscule box listing the temperature, at least when I first got here. But for some reason in this tropical climate, they know almost exactly what's going to happen. From July to September/October it's going to rain 2 or 3 times a day, from October to February there will be no clouds or precipitation, and the temperature should hover around a pleasant 70 degrees during the day, and from March to June it will again be dry and cloudless, but the temperature will hover from a decidedly less pleasant 95 to 115 degrees.

The first two seasons were very comfortable for me. When it wasn't raining during monsoon season, it was very hot, but it was raining like 80% of the time, so that wasn't a problem. And of course, there's nothing wrong with clear skies and 70 degree temperatures every day. Perfect for playing soccer or just wandering outside. This season is awful, and I don't think anybody who has ever lived in India, including the completely acclimated actual Indians, would argue with this. None of my friends like this any more than I do, but the difference between me and them is that they are at least mentally and physically prepared for the heat. I don't do all that well in the heat. I always go back and forth on whether I hate extreme cold or extreme heat more, and having experienced both within three days of each other (I climbed a mountain in a blizzard on the North Tour, so that's where I got my cold fix), I can unmistakably say that I hate heat more. See when you're cold, there's a lot you can do to warm yourself up - hot food, warm clothes, a cup of tea. When you're hot, there's a limit.

I've had a really nice run of it ever since I came back from America in November, and actually just since I've gotten back from the North Tour I've begun to appreciate India as a whole more than I ever have before. But I have two months left, and I am pretty sure that they are going to handily be the worst of my exchange. The thing is, it's just too hot to go out. In India, I'm mostly an afternoon socializer. That's just the way things are done here - the culture is very family-based, and the evening is really the only time in the day where you can see your family. This is true in the US too, but there's less importance placed on it. The problem is that you really can't go out in the afternoons all that much anymore. The streets have become noticeably quieter throughout the whole day because people just don't venture out anymore.

So yeah. It's too hot, and that was really all that I was trying to say.

The ICC Cricket World Cup
Ever since I got here, I've harbored resentment towards cricket for three reasons, all silly. 1) I didn't understand it. 2) It takes forever. 3) In the world of hitting balls with bats, it stands in direct opposition to baseball, the greatest sport on the planet.

But I like sports a lot, and I sure do miss the March Madness right now, and I've been craving something to get emotionally involved in and to provide excitement. So I turned to the Cricket World Cup, under the obsessive guidance of my new host father. The Cricket World Cup, like the FIFA World Cup, happens every 4 years, and this year it is hosted by India. Not only that, India is probably the leading favorite to win. So it's a terrific year to be a cricket fan in India.

Cricket isn't bad at all. You just have to take the time to understand it. It is, undoubtedly, extremely long - the games in the World Cup are a bit shorter than usual, and they usually last about 8 hours. But if you're entertained by it, this is 8 hours of entertainment. This is the argument I've been making for years to people who complain that baseball is too long. Cricket is a game of long, grand strategy. It's much more complicated than I gave it credit for earlier. The captain of the teams, who takes on the equivalent role to a baseball manager, must be a very clever strategist. It can also be very exciting - it's kind of a slow burn, but if you get a tight match at the end, all of the time that you've spent watching before pays off. Imagine - bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded, 3-2 count, down by 3 runs. Sometimes the anticipation in cricket can be that exciting.

The basic problem with cricket remains that it is constructed in what can be a numbingly simple way. One teams bats for three and a half hours. Then the other team bats for three and a half hours. I much prefer the back and forth possessions of pretty much every other sport. But cricket has proved to be one of the most diverting pieces of entertainment that India has to offer. The knockout stages of the tournament will be very helpful in keeping me occupied through these difficult summer months.

A bit about Uttarayan

2011-03-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

Uttarayan is the kite festival that is apparently featured in the book The Kite Runner, which I haven't read, but some of you may have. It involves spending the entire day flying kites. It was awesome. All of the Indian festivals that I have experienced have been major highlights, and Uttarayan was no exception.

It takes place in January, which gives you an idea of how absurdly behind I am. Also, I don't have any pictures, which is only kind of my fault. I took lots of pictures, but then I made the foolish decision of loaning my kite-photos-laden memory card to a friend, and when I got it back all of the kites pictures were gone. Lesson to be learned - your memory card is YOUR memory card.

For this I went back to my first host family - my second one was taking a trip at this time. This is good, because my first host family lives in a packed, kind of old-school part of town - perfect for festivals. Also it was good to see them again. Uttarayan is on a Friday, but the kite flying had already started on Thursday, albeit not in full swing yet.

Here's what the main objective is on Uttarayan. Kill the other kites. Seriously. It becomes an awesomely fun competitive sport. This is hardcore kite flying. Let's just start with the string. They make a special kind of string with small bits of glass intertwined with the actual string, the better to slice off someone else's string. It's savage. This is how I spent the better part of two straight days - up on the roof, flying kites, trying to destroy as many other kites as I could. Now the thing about kite flying is that it is an activity that I seldom, no, never engage in when I'm in the U.S. So I pretty much sucked at all of this, which I have no problem with. It takes the Indians some years to learn the trade too, and this was my first one. I still managed to take down a handful over the course of my career. And it was super fun anyways, the atmosphere is infectious. The dads get into it too, and it's hilarious to watch grown men drop everything and try to slay each other's kites. The houses are all packed together, so we're all up on the roof shouting across the roads at each other. Very fun.

A fact that is of sad interest is that 70,000 birds were killed by garroting themselves on the deadly wires during the festival. Worse, a woman was driving her motorcycle and a downed string caught her across the throat and killed her. These are sad blemishes on a wonderful day.

There is a certain amount of moral ambiguity, environmentally speaking, to a lot of these festivals. Diwali, which I regarded with unadulterated adoration, cannot be good for the air pollution, what with millions of fireworks being shot off. And as a bit of an environmental enthusiast, it's hard for me to rationalize this. But it's their culture, and an extremely fun one at that, and since there's nothing I can do about it, especially as an outsider, I chose to just have as much fun as I could. Good decision, I think.

Allepey, Goa

2011-03-06T18:04:00.000-08:00

Today marks the day when your laziest blogger (relative to his covering-of-everything ambitions) finishes writing about the South Tour, which, incidentally has been done for almost three months. Why am I so bullishly insistent on covering everything in this detail? I've discovered that I really like this travel writing. And what with the onslaught of 95-110 degree heat, I'm going to become a bit more of a shut-in than I have before, so I will hopefully catch myself up with reasonable speed.

Alleppey

Alleppey is Kerala exactly as I imagined it from Arundhati Roy's wonderful book The God of Small Things. We arrived at our hotel after a hellishly long bus ride in which we made a misguided stop at low-quality Subway that made everyone sick except me and got lost multiple times. It's a horrific tragedy that this particular Subway establishment is giving a bad name to what is, generally speaking, a top-notch chain that provides a plethora of sandwiches both delicious and nutricious.

We spent less than 24 hours at this place - we woke up fairly early and took a morning cruise around the backwater canals of the area. Canals is what they claimed to be, but they really seemed more like decisive rivers. If a great picture can speak a thousand words, mine can probably only account for a few hundred, but that would still save me from writing lengthy descriptive paragraphs about the climate and ecosystem of the area. Frankly, there's not all that much to say.

Goa

Goa is among the most popular tourist destinations in the whole of Asia. It is India's smallest state, and among the smallest in population. I've never been much of a sun-and-sand traveling, but Goa is home to some eye-poppingly appealing beaches. The one below isn't one of the most swimmable ( I photographed it from a cliff that was nowhere near the more touristy beach zone), but it's no less beautiful.

We were staying at a resort that extended down on to the beach, and this was a terrific beach. Packed with people, but not too many people. The sand was beautiful, the water from the Arabian Sea was amazing. There were a bevy of activities to take part in beyond the tanning and swimming - we went on jet-ski rides through the rough waves, we got cheap but awesome two-week tattoos, and we went parasailing, which I loved. Beachside restaurants are all over the place, and sometimes they send waiters out to wherever you are sitting so you don't have to get up. Our first day was pretty much a beach day, and a nice one at that.

Day 2 was spent sightseeing. Most of the day was spent driving, frankly, but we did get to see the very beautiful Basilica of Bom Jesus, which is an extremely beautiful basilica in it's own right, but is most famous for housing the remains of Saint Francis Xavier, famous for his pioneering missionary work in Asia. Xavier's remains are, apparently, exceedingly well-preserved for some reason (cited as holy influence, I think), and every 10 years his body is taken out for public viewing. The next one is 2014. It's supposed to be an extremely big deal.

Day three was spent with the morning at the beach and the afternoon at the biggest flea market you've ever seen. It stretched for over a kilometer, just a gigantic, sprawling mess of shops selling things that were generally more traditional Indian than the things I usually find at home. The shopkeepers, based on their dress and behavior, did not seem to be all that prosperous. They weren't trying to sell any electronics or anything very modern, the pace was lightning-fast and the haggling was extreme.

I made an observation here that somewhat helped me to progress in my understanding India. I thought to myself "these are very desi Indians (desi means kind of proper, traditional Indian), but why are they like this in a tourist place and less so in my own city, which is not a tourist place?" The thing is, this kind of wild, zany India is fading. Modern India, the one I live in, is an India that, dichotomously, can still be backwards, poor, and undeveloped, and can also be hurtling headlong into new technologies and ideas of the globalizing world. THIS is the real India today. The other kind of traditional India is fading. People don't really live like that anymore. It's a show for the tourists, as part of their economy. And I have to admit, I loved it. It was a total blast. I kind of feel like this kind of India is either fading, or was a foreigner's myth to begin with.

Well, then we went home. Then there was Christmas, which I discussed several posts ago. In January, there was another festival, and it was extremely awesome. That's what I'll talk about next.

I'd just like to conclude with this goofy little sign at the Basilica. India is perhaps the only country in the world where it is deemed necessary to inform people that there are certain places where you shouldn't explode things.

More South Tour

2011-02-03T10:34:00.000-08:00

I will get this done soon. I've started to realize that these entries of the South Tour are probably more for my sentimental benefit than your entertainment, but that actually just makes me want to write them more. It's very difficult to motivate myself, in the moment, to actually write something though - I'm constantly distracted by the things going on away from my computer, or occasionally other things on my computer, I will admit. It's hard to trim it down to size, too. Oh well. Where were we? Ah yes, Thekkady, land of elephaants, kung-fu, kathakali, spices, Ayurvedic massages, and American coffee. What a place.

He looks friendly.

Our next locale, Madurai, is a tad less exciting. Madurai, in the state of Tamil Nadu, is one of the oldest inhabited places in India - I believe it has been around for something like 2500 years. So yeah. I sit here proud of Northfield's defeat of Jesse James in the bygone days of the late 1800s and these guys have been around for two and a half milleniums. And according to Wikipedia, it was trading with Rome and Greece around 550 BCE. We did not see much of Madurai, which, in retrospect, disappoints me, considering all the history that seems to reside there. At the time, Madurai did not seem like anything special, the following tourist attraction exempted.

We were pretty much there for the Shree Meenakshi temple, which seems to be the bread and butter of Madurai's status as a very holy city. I think (and I may have this wrong) that Lord Shiva is said to have been married there, which kind of gives it the same importance as Bethlehem. Whatever legend says, the foundations of the building have been around for as long as Madurai has been, although the spectacular present building was built in about 1600, which is still super-old by American standards.

It's a sprawling complex, with many intricately carved towers connected by vast hallways. The exterior surfaces are astonishing - one one tower, there are innumerable, intricate carvings of Hindu deities. Our guide claimed that every Hindu god was represented on this tower. I find this hard to believe. There are 36 million of them, according to some sources. Guessing the number of Hindu gods in existence, even to an expert on the subject, seems rather like guessing the number of mosquitoes in Rice County in August. It fascinates me that this religion that has about a billion zealous devotees can be so deliriously inexact.

The interiors are also something else - we've got the Thousand Pillar Hall, which is exactly what it sounds like. There are tons and tons of statues and paintings and religious artifacts. There is even an elephant that they claim is Lord Ganesha (I feel like this would be kind of like grabbing a random carpenter and telling the whole world that he is Jesus). Nonetheless, it's pretty cool to have an elephant bless you. As I've mentioned before, elephants are really awesome.

So that's the Shree Meenakshi Temple, our only stop in our short Madurai stay. The pictures speak for themselves - this is an incredible structure. This may have been more descriptive than I initially intended, but this place was something else, and I wanted to do it justice. There's nothing else to say about Madurai, other than that our hotel was memorably awesome.

After that, we went to Kanyakumari, which is a touristy, seaside town in the Land's End part of India, the uttermost bottom of it, where the waters of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean come together. It was another nice hotel, with meat and everything, and very close to the ocean. We got there about noon, and right outside of our hotel you can see an island temple and a gigantic island statue. We took a ferry to the both of them, and I like them both quite a bit. Nobody saw fit to inform us what the massive statue was supposed to be of, and when I asked our tour guide after the fact, she did not know. But they were pretty awesome.

Kanyakumari is a fun little town - it's got all sorts of markets and things, pandering to tourists, and it's also a good place for some solid South Indian food - masala dhosas, idli sambhar, both of which are delicious. It's a good place to sort of wander around. We enjoyed ourselves. Our second day there was spent strolling around the city and visiting various seaside attractions. We also visited a small museum which marks a place where Gandhi's ashes were held for a time after he was shot. These were not all of his ashes - those are all over the place - but just some of them, and I belive they were scattered into the oceans after a spell. It was a solid place to be.

I'll have to get this done soon - I'd better, the North Tour is coming up. I haven't talked much about my actual life lately, because there isn't anything spectacularly new to report, but I've been happy and healthy - I hang out with various Indians and other exchange students, I work on the language, I do yoga, I drink tea, I mess around with my 7-year-old host brother. It's fun. It's not super-eventful, but I'm slowly realizing just how valuable this year has been on a personal level. There's not much left, actually. When I get back from the North Tour there will be less than 3 months left. It's really hard to believe. Right now, this is a good place to be - things are going well, and if I ever get in a foul mood I know that home isn't very far off. At the same time, it's far out enough that I still feel like I have plenty of time left here.

My mission has changed a bit - I'm determined to get as close to the bottom of this dizzying, incomprehensible, dichotomous nation, and it's a fascinating excursion. I've also realized that I simply will have to come back here. There's simply no way to understand this country in just 10 months, and I am too interested in this to let it fall away. Also, I will miss people my friends and family. I'm only just starting to realize how much.

I will admit, I'm not looking forward to the post North Tour life here - the exchange students are going to start peeling off, and the Indians are going to have their end of year exams, which are pretty much a full-time occupation for a long time. Additionally, summer will start, and summer here is like, 115 degrees. Apparently nobody does anything. It's just too hot. I hope I can work around the weather and keep doing stuff with my last days.

Still, I'm a pretty content exchange student, and I have been for a long time, and I'm starting to realize how many things I will miss when I leave. It took some time, but life has gotten pretty good here. Stay tuned for the concluding part of South Tour, if you're interested.

South Part 3

2011-01-19T05:17:00.000-08:00

I'm just gonna keep on rolling and posting. It's not an especially busy time, so I want to get caught up fast.

Place number 3 was Thekkady. Thekkady is about 100 kilometers away from Munnar, but it takes nearly 5 hours to get there. It's still up in the hills, but in terms of elevation it's quite a bit lower than Munnar. It's dry and hot, but not too hot, and you can see mountains in the distance. Surrounding the tourist-oriented town are lush jungles and traditional villages.

Thekkady was not my favorite place (that honor is given to Munnar and Goa), but the things that we did there were definitely the best. We left Munnar quite early and made it to Thekkady by the early afternoon. Thekkady is famous for its spices. So we went to an elephant-riding zone/spice garden in the late afternoon. We walked around the garden (which isn't really a garden, it's just basically spices growing in the forest). After that, we all took turns riding on elephants.

Elephants are just awesome. These are the Asian elephants, of course, which are known to be not as large as their African counterparts, but they are still very big (bigger than they look in the picture) and intimidating, what with their thick hides and flailing trunks. These guys were very well-trained though. I felt a little bad for them. It seemed like they could be leading much more interesting lives. Still, I enjoyed it. The best part, however, was when we all were led to the elephant's bathing pit and were each given an elephant bath. It was an experience. It also provided me with perhaps my favorite profile picture of all time.

That evening, we dried ourselves off as best we could and attended a Kathakali show at the same place. This facility seemed to be a combination of a wide variety of entertainment. Kathakali, which we sort of learned about in AP Lit while reading The God of Small Things (another excellent India book to read), is a very ancient, traditional song and dance style of storytelling. In our particular show, there were two male actors that were ridiculously made up, one to look like a woman. There was a man singing what was presumably the story in maybe Malayalam (Kerala's widely spoken native tongue) or Sanskrit (the Indian equivalent of Latin). In our tale, a studly warrior-king caught the eye of some sort of demon, who disguised himself as a seductive woman and failed to attract the attentions of the king. The demon then revealed himself to be Blackbeard and had a dance fight with the king before having his ear sliced off.

Kathakali is an experience.

The next morning we got up early and went on a jungle hike through a tiger preserve. Nobody saw any tigers. But the guide said that in four years of taking folks on jungle treks, he had seen tigers four times. I suppose it was too much to expect that we would provide his annual sighting. It was still a lot of fun. This is the kind of thing I like, walking through some beautiful outdoors, looking for wildlife, trying to be quiet enough to photograph deer and birds and monkeys and things.

That afternoon, we went to an Ayurvedic massage session and we were given a long, very traditional massage and steam bath. It was exceedingly pleasant. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Thekkady, which is a nice place to do this because it has a lot of tourist oriented shops. Also, it had a coffee shop. With filter coffee. This was a terrific discovery. The coffee that you can find in India is really overly sugared. Not my style. But this place was cozy in a Blue Monday kind of way, and you just don't find these kind of places in India. Made my day.

That night we went to fighting show in a kind of battle pit, surround on balconies above by excited tourists. It was kind of like a wrestling arena. 7 highly trained athletes had these very fast, incredibly choreographed battles with all sorts of exciting and dangerous weapons. They also jumped through rings of fire. It was really cool.

So that's Thekkady. Post 4 coming up soon.

South India Part 2

2011-01-15T02:22:00.000-08:00

As time-consuming and rather wearisome a task as it has become to update my blog regularly (as you may have noticed), I am determined not to let it die off, because I like it and I like writing. So I am going to prune my tour details as much as is reasonable and plow through it. Hopefully by the end of next week I will be all caught up. The essential problem has been that there can be very long stretches of inactivity, where there's very little that is new enough to be blog-worthy, but there can be even longer stretches, like in the past two months, where is simply so much to write about that I am completely overwhelmed and backlogged. Now, for example, I have to cover, in addition to the rest of the trip, a thrilling new festival and our bombastic District Conference performance. And the North tour is rapidly approaching.

On a non-tour-related note, I would like to recommend a book to anybody who may have an interest in learning about modern India but wouldn't like a textbook , or, sometimes even worse, a textbook masquerading as a novel. The book is The White Tiger by one Aravind Adiga, a Mumbai native who was educated in the United States and London. It is a very sharp satire that tracks the ruthless rise to power of a very poor, low-caste villager. It is an outstanding book. It will not take you long to read. The pages practically flip themselves and it's a pretty short novel anyways. It resonated very clearly with me - it is, perhaps, the first piece of literature about India that tells the story of India as I have seen it. There were so many little pieces and details that I can see clearly out of my daily life. India is a deeply misunderstood society, and it is misunderstood in a lot of different ways ways. If you happen to be interested in a very entertaining and brief crash course in the real India, this book is the best thing I can recommend.

Thank you for indulging my sales pitch of the day. Now to more tour.

When we last left me and my fellow travelers, we had just proceeded on a drive up into Munnar. Munnar is not a large city, but rather a series of communities built around a flourishing tea industry high up in the mountains. Now these are spectacular mountains, but they aren't exactly the Alps or the Himalayas. Look at the picture. That's them.

Beautiful, eh? Admittedly, it isn't the untamed, rocky, snowy beauty of some of the aforementioned mountain chains, but they are still gorgeous. If you look at the ground immediately in front of them, you can see neatly arranged clumps of some sort of crop. The said crop is tea. Munnar is full of tea plantations, and a large part of the mountainside is occupied with these crops. Normally I would not approve of farming and industry spoiling natural beauty, but as you can see, this doesn't spoil it at all. Munnar is gorgeous.

In Munnar, we toured a tea factory and saw a video on the history of the region. This is a place where somehow the humans and the mountains have interacted very well, and the mountain ecosystems have remained safe and beautiful. There are parts of India that are very polluted (most populated areas), but it also should be noted that the government has set aside a ridiculous amount of land for preservation. Then we explored a pleasant town in the hills and we found BEEF. Turns out the cow-slaying taboos don't apply to bulls. This is certainly still frowned upon in a lot of places, but clearly it was ok here. I cannot express to you how thrilling this was. Then we visited a dam and a beautiful, crystal clear mountain lake. We walked around there for a while, visited a roadside market, and took a boat ride. I cannot express to you how nice Munnar felt to me. It was just so cool, so fertile, so beautiful, so natural. This was one of my favorite sites on the trip.

I think I'll stop there for today, but like I said, I'm going to try and plow through this trip pretty fast in the next week or so. I'll probably make a lot of posts, and then make it like two parts trip, one part something else. Just bear with me.

Look how much fun we're having and how proud we are that one of us is from Brazil.

South India Tour Part 1

2010-12-22T04:38:00.000-08:00

Guess what?

The tour of South India was super awesome. Perhaps the single most worthwhile experience of my entire life. Maybe the most fun I've ever had. Certainly a memory I will treasure until the end of my days.

Even with my planned liberal editing of the events of the trip, I am still planning to split the 17-day extravaganza into perhaps three parts. Part 1 will take us from our departure to Munnar, and will then segue into some other things on my mind lately, namely, spending the holidays away. The other parts will come at a later date. Hopefully it won't be too boring, but I like recording the things that I've done.

At midnight changing from the 1st of December to 2nd December, the other four Surat exchange students and myself boarded a train from our hectic terminal that would take us all the way Mumbai. It was already loaded with most of the other exchange students (there are 15 in our district - 5 live in Surat and most of the rest live north of us). This was a sleeper train, however, and we all went to our assigned bunks and tried to grab a few hours of sleep before our 6 AM arrival in Mumbai.

The first day was generally spent sitting, sweaty and disgusting, in waiting rooms or on trains. It was about a five hour train ride to Mumbai from Surat. When we got there we sat in a waiting room for three hours, then took a 45 minute taxi ride across the city to get to the other Mumbai terminal. The drive made me want to explore Mumbai, it looks to be a lovely city. Then we sat at the terminal for an hour or two, then we got on the train and embarked on a 26 hour journey to Cochin, which is quite a ways to the south.

I won't spend an awful lot of time describing train travel in India, but it might merit a little explanation. I'd heard a bit about the Indian train system before I got here, so I, at least, was curious. In a sleeper carriage, you can fit 8 people in one aisle space. On one side of the aisle are two beds, one on top of the other, lengthwise along the train. On the other side, which is much wider, are two stacks of three bunks each, positioned in the other direction. The middle bunk generally stays folded up into the wall until it's time to go to sleep, and the bottom bunks are used as benches. They provide food and snacks on the train, and there are even power outlets to charge your phones or your laptops or whatever, so at least you never get too bored. There generally more space and mobility, so it's way better than a plane. The only big beef I have is that they don't nearly provide enough space for luggage. We had a very nasty encounter with a wretched crone who had like four bags and threw all of ours into the aisle so she could have the entire underbelly of one bench. That might not make much sense to you, but trust me. It wasn't fair.

Sorry. I ended up spending more time describing the train than it really merited.

So the train ride, spent in the good company of the other exchange students, was about as tolerable as a 26 hour journey by train can be, and the food actually could have been a lot worse. We arrived at the Cochin train station, in the province of Kerala. In Kerala they generally speak their native tongue, Malayalam, or English. The national language, Hindi, is not spoken very much there. English is their language that connects them to the other provinces. This worked out well for us.

Cochin is a large city, but it is infinitely more attractive than Surat. It seems at the same time more Western and less traditional than Surat. Western, in that the shops are generally neater, tidier, and cleaner, and in that there's quite a bit of English spoken. Traditional, in that they don't seem quite so obsessed with the material and superficial things that the shops in Surat seem to cater to, and that the way people dress on the streets seems more Indian, rather than the idiotic, flamboyant imitations of Western fashion that I'm accustomed to. I like Cochin very much for all of these reasons.

The first day, we were exhausted and didn't really get out of the hotel until about 5, once everyone was done resting and showering properly. That first night we went to a really nice shop. This is more exciting than it sounds - in the South, especially these more touristy places, there are quite a few very upscale shops with a lot of beautiful, expensive traditional Indian things - woodwork, scarves, rugs, paintings, and all sorts of other exciting things. The shopkeepers really pamper you there, giving you free drinks and stuff, and all the while observing you and trying to sell you something. It's a very subtle art, what they do. Unlike many of their street counterparts, they have mastered the skill of making you want something without offensively pushing it on you, and they most certainly sell more things because of it.

Now I have a penchant for weapons. I mean, violence is cool. Not really, but you know what I mean. I've always had an extremely nerdy desire to have a collection of swords in my house when I grow up. I already have a wonderful machete that I purchased in Costa Rica sitting back in the United States. At this particular establishment, they had a very fine collection of swords. After examining all of them and consulting with the employee assigned to me, I purchased a rather beautiful ceremonial short sword for the price of 2700 rupees, haggled down from 4000 rupees. It's pretty awesome. Swords are awesome. So is haggling.

The night was uneventful - they laid out a private dinner buffet for us and played a fantastic collection of Christmas music for us. Then we all hung out together in hotel rooms and went to bed.

The next morning we went to see the sights in Cochin. Like most of Keralan coastal areas, Cochin is stuffed with wide rivers and canals, with a sort of mangrove ecosystem operating on the shores. A lot of the economy is based around that too, mostly fishing and the like. First we went to this ancient Dutch church, where the famous explorer and infamous asshole Vasco da Gama was once buried. This was big news to a history geek like me. I mean, this is Vasco da Gama. He's pretty damn important. It was a beautiful church, and it was nearly 500 years old.

Something I like about traveling outside of the United States is that nearly every place in the world is older than us. I mean, think about it, nothing in our country can be much older than like, 300 years at this point. Maybe like the ruins of Jamestown or something. But you go nearly anywhere else, and you will find ancient things left and right, or certainly things older than us. It's humbling. In my day-to-day life in the US, I'm just not accustomed to seeing things this old. And India can be especially humbling in this since - it has been populated by civilizations since antiquity, and Hinduism is, I think, the eldest of the five main religions. So that was cool.

Just outside of the church was a kind of public square on the shores of a biggish river. There were these Chinese fishing nets there. I cannot describe them very well, but basically they work on some kind of lever system, where these massive nets are lowered into the water, and then hauled out by these huge ropes pulled manually by some hardworking laborers. Stretched along the edges of the square are a whole bunch of fish stands. We went and saw the Chinese fishing nets, and they let us haul some fish out of the river ourselves, then we explored the square a bit.

This place was infested with walking vendors selling moronic little things like irritating carved wooden flutes and stuffed animals for absurdly expensive prices. They were, perhaps, the most annoying people I have ever come across in my entire life. As opposed to the classy shop salesman, their strategy seems to be annoy you into purchasing their products so that they will go away. The only thing to do with these guys is to be rude and blunt. If you attempt to kindly reject their offer, it simply doesn't work.

Usually they start by approaching you and saying "Where you from?". When I tell them, they always say "Oh, US! Obama!" And then I say, yeah, yeah. Then they show you the product, and it is a terrible mistake to even look at it. They think that if you express the mildest interest in their product, you want it, and the only objective is price. So there was this snake made out of a bunch of separate pieces of wood that kind of moved if you wiggled it. I held it and looked at it and determined that it actually really sucked. So first the guy, who was crestfallen at my disapproval, progessively lowered the price until it was like a sixth of the original one. Finally, I lost my temper and said "You could give that to me for a fudging (this is not what I actually said) pese (their equivalent of the penny) and I wouldn't want it.

His hysterical last resort, as I strode away from him was to shriek "Obama! I like your president! Please!" To an extent, I feel bad for them. Obviously this is their livelihood. But I was eager to show them that I am not some stupid tourist, and also I wouldn't want them to get the impression that being a jackass is the way to sell things.

The fish market was awesome. There were all sorts of things there, included a hammerhead shark. Hammerhead sharks are awesome. Their heads look like hammers AND they're sharks. They're like the Ninja Assassins of maritime animals. Anyways, something cool you could do at the fish market was buy the fish yourself (and it wasn't too pricey) and then give to a cook that was standing, and order him to prepare the fish for you in whatever way you wanted. So I bought a small squid and some sizable prawns for myself and had them made to order. This excited me an inexpressable amount.

After our delectable lunch, we proceeded on a bus to Munnar. The bus ride was a bus ride. It does not merit discussion.

Turns out I have a lot more to say than I thought I would. So we'll cut things off there.

Christmas away

To be blunt, it sucks. But it could have been a lot worse. Christmas for me is not an especially religious holiday. I mean, obviously that's what it is, but what it really signifies to me is family. You have to be home, with your family for the holidays. End of story. For me, it's an unbreakable rule in the same vein as something like gravity. Evidently, of course, it can be broken.

In India, Christmas is just another commercial holiday of very little importance, and they don't do an awful lot to celebrate. Santa Claus came with one toy for my little brother Nishant, but other than that my family didn't observe it at all. And India, as a whole, doesn't care much. There are Christmas specials in the shops and that sort of thing, but it's just not given very much importance. It's probably less important than like St. Patrick's Day in the US. Not to mention that they don't have snow, a quintessential element of Christmas for me.

Nonetheless, my family knew that Christmas was going to be very important to me, and they knew that I was pretty bummed to be gone. There wasn't a whole lot they could do, but I really appreciated the fact that they could kind of understand what I was feeling.

On Christmas Eve, the 4 other Surat exchange students and I got together at one of their apartments, blew up inflatable snowmen, ordered Domino's pizza, and watched "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "The National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation". And you know what? It was a good Christmas. There's something that's all the sweeter about making Christmas happen in a country where they seem rather determined to adopt an attitude of complete indifference to the whole affair.

In Christmas Day, I opened my presents from my wonderful real family, and my dad and I went out for dinner at an excellent Chinese restaurant. Then I had a nice long conversation with my real family. Skype was out of commission, unfortunately, but this was certainly better than nothing. So Christmas could have been a lot worse. It sucked to be away, and God knows I'm never going to do it again, if at all possible, but I'm sure when I'm old, this Christmas is going to stick out in my memory. It was a great comfort to find love and support even on the other side of the world.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

WOO TOUR

2010-11-30T20:29:00.000-08:00

So I'm going to be embarking on the thrilling tour of South India from midnight tonight until the 17th of December. The tour will take us to all sorts of exciting places like the famous beaches of Goa, tropical Kerala as featured in The God of Small Things (no I will not be meeting or encountering the Orange-drink Lemon-drink Man in any context whatsoever), and Land's End, the very bottom of India. And all sorts of other exciting temples and museums and places of natural beauty that I can't recall. It promises to be fantastic. If I time and internet (both of which may be unlikely) I may attempt to do a midway blog entry, but otherwise I plan on keeping a daily journal and taking kajillions of pictures. So there will be an ample supply of things to write about on my return.

There's been some other news lately that I may as well fill you in on.

- I changed host families. This was a traumatizing experience, at least leading up to it. It wasn't as bad as that time that I left home thinking I was going to be gone for an entire year. But it was stressful. However, all of this went away when I met my new host family, which is comprised of a great group of people. I miss my old family, and I especially miss the fact that it seemed like my entire social life revolved around my two brothers and their groups of friends.

- I was kicked out of my school, along with the other exchange students. This school expected us to attend every day, which obviously sounds very reasonable but for a variety of reasons is rather difficult for us exchange students. So I missed these two weeks for the funeral, which at least they didn't blame me for. But when we told them we were going to be gone for nearly three weeks on the tour, they decided they didn't want to teach us anymore because of our inability to stay in class and caught up.

This is a bugger, not so much because I loved the school, the subject, or the people in it, but more because I need something to do with my day. Apparently my club is going to work on it while we're on the tour. Possibly they will have me take daytime classes in useful/relevant things, like Gujarati, Hindu classical music...the possibilities could potentially be endless.

Anyways, goodbye.

Diwali

2010-11-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

Upon my return to India, I was very pleased to discover that there was another festival in the works, and that the days leading up to it reached anticipatory heights that rivaled the pre-Christmas celebration in the United States. Diwali is the climax of these last few months of festival season, an all-out blaze of celebration and bombast. In my opinion it's the second-best holiday in the world. The only better that I have experienced is United States Christmas. Frankly, there are almost zero things in the world that make me happier than Christmas at home, so it's not a knock on Diwali that it isn't quite up to those very high standards.

Now, Diwali is the celebration of the return of Lord Ram to his village where he was unjustly exiled from some 14 years prior, I believe. The story of why he was exiled and how he returned constitutes the entirety of the religious epic poem The Ramayana. I am familiar with a very condensed overview of the story, and it is far too lengthy and complicated to attempt to explain in blog form. If you'd really like the full story, I'd be more than happy to give it to you, but not at the moment. The point is, folks were overjoyed that he came back, because by all accounts he was pretty great. Here's what is done.

People take colorful chalk and draw a new, intricate design on the street in front of their house every morning. They're cool. I wish I was a good enough blogger to post pictures to go along with this, but it just takes way too long to upload a picture with my internet at the moment. They did this from the day I returned (November 1st) up until several days after it ended (November 7th), and some people have continued to draw them in front of their houses, although they have slowly gotten less multifaceted and colorful.

Then there are lights. They string lights all up around the outside of their houses. Every business does the same. This sounds comparable to Christmas but it's not, because the sheer number of lights on display absolutely blows Christmas lighting out of the water. At some malls it's almost as overwhelming as like, Times Square. Ok, perhaps that was a stretch. But it's really overwhelming. They use all colors, including orange. For some reason you never find orange in any United States Christmas lit scene, and I think I understand why. The color orange, for all of its merits, is an exceedingly ugly color when used in neon lighting. They use these strings of lights enthusiastically to the point of garishness, but it's so festive and genuine that it is very easy for me to forgive a little aesthetic displeasure.

Diwali season is considered a lucky time to buy and make investments, so a huge amount of people do things like buy cars and houses. At the very least, everyone buys something, and stores - clothes stores especially - respond with insane discounts, like "Buy 1 get 5 free" or "80% off all items". Everyone took advantage of this. They also buy new things for around the house - my house got a new portrait of Sai Baba (kind of a Hindu saint - he's quite revered), new couch covers, new teacups, new curtains. And all of us got some new clothes. Young Indians are exceedingly focused on things like "looking cool" (which is one of greatest frustrations but I'm not going to get into that now), and they especially care about it during Diwali time.

Then there are the fireworks.

The English language is marvelously expressive, but there simply are not words to describe the effect of Diwali fireworks. I will still do my best. It's absolutely nothing like the Fourth of July. Nowhere near. Take the amount of fireworks and firecrackers that are used on the Fourth and multiply it by about a thousand and then you will some idea of the sensory effect of being in India on the day of Diwali.

The thing is, there are no restrictions on purchasing them. Someone who had no idea what they were doing could go to the store and buy hundreds of them. A massive explosives industry springs up right around this time, and for a few weeks there are these fireworks superstores that have a seemingly unlimited stock of things that blow up.

People are constantly setting off firecrackers in the street, and these are not friendly firecrackers. Some of them light up in the same way that ours do - fountains and spinners and stuff - but the vast majority of them simply explode violently. Little pieces of firecracker shrapnel go flying in all directions at high speeds, and it really stings if you get hit by one. I was told a story last year where an explosion in our very narrow street was so violent that someone's window got blown out. They have strings of firecrackers that are 10,000 units long. It takes like a minute and a half to get through all of them, and each and every one is disruptively loud. Now I mostly reveled in the uncontrolled ability to explode all of these delightful devices. I mean, blowing things up is really really fun. But there is one product that goes by the name "The Bomb" that sucks. It's like a stun grenade. Or at least it has the same effect on my ears that a stun grenade does when I'm playing as James Bond in Nightfire. We had just set one off in the street and I looked around, too late, to see that everyone in the neighborhood had plugged their ears except me. My right ear only stopped ringing four days ago.

As for the fireworks themselves, on actual Diwali night we went to the roof of my house and watched them. I took two videos of fireworks, and I'm going to post them to Facebook soon. There's simply no way to describe how incredibly noisy and overstimulating it is to have millions of fireworks exploding. And I really do mean millions - my city has four million people in it, and most people fire these things off. There is variety that you can't find in the US. It is noisy and it is beautiful. Fireworks are a wonderful thing. I loved every second of it.

The biggest explosive night was November 5th, but every once in while even now, you can still hear them.

On November 4th, one of the Rotarians rented a plot of land and hosted a dinner/dance party for all Rotarians and their kids. Now, I really don't like dance parties, as most of my friends know. It might be because I'm too self-conscious or whatever, but I just don't do them. At least in the US. Inexplicably, I kind of went off the rails (by my standards) and kind of had a crazy-good time. I've always been reluctant to change very much about my identity here, but I mean, this was fun. The rest of the Diwali days, I just conducted my own business, saw family and friends, and blew stuff up.

Diwali is an amazing experience. I have to recommend to every single person who reads this blog to try and come to a good-sized Indian city sometime during Diwali. These are sights that you will never see in the United States. I never counted myself more lucky to be in India. And think about - early November isn't much of a travel time - school and work will be holding me back for most of my life. I may well never be back for another Diwali. I sure hope I am though.

I was going to write about more things. But this has gotten to be quite a bit. So, until next time.

What Happened

2010-11-07T05:40:00.000-08:00

I realized I haven't published for over a month, which is especially strange because I'm definitely one of the most prolific publishers of the kajillion Northfield exchange students. Here's what happened the last month, in a nutshell.
Where we last left off, I believe, was the exciting school trip to the Saputara Hill Station, which was fantastic. After that, however, things started to go downhill. There is nothing specific that went wrong, although my frustration with my teacher that has me do nothing but draw straight lines grew immensely. School went on normally, family life was solid as usual. I don't know what it was. Everyone tells me about this notorious slump that comes about three or four months in, and I think I might have been hitting it. Just a combination of homesickness starting to really set in and all of my little frustrations with the country teeming up and bursting. So it was bad. I felt about as unhappy as I've ever really felt.
Then, one Monday night, I was sitting down with my family, watching the delightful program Kaun Banega Crorepatti (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire - exactly the same as in Slumdog Millionaire) hosted by Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan. Amitabh Bachchan is awesome. Anyways, the phone rang, and it was for me, which is highly unusual. I was surprised and pretty overjoyed to hear my dad's voice on the end of it. Of course, I quickly realized that was only one event that would necesitate an urgent call rather than an email or Skype date.
My grandfather died, very suddenly, in a car accident. Grandpa was not a young man, but he was really healthy and this was completely unexpected. And I've never really had anyone in my life die before. Up until now, my family has been completely intact. The worst that happened is once my cat died.
This was killing me. I took a day to carefully consider the repercussions of the choice I faced - sticking it out or going home for the funeral and burial. It was a tough choice, and of course, it was probably made in some haste. There might be weird, unforeseeable consequences to my exchange arc by having done this, but it just felt ethically wrong to sit in India while this was happening. I felt guilty for abandoning my mom and my grandma. And, I'll be honest, the decision was somewhat for me too. My host family did their very best to comfort me, and I'll always be grateful to them for that, but despite their best efforts, they weren't the same as my real family. I've never felt so very lonely in my entire life. Maybe it would have been worse for the exchange arc to have stayed and not grieved properly. I don't know. But I decided to come home for two weeks, the length of the journey being necesitated by the fact that the burial itself had to occur nearly two weeks after the funeral. Grandpa was in the Korean War, and he wanted to be buried at Fort Snelling, and it takes a while to get a slot there.
It was a rough trip in many respects, but I got the closure I needed, and frankly, it was incredible to see my friends and family and to have a short time to enjoy the beautiful Minnesota fall that we had this year. At the same time, I learned a valuable lesson - every time that little voice pops into my head and tells me to hop the next flight back to Minneapolis, I know that's a bad idea. Because, fellow exchange students, there's nothing for us there, as a permanent resident, right now. Our friends are at college. We don't have any school we can go to. We'd be dead weight around our folks houses. Which, granted, it was exceedingly nice to be for a short while, but we simply can't do that permanently. I wouldn't want to - I would have gotten restless after another week or so.
So I came back to India, sad to leave, but not nearly so much - I knew that I had good family and friends in both countries supporting me. I'm reinvigorated about this exchange, and I have to say - the first week back has been darn good. Hopefully I ride this high for the rest of the year. And there's a lot to look forward to - South India trip is coming on December 1st. I'm stoked.
I'm really grateful - all of you exchange students and Rotarians and friends and family and whoever else reads this thing - you've all been incredibly supportive of me, and that was the thing that got me through what was a really crappy October.

Next post will be about Diwali, which is contributing hugely to my good mood.

To the Indian Countryside

2010-10-02T23:35:00.000-07:00

I had another terrific weekend. Well, I suppose I don't know how Sunday will play out yet but based on the strength of Saturday alone it should go down as one of the most memorable times of my first stage of India.

My older brother Pratik is a student at an engineering college in Surat. The students from his class (they all do everything together...college is different here) put together a trip to a place called Saputara, which is a hill-station to the south. Hill-stations are smaller villages situated at higher altitudes than the surrounding countryside. They were mostly founded by British colonial folks so that their people could get out of the heat of the lower countries and so they would have a more peaceful, pleasant place to be. The Indians today have happily inherited these lovely locations and made them tourist sites.

The time leading up to this excursion was a bit strange. My Friday was fairly uneventful, but at 1030 at night Pratik, Akshay, one of Pratik's friends and I went to see the Priyanka Chopra/Ranbir Kapoor film Anjaana Anjaani. It was ok. Priyanka Chopra is so unbelievably gorgeous that she can make any film at least tolerable, but Ranbir Kapoor, in my opinion, is not fit to lick the mud from the bottom of Priyanka's shoes. I have developed strong opinions on Bollywood actors and actresses.

The point of this is, I didn't get to sleep until two, and the bus was leaving at 5. So I boarded the bus and conducted the following on two hours of sleep.

So we boarded the bus, which was only slightly less comfortable than one of our coach buses. That is to say, it was comfortable as buses go. The drive to Saputara was about 4 or 5 hours, with two stops. At the first one, we stopped in a fairly normal village that housed a very large and very ancient temple. There weren't any tour guides to give me exact dates or anything, but everyone told me that this was over 1000 years old. You couldn't go in at all, and it wasn't that huge, but I was still pleased to see it. I like the temples here. The village itself was pretty impoverished but it still had modern stands and amenities (modern is always a fairly relative term here). There were a lot of hut-dwellers, which always makes me feel very bad. It was not a prosperous place, but for some reason it was rather a pleasant one for me to be in.

After a tasty breakfast there we drove to the Gira Falls, which as you may have guessed is a really cool series of waterfalls. I was taken aback by the natural beauty of the area - we were starting to rise in altitude and there was some beautiful forests surrounding the impressive falls. I was delighted to find that once you get out of the ridiculously overcrowded cities of India, the countryside is something primal and untamed, stuffed with a mass of tropical plants completely different from stuff you would see in the States. One thing I miss majorly about Northfield and the United States in general is the easy access to some open space. It's really easy to just go the Arb in Northfield if you want to get outside, and it only takes about 5 minutes to be out of town and among some pleasant countryside. So it was great for me to get out and see some natural beauty.

After perhaps an hour walking around the area by the falls, we got back on the bus and drove maybe another 2 hours to Saputara. The route to Saputara was rather treacherous - a bus is obviously a wide thing, and these roads were pretty narrow. We basically spent an hour climbing up dozens of switchbacks on the roads, so it was pretty slow going. The ascent was lovely though. Once we got to Saputara, we were at an elevation of about 3000 feet, and the air was noticeably cooler, which was something absolutely fantastic for me, because another tough adjustment for me in this country is that it's just really hot. Saputara has very little in the way of housing. It's mostly a tourist community, and the folks who live there are propietors of hotels, shops, and tourist businesses. It really is built almost right on top of a mountain overlooking a plateau below that is already quite a bit higher than Surat. There's a small lake in the middle of the town, which is awesome considering that's it basically built on top of a mountain, and a small collection of hotels and other stores built into the hills. The hills around us were just screaming at me to go hike in them. If I was by myself, I probably could have spent at least 3 or 4 days there.

We didn't get there until about 230, and after visiting a bathroom that nearly caused me to vomit, I just walked around the town a bit and visited some shops. Then we were given a lunch of puri and vegetables. Then Pratik, a few of his friends, and I, rented a paddleboat by the lake and just floated around for a while. It was unbelievably serene and peaceful, especially when I've been living in a very noisy city for all of these months. I think that might have been one of the reasons I loved it there so much - it was just such a fantastic contrast to the mass of activity and overcrowding that comes with living in a sizable Indian city. It's really not that Surat's a bad city at all, it's just that I'm not a major city person (probably due to the location of my upbringing), and to get to somewhere a little bit more peaceful was massively refreshing.

After that, we walked to the outskirts of town and looked down into the breathtaking view of the valley below, and discovered that with the massive zoom of my camera, we could see people probably from a very long ways away. Then we went back into town and Pratik and I found this service where you would dip your feet in a small pool and these small, toothless fish that were about leech-sized (but they weren't like leeches at all) would come and nibble at your feet. It was called a fish foot massage, and although it felt really weird to look down and see dozens of little fish trying to eat my feet, it felt really good, and afterwords my feet seemed to be very clean.

All in all it was a terrific day, although by the end of it I was really exhausted, and we didn't get back until 2 AM or so. It really reinvigorated my enthusiasm for India...I can't wait to see more of this beautiful countryside.

The New School and A Piece of National News

2010-09-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

After a lengthy (and largely unwise, on my part) hiatus from schooling, my club has successfully enrolled me in a college, which is nice for a number of reasons, the first being that it's more age-appropriate for the 3 graduated seniors that make up our clubs. The school is simply titled School of Interior Design. It's housed in what would probably be some kind of apartment building otherwise over four floors and one other workshop setting. It's nice and clean, and the spots that are dirty are dirty in a "we're working here" way rather than a "we are too lazy to put trashcans in our schools" kind of way.
The classes that we take in the first semester class are Drawing and Painting, Color Workshop, Studio. TRD, IT, History, and Structure.
Drawing and Painting and Color Workshop are quite self-explanatorily titled classes that basically involve me painting things. I have now been wishing that I hadn't avoided all art classes like they were some kind of poisonous animal throughout my entire school career. To put it bluntly, I really suck at painting. I like it fine, and at least I'll get better at it. It's a new thing to be learning, so that's good. The professor (or the sir, as they call it) is a really awesome guy. He has a cool beard and sunglasses that he usually wears to cover up an eye injury from an accident. The only mark the accident has left, however, is that half of the white part of his right eye is red, which to me only adds to his badassery. What is also awesome about this guy is that he's a lot like MacGyver (if you're not familiar with this classic 80s show, find it on DVD and catch up - it's terrific). Forgot your easel today? MacGyver Sir, as I have taken to calling him, willing just whip you one up out of toothpicks and a piece of thermocoil. Also he's quite a good artist. So while I display an ineptitude that has likely never been seen before in these two classes, I quite enjoy them.
Another Sir teaches Studio and Structure. I'm not exactly sure what the stated purpose of studio is, but right now we're working on a complicated project that started with us randomly drawing a bunch of lines and boxes on a sheet of paper and will culminate with us creating a 3D model representing something that developed from the original drawing. It's kind of cool but a lot of work, and again I have absolutely no talent in the subject. Still, I like the Sir so it's allright. Structure is like physics and math - the numbers and calculations of architecture. I like it because the math is pretty basic and I know how to do it and Sir is really impressed with me when I know something like Newton's Laws or the Pythagorean Theorem. I think I could do ok in that one.
TRD and IT involve using a parallel (basically it just helps you draw straight lines) to do "drafting", which is the name for drawings of designs of things. It could be one specific piece of furniture, or a birds-eye view of a room, or whatever. The problem is that the Ma'am for that is very very focused on extremely minute details of whatever project we are doing, and if she doesn't like the work that you just spent two hours doing, she has no qualms about ordering you to do it again. So these two bug me quite a bit.
History is ok - they learn a lot of the stuff that I learned in AP World about ancient civilizations, but then they have to do things like memorize how wide the alleyways were in the Indus Valley city of Harappa from 5000 years ago. How these type of rote details will ever help us in architecture is beyond me, but hey, at least there's a history class here.
I definitely like it better than the other school - the professors remind me of the college professors I know back in town. They are cool folks who trust their students, and for the most part, the students return the trust with a maturity that wasn't present in my high school experience. Interior Design is far from my forte, and I think the teachers will soon become exasperated with my extreme incompetence, but I'm learning skills that I really wouldn't have an opportunity to do anything with at home, and that's the whole point of this exchange, right?

Ayodhya
Ayodhya is a site in India (I really don't know where it is) that is purportedly the birthplace of Lord Ram. I'm sure that most of you aren't familiar with him, but he's really really important. It wouldn't be a stretch to call him an equivalent to Moses or someone like that. Jesus probably would be a stretch. The Ramayana, one of the two seminal Hindu religious epic poems, is the tale of Ram. His stature in their religion is exceedingly great.
For obvious reasons, there has always been a temple there, but back in the day (1700s or so), the Mughal Empire (an Islamic dynasty) smashed the temple down and built a mosque there. Then the British came along and the issue was not resolved one way or another. But ever since 1949, there has been a legal battle raging about whether the Hindus should be allowed to have a temple there, or whether the Muslims should have a mosque there. For 60 years this pitched battle has been raging, and today the Allahabad High Court made a decision.
The tension leading up to this decision was incredible. Extreme rioting and violence was predicted all over India no matter which way the decision went - and nobody was really able to predict what the decision was going to be. At the site today there were nearly 200,000 security personnel on hand to stem the potential tides of rioters. The state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located (one state to the south of me) was completely closed. Nobody in or out. Cell phone signals were shut down in some areas. It's nuts.
What the court apparently did was release a 10,000 page verdict. They made it so long so that it would take a really long time to decipher what it's true meaning is (and it's going to be something very simple). Hopefully the Hindus and the Muslims will cool off and no blood will be shed.
This case is a big deal. The potential for riots is keeping home from school for two days. Well, on that front I'm not complaining.

There's some serious unrest on a lot of fronts here - Ayodhya is just an extensin of this. I might post something on all of that unrest next time. But for now, in the spirit of the Brazilian bloggers always writing something in Portuguese at the end, Challo.

Ganpati Part 2

2010-09-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Ganpati Part 2

As you may recall, the festival celebrating Lord Ganesha lasts for 11 days. The final three days of these 11 were pretty fun, at least for me personally. Prior to these experiences, the Ganpatis had been sitting in the societies. Along with the Ganpatis was the presence of some exceptionally loud drums. I must admit, I'm really not used to this kind of obtrusive noise just coming from the street - it's the sort of thing you would actually call the police for in the US. I did get accustomed to it, and eventually I came to realize that what sounded like the sound of some kind of military band was really just two little kids equipped with really loud instruments. And at least they never really did it when I was trying to sleep.

Other than that, every day at about 9 o clock there was a society prayer, which my parents only went to once out of 11 days. One day they hired a professional to come sing religious songs for them. There are always a few people manning each Ganpati station and if you go up to one of them, they will always give you a small handful of some treat, always called Prasad, no matter what food it actually might be.

DAY 10 - This was my first day of the new school, and I actually had homework. So I was resigned to a night of drawing and sketching, which is far from my forte. But Pratik said "Tonight we're going to drive around and see all of the awesome Ganpatis. We won't be back until after 12 and the Ganpatis look really awesome and it's a great cultural opportunity for you and you're coming." Well, I thought "eff it, this is a cultural exchange not an Interior Design exchange". Good decision. There are some really awesome Ganpatis around, and the other thing was that all of the crowds at the Ganpatis were very eager to have a foreigner come to see their beloved Ganpatis, so everyone was immensely friendly to me. We went out for dinner at a tastilicious restaurant and all in all I had a lot of fun. Among the awesome Ganpatis was included one that was riding a gigantic dragon. The dragon was some kind of animatronic thing - it moved, it made noise, and it breathed steam out of its nostrils every 10 seconds. I'll have a bunch of sweet Ganpati photos up on Facebook in the next day or two.
Fortunately Sir was very forgiving at school.

DAY 11 - The final day of the Ganpatis. There was a gathering at our societal Ganpati and everyone in the society that I encountered that day impressed upon me the importance of my attendance and one man who seemed to be running the show told me that he intended for me to make some kind of speech. So I went, after probably my most hair-raising motorcycle ride yet from Akshay (which is really saying something) I arrived at the society's Ganpati.
A spot directly in front of the Ganpati was cordoned off by small wood barriers and all the young guys of the society were in there. They instantly invited me in there. The Ganpati looked amazing - it always does, but they seemed to go all-out on the lights that night. Also, there was an unbelievable amount of Prasad placed in front of the Ganpati. There must have a hundred dishes in front of him. They were all covered up, though, so I couldn't see what they really were.

The nightly ceremony included drums, a bunch of organized religious chanting, and a burning of a giant plate covered with candles. My bit ended up being that I went up and was asked what I thought of the Ganpati celebration (I enjoyed very much!), led a recitation of the Gayatri Mantra (which is something I say everyday in yoga), and then led the crowd in a very simple Ganpati cheer. All of it seemed to go over very well. Everyone is always very excited when a foreigner does anything related to their own religion.

After that, Pratik told me that my yoga teacher had specifically invited me to come to her society and see their Ganpati finale celebrations. I was surprised and rather touched by the invitation. So we went to see that. Theirs was a little less organized and more relaxed. People were just sitting around the large central courtyard of the society, watching little kids participate in these goofy games. They reminded me of the Field Days we used to have back in elementary school. Kids were doing things like having races holding spoons with lemons in their mouths, trying to go as fast as they could without dropping the lemon. I liked both experiences quite a bit.

DAY 12 - Technically, I suppose, there are 12 days, the last one being where the Ganpatis are taking to the river. I've discovered that the Ganpatis are made of some sort of hardened sand, so that when they are dumped in the Tapi River they will just disintegrate into the water. I think. Not a hundred percent sure on that. Apparently the Ganpatis this year are eco-friendly, as in they are supposed to not pollute the water at all. I can only applaud this idea, as the Tapi River, for all of its merits, is abominably polluted, and the thought of dumping a bunch of dissolving statues with potentially harmful chemicals into it made me cringe. It was an eventful day in the city. It was tough to get around in the streets. The Ganpati processions stop for no traffic. Also the unsmiling cops were really out in force today, and they were pretty heavily armed with shotguns and assault rifles. Apparently this is a pretty big drinking day, despite booze of any kind being completely outlawed in Gujarat.

For this, my family went to the home of my mothers parents on the other side of the river. Before the Ganpatis are dumped into the river, they are loaded onto trucks and paraded through the streets one last time. Their house has a balcony that overlooks an especially well-traveled Ganpati parade street, so it was another great place to see a bunch of Ganpatis. Another thing, once all of the people sitting on the trucks saw that a gora was taking photos from the balcony, they got really excited and started making poses and offering me huge encouragements to take photos, which was very amusing to me. It was a very enjoyable day for me. I like the food at my grandparents house a lot, and I also like them a lot, so all of that was good. They rent out part of their house to a young doctor, and actually we seem to have kind of a standing invitation to just come to his apartment anytime we feel like it. And actually it's in his part of the building that the balcony with the view is located. So we passed most of the day alternating between watching the Amitabh Bachchan classic Sholay (which, by the way, is an awesome movie) and stepping out to the balcony to see all of the neat Ganpatis passing by. Also my grandma made chicken as a surprise for me. I nearly cried with joy.

So overall, I've definitely enjoyed this festival and I'm going to miss seeing all of these cool statues about when I move around the city. Ah well. There's no shortage of other upcoming festivals, that's for sure.

I was going to write about my new school, but this post has become quite lengthy anyways. So I'll save it for another day.

Ganpati part 1 and other updates

2010-09-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

Time for a Hindu mythology lesson/Indian history lesson about the latest festival.

Once upon a time, Shiva (one of the big 3 Hindu Gods, along with Brahma and Vishnu) left his home for a very extended time to go up to Mount Khailash in the Himalayas to meditate (this mountain is real and apparently if you climb it you are liable to find Shiva there - of course the catch is that you have to climb one of the Himalayas). During the early part of his approx. 20-year absence, his wife Parvati had a son, a fellow named Ganesha. Being the son of a god, Ganesha was rather a powerful guy. Anyways, upon his return Shiva attempted to enter his house. His young son had been told by his mother to let no strangers into the house. And he and his father had never met. Shiva became quite enraged with the impertinence of whom he thought was a simple doorman, so he broke through the door and beheaded his son.

Being informed of his horrific mistake, Shiva ordered his closest servant to go out into the woods, behead the first animal he saw, and to bring the head to Shiva. The animal turned out to be an elephant. So Shiva fixed the elephants head to the neck of his son and revived him. His wife said something along the lines of "who is ever going to worship a God with an elephant head?" At which point Shiva decided to vest quite extraordinary powers in his son so that people would worship him. From that point on, Ganesha became the number one deity asked for advice.

Now the history part. It's not quite as lengthy. In the early days of the Indian revolutionary movement, leaders needed a place to meet. So they contrived a festival in which everyone in a community gathered to pray to a statue of Lord Ganesha. In revolutionary days it was a foil, but they decided that they liked it, so they kept it.

Begininng on September 11th (this year at least, it changes every year through unknown determining factors), in every society (which is just what they mean by neighborhood) a Ganpati comes. A Ganpati is a sizable statue of Lord Ganesha. It could be made out of anything. Most are made, I think, of some kind of plastic material, but that kind of makes it sound less fancy than it is. I believe a few are from porcelain, and there's this really cool one around that's made of newspaper. That one's my favorite. Basically all of them are giant statues of elephants with a bunch of adornments like Indian clothes and jewelry. They're extremely attractive.

For weeks a kind of stage has been sitting in our society, and on Saturday the Ganpati came to it. This event was very exciting for the people of the society. Apparently they really love Lord Ganesha. It was celebrated with trademark record-settingly loud drums and some dancing. I participated, as usual exceptional self-conscious about my own dancing. It was pretty fun but was unfortunately rained about by a completely unexpected and cataclysmic monsoon rain. Ah well. I still like the rain. It's one of my favorite parts of this.

For the rest of the 11-day festival, the Ganpati really just sits there. At nine o clock every night, a kind of prayer specialist visits our society and leads those who choose to come in a kind of chanted prayer. I haven't actually been to this because, I don't know, my family doesn't ask me to and I kinda feel like it would be rude to just gawk at a bunch of people doing something very seriously religious to them.

I would post some pictures of the Ganpati but with my Internet connection it would take like, hours. And I apologize, but I just don't want to do that. For some reason the Facebook uploader works very quickly (relatively speaking, of course), so that's where I publish stuff mostly.

Other News
I've never really been completely healthy here. The climate is just so very different from the US, and the food, while tasty, is not what I'm used to and sometimes it messes with my stomach. I'm frequently exhausted during the day, but oddly enough I have a lot of trouble getting to sleep at night. I also have really nasty headaches a lot. Right now everything has culminated with a bout of fever, headache, stomacheache and all sorts of other disgusting details that are unnecessary. It's getting very annoying to me that I can't stay healthy here, but I guess that's just a part of adjusting to a new climate. I mean, I don't get sick that much in the US, and this is honestly just about the most unpleasant I have ever felt in my life.

I have a new school. It's a college for Interior Design and Architecture. I love it, based on the one day that I toured it before I came down with this abominable illness. It's clean (Shardayatan has about 50 metric tons of trash all over the place), the students seem to have moved passed the age of 6, and they actually learn. More on all of this later. I must say, Interior Design has never exactly been my calling. As in I have absolutely no experience or prior interest. But nonetheless, it seems fairly interesting, and Sam Estenson probably didn't think he would be going to a Fishery school when he signed up for Rotary, so I can deal. And my other exchange student friends will be there too. It runs from 8 AM to 230 AM, attendance is compulsory, and there's school on Saturday. So basically it's like a school day in the US, except for the Saturday. I think it might be nice to get into kind of a busy school rhythm again. It'll feel like I'm living a little bit more normal life.

I've also started a guitar class four days a week, and I think I might buy a guitar so I can practice at home. And guitars, like everything, cost about an 1/8 as much here as in the US, so that seems to be an excellent life investment for me to make. So between the new school, yoga, and guitar, I suddenly find myself exponentially more busy than I have been previously, which is definitely a good thing. I've been talking to some past India-exchange students, and a lot of them say they were having trouble finding things to keep busy with early on. Indian school is unfortunately just so completely worthless to an outsider that it's tricky to find things to do. I consider myself quite lucky all of this has fallen into my lap.

At War with the Mystics

2010-09-12T05:34:00.000-07:00

Faith is intertwined into everyday life here to a much greater extent than in the US. It would be cruel and inaccurate to call it blind faith, I think, but they follow the words of their holy mythology very literally and without question. My brother was telling me a story that had great similarities to that of Noah's Ark, and I told him that in Christianity we have a very similar myth. He told me that it was no myth, it was the truth. Whereas I take most of the Bible's stories as metaphorical, my family, and most other Indians that I have spoken to, quite literally believe every tale, every miracle that has been worked by their gods, even though, like in the Bible, some of them are ludicrous.

This devotion also lends itself to faith in other forms of mysticism that are not directly related to Hindu religion. There is a cult astrological devotion in this country - it's actually very similar to the planetary work that Professor Trelawney has Harry do (I'm sorry for more Harry Potter references). Mars sits in the 12th house tonight and that sort of thing. Anyway, Pratik has a friend who is an astrologer. I hadn't met him before, but given my birthday, time, and location, he was able to formulate a series of life predictions about me. Now there is no credence to these predictions. It remains to be seen whether or not he is right.

There were a few things that startled me though - he predicted, three days before it happened (and I was there to see his prediction) that I would have a problem in my left eye. I completely forgot about it because I mostly disregard this astrology as BS. But three days later my left eye was swollen and irritable. Pratik reminded me of the prediction, and I was quite surprised.
In his prediction write-up, this friend included a few paragraphs about my nature and personality, and I must admit, about 75% of the time he is spot on, so directly, precisely accurate that it's hard to believe that it's chance.

Now I'm going to talk about another form of truth-predicting that my family does. There's this guy who comes who subscribes to a Japanese-originated form of healing/mysticism/mind-reading called Raki (that might not be how it's spelled but that is how it's pronounced). He came to the house a couple weeks ago. He had never met me. He asked me the usual introductory stuff - where are you from, how many brothers and sisters you have, all that stuff. Nothing that he could gauge anything from. Then he told me "your favorite school subject is history". Which is right, and there is no way he could have known this. The scary thing is, in their country, history is not even a subject. So for him to so accurately select history is to pick a topic that he really doesn't even consider a topic. He spent about 15 minutes telling me things about myself and my family, again with about 75% accuracy. The Raki-uncle has been doing healing work on my Mom, who has problems with her knee and with depression. He's also apparently going to see Akshay successfully through his exams. Pratik is trying to lose weight - the Raki man has given him very specific advice on exactly what to eat on different days in order to do so.

I'm not a religious guy, and most religious and beliefs of this nature, I kind of take with a grain of salt. But I mean, these guys knew a lot about me. There's plenty of proof for me that their stuff works, all of their astrology and Raki mumbo-jumbo. In the US, this kind of junk is laughable. But here, most people subscribe to it, and worryingly enough, it seems to work. I feel like some crazy idiot listening to it, but I've seen it work.

It creeps me out. It also makes me think.

Janmastami

2010-09-04T04:37:00.000-07:00

I can only say with maybe 80% confidence that I correctly spelled the name of the latest Indian festival. But I can say with 100% confidence that it was awesome.

It definitely seems to be festival season, and it doesn't seem to show any signs of stopping. There's another one next Thursday in which giant statues of the Lord Ganesha are going to be delivered to every society. More on that when I get to it.

Anyways, Janmastami comes to me only a week and two days after the last highly enjoyable festival, Rakshabandhan. Janmastami celebrates the birthday of Lord Krishna, who is a very important God in Hindu culture. I believe that the story goes that Krishna was born in jail, where his maternal uncle was keeping his mother captive. At the moment of his birth, midnight, his father rescued him and put him into a foster home for safe-keeping. I'm pretty sure the entirety of the story is much more exciting than that, but my brother is asleep right now so I have nothing but Wikipedia to explain it to me.

So the way that they celebrate Krishna's birthday is by smashing pots. What they do exactly is tie a string between two buildings, which is easy on the narrow streets where most societies are located. Then they dangle a pot from the middle of the string. It can be any amount of height off the ground. In my society they were about two stories off the ground. Then people build human pyramids from the ground to try getting someone high enough at the top so that they can smash the pot.

Mostly trained pot-smashing squads do this. At about noon on Thursday the main one in our society was smashed by a team that was traveling around in a truck. All of the team members look hugely happy at all times during this ceremony, dancing and clapping, with thunderous drums accompanying their every action. I saw two pot smashes - one in my society and another one that Pratik and I spotted while we were on the way to his friends house.

In big cities, Mumbai especially, they dangle pots from ridiculous heights, at least 8 or 9 stories. Only the best pot-smashing squads get to attempt to scale these heights. I saw some teams on TV attempting to climb and break some of the pots, and it was just ridiculously high. The situation was ludicrously precarious. I saw one team fall when they were probably five stories off the ground, and the results were cataclysmic. Gigantic crowds come out to watch these events, and the dozens of men kind of basically fell into the crowd. Apparently no one was killed, which is good news that I kind of have difficulty believing. There was one team that traveled all the way from Spain to participate. Also they pay the equivalent of about $200,000 to the squads that successfully break the pots.

So I went to watch 3 Idiots at Pratik's friend's house and we got back at about 9 o clock to discover that there were three new pots strung in the houses right next to mine. I was informed that at midnight, the exact birth time of Lord Krishna, all of the neighborhood kids would get together and smash the pots themselves. At 11:55 the drums, right outside my house, announced the beginning of the event. They were deafeningly loud. Akshay and I went outside and all of the neighborhood boys started to have a psycho, drum-accompanied dance party. I had not met most of these folks yet, and I still don't know most of them by name, but they were extremely welcoming and they seemed plenty excited to have a foreigner in attendance. It was a hugely festive occasion. I was not allowed to be involved in the pyramid by my family for safety-related reasons (disappointing but understandable) but I was still very much a part of the party.

It was very very fun.

I love Aamir Khan

2010-09-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

I have seen three Aamir Khan films this week. I have decided that I have to dedicate an entire post to this fantastic man.

In the cinematic hell that is Bollywood (this is not an insult, it's the truth - they just don't usually make very good movies), Aamir Khan is nothing short of a saint. His movies are Hollywood standards, terrific, and by Bollywood standards, stratospherically superior to anything else on the map.

Now Aamir Khan is a terrific actor, but he has also become a major producer. He produced Lagaan, which was terrific, and Peepli Live, which was an excellent movie that I mentioned in a previous post. He has not produced all that many movies personally, but the production company that he founded has produced quite a few. Also, whenever he makes a movie, apparently he is quite involved in the story and production in some kind of uncredited way.

My first taste of Aamir Khan came long before the idea of Rotary Youth Exchange, much less the destination of India, was anywhere in my thoughts. After the AP Exams, our AP World teacher Mr. Wold screened Aamir Khan's historical cricket epic Lagaan. I think the entire class loved it, me included. It was a fantastic first taste of Bollywood. Lagaan is an awesome movie and thanks to Mr. Wold it has a bit of a cult following in Northfield. Go see it.

On Sunday Pratik, Purav (a friend) and I rented this movie called Mangal Pandey and watched it. It was an unusually good print in that it had English subtitles, which was terrific. It was in a pretty similar vein to Lagaan...an Indian historical epic that demonizes the British. But it was quite dramatic. I didn't like it quite as much as Lagaan but it was still way above the average Bollywood film.

Then there was this drama called Rang de Basanti. It was a very complicated movie and I won't explain it, but it was basically a very well-done statement on how the numerous problems of the Indian government (namely the incredibly pervasive corruption) are derailing the youth of India. He starred in it. He was excellent. It was a very good movie, daringly dark by Bollywood standards.

Today, though, I watched 3 Idiots, which features, among other things, a fantastically unpromising title. 3 Idiots is the highest grossing movie in Indian history (but in the Avatar way -unadjusted for inflation, I mean). It's a story of three friends at an engineering college where the headmaster rears them to compete like gladiators. It's an indictment of competitive Indian society and it's cutthroat but often completely ineffective educational system. There's very little learning for the sake of learning in school here.
Basically it's extremely funny and hugely touching. I usually like to be more emotionally detached when speaking about movies, but 3 Idiots is the rare movie that has the power to change its country (apparently schools are reconsidering the way they do things solely based on this movie) and to really just give a person a huge appreciation and gratitude for the life they are given.
I thought I was watching an American movie - that's the highest compliment I can give it. There was so much care taken in the construction of the story, and the songs were completely different from the usual Bollywood songs that just exist to show off the bodies of the stars. They were songs that were actually trying to make some point that was relevant to the story. And they were musical songs too.

So after watching 3 Idiots, I have had my faith restored in Bollywood. Maybe it is only one out of fifty movies, but every once in a while they can make something really special.

Aamir Khan is responsible for most of these great movies lately. He's amazing.

Rain

2010-08-29T22:28:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I've gone 6+ weeks without saying something about the rain in India. It's psycho crazy scary, to put it simply.
There are 3 seasons in India - winter, summer, and monsoon. Winter, apparently is like 60-70 degrees and it runs from approximately late October to February. Summer runs from March to June. Apparently it's just insufferably hot. Like, 120 degrees hot. I am not as excited for summer. July through October, then, is monsoon season. Now one thing about the precipitation here...in the US, in every season there will be some precipitation. It rains sometimes during spring, summer and fall, and in the winter it just turns to snow. In India, according to my family, monsoon season is the only one where it rains.
It's really hard to describe how hard it can rain here, so I'm going to start with how often. If it doesn't rain in a day it's an extremely unusual day. If it doesn't rain twice in a day then it's an uncommon. I would say two rainfalls a day is about the average. Maybe 2.3 or something.
Now not every rain is ridiculous. There are many times where it just kind drizzles. Other times it rains pretty much as it does in the US. About a fourth of the time it is harrowing and torrential, and probably about once or twice a week a week there is a rainfall that can only be described as apocalyptic.
I wish that cameras had a good way to photograph how hard rain is falling. It would be very helpful in this instance.
About four or five years ago there was a horrible flood in Surat. Surat is a city prone to flooding because it is built around the banks of the Tapi River. So in this flood the water apparently halfway up the walls in my living room. It rose all the way up to the bridges that cross the river. My family abandoned the ground floor and they all camped on the second floor and the roof. Many people were killed (I'm not really in danger - it was, I believe, mostly slum-dwellers who have no high ground to get to).
The last four days have each featured one of the apocalyptic variations of rain. There was one last night that was the worst yet. Apparently it's going to do the same all of this week and on Thursday there is going to be a rainfall worse than anything I have yet seen, where (and I kid you not) it can fall an inch a minute. The entire family smells a flood but they say it won't be as bad as the one five years ago.
Well, in four days I'll have a report on whether or not I survived the flood-pocalypse.

Some holidays

2010-08-22T03:16:00.000-07:00

They like their holidays here. I knew this before I came…whenever I attempted to learn about the meanings or approximate dates of the holidays I quickly gave up in face of the sheer overwhelming mass of events that they partake in. In the US, it’s basically New Years, Valentines Day, St. Patricks Day, Easter, Veterans Day, 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. That seems like quite a few more than then are actually important. I mean, all that Veterans Day entails for me is a day off from school. Unless you’re somehow connected to the military you don’t do much. And all I’ve ever done for St. Patrick’s Day is remember to wear green about half of the years.

India has tons more. Like, at least 20 or 25. I think when I arrived I was in kind of their festival-hiatus time but now they seem to be coming fast and furious. Part of the reason for this is that there are a ton of different religions in India and they make recognition of all of the holidays. Hindu holidays are obviously the most important, but they note the Muslim, Christian, and Parsee (Zoroastrianism) holidays. I’m not sure about Jewish and Buddhist holidays, but those are two religions that are almost non-existent in India. Even though Buddhism originated in India, it moved out a long time ago to most other parts of southern, eastern, and northern Asia. It left India for good quite a long time ago.

Since I got here, I can definitively identify three holidays that have happened. The first was Indian Independence Day, which was on Sunday August 15th. I would be annoyed with not having the day off from school but I don’t go to school enough for it to really matter. They don’t take this holiday quite as seriously as we take the 4th of July. All over Surat in the morning there are flag-hoisting ceremonies. I attended one with my dad and a bunch of other Rotarians at a school for the deaf and dumb that our Rotary club sponsors. It seems like they have promoted me to club photographer based solely on the fact that I have a nice camera. I got up quite early and went to the ceremony. While we were driving we could see these flag-hoisting ceremonies all over the place. All sorts of groups hold them – offices, businesses, schools. Most schools hold ceremonies were the students are politely requested, but not required, to attend. I can be considered a part-time student at best at Shardayatan and I really didn’t want to go to that place so I elected to attend this other one with the Rotary club.

That day was the same day as the first district-wide orientation, which was about an hour and a half away from Surat. It was very similar to one of our Rotary orientations so I’m not going to bore with the details of the various lectures that were given to us. But on the way back, I saw a bunch of folks walking barefoot along the road dressed in traditional clothes of orange. The line of people went on for miles. It was explained to me that they make some barefoot pilgrimage to the sea on Independence Day. The reason for this pilgrimage was not really explained to me. But it was a neat sight.

There was a Parsee holiday later that week. It seemed to be recognized by everyone but it had absolutely no impact on my life, school, or the activities of the city as far as I could tell.
Tuesday the 24th of August was a Hindu festival called Rakshabandhan. I’ve been imagining these Hindu festivals as kind of crazy dance parties in the street. I think a few of them are like that, but most of them, and this one, are mostly family oriented. Rakshabandhan celebrates the relationship of brother and sister. To celebrate this relationship, the sister ties a symbolic band to the brothers’ left wrist. This symbolizes that the sister can supposedly reach her brother at any time that she needs him.

The definition of sister and brother is pretty loose. My two brothers have no sisters but nonetheless earned a number of bands from a couple cousins, their maid, and a couple of family friends. I was expecting zilch bands since I was a neither a Hindu nor in possession of any family sisters. But I got one from my host cousin Prachi and one from a family friend whose name I don’t know (this is not my fault, nobody introduced us). We hung out with my dad’s sisters’ family for most of the day, which was fun. For lunch, however, we went to the home of my mom’s parents. I had not met them before. They are very unusual in that they are grandparents living alone. They only have the one child (my mother) and our house is occupied by my dad’s parents. Plus I don’t really think that grandparents go to live with their daughters. They are elderly but seem to do quite well, and nobody, including them, seems too concerned about their lack of youthful support in their old age.

I was surprised to find myself alarmed at this. I mean, all of the grandparents that I’ve ever known live by themselves, and they do just fine. It was a sign that I’m thinking a bit like an Indian. It has now become the norm, in my head, that grandparents should have young folks that they can live with. The fact that somehow my mindset has been changed without me knowing it makes me uncomfortable. I think the essential reason that I’ve never thought I’m going to have a great exchange is because while I’m delighted with adapting and participating in this new Indian culture, I’ve never wanted to embrace it. I’ve never wanted my mindset to become Indian rather than American. I don’t want to think like an Indian. It’s not like I have a problem with how they think. I guess I’m just resistant to permanent changes in my thinking.
I shouldn’t be. This is not what Rotary wants of me. But I can’t help it.

An Extensive Compare and Contrast Discussion of Hollywood and Bollywood

2010-08-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

This post is more for my own purposes than yours. I just felt like writing a discussion on this topic.

It happens that movies are one of my biggest interests, and from that perspective, India is a great country for me to visit. I've certainly made mention of my early experiences with Bollywood films already in this blog, but I'd like to write a fairly extensive piece on the differences between Bollywood and Hollywood, which are large. It might end up being kind of a nerdy, lengthy piece with references to lots of old movies. As always, don't bore yourself if this doesn't exactly strike your fancy. I've been slowly putting this together a bit at a time for quite a few days, so it might seem quite fragmented.

A good place to start is to give their definition of the phrase "Hollywood ending". What we call a Hollywood ending would be something like this - hero defeats the bad guy handily, gets the girl, nobody important dies, everyone lives happily ever after. That's not what they would call a Hollywood ending. We watched Gladiator, an awesome movie in which, at the ending, the main character slaughters the villain but loses his life in the process. The Indians hated that part. They said it had a Hollywood ending. I told them "no it doesn't, he dies, it's a little unusual, that's part of what makes it a good movie". They said "A Hollywood ending is a bad (unhappy) ending. And that makes it a worse movie".

Now this got me thinking - the phrase "Hollywood ending" used to mean what it does isn't exactly accurate. Lots of Hollywood movies end happily, but there are just as many, if not more, that don't. Titanic - for a very long time, the highest-grossing movie of all time. It's one of the quintessential blockbusters of our generation - far from a happy ending. The Dark Knight - also high up there. Not a happy ending. If you look at the adjusted for inflation list, Gone With the Wind tops the list and probably will never be defeated. That doesn't exactly end happily either. Casablanca - often regarded as one of the greatest Hollywood achivements of all time. Not a happy ending for the main protagonist. On the adjusted list The Exorcist is 9th. This is a brutal dark horror movie with an ending that is bittersweet at best. The Godfather and Citizen Kane are usually interchangeable on the lists of Greatest All-Time American films. Unhappy endings. The list goes on and on and on - the recent Spiderman trilogy, Forrest Gump, The Sixth Sense, Terminator 2 are all other blockbusters with bittersweet or unhappy endings.

Now granted, for each of these there's a Star Wars, or an Iron Man, or an Indiana Jones, or any romantic comedy, and there are probably many more of these than there are ones with unhappy or bittersweet endings. But still...you can see how they latched onto the concept that a Hollywood ending is a less than joyous one.

It makes even more sense when you look at the qualifications for a good Bollywood film. A good Bollywood movie has, for want of a better phrase, what we would call a "Hollywood ending". It has to. The hero cannot die. It also MUST have songs. At least 3 or 4, and preferably 5 or 6. Additionally, it should usually have one of the 5 or 6 rotating male actors and/or one of the rotating female leads.

The only time that Indians make exception to their happy endings rule is when it is a story involving a martyr from their own history. They have a lot of movies where oppressed freedom fighters are executed or something like that, and these types of movies are played out very melodramatically. The Indians don't mind - national pride is the exception to their happy ending rule, and there is a great deal of healthy nationalism in this country.

The guys are Akshay Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan (according to Wikipedia he is the biggest film star in the world), Salman Khan, Aamir Khan (I'll discuss him in a second), Ritik Kroshan (I'm 500% sure I spelled that one wrong), Ajay Devgan and Abhishek Bacchan (son of the legendary Amitabh Bacchan). Now these guys, with almost no exception, always play heroes. Nothing else. Not complicated heroes. Good guys. The only variance in character is in their levels of funniness or badassery. Villains...nobody knows who plays them. You play a villain once, you're a villain for life. And villains there are not charismatic or entertaining. They are just mindless, ugly thugs, for the most part. Typecasting is extremely common in Bollywood, for both heroes and villains. There's nothing in between, by the way. There aren't antiheroes. Generally, we have only perfect heroes and despicable baddies.

Most of these men come out with about 3, maybe 4 movies a year. Shah Rukh Khan is especially prolific. Aamir Khan is the exception to every Bollywood rule. He only comes out with one film a year, and it's usually one of the best. His latest was 3 Idiots, which sounds awful but was given extreme critical acclaim and became the highest-grossing Bollywood movie in history. It's your typical Bollywood movie...big star, songs, the like. But it apparently makes a very modernizing statement by Indian standards. In India, there is sometimes a lot of pressure given by parents on to students that they get some kind of very well-paying job - specifially engineering, a competitive and tricky field. In 3 Idiots there is a character who was forced by his parents to go to this engineering school and he hates it. But he is a very talented photographer. Aamir Khan is basically trying to say that young Indians should be allowed to do their own thing instead of conforming to their parents desires. This is a very progressive statement by Indian standards.
The other thing about Aamir Kahn is that he has founded a very highly regarded production company. I saw the latest of that production company in theaters. More on that later.

The ladies - there are three huge ones and an array of lesser ones. The biggest one, I think, is Karina Kapoor, closely followed by Katrina Kaief and Priyanka Chopra (the foxiest by far). There are a few others, including Lara Dutta and Karishna Kapoor (Karina's older sister) but these three are the biggest. The famous Aishwarya Rai retired several years ago after a blockbuster wedding to Abhishek Bacchan. There is one large hyprocrisy about the way that these ladies behave in films. Bollywood dances are very very sexual. They were ludicrous outfits designed specifically to arouse. Yet you will never see one of these leading ladies kiss their leading man. Pratik has told me that all of the big female stars don't allow what he call "the kiss shot". But by American standards a kiss is very tame compared to some of the things that they do. This is very unusual to me.

Now I have seen bits and pieces of probably a couple dozen Bollywood films at this point but there are three that I have seen in their entirety. They are all quite different from each other, and taking a look at each of them reveal interesting things what Indians think about their movies.

The first is the latest from Aamir Khan's production company, a film called Peepli (Live) which was unusually similar to an American film. I saw it in a fairly empty theater with a screen larger than the Muller Monster Screen. The movie was about an issue that India faced in the 90s. Agriculture employs over 50% of Indians but in the 90s and early 2000s a lot of farmers were facing forclosure on their homes, which would be really catastrophic and crippling for them and their families. A governmental loophole became widely known amongst the farmers, which was that the government would heavily compensate the family of a man who had committed suicides. So there came to be a large issue of farmer suicides. Peepli (Live) follows a farmer who is deciding whether or not to commit suicide. He is a squat, rather unpleasant looking man who is not portrayed by any of the chief Bollywood actors. The film is fictional (but based on real events) and it is filmed in a pseudo-documentary style. It focuses on multiple characters - the farmer, his family, a crusading TV journalist (one of dozens who descend upon the farm to make the suicide a kind of a human interest story), and politicians. There are no big actors and they all look like real people. The end is only middlingly happy. There are no songs.

I thought it was a damn good film and the sort of thing that would be good fodder for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award. The Indians hated it - they said "no action, no comedy, no stars, no songs". It seems derogatory to say this, but they seemed mostly concerned with the most superficial aspects of movies.

The second is called Once Upon a Time in Mumbai. It stars Adjay Devgan, who is one of my favorites, and some gorgeous Indian women. It's a gangster epic set in 70s Mumbai that follows the rise and eventual assassination of a gangster called the Sultan. But the Sultan is a good guy. It utilized a lot more realism than most Bollywood movies do, but it definitely had a distinct Bollywood flavor - several songs and very Bollywood-style romance scenes. Although the hero was killed at the end, the Indians were ok with this because the murderer, one of his subordinates, was still alive. They said that he counted as a hero too. I don't know how they rationalized this. For me it was a very entertaining movie, and it was for them too. It was one of the few successful cross-sections between American and Bollywood style movies that I have seen yet. My brother gave it 4 out of 5 stars. I asked him why not 5. He said there weren't enough songs. I could have called it.

The third was a very, very typical Bollywood film starring Akshay Kumar and Karina Kapoor called Kambakkta Ishqi. It's kind of a battle of the sexes between Akshay and Karina. There are 6 or 7 songs. In the movie, Karina plays a model/doctor (the most plausible combination) who appears in a film where Akshay Kumar is a stuntman. They clash. Somehow she ends up performing a surgical procedure on him and sews her watch into his stomach. Then she sidles up to him and tries to get close enough to him (as in seduce him) so that she can secretly knock him out and get her watch back. There are other developments that involve surprise appearances from Hollywood "stars" Denise Richards and Sylvester Stallone. It's an incredibly stupid movie. I mean, just listen to the plot. It's very popular in India - sexy leads, catchy songs, happy endings. Superficial stuff.

So Indians hate an issue drama, like a romanticized gangster film, and love an idiotic romantic comedy. What does this tell us about Indian moviegoers and Indians as a society? They fall on the entertainment side of the classic art vs. entertainment debate. Hollywood is a lot more in between the two. Why is this? Why do Americans have a little more preference to darker or more realistic movies and Indians loathe them?

I think it comes down to lifestyle. Indians use film as escapism. And this is understandable - over half of India lives in impoverished agricultural circumstances. Millions more live in slums. Their lives are a little tougher - their houses are not as nice, they don't have as much variety of food. India is in many places a developed nation but a huge percentage of the population is woefully impoverished. Indians live a fairly tough life. I mean, it's not like it's AIDS-infected Africa, but it's not the Western world either. I can see why they don't want to see more of it - I can understand why Peepli (Live) would not do well. They want to see something that will make them happy, something that will show them beautiful people living in places that are far too nice to really be India having happy endings. Now my family lives comfortably, but their tastes are descended from those of their forefathers, and I completely understand how those tastes came to be.

In the United States even many families that would be considered poor live in better circumstances than Indians do. Most families live in far better circumstances. Emotionally we don't always need escapism. Our lives are nice. It's ok for us to watch an unhappy movie. In the United States, there's more of a market for darker and perhaps more artistic movies. In fact they are certainly more artistic movies.

So it would be easy for me to dismiss a Bollywood musical as fluffy trash. They are, there's really no getting around that. But they are undeniably fun. I would take a Bollywood romantic comedy over The Holiday any day. They go over the top to entertain, and the sheer effort is infectious. As long as I can watch an American movie every once in a while (and they do sometimes go to American movies) I think I will mostly enjoy the Bollywood world.

Up and Down

2010-08-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

Without going into dull emotional details, I have to say when Rotary said that I would experience mood swings...good Lord were they right. In this day alone I've gone from overjoyed to inconsolable to pretty good to pretty bad to (right now) fairly contented.

Recent positives:
- It seems that the Rotary Club of Udhna realizes that it's school system is much less pleasant and accessible than that of the Western world, and that even though there are supposed to be tough adjustment parts of exchanges, their school system is just too much. So...I'm going to fill up my day with a bunch of different classes instead and only go to school when I feel like it. The deal is, of course, that I make sure I find things to do, to which I am only too happy to oblige. I want to find things to do. But...not so much school.

- Yoga is marvelous. Because of the feminine connotations associated with yoga in the states I was initially reluctant to do it, but it's a really terrific thing to do. It's good physically, for all parts of the body and it's emotionally calming. The latter is the main reason why I'm feeling pretty ok at the moment.

- The food is getting SO much better. I'm still struggling with no meat. In fact I don't there will ever be a moment where a big juicy hamburger isn't at the back of my mind. But I have still found a handful of dishes that rival anything I've ever eaten in the states. Firstly, there's Allo Puri. Puri, first of all, is tied with roti as their primary flatbread (there's no Naan to be found in Gujarat, despite Kurry Kabab and Chapati's insistence that Indian meals begin with them). Roti is the bread of choice in my house - I slightly prefer Puri. Allo Puri is...well now that it comes down to describing it I don't have a clue what the hell all goes into it. It's basically about a dozen pieces of puri with a bunch of stuff on it. It's delectable. Then there's Pani Puri. Pani means water (it's one of about 10 Gujarati words that I know). What they do is take puri and kind of blow it up into hollowed puffballs, but it's still mostly crunchy and hard on the outside. Anyways, you break a small hole into the puri puff and dip it in water, filling up the inside. It's a wonderful sensation, and it's not horribly hot/spicy like most of the foods here. Also they drink mango juice a lot and its tremendous. There's a dish my brothers call Manchurian and it is a Chinese dish. It's got kind of veggie meatballs all meshed together in a really tasty, thick Chinese sauce. This one is spicy, but I'm beginning to adjust to the spice. One final delicious food is something I don't know the name of. It's a breakfast food. So probably once a week or so Akshay and I venture into the Muslim part of town to look for this food item, which is a very hot and middlingly spicy soup. The broth is different from ours - it's not at all like chicken broth. The vendors heap a handful of ingredients (noodles, onions, small pieces of egg, CHICKEN!!!!!!!! and a bunch of other things I don't know) into the broth and mash it all together. It's very delicious. I'm happy to say that I could go on and on about things that I like here. But I will stop.

Downs:

- Actually there's only one down. But it's a gigantic down. I dropped my Nook. I was just walking with it and I bumped into the desk in my room and it dropped and now the screen doesn't work. This is truly catastrophic. I brought like 2 actual books. My Nook is one of my primary sources of entertainment. I mean, it's still early on and my classes and stuff are still being sorted out, so I lead a fairly quiet life. I try and spend most of it reading. It's not all that healthy to be on the computer so much. So I've been using my Nook probably 2 or 3 hours a day. It's a great device.

I'm a huge idiot-face.

Pirated DVDs and Yoga

2010-08-09T12:10:00.000-07:00

Pratik has a friend who has the most amazing home theater system I've ever seen. Projector, incredible surround sound systen, Blu-Ray player. And his projecting screen is massive. It seems like Pratik and his crew of friends go over there to watch movies a lot. It's kind of the Ted's Basement of this particular friend group. Anyways, the movies that I've watched there were 1) a legitimately purchased Blu-Ray DVD of Gladiator in English (which was awesome because Gladiator is one of my all-time favorite movies. The Indians didn't like it because the old-fashioned dialogue was tricky and it was quite long) 2) Angels and Demons in Hindi (I have no idea what on earth was going on) and 3) The A-Team in English.
Now The A-Team came out about two months ago. It should not be on DVD. I had been informed by Max that there is a ton of pirated movies over there for ridiculously cheap, but I didn't realize they could get them so quickly.

Today I went to a DVD street vendor with Akshay. They sell pirated DVDs in 5 or 6 packs there, all on one computer disc. I was even more surprised to discover that about 20 of the DVD packs included Salt. Which is three weeks old. How do they do this? And it's not as though these are like, cell phone videos sneakily taken from inside of a theater. It's the actual movie.
Pirating movies is something that I'm very, very morally opposed to but when in Rome...
So I purchased 11 total movies for 60 rupees, about $1.33. I bought them on the promise from the street vendor (who turned out to be just as shifty as he looked) that they would all be English rather than dubbed in Hindi. Or rather he told Akshay this in Gujarati, and since Akshay believed him, so did I. It was literally the exact opposite. The one that he said would be in Hindi is the only one in English and the others are in either Hindi or, inexplicably, French. That's what I get for compromising my morals.

My yoga class has started. I was under the impression that yoga consisted of strange positionings of your body and like, balance and flexibility stretches. I'm sure that there are multiple interpretations of yoga, but in my experience it's quite different. There are three main components of it.
1) The seven stages. I can't remember what all of these are but they are basically many different variations on breathing in and out. I won't bore you with extensive descriptions of each of them but suffice it to say that especially in the case of Kopal-Bati, the second stage, it's not quite as easy as it sounds.
2) Body stretches and exercises. These aren't what I thought they would be. I thought it would be putting my body into some obscene position and holding it for as long as you can. That's really not true. It's mostly just aerobic stuff - leg swings, these weird kind of situps, and other pieces that bear unusual similarities to the core that we do in Nordic. And actually some of them are fairly difficult. Sometimes I hear Kust shouting in my head for me to "suck up the pain! Be a man!".
3) The religious aspect. Yoga is not just good physically, it's also a tenet of the Hindu religion. A lot of Hindus do it every day. We always open with chanting the Gayatri Mantra. It's a bunch of words in Hindu. I've almost got it. I haven't the slightest idea what it means, but I have confidence that it's important. They also say the word "om" a lot. It means peace, I think. They have a lot of different variations on the ways that they say it - eyes closed, eyes open, say it fast twenty times, say it for as long as you can while covering up your ears. Also in the middle of the sessions we always have an eyes-closed two minute meditation session. I am told to focus my mind and think about my own god. I always spend the two minutes thinking about what I think about Catholicism in my head and before I reach any conclusion they are up.
I will admit, it seem to be good for all parts of the body. And I can do lots of it on my own. In fact I am recommended by my family to do 10 or 15 minutes of yoga 2 hours after every meal.
It's become one of my favorite hours of the day because I like exercise, because it's good to be doing something outside of school or reading on their porch, and because it's at least one hour out of the day where my mind feels at peace. I will admit that's something I could use at the moment.

Understanding Vegetarianism

2010-08-07T02:11:00.000-07:00

Now I don't mean to offend any vegetarians out there, but for my entire life I've always been extremely exasperated with vegetarians. I've always known also that this is ignorant of me, and perhaps "vegetarianist" but I just can't help it. The idea of going a day without meat by choice is unfathomable to me. I mean, it's MEAT for goodness sakes. How could a person go through their entire lives without chicken, steak, burgers, hot dogs, ribs, bacon, pork, turkey, wings, ham, salami, sausage, roast beef and brisket? I mean, they are so delicious. In the United States, I hardly go a single meal without one of the above.
In India overall about a third of the population is vegetarian, but in Gujarat the percentage is much higher, over 2/3. And it's mostly the elder folks that are vegetarians, so really most people eat vegetarian. So, for example, in my household, my brothers and I will eat non-veg, but my parents and grandparents are vegetarians, so really everyone eats vegetarian.
There's this soda shop that I usually go to with Akshay at about 1 in the morning, and at the time of night there are sometimes unusual folks there. Yesterday there was a British Hindu couple and the man in it explained vegetarian philosophy. There are two reasons for it.
1) I'm sure you've guessed one of these is religious. In Hindu religion, God is part of everyone and so if you kill anything, you're killing God or destroying his creation. And cows, of course, are absolutely off-limits.
2) This one I didn't know about. The claims that they have scientific beliefs that biologically, humans should not be eating meat and that eating meat makes us sick. He says that's why humans get ill all of the time and animals don't. He cited examples like how we don't have teeth equipped for ripping meat the way that predators do. He also says that since our intestines are like, 36 feet long if you stretch them out, somehow means that we shouldn't eat meat.

I'm extraordinarily skeptical of the second line of reasoning, but religious reasons, when they're explained to me like that...well I can't really argue with them. And frankly I respect them. This marked the first time in my life I gained a little understanding and respect of the thought of vegetarianism. So that's one eye-opening thing that has happened here at the very least.

Now, if I come back to the states a vegetarian...if you are my friend you will force-feed me a steak. There's a limit to how far this vegetarian stage of my life is going to go. Even if when I get back I cry and scream and beg that I have become vegetarian, change me back. I can let India change me a lot, but Ted Meyer is a carnivore for life.

The cost of living and some stories

2010-08-05T11:49:00.000-07:00

Let me give you some prices of things that I've purchased in India and the approximate US dollar equivalent.
Soda - 5 Rupees - 11 cents
Ice Cream - 20 Rupees - 43 cents
Subway Footlong - 170 rupees - 3 dollars and 67 cents
T-Shirt - 170 Rupees - 3 Dollars and 67 cents
Movie Ticket - 130 Rupees - 2 dollars and 16 cents
I have one more great example. This year, for the World Cup, I wanted a Dutch jersey. Jakob and I looked at literally every single store in the Mall of America for jerseys. I found one Dutch jersey in the whole place. It cost 35 dollars. It didn't have anyone's name on it. It wasn't even orange. It was their secondary uniform.
Yesterday Akshay and I went shopping for soccer jerseys. There was good selection available (unfortunately no Sneijder or Robben). I purchased, for 180 rupees or $3.89 a BARCELONA CLUB JERSEY OF LIONEL MESSI. It's high quality. Like, actually jersey material. What do you think that would have cost if I had found it in the United States? $70? Or more? Ridiculous.
So if you haven't figured it out, things are preposterously inexpensive over here. When I discovered that my monthly allowance was the equivalent of $20 per month I was extraordinarily skeptical but I shouldn't have been.
Here's my dad's economic rationale of the low prices. There are over a billion people here. So there's a lot more demand for everything. A shopkeeper can sell something at about a third of the price we would sell it at in the United States and sell many more units than any U.S. shopkeeper could hope to. Hypothetically, the money would come out about the same. This doesn't take into account all of the additional selling competition that would arise from having a billion people, many of whem would be other shopkeepers. I still don't quite understand it, but I'm sure that my dad's explanation isn't all that far off.
What the country lacks in goods prices it makes up for in land prices. Land is scarce around here, especially in big cities, and I must say everywhere I go the country seems packed to the brim. My dad is a middle or upper middle class kind of guy, but his house (or bungalow, as they call all houses) is much, much smaller than mine in the United States. But it's quite comfortable. The thing is, in every household there are a lot of people living in it. In ours, for example, there's me, Pratik, Akshay, Mom, Dad, Ba (Grandma), Dada (Grandpa) and the maid. That's 8. Eight people in my house in the U.S. is a stretch, but somehow we all fit comfortably into this one. I think it's because they don't have extensive recreational space - most of the rooms are used as bedrooms.
It makes sense why land is so expensive - there are over a billion people, mostly all trying to work in one of the bigger cities, and there is just not nearly as much land as there is in the United States. The population per square mile ratio must be out of control.

Yesterday I came downstairs to find a man that I hadn't seen before, which is not unusual. People bop in and out all the time. What WAS unusual was that he stood up, clapped grabbed both of shoulders and (with the most decibels that I have ever heard in a declaratory statement) told me "I am your MAMA!!!".
Turns out mama means uncle. He's my great-uncle. Fortunately Pratik was there to explain what he meant. I was more than a little shell-shocked by his declaration.

Today my auto rickshaw had 8 people in it, which is high even by my driver's standards. There's an especially small boy who usually rides with me who has yet to take full command of his bodily fluids. He has urinated in his pants twice during rickshaw rides and another time I saw him peeing on the floor of a school bathroom.
Now my rickshaw driver, kindly as he is, seems to have only one professional goal, which is to carefully select the bumpiest route imaginable and dash through it at ridiculously unsafe speeds. Today he chose to hurtle over a speed bump just as this lad decided to throw up. Whatever he had for lunch went flying everywhere. No one in the rickshaw escaped the spray. Fortunately it only got on my pants. The person sitting across from the unfortunate child was not so lucky. I don't think I need to go into further details.

In other news, I think I'm starting daily yoga classes tomorrow, which is great because it's anything other than school. Apparently yoga, in addition to being a physically healthy thing to do, also has a very calming mental effect which I will admit I could use at the moment. Also dance classes are being arranged and my club counselor says that he is close to arranging sitar lessons for me. I can't wait for the sitar.

At long last, some photos

2010-08-03T01:32:00.000-07:00

So with my internet connection it takes about 10 minutes to upload a picture and you have to do them one at a time. So I have edited this post very slowly over several days. Also I haven't exactly been an attentive photojournalist, so most of the really interesting things that I've done have gone undocumented. But here are captions, left to right, top to bottom. They are kind of in reverse chronological order.

1) Mom and Dad at a beach place called Dumas. Great folks

2) This is what a beach looks like in Surat during monsoon season. I know all of you are jealous, especially the Brazilians.

3) The street where I live. This is a pretty upper middle-class neighborhood, which gives you a good idea of the spacing in India. Figure it like this - they have over 3 times the population of the United States in about a third of the actual space. So the cost of land is ridiculously high, and there just really isn't all that much space for people to spread out. My building consists of three fairly narrow stories. Don't get me wrong, I'm plenty comfortable, but everyone justs lives a lot closer together.
4) Every home has some kind of a worship space. Ours is in the basement. Every morning Ba and Dada spend an hour worshipping. On the right is my big brother Pratik.

5) A street in Mumbai. I took this photograph at approximately 1 in the morning. The left side of it gives you a pretty decent idea of what a shop front in India looks like. There's an auto rickshaw, their taxi vehicle, on the right side.

6) In India, Rotary has an organization called Intaract at the high school level and Rotaract at the college level. I was summoned to a Rotaract event where a bunch of college students were to have some sort of a tree planting competition. It seemed like the only reason that I was there was literally so I could pose for this photograph. Which is something that only I have a record of. I don't know the name of the confused-looking Indian student. I haven't seen him before or since.

Too much fun

2010-08-02T00:55:00.000-07:00

This last weekend kicked some serious butt.

Friday
Shardayatan had exams Wednesday through Saturday last week, which was a lifesaver because school is awful. Truly wretched. It gets worse by the day. But anyways, I got up at about nine and did my usual morning tea then play FIFA with Pratik thing. I had to go to the police station afterwords for the third of four trips needed to properly register with the police department (one thing that Indians do not do well is bureaucracy). So far I suppose this doesn't exactly sound like a ton of fun, but right after the police station I went to the new Bollywood gangster epic Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, which was a cool movie. Also the movie theater was very very nice. Better than the Atlantis in Burnsville. Following that, Pratik and I went to Subway.
Subway just about saved my life. Now I really like the food here, and you know I'm being honest because when there's something I don't much like about India I'm usually pretty honest about it on this blog. But it just hasn't settled yet for me. It just doesn't quite do the trick always. It's a satisfaction thing. There's just something about not having meat every day that just doesn't quite work for me yet. Fortunately, Subway in India, despite not having the Chicken and Bacon Ranch that I so adore, did feature a Chicken Meatball Marinara. It was so unbelievably satisfying to have something that tasted even remotely like anything that I had ever eaten before. Nothing in Surat has any similarities to anything in the United States.
The evening wasn't quite as eventful. More FIFA and then a long night of card games and going out for sodas with Pratik and his friends.

Saturday
My mom told me I had to go to school today. I haven't the slightest idea why. They still had exams. But on Saturday school goes from like 11 to 2, so at least I didn't have to get up terribly early. I went in the rickshaw, got there, and everyone was confused why I was there. There were still exams. So I went to the library, which mostly has magazines and academic publications in Hindi or Gujarati. I read one of my books for a bit but then I took a nap for an hour and a half. Then some school friends got me and we went outside to where the rickshaw should be waiting. No rickshaw. So one of my friends drove me home, but a motorcade of about 6 bikes accompanied us - other school kids, I mean. Seemed to be a hell of a lot of trouble so I could go take a nap in the school library. To drive me to Adajan would be kind of like driving someone to Lakeville and back.
Then I went roaming with Akshay and his friends for the rest of the afternoon. We just kind of went around and ran errands that they wanted to go on - soccer shoe shopping, laptop repair and other things. But then we went to a Domino's. Domino's in India is very different pizza from the Domino's in the US but it was a damn fine integration of the spiciness of Indian food and basic concept of pizza. I really enjoyed it.
The evening, however, contained an awesome pickup game of mud soccer. It was the classic developing country soccer scenario - muddy pitch, cruddy ball, no real goal posts, but a lot of pure fun going on. Everyone was very friendly and I didn't suck, which surprised me considering that my extensive soccer game experience includes this one game that I played in Costa Rica. It went until 830 or 9 when it got dark, and I was a delighted muddy mess when I got home. Not so muddy that I ruined the house though. I watched campy Bollywood with the family and went to bed fairly early out of exhaustion.

Sunday
Pratik and I were going to go to Dumas, which is this beach probably 30 or 40 minutes away, for the morning. It's not really a swimming beach at all, but there's a lot of open space for games and it's a nice place to be. The problem with this was that we would have to get up at 630. Fortunately, that morning featured some torrential monsoon rain so that particular excursion was canceled and I could sleep. Instead, we spent the day in a gathering at a farmhouse about an hour and a half away with some extended family of my dad's. This was a pretty nice house, and it had a pool.
This day was like an Indian version of the quintessential day at the lake for Minnesota - lots of food, family, water games and crazy uncles. I loved to be in the pool, after two weeks of this heat it was just unbelievably refreshing. We played fun water games and they had a wide variety of non-veg things for me to eat - panfish, chicken, and sheep meatballs. It was just way too much fun the whole way through. Probably my favorite day in India to date. This excursion went from about 2 till 11. So I wasn't asleep until 12. That made today a really really nasty Monday, but you know, that's ok.

I've discovered that there is a direct correlation between days of school or no school and my mood. School is really bad for me. The kids that are there are nice to me, but the way that they think about things is just so alien to me that I'm having a really hard time relating with them. Especially their ideas of the opposite gender. These folks are a study in paradoxes on that front. To have a girl as a friend for them is not possible. They must be your girlfriend. So in school, sometimes I talk to Annie and Lila, some of the other exchange students, and Juhi, a Rotex who is also in my class. All of the boys think that I am going out with all of them, which let me assure you is not true. I'm following the 5 D's carefully. They cannot understand that it is possible to have girls as friends, which I have to say seems quite sexist to me. So they never, ever, EVER talk to girls in their class. But (and this may sound a little crude), vocally they are very horny individuals. In fact pretty disgustingly so. Probably 50% of their conversations with me, now that we've gotten past the "What is school like in the United States?" phase, are about different girls in the class, mostly in very crude terms. God forbid we could even talk about how I like them as people. Also they are obsessed with pestering me about my relationship history at home, which isn't extensive enough to even merit a sentence of explanation. But they keep asking, asking, asking.
Also, as I have said, school is just unfathomably boring. They don't learn anything, and even when the teachers actually attempt to teach the class something, it's something extremely dull. I would much rather be taught something useless than be taught nothing. In school, the kids don't do anything. All of their learning is done in their tuitions. I don't even know why India has school if they don't do anything there.

Now somehow I've been lucky enough to fall into an awesome family, and whenever I spend time with them, I have a lot more fun and I feel more comfortable. Case in point, this weekend. Also my brothers' friends, even though they still have that delightful Indian craziness, are a lot more mature than the other guys at school. And they do fun things that don't involved any illegal activity. The other problem with my school "friends" is that, as I have gauged from their conversations, if I were to ever hang out with them outside of school there would be a lot of drinking and smoking. For obvious reasons I must stay away from such behavior. Akshay and Pratik's friends have lots of good clean fun. I wish I could just go to school with Akshay.

This has been a rambling, moody mess of a post, but the gist of it is that there are a lot of days here where I have an absolute blast. Seriously, the tandem of the movie, mud soccer and the farmhouse made this weekend probably on of the top 5 or 10 of my life.

Some stories and observations

2010-07-30T12:13:00.000-07:00

These are just a few things that prolly don't merit a whole post of their own. So I made one superpost.

Animals in the city

Stray dogs on the streets of Surat are probably about as common a sight as, I dunno, squirrels or something in the United States. But they are a lot more conspicuous. I mean, there are a hell of a lot of dogs here. They're all strays - I have seen only two domesticated dogs here the whole time - and nobody seems to be doing anything about them, so I can see why their breeding is so rampant. They are extremely well-adjusted to people, which they should be, living a country that is so inundated with population. A lot of them hobble around on injured legs (probably casualties of the psycho drivers) and this bugs me. I really hate it when animals are hurt. It's almost worse than when humans are hurt. I don't know how all of these thousands of dogs find enough food to keep them going.
I have also seen two camels here, one in the industrial district and one in Adajan, my district. These two are very far away from each other. The first one was quite a shock to me. The two that I have seen just lug carts with food goods along on the sides of the streets.
Also cows. In certain parts of Surat, as in the more quiet parts, you can see cows roaming the streets. I don't know if they are owned or domesticated at all. Obviously they aren't eaten, but they do drink cows milk over here. The cows seems all skin and bones to me, but it struck me that cows that we typically see might be unnaturally fat since they are raised primarily for slaughter.
And I saw a monkey. In the middle of a very busy street. It startled the crap out of me.

My First Bollywood Movie in Theaters

It was called Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (with the two As, I don't know why). It wasn't exactly your classic Bollywood movie, as in it wasn't a romantic comedy and it only had two songs rather than the average 5 or 6. It also didn't have one of the 5 or 6 primary rotating lead actors and actresses, which is unusual.
It was a gangster epic set in 70s Mumbai about a mafia don/town hero who has a stunning rise to power only to brought down by his treacherous underling. For the most part I didn't have a huge idea what was going but you could figure it out. I can't speak to the dialogue and the acting, because I just don't know, but like the visuals and the directing were really impressive. If it weren't for the songs, it could have passed as an American movie in terms of the realism and the way that it was filmed. I thought it was a pretty enjoyable movie and I think I would have liked it a lot if I'd understood all of the dialogue. The audience was constantly whistling and cheering for the hero. At least this time I was prepared for the strange cinema behavior of Indian audiences.
Also it had some gorgeous leading ladies. I mean, these ladies were something else.

Ketchup with everything and salted soda
They like ketchup a bit too much in my opinion. The ask me if I want it on just about every non-vegetable food we eat. Bread and things like that mostly. A few days we a food that would probably be best described as a delicious variation on Ramen noodles (but it wasn't packaged or anything - they cooked it themselves), and Akshay smeared tons and tons of ketchup and spread all around our shared bowl. I'm not sure if I have ever been more skeptical of a food item in my entire life. But it was actually pretty good. I mean, this is not a practice I'm going to enact when I get home, and if anyone sees me putting ketchup where ketchup doesn't belong on my return, slap me. Nonetheless, I see why they like it. It wasn't so bad.
There's this soda shop that we frequent. The propietor is a nice guy who always makes a point of talking to me a bit in his fairly ragged English. I always appreciate the effort when folks do this. I got one soda on the recommendation of Pratik and another one on the recommendation of Akshay. Both claimed that their soda selections were sweet and cool. Not true. Akshay's was salted. Generously salted. It turns out that in addition to their strange ketchup tastes, they also put a large amount of salt on the top of their sodas. Now, I don't mean to be so dismissive, but this is a truly disgusting practice and I haven't the foggiest idea what about salted drinks tastes good to them.

Identity Crisis

2010-07-30T07:11:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna warn you, this post is more worrisome personal reflection rather than interesting or amusing or informative stories. If that's not your thing, please don't bore yourself. But other Rotary kids might be thinking some of the same things, so maybe it'll have some merit for those folks.

Rotary always tells me that I'm going to change this year. I thought, "yeah, yeah, whatever". I have spent my whole life operating on the assumption that people are essentially the same all around the world. This I gauged through my travels to Australia, Costa Rica, England and Scandanavia.

The thing is, those are all Western countries. In India, people are different. Not in terms of humanity, helpfulness and kindness. That they have in spades. But I was completely unprepared for the vast cultural disparity that there is between my home and India. There are things that are of essential importance to my lifestyle that are done completely differently here. They have massively different ideas on gender relations, formality, household structure, education. All of which I see the point of. I understand why Indians arrange marriages, for example, and it's really not for bad reasons. They have decent reasons that they do the things do. But still, some of their lifestyle attitudes are alarmingly different from mine.

The point of this, I didn't realize how much my substance, my essence was going to have to change to adapt to this culture. I feel pressured to adapt, and quickly. To fully adapt, though, to fully become part of this culture I have to become someone entirely different from myself. Which is a bugger. I like myself. Is it worth it to change Ted Meyer the American so that I can become Ted Meyer the Indian for 11 months of my life? I mean, the United States is my home. This, it feels more like home every day, granted, but it's not where my heart and head lie, and it never will be. I already see the changes in myself. I used to intentionally put sentences in the incorrect manner that they do so they would understand me, but I realized with a jolt today that I was doing it subconsciously as I was writing. And there are other things too, more complex things that I couldn't really explain without extensive background information.

Ultimately, I'd rather be an American than an Indian, but it may well be possible to act as two people. I haven't figured it out yet completely. I'm still less than two weeks in. However, the entire point of this is to become bicultural, and I think I will have to change. But you know, I think I can find ways to stay myself and still lead a healthy, involved Indian lifestyle. This blog, for one. It's extremely refreshing to write like I would talk in America. Contact with home of any kind is another.

Now there is, of course, a fine line between remembering where you came from and trying to pretend that you're still there, and I'm going to have to toe it. There's a very good reason Rotary recommends slim contact with home. It's difficult for me to gauge how much is too much. I'm still not going to break my monthlong Facebook vendetta, except to accept new Indian friend requests, and I think I will hold off on Skype too. This is probably still a healthy thing to do. It won't be a good experience with my head in the United States.

But I do think contact with home is not as damaging as Rotary made it out to be, and actually for me will probably be critically important to keep my head in line. I wonder if it's unhealthy to try and stay myself while I'm still here. I wonder if it's going to deter from my experience. But you know, I like Ted Meyer the way he is and I'm going to do what I have to, within reason, to not completely lose track of him.

There are easy ways to do this. Today, apart from now, I spent no time on the computer and I still had some good, centering memories of home. How? Songs. Music induces memory like no other. Except for smell I suppose. Examples - today I listened to Kids by MGMT and I remembered that I'm still who makes crappy harmonizations with Mark. Then I listened to Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, which has a sick drum part, and I remembered Jakob the amateur New Year's Eve drummer.

I really hope I can find a way to strike a good balance. This is going well, but still I have my concerns - both that I will lose myself in this exchange and that I will be so focused on not losing myself that my exchange will end up doing nothing for me.

Birthdays and Soccer

2010-07-27T21:38:00.001-07:00

Birthdays in India
Today is my host mother's birthday. Birthdays in India are handled differently from birthdays in the United States. At about 1030 yesterday my brothers rather urgently asked me if I wanted to go "roaming", which is how they describe going somewhere on their motorbikes. So we went outside and they informed me that tomorrow was their mother's birthday. So we looked for a still-open gift shop in Prime Arcade (our local mall) and we found some very nice cards for her.
Up until midnight I was playing Carrom (a marvelous game with slight similarities to pool) with Akshay, Pratik and Roosil and then Akshay said that it being now his mother's birthday, we had to go give her the cards.

Additionally, it was also the birthday of one of Akshay's friends, so after wishing his mother well, we took one of those awesome motorcycle rides over to the house of the friend. There were 5 or 6 friends there, and Pratmesh (the birthday boy) had cake, chips and drinks for us. Then we went home and my father took us all out for iced coffee. This all at like 1 in the morning.
So in India, birthdays are a midnight event. Which I have to say, is a very fun idea. Driving back from the coffee shop to the home, for some reason I felt more contented than I ever had before during this stay. I don't know what it was - maybe it was that I felt more fully accepted into the family than I had before and that I realized that I have great affection for these folks. It also might just be that we were out at night, and the cool loveliness of late summer nights always puts me at peace.

Soccer
Everyone talks about soccer as the world sport, and I never really doubted that. Statistics of World Cup TV ratings don't lie. But I didn't realize until now that it truly has the ability to connect people. It has served as one of my only cultural touchstones with a group of people living a lifestyle that is, in almost every way, hugely different from my own.
Soccer is the 2nd biggest sport in India after cricket. I'm afraid that despite Pratik and Akshay's best efforts to explain to me the finer points of the game, I really don't see the appeal of cricket. My post-Lagaan cricket-obsessive phase is long over. Soccer, though, is something I like.
This year I watched the World Cup obsessively. I watched as many games as I could. I had never really seen soccer before, and I basically decided to obsess over the World Cup and the Netherlands Oranje because these sort of sporting events are infectious, and I wanted to join in. I was delighted to find that soccer is an excellent game. It was pure luck that I am right now at the height of my new soccer obsession.
People in India truly love soccer. It gives me great conversations to have with the new kids I meet in school. It gives me things to talk about with my brothers. I play a FIFA game on the PS2 with Pratik with great frequency. I kick a ball around in the street with my brothers and a bunch of little kids. And nearly everyone in this country will talk to you about it - almost no exceptions. The other day I had a lengthy conversation with my Stats teacher about this year's World Cup. I don't think I would have had much to say to him otherwise.
Indian soccer fits the vision that I think a lot of people have of soccer in impoverished nations - a huge crowd of delighted folks kicking a deflated ball around a trashy pitch with no nets behind the goalposts. But this is the charm of it - that soccer is a game that makes people so excited that they will do anything to play it. The other thing - it's cheap. For cricket you need a ball, a paddle, quite a few players, wickets. Soccer - you need a ball. Not even any other people, necessarily. This, I think, is why soccer became the world's sport and not baseball or basketball - the accessibility.
I hope all of you Rotary kids watched the World Cup. It's been immensely helpful.

On the topic of other Rotary kids, if I'm not mistaken the Sweden folks left today and the Brazil kids are heading out the day after tomorrow. Make the most of your remaining time and everyone have an absolute blast. No matter how different your lifestyle becomes, the human body is a very adaptive entity. I'm a week and a half in, and I get more comfortable by the day.
Have fun!

School - The people are great, not so much the school

2010-07-27T02:51:00.001-07:00

If Shardayatan English Medium School is a fair indication of the Indian secondary education system, then the Indian secondary education system is in a pitiful shambles. Fortunately, there seem to be other ways that kids actually learn their stuff, but for me, school is not the best
Let me run you through a normal school day for me.

My grandfather, who is an early riser, opens my door and mutters a bunch of Gujarati and somewhere in there mentions "six o clock". He seems to have taken it on himself to serve as my alarm clock, which I appreciate. So I get up, shower quickly, brush my teeth, yadda yadda yadda. Then I go downstairs and have some tea with my grandpa. Around six-thirty, the auto rickshaw shows up at my house and I am off.

An auto rickshaw is basically a taxi, and looking at it you would think that it would not be possible for more than three normal sized people to fit in it. In my auto rickshaw, however, the driver somehow manages to stuff myself, two middle-schoolish kids and about six obnoxious 5-year-olds. The rickshaw driver seems to know all of these kids pretty well and has a kind of friendly banter with them. He's actually a really nice guy, even though he speaks no English.

Shardayatan might be a decent facility by Indian standards, so I won't judge the classrooms and technology available with nothing to compare it to. But what I can tell you is in terms of trash, Shardayatan is really, truly, disgusting. There are gargantuan piles of wrappers, chip bags, bottles, and papers all over the outdoors of the school. The hallways are relatively clean, but they are open air, and kids are just constantly tossing their crap off the edge into their central sporting area. I can't believe that a scholarly facility allows this kind of horribly damaging littering to occur with such frequency. Another icky thing - I was stepping into a bathroom and there was a little boy who could have been no older than five who was peeing on the floor. I decided to move on.

When I get to school, I go sit in class. Their schedule works like Harry Potter - different every day, not every class every day. I am in 12th standard, which is basically senior year. In India you are to choose one of three streams of learning after your 10th standard year. These can be Art (which apparently nobody does - it seems to cover the humanities), Commerce, and Science. For me it was basically Commerce or Science. Anyone in my AP Chem class knows how I feel about science, so I chose Commerce. Here are the classes that they take and a brief description of what is done in them.

English: Their homeroom teacher, who is an excellent lady, seems to just give them kind of general advisory information. Through three days, I haven't seen any actual English being taught.

Gujarati: This class is for real. It has their most strict teacher, who makes them read and write things in Gujarati. I don't know exactly what they are doing. I usually read my Traveler's History of India during this class period. Obviously it sounds like this would be a good class for me, but it would be like taking Cohrs' class without having ever spoken a word of English, so really almost everything is futile.

Stats: This class is also for real. The only one with a male teacher, who is a pretty awesome guy. Yesterday he sent me and Annie out to participate in some sort of a parade instead of sitting the class, and today he just gave all of the kids a monster problem to do and then talked with me about the World Cup. They learn Stats at a pretty advanced level - I took a decent Stats class last year and I don't have a clue what they are doing.

Organization of Commerce: In this class they are asked to do things like define the word "profession" and learn about budgets with the sort of details that are very intuitive, but somehow are made extraordinarily complicated. I hate to be so critical, but I can't really see how these mundane, obvious details would be at all helpful in the real world of business. I think that this is the worst class - it is both useless and extremely boring.

Economics: There are a few teachers who accept that they have no control of their class. The Economics teacher is one of those. She does not give them things to do. She does not attempt to lecture. She just walks around the classroom and talks to the kids about everything except economics. Sometimes kids ask her questions about economics and she seems to know what she is doing, but this class isn't the best because I would actually prefer to be taught something than just sit around.

Accounting: A decent teacher, halfway in between the extremely strict Gujarati teacher and the relatively without control Organization of Commerce teacher. The problem, unfortunately, is that Accounting is a record-settingly dull topic.

The biggest problem with Shardayatan is that the students don't seem to care at all. They don't listen to the teachers at all. They just talk and squirrel around. Even though the guys that I have fallen in with are nice folks, they really don't have any respect for most of the teachers, and their behavior is sometimes immature. But they are good guys, and since school doesn't matter very much for me, it's not exactly hurting me.

Now there are a lot of things that I like about school - even if the teachers are sometimes fairly useless, they are always intelligent and good to me. The real purpose of me going to school is to meet people, and I have done that in spades. There's a largish group of about 15 or 20 kids that instantly inducted me into their group of friends. They don't do a lot in the way of school, but they aren't stupid either, and they're nice guys. The other thing is that the homeroom teacher is a very helpful lady, and the principal of the school is also a very helpful and informative woman. All of the administrators are very well-intentioned.

The expectations for my scholarly pursuits are almost non-existent. Indian school is just so very different from American school that they don't really expect me to have any idea what they are talking about. Every couple months or so the kids have a sort of final exams period during which I am not expected to attend school. I am given no grades, and the teachers expect me to sleep in class. Also attendance is not compulsory. Many of the Indians rarely attend.

They don't seem to want to learn from their teachers, but they do care about their exams - they don't really earn points daily like we do in the US. Everything is basically determined by these major exams. I have to stress that they do learn, but it is not in school. Instead they take extra classes that they call "tuitions". Akshay goes to these a lot in the evenings. It seems to me like they take these quite seriously, and that is their main source of real education.

The problem with this from my perspective is that I don't go to these. I would rather be taught something in school than just sit around. I hang out with these new friends of mine, but a lot of the time they are having their own conversations in Gujarati. And even when they really are being taught something, it's either exceedingly boring or it's something that I would need some frame of reference that I don't possess to be able to participate in successfully.

So school...isn't great. But it has done it's job of introducing me to people.

One other amusing thing. Today when the auto rickshaw was taking me home on a back road a gibbon jumped out of a tree and nearly hit the rickshaw. This was so unexpected, so shocking to me that before I could stop myself I shouted "Holy s***! That was a f***ing monkey!" I realized that I had just uttered some horrible American vulgarities, but fortunately I remembered that these little children don't speak any English.

Inception in India

2010-07-26T05:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to Inception at a 1030 night showing with my brothers and a couple of their friends. They were basically going to it on my recommendation, which was "Inception is the awesomest movie I have ever seen. It is so cool. Every human has to see it."

So they went. I was worried that they wouldn't like it because they are used to the idiotic romantic comedy musicals that Bollywood pumps out like clockwork every week. But I will get to their reactions later.

Pratik and I looked in the paper for showtimes for movies. The ad for Inception had critical accolades like US ads often do, but they were things like "3 and a half out of 4 stars!!!!!" (with all of the unnecessary exclamation points) from a real newspaper and "Saw Inception. Really liked it!" from a mysterious figure named Shah Amin Rakat. So already it was a little strange.

The Fame Multiplex has its six screens spread out over the floors of a towering mall. I guess instead of each movie costing the same, they put them on different screens arranged by how popular they will be, and then make each screen cost more or less. So they name their screens. We were in the "French" theater, which is apparently the third best, and the third most expensive. It cost me 130 rupees, which, for reference, is less than three dollars. The multiplex didn't have quite as much seating as the Muller Monster Screen in Lakeville, but the screen was about as large.

Before the film started everyone rose for a clip of bunch of old people singing the Indian National Anthem. I couldn't understand any of the words, of course, but it seemed to be a pretty rousing tune. Then we sat down and watched. The film was dubbed in Hindi and I was exhausted, so the parts where there wasn't awesome dreaming stuff happening I was falling asleep. But I was awake for the awesome parts. It took the Indians a while to understand what was going on, but they got it. Also halfway through the movie there was an intermission. Also whenever an audience members cell phone rang they answered it.

I hate intermissions. I also hate dubbing in any situation. If foreign movies were dubbed in English at like, the Lagoon, I wouldn't go to them. And I HATE people talking on their cell phones in a damn film. I love Pratik and Akshay, but I really wanted to take them to America and explain how to watch a movie.

Of course, this is ignorant of me to say in retrospect. They just do things differently. Nonetheless, I was quite irritated.

All of you who have seen Inception (which had better have been all of you otherwise you are a huge loser) will be pleased to hear that they loved it. They used the phrases "mind-blowing", "superawesome", "the Matrix with more cool", and "they can never make a better movie".

But the point of this is to describe the process of going to a movie in India, so other details - we booked our tickets in advance and had assigned seats. Also the theater was absolutely stuffed. Indians love their movies, even if they aren't Bollywood. Sunday night, according to Pratik's friend Roosil, is the hopping night on the town for India. I don't really understand why it wouldn't be Friday or Saturday. For the most part, weekends are timed the same way there. School and work do start again on Monday. It really doesn't make any sense why Sunday is the party night of the week.

This experience also reminded me that movies are going to be one of the biggest things I will miss. It's time to start making good use of Netflix Watch it Now when I have spare time.

A short list of funny things that they say to me.

2010-07-25T03:25:00.000-07:00

Some of the ways that they construct sentences are very amusing to me.
- Whenever my brothers say that an upcoming segment of a movie is funny they say "This part, it will be very very comedy for you."

- Dad was talking about Akshay Kumar, who is a ridiculously ripped movie star: "Oh man. He has a great body."

- Commentary on my running: "I believe you have transformed your body into that of a horse for running such long ways"

- My great aunt, commenting on the weight disparity of my brother Pratik and I (which isn't nearly as significant as she makes it sound) : "I want you to chop off fat of your brother and put it on you because you are far too skinny"

The only thing I truly dislike about India

2010-07-24T07:03:00.001-07:00

I'm just going to take this opportunity to kind of rant a bit. For the most part I am having a great time, but I have identified the root of any of my annoyances.
Most of the things that are different between India and America are things that I understand. You know, arranged marriages, I disagree with them, but having been given their perspective on it I understand why they do it. Bollywood films? They are vastly stupider and more superficial than American films, but I understand why they enjoy them. Heck, I enjoy them too. Hindu religion? Their school system? Psycho driving? I can rationalize all of them
But I have pinpointed the main thing that they do that defies all reason for me. and it encompasses most of my main problems so far.

IN ALL OF THEIR ACTIONS, THEY SEEM TO BE DOING THEIR DAMNDEST TO EXACERBATE THE TERRIBLY UNCOMFORTABLE WEATHER THAT PLAGUES THEIR COUNTRY.

They always wear pants. Probably 99 percent of Indians outside are wearing heavy jeans. Why do they do this? It's 85 degrees outside with horrid humidity! Formality? That's not really the reason because their jeans are not formal at all. Usually they are rattier than mine. In the home they wear a little more normal clothes, but surely they are just making themselves more uncomfortable. I mean, they all say that they are as irritated by the heat and humidity as I am.

They have hot milk. They offered me some corn flakes with hot milk. It was one of the more revolting things that I have ever eaten. From a taste perspective, I can see that in some twisted, tortured group of taste buds it might be possible to enjoy hot milk. But this is INDIA. They are right next to the equator. Hot milk is not a good idea.

Now they drink plenty of water, but their idea of a thirst quencher is searingly hot tea and coffee. I love tea and coffee. It tastes great here, especially their ginger tea specialty. But it heats ones body up. There is no reason, in this stifling heat, that they would want to do this. It's not like they don't drink water, and they also have glass-bottled Coke in much greater quantities than are available in the United States. But I think that most Indians, given the choice, would prefer to scald their tongues on tea than drink something that might bring their body temperature down to a healthy level. This is inexplicable.

And then there's the food. I must first mention that out of necessity I am happily getting used to it. And it is delicious. Sometimes. But it does not compensate for the weather at all. They have very few cold foods. It's all spicy and/or very hot (which is a different kind of unpleasantness than spicy). Adjusting ones food for the weather is the only area where I would say that the United States actually does something better than India. During winter we serve hot dishes, soups, hot chocolate. We adjust for the cold. In the summer I suppose we grill, but we also have a lot of cooler foods like frozen treats and fruits. Mainly we don't go out of our way to make our food uncomfortable to consume.

Obviously, the Indians have adjusted to this over the millenniums of their existence, but I mean, humans all came from the same place. I am at a loss as to how these practices could possibly have been enacted in the first place.

Religious Education

2010-07-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

Today school started, which is a topic I will cover in more depth after a few days of it. I don't have much of a read on it at the moment. But I met a lot of cool folks, and this guy called Gharsham. Gharsham is Head Boy and President of Intrack (I'm not sure if that's how you spell it - I never really understand what they are saying - but it is basically Rotary organization at a student level). He has a reputation for being studious and religious, but also a nice guy. Since he is involved with Rotary he was very interested in me.

I took a nap today from 4 to 6. When I woke up, I had 6 missed calls. This was very exciting. I hadn't been called once yet, and now I had 6 within 2 hours. One of them was from this dude I met at school. FIVE were from Gharsham. So I called him back. He wanted to take me to this temple on the Tapi river (which is a river that bisects my city). So I went. It was a gorgeous temple. I will try sometime to find some pictures of something like it. Predictably, I left my damn camera memory card in the computer. I was quite irritated with myself. It was a nice tan color, with about a dozen domes scattered around. There were idols all over the place and monks in orange robes. That's kind of a wretched description, but I really don't know how to give you a good sense of what it looks like.

The temple was a temple of an organization called BAPS, which is a branch of Hinduism. It stands for something. I don't know what. They believe in Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu and all the rest of it, but they have this idea that a guy who lived from 1781 to1830 was an incarnation of their most supreme deity, someone above that other triumvirate. He's kind of a Jesus Christ equivalent. His name was Swaminarayan. Gharsham described it as a socio-spiritual organization. The first thing I thought of was Opus Dei-esque cults, but it truly seems to be an honest and legitimate organization.

Gharsham showed me much of the temple and some of their prayer services. I met a couple monks. I performed the holy act of bathing a golden idol of Swaminarayan in water. Then this employee of the temple put a dot on my head with his finger (just with water, so it didn't stay), and then he tied a band around my wrist. He also gave me extensive information on the tenets of BAPS. Their monks forgo all relations with their family, with women, with material goods. They are also supposed to somehow train their mentality to think that everything tastes the same. It sounds like my Catholic priests. I told him "This is my biggest problem with religions Gharsham. What loving God would deprive you of the best things in life?" (Although I am fine with the material goods part of it). He was disappointed in my lack of enlightenment. I told him "Gharsham, I will happily listen to all of your information because it is of interest to me, but I ask that you accept if I disagree." He said ok, but he seemed very disappointed. He seems to be attempting to convert me to BAPS. At one point he asked me if I had felt the presence of God in the temple.
I mean, come on.

The best way to describe Gharsham is to call him a zealous Percy Weasley, but nicer. He's a studious prude at school. He tries to steer me down paths the way Percy tries to steer Harry. He seems very interested in taking me to this temple again. I would only do it to take pictures. I feel like he wants to induct me into this cult. He wants me to join Intrack. That one I will probably do. Dumbest of all, he tells me that I shouldn't spend time with the friend group that I joined in with today. Continuing with the Harry Potter analogy, they seem to be like the Weasley twins - hugely friendly jokesters who don't do much for school, but their hearts seem to be in the right place. Basically I took everything that he said with about a billion grains of salt. He's nice to me, for sure. But I was very annoyed with his insistence that I accept his religion and his ignorance at the possibility of a life without religion. It was impossible for him to accept that I just don't spend an iota of my energy on religion.
It was interesting nonetheless - both to learn more about the Hindu religion and to discover that are annoying zealots in India too.

Already adjusting. Also Bollywood films

2010-07-22T07:13:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how quickly humans can adapt. Without trying, I have already made the necessary changes in my mindset to try and mold myself into this culture. The veggies are still not my favorite, but I already like them a lot more. The spices don't seem so unpleasant. And I am trying to learn Gujarati in earnest. With every passing hour I feel more and more comfortable here.

One of my biggest educations has been in Bollywood films and film stars. Every time we watch a Bollywood movie Pratik quizzes me on if I can recognize the star. There seem to be only a handful of elite actors. These include Amir Khan (he is apparently the absolute best - he's in Lagaan) , Sharu Khan, Salman Khan (the most muscular non-Stallone/Schwarzenegger actor I have seen), Akshey Kumar, and Abhishek Bacchan, son of the legendary Bollywood actor Amitabh Bacchan, who is mentioned in Slumdog Millionaire.
The leading ladies include Aishwarya Rai, Karina Kapoor, Katrina Kaief, Priyan Kachopra, and my personal favorite, the lovely Lara Dutta. I've also had to get up on all the gossip - Amir Khan is notable for being married to someone who isn't a Bollywood actress, Aishwarya Rai is married to Abhishek Bacchan, and Salman Khan is almost 40 but is scandalously unmarried. He loves Katrina Kaief but she has been rejecting his amorous advances for years.

Bollywood films are almost exclusively romantic comedies/musicals, which, in the United States, would be like putting my two least favorite genres together. Somehow - and maybe it's the way that Bollywood so triumphantly celebrates the worst genre cliches - they are inexorably entertaining.

I feel it might be entertaining to tell you about this one movie that I saw. It had Akshay Kumar and Karina Kapoor, but it also had an apparently desperate-for-work Denise Richards, the star of Superman Returns, Mr. Brandon Routh and an outrageous cameo from none other than Sylvester Stallone. In the Sylvester Stallone scene, our heroes, rushing to stop a wedding that would not involve Akshey Kumar and Karina Kapoor being together, are stopped in the street by a bunch of thugs. They are menacing our heroes when Sylvester Stallone, who just happens to be walking on the street, kicks the shit out of the thugs. It was a moment of incredible hilarity.

I am excited for the first time I see a Bollywood film in a theater, although I won't have Akshay and Pratik explaining what all is going on.

A special on driving in India

2010-07-21T07:14:00.001-07:00

Driving in India is, as I have mentioned, quite psycho and completely different from anything in America. I must say although most everything that I will say is going to sound critical, I really have a great affection for the way that the driving works here. When I get back, the United States will be boring by comparison.
Firstly, the vehicles. There are more motorbikes than auto rickshaws, and there are more auto rickshaws than actual cars. Most of my experience has been on motorbike rides with Akshey and Pratik. These are extremely fun for me - I've never really been on motorcycles before, and the fact that they go way too quickly and steer very sharply makes them a lot of fun. I was worried at first, but I haven't come anywhere close to falling off. Auto rickshaws are basically taxis. They are very small, compact little automated carts that seem to pack like a dozen people into them. The cars that are driven are mostly little sedans, or they are cars as small as those Smart for 2 things. None of those hulking trucks and SUVs that occupy our streets.
Secondly, the traffic laws that they don't obey. The only one that they seem to obey is which side of the road to drive on. But speed limits are completely optional. There are sometimes stoplights, but absolutely nobody even considers adhering to their orders. It would be far more dangerous to be stopped obeying the rules of the stoplight than to be disobeying them. The police are a nonfactor. Akshey told me that if he were to be caught driving his motorbike without a license, the fine would be 50 rupees. That's like, a buck. They don't follow lane lines at all. They pass each other like Bob Jacobel on steroids.
Thirdly, the honking. Some of the cars have built-in honking devices that change their intonation every other honk. These are very amusing. I also have come to tell the difference between a polite "get out of my way" honk and a "What are you doing you idiot!?" honk. It's incredible to me how melodic some of these honks can become though.

It's a good thing that no driving is one of the 5 D's...I would get killed instantly if I attempted it. As a passenger, though, being driven around on motorbikes has become one of my favorite experiences.

Early days

2010-07-20T19:03:00.000-07:00

This is it. I know you've all been waiting to hear how the first one is going to do.
I'll give you brief narratives of my first days. I would post some photos but for some reason they can't get internet on my computer, so I'm writing this on an absolute dinosaur of a desktop.

July 17. 18th, and 10th

Well I'm sure you've all flown before so most of those details would be mundane. The Continental flight that I took from Newark to Mumbai was on a massive 777 jet with TV screens for everyone and 197 movies to choose from. Which was ridiculous. I watched The Crazies, City of God, and the Usual Suspects. This flight was a 15 hour, 9000 mile monstrosity. For the most part it was awful. I was exhausted the whole time but I'm an insomniac on airplanes, so I was just sitting there while everyone around me was snoring. It was boring, uncomfortable and interminable. But eventually I got to Mumbai.
I went through customs, got my baggage, all very easy. Then I got to the arrival lounge and I circled through it all looking for a sign with my name or someone that was looking for me. No one.
I ended up waiting there for two and a half hours. It turns out that they had left Surat at 3 o clock to come to get me, which is allowing for more than enough time. I guess the traffic into Mumbai was just ridiculous. They claimed that at one stretch it took them 3 hours to travel 30 kilometers.
So at about midnight I left the airport with them. There was this Canadian girl who was staying with some man in Mumbai that we had to get. She had some horrible mishap with her flight and had been waiting with this Rotarian for the entire day. From1 to7 we drove to Surat.
I went to the home of my first host family with these guys that picked me up (they were the nephew and brother in law of my host father). My first host family is in Kenya for a vacation right now, so I'm actually staying with someone else. I don't know why they took me there, but I went and gratefully took a nap. Then I had some vegetable sandwiches and my actual first host father, Mr. Anant Gandhi, picked me up. We drove across town to his home. He has a wife whose name escapes me (I have been told to just call her Mom) and two sons, aged 21 and 17. Their names are Pratik and Akshey. Akshey is my main outlet for activites, and I like him quite a bit.
I hung with Akshey for most of that day, had some dinner, went on a few motorcycle rides with him, and went to bed.

July 20th
I got up at like 7 and Dad showed me this jogging park. I went for like a three and a half mile jog. It didn't all that well, but every person in the park was like, extremely impressed with my stamina. I think that distance running is not a common practice here. Then I got back, showered and did some yoga with my mom's yoga instructor. Yoga seems to basically be variations on breathing in and out. But I liked it.
It's embarrassing to say this, but I had quite a boring day. Pratik was not around and Akshey was out of commission between a cold that he had and a crap ton of school work. I looked around the house, but my host mom and grandparents don't do all that much. I'm ashamed to say that I watched 5 episodes of Dexter Season 4 that day. Well, it is excellent.
The evening was better. Pratik arrived and we went out to eat and then I went to bed.

Here are some notes on notable cultural differences.

Food: Food is a real problem for me right now. My family is vegetarian. I like vegetables fine, but I don't consider a meal a meal unless it has meat in it. I think I've been getting enough food. I'm not going hungry and it tastes ok, but I haven't really had a satisfying meal yet.
We went out to a place that they said has the best chicken in Surat. The problem was that it was extraordinarily hot and spicy. Nothing in the United States compares. I think I might just stick to veggies so that my mouth doesn't burn up. The food is difficult for me, and I will have to adjust.
The basic staple of their diet is roti, a flatbread that they scoop up rice, vegetables and curry with. The veggies are completely variable. They have fruit too, mostly pears and bananas. Plenty of ice cream. I've had a lot of tea and coffee, but the concept of having coffee black without sugar is completely unfathomable to them, so I've given up trying.

People: There are an obscene amount of people here. Everyone knows this, but I was still completely unprepared for how absolutely jam-packed this would be with folks. Everything is very tightly packed in. It's kind of really overstimulating, and there isn't going to be a whole lot of peace and quiet here. This is too bad. I like my peace and quiet.

Driving: It's insane. They don't follow even the rules that their government has set. The strategy for driving seems to be to go as fast as you possibly can, make your own lanes, and honk at everything that moves. I went for a few rides on Akshey's motorbike (which he doesn't have a license to drive) and it was quite scary at first. It's actually really fun now, because I've realized that they really don't crash very often, they just take things at a faster pace.

Sports and Exercise: Yoga is a part of their religion. Mom has a yoga instructor who comes every day and does these breathing exercises with her. The two times that I have sat in she has also done other more aerobic and cardiovascular exercises with me. They have jogging parks here. But the one that I went to, there were about three hundred people there and I was the only one actually jogging.
The sports that they play are soccer and cricket. They are obsessed with both of them. It's a good thing I watched the World Cup this year, it's become one of the few cultural touchstones that I have with them.

Movies: In a typical movie theater, two of the three are Bollywood and one is American. But the American movies are dubbed in Hindi. This sucks. I mean, a LOT. Movies are probably one of the biggest staples of my life. In the summer, if I go a week without seeing a movie it is an unusual week. So while I might see American films, I'm never going to understand what the hell is going on. On TV, only the news is in English.

So the cultural differences are immense, but the important thing is that the people are nice, and that is definitely the case here. I think it will get better. For the most part, I'm having a blast. This place is pretty fascinating. I chose it because i knew that it would be the most different from the United States, and it definitely is that.
I might not say anything for a while, so good luck to anyone who leaves before I look in again.

To all you Rotary kids following in my footsteps.

2010-07-16T01:56:00.001-07:00

I guess I have the honor of being the very first Northfield Rotary kid to leave this year. I know that mostly fellow Rotary folks read this, so I want to offer a small tidbit of advice for when you get to this point.
This whole leaving thing - now that I come down to it, it is far more difficult than I could have possibly imagined. I am very close to just breaking down and being reduced to a completely inconsolable state of existence. It's not that I'm worried about India - I'm completely psyched about that part. It's the leaving that is the problem, not the arriving. Saying goodbye to everyone tomorrow is not going to be fun.
I'm telling you this for 2 reasons.
1) So that you might be a little better prepared for it.
2) You should get all of your junk - packing, whatever Powerpoint you may have to put together, shopping, any money or technology stuff you might be using - done quickly. I have put it off, because I'm essentially a very lazy person, and it's going to crimp on my time. Which is awful. When it gets to the end, you won't want to waste a minute of your last days.

Good luck guys! I know my overly emotional ravings probably don't sound very encouraging at all, but very soon I'm going to put up an excited post about how I came out the other side and that India is awesome. It's gonna be ok.
Everyone have a great year!

Leaving Soon

2010-07-01T18:50:00.000-07:00

On July 17th, I'm going to board a plane at the Minneapolis airport, and after nearly 18 hours of flying, with a seemingly inexplicable stop in Newark, I'm going to arrive in Mumbai at 9:00 PM. After that, I have no idea what's going to happen. Presumably someone will greet me. I can comically imagine someone waving a sign with my name in the Mumbai terminal. But after that, I can hardly guess what the following days will hold.
The website for my high school in next to useless. I've spoken to my first host family, and they definitely seem nice, but I still can have no sense of what their day-to-day life will be like. What kind of a neighborhood will they live in? Will it be easy for me to run? What kind of kids will live in the area? How do I get to school? And what will school hold, exactly? The number of unknowns that surround my impending journey is pretty ginormous. That is actually fairly exciting to me. I mean, the point of this is new, unexpected experiences, right?Certainly the coming to India is much easier than the leaving Northfield. Anyone who's talked to me about this lately would probably find me acting pretty melancholy about my early departure date. But I can't tell how excited I am to be going to India. By all accounts, it's quite a place. It was by far my first choice, so I can't complain.
Now that it comes down to it, leaving my town and the people in it is harder than I thought it would be. The closest thing I've done to this was going to Costa Rica, where I was really only isolated from my friends for a few days at the beginning. This is going to be much worse. I can think of two people that will be in this sprawling country of a billion that I will know.
I didn't make this blog to complain interminably, though, so on this joyous note, I'll close out my post. Thanks for reading. I'm sure I can provide you with some exhilarating update on the thrills of packing or something before I go.

Hello there

2010-06-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be in India for a year. This is a fairly interesting thing to be doing. So I'm going to write about it. If you're interested, take a look.
Also, some stuff about myself. My name is Ted Meyer. I'm an 18-year-old recent graduate of Northfield High School in Northfield, Minnesota. I'm taking a gap year to travel to India as a Rotary exchange student. I'm going to be living with families and going to school. But school doesn't really matter, so it should be great.