Back in the US; Catching up on TV

I've been back in the States for exactly a week, and I've spent half of that time staying with friends who are introducing me to American television. Since returning, I have been privy to episodes of The Bachelor, The Office, Desperate Housewives, Gray's Anatomy, and more. I have never been much of a TV fan but it's been fun to see what these shows are all about, especially since my yale suitemates talk about them in every suite-email we send out. Actually, for all I know, these shows may have been around even before I left for India and I was just too much of a cultural dinosaur to ever catch them. Anyway, fun times.

It's quite an experience though, returning to America after a year abroad and feeling temporarily like a foreigner here. I have to get used to cars driving on the right side of the road, and to counting with American money. To speaking English and not Hindi, with shopkeepers and waiters. To remembering that one cannot order fresh lime sodas, my favorite drink, in restaurants. To not wobbling my head during transactions or interactions with people. To not bargaining over the cost of every and any item. To the outrageous prices of everything here. Although, in many cases, the better quality of goods and food here somewhat makes up for the price issue.

India has also transformed me from a cold-weather to a warm-weather person. I'm freezing! I miss wearing sandals every day. And I miss my Indian clothes that provide lots of color and sparkle but absolutely no warmth. I went to an Indian restaurant with my dad and instantly regretted not wearing Indian clothes, when I saw the hostess decked out in salwaar kameez. Fortunately, every single person who I am meeting in the next month asks if we can go out for an Indian meal together so I guess I'll have plenty of chances to wow the waiters with my Indian get-up.

Delayed Posting...

Whoops, I wrote the post about leaving India a week ago. That was when I actually left. I have now been out of India for about 8 days... yikes. I will write a more up to date post later!

I leave India tonight

I leave India tonight. I can’t even believe it. There is so much that I will miss. But still, I actually feel less sad and sentimental than I did when I left Bombay two and a half years ago. Because now I know that I will be back. I really don’t think of this as leaving India; I think of this as a trip away. Ok well, literally, I’ll be back in mid-December with my family, for some traveling. So that makes the leaving a whole lot easier. But honestly. I am going to find ways to keep coming back here and I’m sure that part of my career will involve India. So there you go.

Last night I went to a big Dandiya party with some of the Fulbrighters. Dandiya is an annual dance at this time of year, originated in Gujarat, that happens with sticks. At which people do all of the typical bhangra/bollywood moves, but waving sticks. So at this party last night, there were about 80 people up on a stage, dancing around and nearly whacking each other in the head at every second. The four of us were the only Americans, and the press was all over it. The Times of India took a photo of me and Bryce and claim that it will be in the paper on Thursday (the day AFTER I leave!!!). Some local TV channels filmed and interviewed us. The reporter told us beforehand to say that we’ve come from the US to India just for Dandiya, and that we are loving it. So we did. The reporter asked me, “How do you like India?” I shouted into the microphone, “I love it! I want to stay forever!!”

After the brush with the paparazzi, we continued on our dancing way. I love love love Indian dancing. Both old folk dances and more contemporary Bollywood-influened stuff. My friend Sheng knows how to dance to everything and taught me some of her moves. And I remembered dancing a year ago at the Mussoorie Tavern with some students from my language school. That night, they’d put Bollywood music on at the bar and encouraged all of us foreigners to get up there and dance away. I loved the dances, and in particular I loved how everyone danced, from the little kids to the grandparents. Dancing here is such a warm and inviting activity—at every party, at every occasion with music, someone pulls you to the dance floor.

In many ways I’ve come full circle. I arrived in India on October 11, 2006. Raj Chatterjea, my aunt Lucy’s friend, picked me up at the airport and took me back to his family’s house. The next night, I went with Raj’s wife Briar and their daughter Braelyn to an Odissi dance performance at Purana Qila, the Old Fort. On October 11, 2007, I went to the very same dance performance! Again it was outdoors, with candles lighting the way, the majestic Purana Qila behind the stage, the same strains of Indian classical music and the same sinuous, graceful dance.

And a year later, I am leaving India. It’s been a special year. Sure, it hasn’t always been great by any means and at many times I’ve been ready to get the heck out. But I do know that I’ve learned more this year than any other year of my life (take that, Ivy League education). I’m sad to leave this experience but I’m also ready to move on and take the next step.

But what I will miss. If I had to say one thing, I will miss the intensity of India. The intensity of color, sound, smell, the constant bombardment of senses, the constant crowding of people. In India you are never alone. There are people everywhere. Friends of mine who have gone back to the States after a long time in India say that the streets feel eerily deserted. But not only are there people everywhere in India, there is constant encroachment of your personal space. People push and shove into you all the time. Beggars thrust their hands in your faces as you walk the streets or drive in an auto. Vendors chase after you for a whole block and call at you to buy their goods. There is always someone staring at you. There is always someone shouting at you, “Madam! Madam!” A simple task of buying milk at the market becomes an endeavor of pushing through people, warding off aggressive shop-keepers, risking your life to cross the street, weaving around cows who have decided to sit on the sidewalk. Sometimes I detest the lack of privacy and personal space, and the challenge of doing absolutely any simple task here. But I’ve also become used to it. I worry that the United States will feel empty to me, that everything will be so easy and routine that I will miss this constant challenge and excitement of India.

Immediately, I’ll be doing a little traveling on the way home. I arrive in Winston-Salem on November 5th, and then I hope to start doing some job-searching, some career-thinking, some India-reflecting, and some writing on my research here. Who knows what I’ll do next—I’m afraid to say that I have no idea myself.

If you’re still reading this blog, do keep checking it. I am going to make belated posts about certain things that I’ve done or that have happened to me here in India. I will also try to post about the cultural re-adjustment process that I know will happen when I arrive back in the States. My traveling in between India and the States. And maybe maybe I’ll put up some pictures.

I learn that I am damn inflexible-- and reevaluate yoga

This might sound sacreligious to say, especially in India, but I'd always secretly thought that yoga was kind of...tame. The sport for people who don't play sports. I mean, I like to stretch... but before and after a 40 minute run or set of tennis. But, seriously failing in the exercise department as of late, with Delhi being a difficult city to run in (for a number of reasons, including traffic and dogs and staring men and heat), I decided I should give yoga a shot.

I went with my friend Rafaela to her class at the Brazilian embassy and learned that yoga is hard work!! It felt simultaneously great and tortuous; I didn't want it to end but I also couldn't wait to stop. And that's how I like good exercise to feel. I am horrendously inflexible, I mean seriously seriously stiff, and have been all my life. I always used to think that this was a reason why I WOULDNT be a yoga person... but maybe it's an activity that's all the more important for people not blessed with natural grace and flexibility?

I'm kinda kicking myself now for living in India for a year, and ONLY checking out yoga in my last month! Especially when it's starting to get cooler and I conceivably could go running or play tennis any of these days. Where was yoga in the hot summer when I needed it?!?!

Friday Lunch in Gurgaon

I was kind of nervous to go out to Gurgaon by myself-- I'd only been there once before, in a private car with someone's driver. Many of you seasoned Delhi-ites will probably laugh at me for this... and for those of you who don't know, Gurgaon is a former village 40 minutes south of Delhi. It's where all of the high rise office buildings and the mega shopping malls are located. From a distance, it could almost be some ultra modern city... but no, the whole of Gurgaon experiences power and water outages every day, there's lots of crime there because the development of a security force hasn't kept pace with the expansion of the city, and next to high rise office buildings you still find cows ambling and vegetable sellers pulling their carts.

So I hired a way-too-pricey tourist taxi for the day and set off. I was going to have lunch with the Anand (not their real name) family. I'd met Mrs. Anand at Suniye, an NGO for hearing impaired children. As soon as she found out that I have a hearing impairment, she invited me to come have lunch with her family so that I could meet Sally (again, not real name), her 32 year old, also hearing impaired daughter. I got to their high rise apartment building and, no surprise, the power was out, so I ditched the elevator and trekked up to the 9th floor.

We had such a lovely lunch together, and I was almost brought to tears by how much the family opened up to me. Though they are Punjabi, they lived for many years in Gaya, a small city in Bihar, until they realized that moving to Delhi would bring more opportunities for their children, especially Sally. Mrs. Anand told me all about her struggles to come to terms with Sally's hearing loss, to fit her with hearing aids, to find a school that would accept her. Mr. Anand told me about his years of studying in London in the 60s and how, to this day, he regrets turning down a job offer there. He believes that if he'd been able to stay on in Europe, life would have held far more opportunity for him, for his children, especially for Sally. He showed me old black and white photos of himself and his wife in their youth, the children babies in their arms, wearing traditional Indian clothes and usually surrounded by relatives in front of a country home. He showed me pictures of his carefree days as a student in London-- they looked like stills from a 50s movie-- and we talked about the freedom, the opportunity, the sense of I-can-do-anything that Americans and Europeans take for granted, which simply don't exist in the same way here (despite what you may read in The World is Flat).

Sally herself was amazingly sweet and always smiling. I communicated with her through a mix of Hindi, English, lip reading, rudimentary (on my part) sign. Her parents left us alone on a couple of occasions, so that they wouldn't distract our conversation. Though she's been hearing impaired her entire life, she didn't get hearing aids until she was 7 because no doctor before then ever explained to her mother that hearing aids would help and morever, that it was important to get them ASAP. Thus, she's had to catch up on her language development since then. She tends to mouth most of her words, rather than say them aloud. She doesn't have a job but she works informally at art and dancing. Her paintings lined the walls of the apartment, along with photographs of her sister who lives in Kuwait with her Pakistani husband and of her brother who works for an American security firm in Baghdad and goes to sleep every night to the sound of rockets and alarms. He would never choose to live in such danger if it didn't pay about 15 times the salary he could get here in India.

At the end of lunch, Mrs. Anand cried that I hadn't eaten enough-- after two and a half chicken kebabs, two servings of rice, two servings of dal, two servings of vegetables, half a chapatti, and a bowl of yogurt, she insisted that I must not have liked the food. I placated her (I have become practiced at doing this) and accepted some Indian sweets for the road. I promised the Anands that I'd help look into scholarships for Sally to study in the US-- I know there are scholarships for deaf students through Gallaudet and other places. I also promised to come visit again before I leave, and I'm sure I will.

I keep thinking again and again about this meeting with the Anands. Coincidentally, the day of that visit was the eve of Yom Kippur. Though one side of my family is Jewish, I am not religious myself, but had agreed to accompany a Jewish friend to services that night. Yom Kippur is a Day of Atonement which to me, since I don't really believe in "atoning," means a Day of Reflection. The lunch with the Anands gave me so much to reflect on. In a synagogue full of Indian Jews, Israeli diplomats, hippy backpackers and white expats, I thought, not for the first time, about what it means to be American, about the privilage and opportunity I have received just by being born in the USA. Anyone who says that America is NOT the land of freedom or opportunity has got to come to India... then they'll know...

Lizard Alert

There is a lizard stuck on my window, staring at me. Not going away!!! What to do??!!!!!

New Fulbrighters in Town

The newbie Fulbrighters arrived last week. It's fun to have fresh new faces in Delhi. It kinda made me feel like the equivalent of a sketchy alum that still hangs around New Haven... I've been here for so long! But it also made me jealous: I envy them starting off, having this whole year in front of them. A whole year during which they can essentially do whatever they want, living in the great country that is India.

And it made me sad that I'm leaving soon. I leave in less than six weeks! UNbelievable! I knew all along that my Fulbright and my visa would expire on October 6th. About two weeks ago, I realized how damn CLOSE October 6 is! I can't leave India that soon! So I freaked out and did the easiest thing: applied for a Fulbright extension. That is, with the help of a little peer pressure from some Fulbrighter friends staying until March... (you know who you are). So now I am crossing my fingers that the GOI (government of india, for those of you who have yet to deal with indian governmental bureaucracy) smiles appoval on my application and I will be allowed to stay until the end of October. After which, I will be going HOME after a prolonged stopover in Europe for some travel and fun.

The last six weeks here shall be well filled. I'm planning a conference/meeting for parents of hearing impaired children and for some people who work in hearing impairment/disability/special education. A chance to discuss some issues relevant to hearing impaired children in Delhi... and a chance for me to bring together many of the different people I've worked with while I've been here. Also the time has come for me to put together some reports on the research that I've done over this year. A difficult task, as I think that in the time during which I have been a college graduate, I have forgotten how to write anything academic whatsoever.

Not to mention the fun parts: I am hoping to travel to Assam with my buddy Michael who works on eco-tourism and corporate social responsibility in Northeastern India and Kashmir, and live it up in his eco-lodge. And I cannot leave India without visiting my lovely Rachita and her lovely family in Bombay, now that she is back in the Bharat Mata. So that'll be another trip to Bombay-- fourth visit in a year-- just can't stay away from a fabulous city like that one.

Transportation Part 2-- The Killer Buses

It is not uncommon in Delhi for buses to kill pedestrians. There are two major city-bus companies in Delhi: the DTC buses and the Blueline buses. The Bluelines have been dubbed "The Killer Buses" and have already killed 76 people in 2007. The problem is that, first of all, the drivers get paid PER passenger they pick up, so they race each other to be the first to arrive at the bus stop. The second problem is that, at the same time, the bosses of the Blueline penalize drivers for not finishing their routes on time. It's crazy, no? So apparently, the bus drivers simply mow down people crossing the street in their path. Whether this happens because the drivers just don't give a damn, or because their brakes are rusty and they can't stop in time, I'm not sure. Either way, the bus driver usually ends up fleeing the scene of the crime, later gets caught by the police, gets beaten up, and arrested for reckless driving.

The problem isn't only the carelessness of drivers and the strange workings of the Blueline system. It's also that on Indian roads, one finds a mixture of cars, buses, trucks, auto-rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, bicycles, mule or camel-driven carts, pedestrians, the occasional elephant, and the ubiquitous cow. With all of the different speeds of these various vehicles, traffic is chaotic and unpredictable. On large highways, there is a single lane that is designated for animal-driven vehicles, bicycles, auto-rickshaws (kind of like golf carts, they are Delhi's cheap taxis), pedestrians, and buses. The buses are forced either to drive at 5mph, drive out of their lane (and break the law in doing so), or mow down the slow-moving obstacles in front of them. Furtthermore, while certain busy roads have well-placed pedestrian footbridges or subways above or below them, many do not, so pedestrians have no option but to dash across the road. There are hardly any traffic lights that give the friendly "To Walk" signal, and those that do, are ignored anyway by the traffic, which continues to hurtle past.

The government's "solution" to the Blueline crisis was to ban all Blueline buses from the roads on a certain day several weeks ago. Only when the drivers presented their buses for a "fitness inspection" and received a certificate of fitness, could they return to "ply" the roads. The problem with this was that for several days, the number of Blueline buses on the road went from 900-something to 0, leaving commuters stranded. Despite the recklesness of the Bluelines, thousands of people take them to work every day- in fact, the buses are usually so packed that people hang out the side doors. There's gotta be a better solution than that...

In other news, today is the Indian holiday of Raksha Bandhan, in which sisters thank their brothers for offering them protection and brotherly love, and brothers pledge to renew their protection for another year. Since my own brother is MIA somewhere in the woods of New Hampshire, I asked my buddy Bryce who lives in Delhi to be my brother until I leave here. Shoutout to Bryce. I hope it doesn't cost him too much.

Stop that Push and Shoving... Transportation in the Capital- Part 1

Part 1-- the Metro
The Delhi Metro used to be one of my favorite things in this city-- it is fast, clean, modern, on time, fully air conditioned, nicer than the London Tube, the DC Metro, and a helluva lot nicer than the NYC Subway. Nevertheless, in the 8 months that I've been here, I've come to hate riding the metro... for the reason that the people on trains are TOO DAMN PUSHY!

Here's what happens-- you are standing in your compartment as the train pulls into your stop. There are about 10 of you getting off at the stop, and on the platform are about 20 people trying to get inside the very same door through which you are exiting. Here, there is no law of letting people out before the waiting passengers walk in, so everyone just pushes! You literally have to fight and push with your hands and arms and elbows to make your way through the maelstrom--if you don't, there is no way you'll get off that train. So today, when I arrived at the station where I wanted to change lines, I felt my heart start beating faster and my hands get all sweaty as I prepared to push my way past the oncoming passengers blocking my exit. Which is what I did, and I made it through the doors, glaring at all the people around me who don't understand the simple rules of boarding trains.

So, I thought I was a bigger, better, more rule-abiding person than the rest of that crowd... well, I proved myself wrong. As I waited for my connecting train, the platform got more crowded. By the time the train pulled in, there were 25 or so of us crowing around one set of double doors, and 5 or so people waiting to make their way out of the doors. As soon as said doors slid open, the push began, from in front of me, behind me, all sides of me. Damn, I want to catch this train as much as the next person does! I'm not going to let some teenagers behind me push me out of the way! So I start shoving and elbowing and clawing my way into the train along with everyone else while the exiting passengers try futilely to make their way out. I make it into the train. Safe! I don't care if I shoved five people out of my way! I've got places to go and if this is how the world works, I better play the game!