Thoughts from Sept 11 2008

Another fortnight, another monster email. I haven't been anywhere new, but I've been doing a bit of stuff while staying in Delhi. I have noticed that, at least for people like myself, it takes a long time to write down experiences. I guess that makes sense since I have to relive the experience somewhat to chronicle it. So if I want to keep track of everything I do, it will take twice as long to do the same amount of stuff. This seems to be a good argument against keeping a diary.

I've been doing a variety of things here at the hostel. I've managed to talk to the majority of people I see in my Hostel. I feel like this may be a good or a bad thing. I'm sort of a sideshow to a certain extent because I'm white, I'm from America (which seems to be the promised land to many people), I am generally willing to talk a lot, and most importantly I speak good english. So many people like to talk. Often conversations stay pretty superficial, though. It is difficult to get away from the usual topics of India or the US, so I rehash the same things very often. So it's very difficult for me to really connect with people. The one people who are easy to make friends with are the other foreigners as they also are more or less friendless. All being pretty cool people, having decide to go to India and all, I've been spending more time with them. (I deliberately avoided spending too much time with them earlier so that I would be able to meet more Indians.) We'll see how it goes.

I made two friends at this place called the FRRO (Foreign Regional Registration Office) a while back. Basically, if hell is filled with paperwork, which it probably is, this thing borders on one of the upper circles. During the horrible process of of registering I met Aparna. She is a Bangladeshi who was planning to study Botany at Delhi University. She made sure I didn't drown in the sea of forms and shared some apples with me. The other guy, Pryantha, is from Sri Lanka. We met as I was waiting for the last of my french comrades to escape the morass. Pryantha was very quickly convinced that we would be good friends, so I ended up exchanging email addresses with him and Aparna. Although their university is in North Delhi, and consequently very far, we met several times in Connaught Place. (A huge tourist with allegedly very cheap prices.) We generally went and did something near Delhi University, like riding a boat on this lake or going to Raj Ghat (Gandhi's Tomb).

It was a good time. Unfortunately, Aparna had issues with her enrollment and so she was forced to return to Bangladesh. On the weekend before she left, we went to Lal Qila (the fabled and in my opinion, slightly overrated Red Fort). It was very sad to see her go, especially because I'm concerned with how her plans for the future will work out now that she needs to find a new university again. The people at the Delhi University were fairly unforgiving and unhelpful in her struggle to get her accidental removal from the enrollment reversed. The whole procedure seemed pretty senseless to me, as everything could be corrected relatively easily on the University's end and the benefit to Aparna would have been incredible. I gave her a stone Elephant that I had bought in Rishikesh, and Pryantha gave her a necklace that he had bought in Delhi as parting presents. She has returned to Bangladesh and hopefully will find a way to move on. I hope everything works out well for her, but I have a very bad feeling about the possibilities offered by the bureaucratic mess she will have to navigate.

Classes here are definitely worse than at home. The Profs aren't super great at presenting the material. The computational abilities of the students combined with the worse presentation skillz of the profs make it possible to fly through various derivations at lightning speeds. The Physics profs are the worst (with the exception of this one Math teacher who does proofs very quickly, and I suspect incorrectly most of the time). However the one physics guy I have really does his best to convey the material. The main problem with the classes, though, is the lack of contact time with the material. It is very difficult to get homework in a timely fashion from an Indian because deadlines are not taken as seriously here. This is prolly why the Profs don't hand out as any assignments generally. So the contact time with the material is basically up to the wishes of the students. I think this is a good thing provided that you are dealing with motivated students. That doesn't seem to be the case here. Most people here decide to ignore the courses till the minors (midterms), for which they cram very efficiently. I've been taking a similar approach with not the greatest results as of now. I've passed my minors, but I managed to fall below average on everything except perhaps my sociology class. It was an interesting experience.

Before the minors I represented my hostel in the scrabble tournament. A surprising amount of the competitions here take place in western games. Scrabble for instance, seems like a weird thing to play here as English is a second language to everyone. I'm not particularly gifted at word games, but I played fairly well compared to the other players. I managed to screw up during the tournament though, and so our team ended up with third place. Ironically I ceded our victory by making the fatal decision to make the word "cede" instead of "ceded" and thus I did not block a triple word score. However, I managed to win against a scrabble monster for third place, although I had to challenge a bunch of words. The tournament was organized in two sections, the first to qualify for the finals and the second to play in the finals. The qualification round was played in the night at the Student Activity Center (SAC). It ended around 12 or 1, and although the plan was originally to play the finals the next day the insane dude running the games wanted to finish that same night. (It would have taken till around 4 on a Thursday, maybe.) Fortunately my teammates interceded and convinced the guy to postpone it. Not that it improved my performance.

Everything I need I can usually find in one of the general stores here. They sell this awesome mosquito poison that you plug into the wall, and then you can sleep all night with your window open and be untouched. You can occasionally see mosquitos literally falling out of the air a while after you plug the poison in. It works so well, that I can only surmise that it most be doing irreparable damage to my lungs and brain, because otherwise it would have been sold in the US. I've been eating a lot of different fruits here. Mangos are incredibly good, but unfortunately going out of season. Pomegranates are good, too, but they take too long to eat. Oranges are apparently coming into season, so I'm excited to see what they are like here.

The other thing I managed to acquire was a cycle (bike is a word reserved for motorcycles) at the auction of the orphaned bicycles of the hostel. There were a half dozen of cycles and the auction started off at 300 rupees a cycle. I wasn't super active in the early bidding because I was getting used to the auction bit, and then finally I was less active in the later bidding because the prices were dangerously close to 1000 rupees which is half of a new bike. Finally there was only a very dirty less flashy looking bicycle left. I managed to get it for 500 rupees (~$12.50), since very few people wanted it. It turned out to be better than the majority of the new bikes my confederate foreigners had bought.

This Saturday I went to a concert given by a punjabi band that was playing a fusion of Indian/Punjabi and Western music. That means singing in their traditional manner with electric guitars in the background. I was feeling kind of sick, so I couldn't really appreciate it. Getting there was pretty awesome though. This guy that I randomly met on the way to Rishikesh, and who happened to give me his phone number picked me up from one of the iit gates with his motorcycle. It was really cool sitting on the back, although Delhi traffic made the ride a bit unnerving. Basically the guy was dodging in and around buses and cars on his motorcycle. He didn't go too fast though because the streets were pretty congested. It was definitely an experience.

Something occurred to me sometime between the last email and now, so I figured I'd share it. I get the strong feeling we are all products of our culture. Basically it seems to me that when people have a decision to make they consider their options. All their options are generally drawn from what people have done before or might do in their culture. If for some reason they come up with something different they are shut down by their peers. I think this can be good and bad, since options you invent can be an improvement or deprovement of the status quo. I still would recommend surveying other cultures a bit to get an idea of what is possible.

Well, that's all for now. I'm going to a Desert City in Rajasthan callen Jodhpur. I hope it will be awesome. Have a great start of the semester, those of you who are still in school.