Some Pictures

Here I am with another exchange student and a Doctor from some obscure town visiting the best monument in Delhi (Humayun's Tomb).

Here is a close up of said tomb.
The statues behind me are huge. They're effigies of Ram's enemies for Dusshera. Fortunately they will be burned to the ground at dusk. (They also happen to be filled with fireworks.)

More content from a while ago.

One of the biggest Hindu Holidays is the festival of lights (Diwali or Deepawali depending on who you talk to.). It commemorates the return of Ram (the ideal man and incarnation of Vishnu) to his home after he and the monkey god Hanuman killed the evil (or not so evil according to your sources), ten-headed, Sri Lankan wizard dude Ravana who had stolen Sita (Ram's wife). Any way there is a smaller festival a week or two before Diwali, which commemorates the killing of Ravana called Dusshera. This is pretty cool as in many places in India huge effigies of Ravana and his two lieutenants (who I believe are also his brothers) are built and subsequently burnt to the ground. This was also done on my campus which I of course attended as the effigies were maybe 40 feet tall or so. The thing I didn't realize at the time was that it was also considered to be a good idea to stuff the chest of the effigies with fireworks. This gave the burning an added dimension of craziness. Fortunately they were only the kind of explosives that make loud noises without flying around. It seemed pretty reckless but it ensured that everyone had a blast on Dusshera.

It has pretty much not rained since the Rendezvous event (So late September or so). This is easy to monitor as there was an asphalt painting competition at Rendezvous where they painted pictures with chalk on the street to the main building. They still haven't been washed away, so it's possible to infer that it doesn't rain too much during the nights, and during the days I haven't seen any rain. Only once there was a very short shower. My mom noticed all the dust that is now everywhere which sort of crept onto everything without my noticing. Prolly this is also a symptom of the lack of rain. This hasn't bothered me too much as I've gradually become used to the amount of airborne dirt, but my mom was pretty shocked when she encountered it. Also when we finally washed my clothes with real washing machines in Germany there was a layer of dirt with every load of laundry and every time I washed things on my own in Indian machines the water became a distinctly darker color regardless of how often I washed them.

The european student all complained of the food a bit and got sick of rice because it was with every meal. I find that eating Indian food is awesome, and I don't dislike the food, but I also miss western food, in particular bread, for which there is no suitable analog. The european students then often organized themselves around food related events. Particularly this one French couple had an apartment off campus where we went to have something unIndian for a change. Usually it was crêpes or something along those lines. We also had something that was supposed to be Mouse au chocolat, which contained raw eggs, but was very good. I also tried eating at a McDonalds, which I generally don't do at home for the weirdness of it. The burgers there consist of either these vegetarian potato based burgers or of chicken patties. The best that they have to offer is a Chicken Maharaja Burger which is very well spiced and reasonably filling for a chicken dish. The Mcdonalds generally have a big sign near the counter saying that they do not serve beef products there to avoid any social uproar.

Right before Diwali I went traveling to the south before returning North to Aligarh to my friend Amit's house. We briefly checked out a little known city with ancient forts called Orchha. It is near the somewhat uglier train hub called Jhansi, and has beautiful palaces and temples belonging to one despot or the other a little while back. My travel companions consisted of an Austrian, a German, and a Swiss guy so we were all able to speak German together. This was cool as it made discussing our intentions in front of sales people possible and gave us an added edge of privacy on our journey. It also led to the chance encounter with a tourist from Lichtenstein, who also happened to speak German. Tourist's often have interesting stories behind why they came to a given place. I liked this guy's story because of how extreme it was. Essentially he worked as an mechanic in one of the smallest countries in the world and then decided to just quit his job and see the world, and so he's been traveling for maybe six months or so, I can't remember the details. The idea of just getting up and leaving has always been cool to me, and the fact that he just went was cool to me. Of course it's not all as cool as it sounds since his sister had already done something similar. Also my one problem with his story was he did not really understand the places he went to, rather he was more about sight-seeing it seemed. The thing that hinted toward this was that he was completely oblivious to the fact that Diwali was approaching, which is hard to imagine as any Indian you would have talked to would prolly have mentioned it, and was preparing for it. Be that as it may, Orchha was a beautiful and quiet place unlike many of the tourist traps in India such as our next destination; Kajuraho.

Kajuraho is a town that has no train connections to the outside world but is still heavily visited by tourists because it is the site of some temples which have some pretty explicit sculptures of people having sex. I was struck down with a migraine the morning of our arrival so I missed the viewing of the main group of temples. I did manage to see some of the other temples which also had strangely globularly breasted women in suggestive poses. The temples were very beautiful, but it was hard to unite the possibly sexually freed temples with the somewhat more repressed modern India of today. It's also unclear who built them and why. Despite the beauty of the temples, though, I personally did not enjoy Kajuraho because of the surrounding village. It was similar to my experiences in Jaisalmer in that it seemed to exist solely as a showroom of useless junk to sell to tourists. It was almost impossible to avoid young kids and young adults who were trying to be friendly in order to sell something or get money as tourguides or something. Apparently the trick to getting around these people is to be very impolite and just ignoring them completely. Unfortunately my companions weren't cold enough to complete not talk with them, which led to us leading an army of people in hopes of money around with us. Despite the beauty of the temples, I would not recommend going there.

I then left my German speaking friends behind (they were going to go to some wildlife preserves) and went to Delhi in a rush to meet Amit so I could accompany him home for Diwali. Amit lives in a city called Aligarh, which is cool for several reasons. I personally liked it as it had no tourist attractions. This meant there were no tourists, and none of the tourist sharks who come along with them. This also meant that very few people spoke English, but that wasn't so bad. Aligarh is an industrial city famous for making locks. It also is split into to sides a Hindu and an Muslim population, which do not really mix. There is a huge market at the intersection of the two parts of the city, the muslim side is not as bright and gaudy as the Hindu side. Sometimes that particular area is the site of riots so that there are soldiers there to ensure the peace is kept. Aligarh is also home to the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in which Amit got his Undergrad degrees. (He is now working on his Masters.) Accompanied by Amit then, I was able to just observe normal people doing what they generally do.

He also took me to his home which was a on top of his landlord's home. He had two patios (huge balconies), one on in front of his home and one on it's roof. Indian homes, or at least those in Aligarh, are generally built from bricks and concrete. Essentially the walls are made of brick which are sandwiched between two enormous plates of concrete which compose the roof and the floor. This is really cool as it makes spilling water on the floor not a big deal at all. In fact there were no sinks in the house, there were only two places (one in the kitchen and one on the front patio) where there were spigots and the water was allowed to fall on the floor, and then run along the floor to the outlets that lined the house to pour into the streets. I thought it was pretty cool, especially as his mother didn't use a sink in the kitchen, although that isn't typical in India. The house was incredibly clean, and everything had a place and a function. It was really nice to see something that really worked well for a change. The showers consisted of a bucket with a mug, but that actually was pretty nice, especially because his mother boiled water in the morning for me so that I could shower at a decent temperature for a change. (When I returned to Delhi I also quickly procured a bucket and a mug to take advantage of hot water spigots at IIT.) The toilet was Indian, which I had gotten used to, and almost prefer, by that time. The flushing consisted of just pouring a bucket of water into the toilet, which was pretty simple, and kind of cool since I never understood what all was necessary to flush a toilet before.

Amit's mother was an amazing cook, and in keeping with the traditions I as a guest was served. Typically the women eat after the men have eaten enough, so I was forced to eat with Amit, while his beautiful sister kept bringing refilling my various dishes with whatever had been finished. It was pretty tough to eat all the good food and when I was full his sister would not ask me if I wanted more but instead would ask very sweetly to please have some more of this or that. It was so bad that I was half to three quarters full when the next meal started, but I persevered (the food was too good not to) and had extra helpings at every meal.

I took part in the family Pooja (Hindu prayer) for Diwali, which essentially consisted of chanting some mantras and stuff while waving a plate full of deepaks (clay bowls filled with mustard oil, with a wick which is lit like a candle) in front of some idols. There was also an interesting portion in the Pooja when the traditional greeting of the parents is done. It consists of touching the feet of the elder people in your family and then bringing your hand to your chest and stuff. It went up the family by age, and the Amit's mother did it to his father, but he wasn't required to do it to her. I thought it was worth noting that a hierarchy is built into the greeting of family and into the prayer itself. Traditionally younger siblings don't call their older brothers or sisters in families, but by a title that means older brother or sister.

Later that night we lit deepaks and lined them all around the roof and front patio and Amit's sister made a Rangoli in front of the house. (Rangolis are temporary floor pictures usually made with flowers or colored dust. Basically it's just spread on the ground in a pattern that often has a concentric scheme. It's very pretty. Then there were fireworks all around, although less spectacular than previous years, I'm told. It was all in all pretty dangerous I suspect as they were just normal people shooting them off, but it was cool that a large portion of the city was celebrating. The Muslim part of town, however, had only very few fireworks above it.

When I returned from Diwali Johannes (the German dude) and I went to the nearby Jawarhallal Nehru University (JNU) to see what it was like. JNU is a more humanities oriented school very near to us. (It was in fact just across the large street which borders our campus wall, which I had only realized at that point.) We walked onto campus and had the plan to find a mess in one of the hostels and to eat there, as it would facilitate the meeting of JNUites. The mess food in JNU is comparable to ours, but lacks the variety of roti (breadish things) and prolly is just as monotonous. We met one of the grad students who was happy to show us around, he didn't speak the greatest english, but was the second best of our random sampling (the sample size consisted of four and was chosen based off of who was sitting next to me in the mess and of the student who directed us to the mess in the first place). The student was kind enough to show us his room and explained the general situation on campus. Apparently JNU students are mostly grad students, who aren't subjected to the same strict rules that apply to IIT. Unfortunately they need to supply their own internet connections, but on the upside girls are allowed to enter boys hostels as they please whenever they wish. (The other way around is not permitted, but the hostels are generally not incredibly far apart either as they are at IIT.) The students seem to be more active as far as clubs, parties, shows and other fun stuff are concerned, but there is also a huge amount of politics on campus. (Politics seems to involve having annoying people asking you to support them in causes.) Campus was also generally prettier, newer, and cleaner than at IIT. In general it seemed like a nice place. I figured I'd check it out later in the semester but that never ended up happening.

Piece of News: January 9, 2008

So, I'm in Germany now as I'm writing this, perhaps I'll be in Hong Kong before I mail it though. I have just a couple of remarks to summarize. A while back I discovered that there are two branches of Indian cuisine. The one is based off of Hindu recipes and they are all traditionally vegetarian. Most of them are excellent and generally consist of a sauce (or gravy) and some number of vegetables inside, as well as occasionally this type of somewhat solid yogurt cheese hybrid called paneer. The other branch is derived from food types brought to India by the Mughals when they took control of the land back in the day before the British. (Mughals were the Muslim rulers who took over India and prolly are serve as the origin of the word 'mogul'.) The Mughals being Muslims have nothing against eating meat apart from pigs. The dishes officially taken from them are of course then meat dishes. As far as I can tell though, the only type of meat dishes that survived are the ones consisting only of meat with or without some sauce. So essentially meat in the absence of any vegetable. My guess (and the explanation given to me) for reason behind the lack of vegetation in all the Mughal dishes is that people nowadays want to escape from all the vegetables and just eat meat for a change. The Mughal dishes are also pretty good, but generally I take the vegetarian ones because they are cheaper and still incredibly good. (A better reason would be that meat can be pretty sketchy, but that isn't why I usually avoid it.) It's scary, but I think I could be a vegetarian with this kind of food, since I don't miss the meat. Often there is no milk or egg products in the food either, so being vegan here would be pretty simple and very tasty. Although I don't miss the meat, whenever I have it I really enjoy it, so now that I'm back in the western hemisphere I have no qualms about continuing to eat other animals on a regular basis.

If you by some chance managed to read that far in one of my last monster emails, I made plans to interview the mess workers here. I ended up doing it with the help of my two closest Indian friends, Nitin and Amit. I unfortunately was unable to understand what they were saying as my Hindi has not reached a serviceable level yet. (I can ask many basic questions, but neither my vocabulary nor my aural comprehension is enough to understand the answers.) The interviews turned out very successful and many of the people seemed very flattered that I interviewed them. That was actually one of the motives behind it. I wanted to hear the stories behind how they had gotten to be in their position, understand what their position is, and give them a feeling of being interesting and important by interviewing them. I may have defeated the purpose of this, as I did not interview everyone, but for a few I think it was prolly postive. I interviewed 4 or 5 mess workers, a gardener, as well as a sweeper, and a guard. I wanted to interview my favorite guard (Sanjeev) who had taught me much of my Hindi, but I ran out of time, and also I already have talked with him about his story. Fortunately I've been spared the necessity of elaborating on what they said here as I still haven't gotten the interviews translated, yet. (My two friends who took the interviews still need to get that done. My Hindi skillz aren't enough to figure it out.)

The gardener seemed like a really good guy. I met him while juggling. He came to me and tried to ask about it in Hindi. I asked him for his name, which he told me was Akleesh. He, like many other people has had his name tattooed to his arm. At first I though it was some sort of a degrading ID tag, like for a dog or something, but apparently it's just something people do (it's usually more popular in villages). He was a pretty hardworking guy and from what Nitin and Amit have told me his was one of the better interviews.

I found a mint bush on the banks of some mountains at the hill station of Mussoorie which I mentioned last time. The weather was quite european and the markets there were very peaceful. No one called out to us to go to their shops unlike the usual practice in India. Besides chilling out though, there wasn't too much to do there. All I wanted was to chill though, so it was fine. While we were there we went to see a Tibetan colony and a waterfall. The Tibetan colony was mostly funded by Europeans, so the houses were really sweet. It took me a moment to figure out why I liked them, so much, but I'm pretty sure it was because of them being somewhat outlandish in appearance, but clearly up to western standards as far as everything else was concerned. They were also built upon a hill so the effect was quite cool. There was a Buddhist temple there too that we looked at. (Most Tibetans are thought to be Buddhist.) Amit was there so he was able to tell inform when the Buddhist priest/monk who was chilling in the temple observed to some other Hindi speaker in the temple that I was pretty superficial. I think he was referring to what I was looking at in the temple. I didn't speak a word to the guy, so the speed with which he managed to succinctly summarize me as a person is quite impressive.

The temple was very pretty and was situated on this mountain ridge in an incredibly scenic position. Apart from attracting tourists, though I don't think it was an extremely practical place to locate the the city. Massoorie as a whole is positioned on a mountain ridge, but in such a way that all the roads could be level, so it was a pretty cool place to walk around. It was also extremely quiet there before we arrived. I was there with this German guy Johannes with whom I get along really well. When we were returning to our hotel at some late hour we were by far the loudest thing around. We found a scorpion that was mostly dead on the road, and we were a little bit freaked out by the idea of them hypothetically running around our rooms at night. The waterfalls turned out to be not too exciting, and a bit annoying as it also attracted a ton of Indian tourists who have the habit of asking white people for the opportunity to take pictures with them. It is ok to take a couple of pictures, but if 15 people all want pictures and won't stop asking, it's incredibly annoying. Once or twice after I said no, people would try to casually sneak up next to me and have their friends take a picture inconspicuously. We avoided them and moved to more remote parts of the river after that.

All in all Massoorie was good, although getting there we took a bus. It was a tourist bus and cost somewhere between 2 and 4 times the local bus's price. The driver was much worse than those of the local buses and the seats were not that much more comfortable. Trying to sleep on the bus was next to impossible as there were speed breakers on the road and the driver didn't seem to care about slowing down. Thus every 5 minutes or so the bus would jump with a loud noise making it difficult to sleep. Since we sat in the back we got more of the effect and were often bounced up off our seats, which made sleeping very difficult. The last bump I was almost asleep, but not only was I woken by being thrown up off my seat, I also managed to bang my face off of the luggage rack above me, which cut my eyebrow. Fortunately I wasn't wearing glasses at the time, but the luggage rack had drawn blood. I thought it was kind of funny at the time, but I refrained from using the tourist buses afterwards. I had the thought at the time that it kind of sucked to be bleeding from the eye in the back of a loud bus which periodically threw me out of my seat, but at least it offered a pretty ridiculous story to tell afterwards. Often when stuff really sucks I console myself with the "it'll be a funny story later" or with the "it's an experience" rationalization. I've found them to be pretty effective.

One interesting thing about Indians is that they don't say "thank you" very often. Often if someone is just doing there job, there is no need to acknowledge any appreciation for it. Please by the same token is not used very often. It's also a reflection of the idea of asymmetric given relationships. Basically If a friend loans me some money, I should not pay him back, at least not precisely. I can give him more or less than what he gave me, but not in the form of cash usually. I would have to buy him something else or the like. Settling your debts is like saying the relationship is over in some ways. This is pretty cool as I will buy some people food or tchai, and someone else will buy it for me later. I really like this idea as it is only natural to help someone who is need now, even if they can't return the favor as someone else will help me later when I need it. Still, this makes saying thank you pretty rare and special, and so I got a ton of huge smiles when I arrived. I still say thank you, but what's interesting is that the word means something here as opposed to being a formality. A little brother of a friend of mine back home mentioned that 'please' and 'thank you' lose their meanings since they are overused, and I think I agree. I don't think we should stop being polite, I just figure it's something to think on.

Anyway, this is a good place to stop as I've written a lot so I'll cut it into smaller pieces. I can also just send a big mail, but I think this makes it more readable. (I'm in Hong Kong now, so I'll keep sending the India stuff periodically, and maybe some Hong Kong stuff eventually.)

Happy New Year!

Mammoth Post Suspected From November 10, 2008

I've become a bit reclusive recently, which is kind of weird and runs counter to the whole plan of learning about Indian culture while I'm here. It's kind of more IIT culture though that I'm exposed to, which this german guy (Johannes) I juggle with pointed out. I get a pretty good feel for certain aspects of the culture here, but perhaps it's a stereotyped version especially since the people I deal with are mostly students. I talk with other people on trains or buses when I'm out touristing about. I've met many old people and middle-aged guys and aspiring business people, but they are generally fairly well educated, as they speak english. The real India is allegedly in villages, which makes sense as some statistic that I won't cite claimed that 80% of the population lives there. That's a pretty sizeable chunk of the people, and from what I understand they are very poorly educated as well as poor. A friend of mine agreed to take me to his village later in the semester, and I'm going to the town of another friend of mine during Diwali (the biggest festival here), where I will get a glimpse into the lives there. I am very curious, but it still strikes me that my viewpoint here is pretty narrow. It also occurs to me that my viewpoint at home is pretty narrow as well. I've been brought up in a WASP area amongst middle class people, and I live at UMass most of the time surrounded by the educated middle class. So when I say that America is this or that, it just means that my slice of America is like this or that. Basically I haven't talked with really poor people or rich people. I've got an incomplete view of almost everything it seems. I wonder what portion of stuff would be good to see in order to have an understanding of what a place is actually like. My little brother did an internship in a museum where he did all sorts of odd-jobs with the relatively exploited workers there. They were definitely from a much poorer less educated class of people. I'm not sure what portion of the population they make up, but it occurs to me that perhaps it would be good to gather experiences across these economic boundaries as well. With that in mind, I think maybe I will interview the workers in the Mess (cafeteria) here, with the help of my friend Amit (the guy who I am visiting for Diwali), in case they don't speak enough english. They are generally treated as servants by the students who don't feel to bad about giving them orders or the like. This makes me a bit uncomfortable but I have grown used to it.

I went to buy some curtains at the Sarojini Nagar (SN) market recently because I wanted to remove the black paper that the previous students had pasted to my window for privacy and to keep out the sun, but I did not want to give up the option of privacy. I went with another friend of mine and he helped me bargain for the curtains. We went under the assumption that they would try to rip me off, and that he would get a lower price suggested. To test our hypothesis he went without me to ask how much a curtain was and then afterwards I would come and ask about the same curtain. We got the same offer, I think it was 125 rupees. (So about 3 dollars.) So perhaps the overcharging of foreigners is somewhat of a myth. Or conversely the idea that Indian's get fairer offers is not true. Generally the foreigners get ripped off trying to rent autorickshaws. They are like motorized tricycles with a roof and a windshield. This is the standard form of transportation, and I hate them. The drivers always force you to argue down the price, which is annoying, especially if you don't actually know the price. Essentially what I do is I argue with three or four different drivers to test their lower limits, and generally they all fall around some number. The lowest offer I get I assume to be fair and I try to get that price from the next auto driver. It's incredibly annoying, and the better the driver speaks english the worse, because it means they are very good at ripping off tourists. Typically the most heinous are middleaged with mustaches and good english. In any case, I've argued drivers to take me to Connaught Place (CP) for around 70 rupees (~$1.75). This is a fair price actually and when this Sikh friend of mine (Parminder) was taking me to a temple near CP he also got it to 70 rupees. Of course he didn't have to argue for a long time, but the bottom line is that if you have a good idea of the price you can generally get the item at that cost. I've also been with some Indians and Indian Seeming individuals who have gotten ripped off despite the fact that they looked local. So basically everyone needs to be careful and bargain their brains out, but the real price seems to be available to everyone. Exceptions to this rule are some tourist places, although if you make it a big enough hassle, apparently you can get discounts. The theory was put to me that westerners get ripped off because they don't complain. So if people trying to sell stuff see that it will be annoying to get some white individual to comply with their demands they will eventually become more reasonable. Still Lal Quila for instance charges 250 rupees for tickets for foreign people and 10 rupees from locals. Taj Mahal wants 750 rupees. It's pretty annoying to see the clear double standard.

When Parminder took me to the Sikh temple in Delhi, I couldn't help but compare it to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Both temples had an outer wall with the actual holy temple building in the center of this lake. That was pretty cool. Also there was no insane mass of tourists and people looking for tourists there. It was really nice, like going to some random church back home. There was no hassle and people were chilling in the island temple listening to this dude singing with an accompaniment of outlandish (or in prolly more correctly for finding them here inlandish) instruments. There were also a collection of religious men reading the holy book of the Sikhs for people. You can buy a reading for yourself so these guys just keep rereading the book over and over. It was like a real place where people practiced Sikhism not a showcase of the religion as the Golden temple had been. Much like St Peters at the Vatican is this ridiculous church, the Golden Temple is a caricature of a real temple. I think in the future if I am looking for real things I will try to go to places that aren't known for them.

As I have become extremely lazy due to the amount of nothing that often goes on here, I've decided to motivate myself, myself. So in order to do that I've come up with a schedule which assigns like an hour a day to do things for me so that I at least progress in some senses. Most importantly I've decided to start searching for a future topic for grad school type things in the future.

Some of my classes I really don't care about here, and so I've had tremendous difficulty working for them since I just don't care. Basically I have plans and the classes interrupt me and waste my time and energy. If I can integrate my classes with my plans, probably I will be in much better shape. Particularly a certain sociology paper is annoying as it really gives me nothing in return for the time I waste trying to write it.

The weekend before last I and an Austrian fellow named Lukas went to this place called Jodhpur in the "deserts" of Rajasthan, the westernmost state of India at the latitude of Delhi. The deserts turned out to be pretty barren shrublands. The train ride over was in the sleeper class which is a pretty chill class because it's extremely cheap, and as my one friend pointed out, you talk with everyone. On the way to Jodhpur this turned out to be not so good of a thing because we encountered a blowhard from one of the medical schools in Delhi. He was so full of bs that I was surprised he didn't explode and cover the compartment in it. He seemed content in liberally dispensing it orally, though, throughout the night, which I couldn't avoid without being extremely rude. I finally escaped by going to my bed to write some diary entry before going to sleep.

The third reason the sleeper class is awesome is because it facilitates a plan that Lukas and I have schemed into existence. If a tourist is able to get a good night's sleep on a train, then he or she can avoid hotels entirely and spend one day in each location and wake up in a new spot the next day. This is theoretically cheaper, allows us to cover more ground in a shorter period of time, and what's best is that this way none of your days are wasted by traveling. The downsides are that hygiene is pretty bad without showers and cities need to spaced at a reasonable distance apart to make it worthwhile. Otherwise if a city is too close we don't get enough sleep or arrive at a ludicrous hour. I like this because it is counterintuitive to me that a city might be too close of a destination.

Jodhpur upon arrival was extremely hot. I sweated a lot there, but the humidity was extremely low, which actually made it more pleasant than Delhi. When I returned to IIT I felt very sticky and unpleasant because of this. The reason people go to Rajasthan is for the forts. Jodhpur had a huge fort named Mehrangarh which did not disappoint. It was enormous. It reminded me of the castle Carcassonne, which is a monstrous citadel in the south of France. The audio guide was pretty funny, and we saw many beautiful things there.

On the way out there was this dude who was overcharging people for a camel ride. I had two things on my list of to dos when in India, and they were to ride a camel and to ride an elephant. So I overpaid the guy. It was pretty cool. The scariest part being when the camel gets up or gets down. It is very unsmooth. A camel is also an immense animal. Much like the first time I saw a horse I was surprised at how big this thing was. This camel's hump was at least at a height of 8 or 9 feet. The head was higher as it was on this huge long neck. The camel did not walk very smoothly so I would sway from side to side on this thing. I was basically guided by the very unfriendly looking camel owner down a street and then back up for what was allegedly half a kilometer. All along the way people, most likely Indian tourists come to see the fort waved and smiled. I'm not sure what was more of an oddity to them, the camel or me. It was like I was a star of some kind. It was interesting.

Many Indians seem fascinated or taken surprised to see tourists. I'm not sure why, but even in very touristy areas many people who don't seem to be out to screw me are very curious about me and where I come from etc. I think it may really be lack of exposure. It has happened two or three times to me that I have been doing something or going somewhere, and I see this white guy here. On the Metro this happened once and here in IIT it happened also. I sort of turned and looked (hopefully not stared) at him and wondered to myself, "How did he get here? What is he doing here?" and stuff like that. White people are pretty rare in the non explicitly tourist places that even I am shocked and curious to see one.

After the first day in Jodhpur we set the night train plan into action and went to the nearby town of Jaisalmer. Unfortunately we hit upon a a problem. All the trains were booked or only offered standing room, neither of which we desired, all the local buses had already left, which made our only option to travel by tour bus, which sucks because you have to reserve them and that they are no better than the local buses in my humble opinion. We managed to organize one forty minutes before the bus departed and then got to the departure point by auto-rickshaw. We had reserved a sleeper class bus. The kind bus official gave us the worst bunk on the bus. The mattress had been torn up and the cover that was also in shreds was moldy. Yay! We prolly should have made a fuss about it, but we were too happy that we had gotten a place on the bus to complain to the driver. Instead, Lukas and I spent a long time complaining to each other in German before deciding that there was nothing to do except sleep. Unfortunately just as we had reached this conclusion and after the bus had reached an uncomfortable level of fullness, some dude got up onto our bunk. I don't particularly like confrontations so I didn't brutally throw him out of the bunk. When I timidly started to complain he claimed that he was at a nearby village and wouldn't be there for long, so I tolerated it. After a while I made the mistake of talking to him which would make the inevitable ejection of him from my bed more difficult. He was an english teacher, in a village. I did end up asking him to leave pretty late. Around 11 or midnight. I can't remember, but either way I was moronically tired when I was woken upon arrival to Jaisalmer around 4 or 4:30.

People were telling me welcome to Jaisalmer. There were three or four of them everyone holding a brochure with the picture of their hotel on it. Each of them wanted us to agree to come to their hotel. Lukas and I decided to leave the bus and they followed us. Outside there were maybe 15 of these hotel guys all trying to get us to come to theirs. No one waited for us to say anything, they would just talk to us all at the same time and interrupt us whenever we tried to say anything to someone else. People grabbed us and flashed fliers into our faces for a while. Eventually we told them to leave us alone and started to walk off. As we halted a bit further to regroup the mob quickly overtook us and assaulted us again. Someone offered us tea on the roof of their hotel with no strings attached. (A common strategy here is to give something for free or be kind and then expect guilt to ensnare the hapless victim into buying something.) All of a sudden everyone offered this. Now as we didn't need a hotel, we didn't want a room anyway, but partly in order to avoid the crowd, and partly to see the sunrise from an advantageous spot we agreed to follow this one guy.

By the way, the sunrise and sunset are the only tourist attractions in Jaisalmer. They have a huge fort, but so does every place in Rajasthan. Given the two attractions, you can imagine how exciting Jaisalmer is. As the sunrise and sunset look surprisingly similar to the others I have seen on those rare occasions that I am conscious at the appropriate times, I wouldn't particularly recommend going there. The guy took us to the top of his hotel and when we reached the roof he viciously shook two serving boys awake who were sleeping on the roof. (The roof was built as a large deck.) We got the impression that he might as well be waking some animals from his manner. He then had them make us tea, and stayed with us to have a conversation that would hopefully lead to our renting a room from him. Apparently he got the funds for his hotel from his rich cousin and was toying with the idea of building another hotel next to the first. It was like he was playing business man with his rich cousins money. That and the way he woke the servants up made me not very sympathetic. We left after he went to go scavenge some tourists off the train that arrived at 5 and watched the sunrise from the fort walls. (It was a much better location for seeing it than the hotel roof.) Lukas had some misgivings about just accepting his hospitality (including the toilet) and then leaving. I figure though, if he made the offer of giving us tea et cetera without asking for payment, then we shouldn't feel obligated since if we were then it wasn't a gift.

It seems that Jaisalmer has no industries or other reason besides tourism to really stay alive. And everyone seems to try to make a living doing the same thing. As Lukas and I later walked through the fort, we realized that we were just wondering past one shop that sold useless junk after the other with restaurants here and there. It was very depressing to me that so many of these people based their lives around us. Two reasons make this pretty uncool in my opinion. First of all their welfare is hugely out of their control. They build something to please me and if I arbitrarily decide I don't want it, there's nothing they can do. It's as if the quality their work in their eyes is unimportant. They can't work for the satisfaction of what they are doing. Without me, their work is more or less pointless. Secondly the constant pandering to tourists places foreigners on a pedestal. The world is clearly cut into two groups now: humble workers who can only hope that the noble foreigners come and deign to dispense their life-giving money on the dying town. It was pretty chilling to me. But someone pointed out that perhaps working for money anywhere is like this. I think there is generally a mix of personal satisfaction and goals in the job and ensuring whoever is buying your product is happy, and this seems to be an extreme case of ensuring your customer is happy. Maybe I would feel like I would have less dignity if I were one of these guys, in any case, I'm not sure what the difference is, but I think there is one.

So the one thing besides the motions of nearby stars that Jaisalmer is famous for is taking camel safaris. I had already ridden a camel in Jodhpur but I figured a longer experience would be better, and as an added bonus, we could see the sun going down in the desert! Riding the camels again was fun, although I had developed some sort of a stomach ache and that tainted my perception a lot. We were guided by there two small children who spoke only very poor english. I wonder what they thought about us. The "safari" was a shortened version of a several day trip. Basically we rode the camels for maybe 2 or 3 hours. During the trip we stopped at a bunch of tombs and then also at a "gypsy village". The tombs were interesting. I bought a rock off a child there for no particular reason. The "gypsy village" was a collection of makeshift huts which stick in my mind for having tarp or trashbag roofs. Basically we stopped and a group of women who had dressed up and painted designs on their faces came up and sang a song for us while two of them danced. I felt particularly rotten watching this. I feel like these people are being exploited by me and by the people from the Camel touring society etc. Particularly when I looked at their really cheap houses I feel like I'm taking advantage of their poverty into making them humiliate themselves by dancing for me.

We ended the safari on this set of dunes which rose out of nowhere from the shrublands. It was fun playing on the dunes, although my stomach did not let up torturing me. That night in accordance with the night train plan we boarded a bus again, but there was only one place to go which was Jodhpur, so we went back. (This wasn't really a cheaper or good way of setting our plan into action, but we made due with what we had.) The return trip was miserable, because I was a mess.

We did end up getting a hotel because I was feeling very sick and we weren't returning to IIT till that evening. I slept while Lukas went to some monument place. Around noon I got up and Lukas and I went for a pseudo random walk through the back streets of Jodhpur. We ended up in this Muslim area and it was particularly cool because no one accosted us trying to sell anything. Many people said hi, and everyone was friendly. We saw a passing parade dedicated to Ganesh, a peculiar dude with an elephant's head. People had spray painted their bodies and were on carts making a lot of noise. Many beckoned us to join them on the wagons, but Lukas and I declined. Earlier in the morning we had met a pair of French girls with the most abominable english that I've heard in a long time (makes me glad that I learned French, as it seems the French are the only people who can't speak English) and a young reprobate who tried to sell me a monstrous basket (which I almost mailed home). The basket was maybe 4 or 5 feet in diameter and was strong enough to support the weight of at least an Indian woman. We ended up getting on the train platform just before it left. I met a friend of mine from IIT who happened to have been there while we were there. It's too bad I didn't know, since it would have been awesome to visit him, but I had fun anyway.

I talked with a lot of people on the train who were delighted to help me read out of this book designed to learn Hindi. It was funny, people would read a word out loud while I was struggling to decipher, it as if to prove that they too could read Hindi. I talked with people about arranged marriages and how they had gotten married and the like too. It was very interesting. People seem to be happy with what they ended up with partially because there is no alternative.

The internet connection here is really, really slow. I used to think that this was due somehow to the low level of development of the Indian infrastructure, but apparently, as Lukas clarified for me, the connection used to be much faster. The connection is so slow because the University has set it to that level! In order to limit our abilities to waste our time or something the administrators have decided to remove our options. It's like we aren't trusted by the University to make decisions on our own. They remove our access to the common room which has a tv and some games from certain time, they don't allow the students to change their major more than once, they separate genders as much as possible, and they block easy access to the internet. It's like they try to force their students to study by removing everything else that people like doing. The general response seems to be apathy and watching a lot of movies. Also the students are very involved in interhostel competitions, but aren't very focused on their studies. It is frustrating that we aren't treated as adults. Many students seem a bit more dependent on their families than the students here, but they are still adults and should be allowed to make their own decisions I think. But then that may be my upbringing talking.

The movies they watch are of course impossible to steal off the crippled internet connection, but the students, being some of the brightest people in India managed to set up a LAN which allows the students to share files on an internal network. The percentage of porn on the LAN is pretty large, although I would have expected that it would be extremely taboo here. Most of the students are very open about watching porn and sharing it.

The weekend after the Jodhpur trip there was this huge festival here called Rendezvous where there were a lot of other colleges invited here to take part in a variety of events. Almost all events were competitions, as usual. There were a large portion of group dancing events and some music shows too. I attended a group dance and one of the music shows, both of which were pretty good. The music was a sort of Indian rock. It wasn't bad. There was another event which took place called Podium where a bunch of DJs set up shop in front of the library and played music while tons of students, mostly guys danced. (This started at noon and went till 5.) There was another dance called RDX where you could only enter or leave if you were accompanied by someone of the opposite gender. I tried my luck in the chess competition in which mostly pretty bad players were playing. Unfortunately I was undone in the second round by a pretty nasty trap which I should prolly have been familiar with. Fortunately there was no one there I particularly wanted to impress, so it didn't bother me too much. I got the rest of the tournament off, which was pretty chill.

I met these two crazy people at this quizzing competition I was part of, the day before. One was from Kashmere and the other from Haryana. They asked me where I was from and then we talked a little bit after the competition, nothing of substance was said, though. The guy from Haryana in particular was very possessive. He managed to decide from our brief encounter that he and I were good friends. I ran into him the next day after my gruesome demise in the chess competition. He then made plans for me coming to Haryana to visit him and asked me a ton of things about me. I, out of courtesy, didn't make the conversation particularly awkward. Later he searched me out in my room just before he was about to leave. It was the incredibly draining and weird to me. The idea of immediate friendship seems pretty irrational and in many ways unhealthy to me. I have encountered 3 or 4 people like this here so far. It's unnerving. I don't know what to tell these people, especially as I don't want to be slave to random people's whims in order to not hurt their feelings.

Since then not much has happened. Camille and Julien, two french students had a housewarming party, so I got to see their apartment. The French, Swiss, and American (me) students went as well as Amit, an Indian friend of mine and Camille's all went. The French and Swiss spoke French amongst themselves, and since I was not feeling in the mood to be social I did not try to either follow along in French or get them to speak English. So I basically hung out with Camille, Amit and Julien off to one side while the Francophone students did their thing. The apartment was pretty cool. And we had crêpes along with various condiments we brought along. I bought honey which is expensive, but incredibly good. (It's also awesome on rotis (Indian bread type stuff) from the mess. Incidentally, bees are apparently still having some sort of housing issues and are leaving their hives en mass for no apparent reason. Somebody ought to get on to that.

My roomape also moved out and got an apartment with his girlfriend. This leaves me with almost a single. (Occasionally he still shows up for stuff.) It's pretty chill, since he would usually go to bed about an hour or two before me and would often take naps during the day. Now I don't have to worry about waking him. Although my sleeping habits may be in danger of drifting more towards later hours at night and sleeping a bit during the day.

Alright before I end this absurdly long communication, I figure people might be interested in knowing the following, US passports will warp like crazy if they are left in a moist environment, so I'd recommend a plastic bag. (Mine straightened out after I kept it tied flat in a plastic bag.) German passports mold if kept in a moist environment. I'd also recommend a plastic bag. Sandals made of cow leather seem to chafe my feet in a moist environment. Plastic bags might work for this one too, but instead I have resorted to generally wearing sneakers and my rubber shower flip-flops instead. Mosquitos like to bite ankles, so I'd recommend wearing socks at night.

That's all for the moment. Tonight I leave for Mussoorie, partially because I want to go some place farther away from the bomb blasts which seem to becoming vogue in Delhi, and partially because I'm tagging along with a group of cool people. Hope everyone is having a smashing semester.

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.

Sometime later than last post. Maybe a week. (August 19, 2008)

Some of my French friends and I went to Amritsar in Punjab. It's one of the super holy places of the Sikhs (I believe Punjab is the state were Sikhism originated). Sikhs are known for wearing Turbans and having beards. They also traditionally wear a certain type of bracelet, a sword (nowadays mostly a small decorative one), a special type of underwear, and a special comb. We were planning on seeing the famous Golden Temple there and go to the Pakistani border to see some sort of a ceremonial dance between the Indian border guards and the Pakistani guards. The plan was then to also sleep in the Golden Temple, which is apparently allowed.

The train ride there was a night train. It was fun because people were very friendly. Most people are charmed by the idea that I might be trying to learn Hindi. I generally try to spell their names when I meet them and they generally get a kick out of it. My vocabulary is not increasing at a particularly fast rate though. The one thing I am getting skilled at is talking about food. I got the traditional swearing course from two of my first Indian friends fairy early, but my useful vocabulary is still pretty low.

One young guy saw me struggling to speak Hindi with this old guy before my train arrived and then decided to sit down next to me. He told me a bit of his philosophy. He also mentioned that he thought that learning Hindi wasn't particularly useful for me. I gave him various arguments on how it improves my mind at the time, but I'm left with the nagging doubt that maybe he's right. It is a very esoteric thing to learn, particularly when I'm faced with a culture in which probably the majority of people speak English anyway. The vernacular seems to be Hindi, but almost everyone I generally talk to is quite good at English.

Anyway we met a variety of people on the train, I was surprised to meet a group of tech service representatives for Del. They were very friendly, and their leader Sukhmit explained to me his theory of how everyone was essentially the same. The next day he showed us the Golden Temple and was kind enough to negotiate a bus to the border for us. I was a little weirded out because my French friends who had been with him previously said he behaved markedly different when I showed up (apparently he was very curious to see how an American would react to his theory or something). So I was a bit on edge after learning this. In any case, he was a great host for Amritsar (although he lives in Delhi) and he cued us in on a lot of interesting stuff about the golden temple etc..

The golden temple was beautiful. Essentially it consists of an outer wall, which surrounds a lake and at the center of the lake is a gold-plated temple. We had to remove our shoes before entering, which everyone warns you not to do in India because of parasites and the like. Oh well, so we walked around and then Sukhmit took us across the one walkway to the golden temple. (There were two lines of people waiting to get in. We were somehow in a VIP line and bypassed almost everyone.) Double standards don't seem to be too uncommon here, though. We bought something that I think was called a Prashad before entering and it was parted in two by a priest with a large knife. Apparently one half is for god, and the other half is for the bringer. After seeing the inside of the golden temple, which was very pretty, we (by we I mean all the Indians and mostly just me) drank a sip of water out of the lake. The holy water apparently is good for a lot of things, and if you bath in it you retain eternal life or youth or something. Everyone who comes to the temple bathes there. (Except us, apparently.) So there must either be a lot of immortal or eternally young people in India.

After leaving the temple we went to the border which was disappointing. Some Indian dudes in funny looking hats and some Pakistani guards in similar outfits did a weird high stepping sort of ceremony to raise and lower a flag. Out of solidarity to Sukhmit and co we waited in the Indian bleachers. It was pretty unpleasant seeing as how somehow the crowd couldn't be coaxed into sitting down. So we ended up standing for two hours in the heat and being jostled by tons of equally sweaty Indians. It was hot and unpleasant, and Sukhmit and co ended up leaving because they were bored without telling us, so solidarity was no longer a valid excuse for being there. It was cool how the crowd responded to the chanting various slogans called out by the guards. The group energy or whatever is impressive. I did not understand where the actual guard even thingumugummy was going on, so I was looking in the wrong direction for quite a while. I don't regret having gone, but I wouldn't recommend it.

We stopped by this bizarre temple to this Vaishna Devi goddess. It was a reproduction of another temple in Kashmir. It had many large statues and obstacle (for instance a giant head only slightly smaller than myself) like things to tell the story of how she was followed by this evil guy who was out to kill her. At one point we walked through this big mouth into an artificial stream. It was like a haunted house of sorts. In the story she wins by killing the evil dude. I only learned this afterwards, the story was not at all clear to me from the assortment of stuff in the temple. Holy water was also offered here to drink, but I decided one chance at getting a holy nematode in my system was enough so I declined.

We ended up sleeping in the Golden temple in Amritsar. By in the golden temple I mean on the marble floor. I slept well, after I got over the paranoia of what might happen to me or my stuff. There are three types of Indians who talk to tourists it seems. One is a friendly type who wants to learn about this or that or help me or improve their english, another is out to make fun of the tourists, and the third is out to get money somehow. I met some of the first two types in the temple. So manu pf them were pretty nice.

At around 3 we were woken up so that they could pour water on the floor, and around 5 we were woken up because holy rites were being performed and it was sacrilegious to sleep. They then showed us to this guest room for foreigners. Apparently we shouldn't have slept on the floor. The last day we just went to the Ranjid Singh museum, who was a distinguished Sikh king of Punjab. It was very interesting, although we also had to remove our shoes for it as well. Using the bathroom barefoot is pretty gross. Apparently the way to be remembered in history is to fight wars (and probably win them).

Last week a bunch of cultural events were going on. In particular a music night and a duo dance thing. All the hostels are in competition for the trophy for the year. Apparently the contest gets pretty towards the end of the year, but this was only the beginning. Yet for the music thing, there was an attempt by the other hostels to disqualify our hostel using a technicality. (This is understandable as our hostel is the best at cultural events, and hopefully everything else I might add.) We won both the music thing and the dance competition. The chanting was pretty sweet. Our entire hostel screamed stuff like Jaya Kumaon at the top of our lungs. (Hail Kumaon, which is our hostel name.) I joined in for the stuff I could pronounce. All the other hostels did the same for their hostels. It was worth going to only for the screaming, I think. The dance thing was better than the music thing. In the dance competition 2 people from each hostel danced with props and other things. They were by and large pretty good, with some tricks with shadows being very popular. They also had a gimmick with a little midget made out of the two dancers and a screen. Besides that, some cool things were a sort of reflection thing done where our dancers pretended to be the reflection of one another. Another hostel had one dancer put on white pants and the other a white jacket, hat and tie. They then turned off all the lights except for a black light. The effect was pretty good.

I am supposed to represent our hostel in the scrabble event. I am too slow at the moment, so I've been training with some of the scrabblewalas here. (Adding the wala to a word signifies a person who is associated with that thing. Scrabblewala is not actually used, but I like it.) I'm too slow, so they insist that I train continually before the event. I have been enlisted by the water polo team too, but if I can manage to avoid playing I prolly will.

I was at the banks of the Ganges last weekend. I saw a lot monkeys there and was attacked by a cow. Most of them are pretty peaceful, but this one must have sensed my many crimes against the Bovine species, so it headbutted raised me off the ground with it's horns. Fortunately someone thought ahead far enough to saw the tips of the its horns. Other wise I'd probably be returning to the US in an extremely castrated and otherwise disemboweled state. I hope everyone who reads this eats a hamburger out of solidarity.

In any case, that's pretty much the gist of what has been going on here. Writing these emails takes a long time, but I figure it's good to document weird stuff in the end. Looking over the length of this one, I think I can see how blog writers develop their megalomaniacal tendency to assume everything that happens to them interests other people.

Second Week: Aug 1, 2008

It's been like a week since I wrote, I guess. So far all the B-Tech (BS) students have arrived here. They're very friendly, so far and most of them speak very good english. Generally it seems you have to introduce yourself to someone once at the Mess (cafeteria) or somewhere, and then they say hi whenever you see them. It's a bit confusing, because I keep losing track of who I have met before and who I haven't. Their names are also very difficult to remember but Abishek and Arvinder seem to be very popular. The situation is peculiar in that IIT is set up so that all the girls are on one side of the campus and all the guys are on the other. Since the food in the mess is offered in our Hostels and we can't eat at other hostels, generally people are separated by approximately 1.5 to 3 kilometers from anyone who is not of the same gender.

The foreign students and I went to a bar in Yusuf Sarai (I believe that is the name of a small region of Delhi near IIT. The bar was actually more of a restaurant which served alcoholic drinks and played music so loud that it was almost impossible to talk. Apparently most of the "bars" here are similar. It is more of an imitation of what a bar is thought to be like in the US for the more upper class Indians or so. The drinks seemed to be reasonably priced, around 140 rupees for mixed drinks and 200 rupees for bears. 200 Rupees is 5 dollars. In any case, prolly due to some of the same cultural ideas that lead to the whole separating of the guys' and girls' hostels, there were virtually no women in the entire bar. I think I may have seen 2. Three others may have passed through, but I don't think they stayed. This did not stop the guys who were there from dancing after it became sufficiently late. One guy randomly started dancing and then slowly people started joining him. Almost everyone at our table, including me, eventually got up and joined in. Throughout the whole "Dance Party", if you will, neither of the girls danced along. Allegedly at the very end one of them started but I did not see her. It was very bizarre, but fun.

I still have not succumbed to disease, although my roomape is suffering from something. So far everything has been going well, although I've started to drink the drinking water here, and I've been brushing my teeth with less potable water since I arrived.

The whole hostel seems obsessed with sports, and they keep recruiting people for there hostel teams. All the hostels (I presume by all they mean the male hostels.) compete to get a ranking in a lot of sports. Swimming, water polo, football (soccer), badminton, squash, basketball, and, of course, cricket are on the agenda. They compete on the "cultural" level too. So like music, dance, etc. They are especially interested in recruiting foreigners because our size and often athletic ability makes us pretty useful I think. So I will try to play with them and see how it goes. The freshers (freshmen) are forced to do running and other exercises by the upper classmen for the first week, because generally they spend 2 years preparing almost exclusively for the entrance exam to IIT. So usually they aren't particularly active before they arrive. The goal is to make sure that they stay physically fit as well. It seems to be working, since everyone here seems to be athletic. There are not many fat people as far as I can tell. Most if the foreign students are more or less ripped too. I'm not sure why.

The bureaucracy here is incredible. I had to register for staying here for more than 180 days. This involved standing around in various lines from 9:30 till 3. A friend of mine who was ahead of me in line initially wasn't done until 4:20. It was a pretty terrible experience. In the end, all it boiled down to was getting some stamps on some papers and getting the stamps signed. They also scribbled some stuff on my passport saying that I had registered or something. I think there was a stamp for that too. Some friends of mine didn't have the correct papers so they forged them right outside the office. It sort makes you think how pointless the whole paperwork is, if all it takes is a stamp and some scribbles to makes something official. And yet, despite the utter lack of sense they make people wait for around 6 hours to get registered. It's unclear to me what happens with all the papers, I get the impression it all goes into some 1984ish memory hole, or onto the trash heap immediately outside. It all seems like a waste of life, since I get the impression all the paperwork is more of an imitation of the Western systems than something meaningful. They wanted me to fill out a paper in triplicate with a picture of me on each page. In the end they stapled all three papers together and dumped them on a pile on the desk of someone "incharge" as the sign above his desk read.

The only good thing about the whole experience was that I did meet some interesting people there; one from Bangladesh, one from Sri Lanka, and one from the Czech Republic.

Classes have also started. It's too early to tell whether they will be good or not. My math classes are pretty good, but my physics classes are brutally early (8:00). That combined with the heat and the somewhat boring nature of the lectures makes it very difficult for me to stay awake. I've been doing my best to stay conscious though, because I've been told the profs won't have any understanding or show much mercy if they perceive such a lack of caring. So needless to say, it's been pretty rough. In my lower dimensional physics class their are some scribbles where I almost fell asleep while trying to write something at the same time. I was sitting in the first row, so I hope the Prof. didn't notice. The students here seem to be very good. Generally they seem to be computationally much faster than I am and surprisingly enough people ask questions in class. It will be interesting to see how they go about the homework. (I talked with one 3rd year Bachelor degree student in Electrical Engineering, and he told me had 4 hours of free time in a day.) Apparently taking 8 classes is the norm. That is 6 lectures and 2 labs. I will take at most 5 and am shooting for 4.

Anyway that's all for now, I am going to Amritsar for the weekend so I need to get ready.

Arrival on July 22, 2008

I've just arrived in Delhi (on Sunday) and I've become somewhat used to the heat. It is like a sauna here all the time. The humidity is the worst, but allegedly it gets better as we approach december. The heat makes it really nice to sleep here, but very difficult to get up in the mornings. I think it is also mostly the reason that everything is crawling with life. There are a ton of insects everywhere, including huge ants that climb trees, lots and lots of birds (which I guess aren't insects), and of course flies by the truckload. There are a lot of stray (perhaps?) dogs on campus that just chill at the road sides and seem very friendly. I refrained from trying to befriend any of them, although I'm sure they would be very nice. I also saw 4 monkeys. One was probably wild, and the other three were owned by somebody who had them on a leash.

Everything here is incredibly cheap, and almost all prices outside of campus are negotiable. I haven't figured out the best method for haggling yet, but I'm working on it. The method of transportation here is by "rickshaw" or at least what the other foreign students call rickshaws. We aren't pulled by someone walking, the rickshaws are either attached to a bike or are a sort of cross between a motorcycle and a tricycle. As far as I can tell foreigners pay about twice what an Indian would, but it still amounts to maybe 60 or 80 rupees for a motor rickshaw (1.5 to 2 dollars).

So far almost no B-Tech* students have arrived. (*That's BS.) Mostly we are surrounded by Masters and PhD students. (We being me and the other foreign students.) They are all very friendly. Almost everyone takes the time to talk to you. It's as if there was no pressure on them to do anything. I remember the feeling of being under pressure for most of the time at home to get somewhere or do something, but here everyone is very relaxed. They are extremely helpful interrrupt their conversations or whatever they are doing and help you with whatever information you need. They will chat with you afterward too so it's extremely pleasant generally. People often ask you whether you need help if you are looking particularly clueless. That is pretty cool too. The difficult thing is learning names, since everyone's name is a bizarre mixture of weird sounds that are hard to follow because I can't differentiate the sounds people make that well. Many people (probably three quarters of them) speak english well enough to help you out, but the language used is very clearly Hindi. Hindi seems like it will be a fun language to learn, in particular because most of the signs are already translated into english. So it is easy to compare the English way saying something and the Hindi. In the US I managed to pick up some basic grammar and got a good grasp of how the script is pronounced, so the signs are very useful.

So far I've been hanging out with the people who are also on exchange. We have done a lot of touristy things. It is fun buying things here because it is cheap, and haggling is kind of cool. I will want to buy some clothes and the like. Ironically there are three types of people on exchange here: French speakers, German speakers, and me. Everyone speaks English fairly well, but I've been travelling mostly with the French so far, so they speak French among themselves and feel less guilty about it since I can sort of speak it too. We teach each other French words and English words back and forth and when I communicate with them it's usually 70% English 30% French. My roomape is from Switzerland, and we speak English although he is a French speaker as well. They're all pretty cool so far, and the other students are too. There are two CS students from the TU Munich who know of my uncle Helmut, so that's pretty interesting too. I seem to be the only American & native English speaker.

The food here is excellent. It is all Indian and generally a curry or something. I figured out that it's all vegetarian, but you don't really miss the meat. I'm trying to eat using one hand like the Indians. It works fairly well, although I've poured food all over my shirt a couple of times now. There is bread (Chapatis or Nan) with every meal, which is really nice, but very difficult to tear into pieces one handed. Some dude who was a Grad student or exchange student from England informed me that Aloo means potato, Paneer is something like a cheese (prolly a curd), and Masala is like a spicy vegetable thing.

Anyway, tomorrow is my orientation, when I ought to get a real internet connection for a change and hopefully get the paperwork that allows me to register for my visa. We will see. Rules don't seem to apply here like they do at home. It doesn't seem unlikely that it won't work out like that.

This seems like a long email, maybe I will look into writing a blog instead. Although if it is particularly complicated I prolly won't bother. If you have any thoughts etc. feel free to drop me an email. I'd recommend not replying to everyone, just to me.


I hope life is good wherever you are.

Hello.

Hello everyone.  This is a compilation of my experiences.  I hope they're as useful to you as they were to me.