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.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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