Program, orientation, village, city

A lot has happened since I last checked in; it all seems pretty relevant though, so I'm going to put down all I remember.

On Monday evening I met the people from my program in a hotel in Mumbai. I met Zane who had been in last year's summer program and is now our Alumni Adivior and studies yogic religious practices, and Abishek, who is the Assistant Resident Director and a native of Pune, though he has travelled all over India (and never outside the country). Abishek also is very skeptical of Indian cinema, and doesn't like Sharukh Khan. (All of us are quite mystified by this.)

I stayed in a single room because there's an odd number of guys in the program, and had dinner with some of the early arrivals. A couple people (Elizabeth, Casey, Jenny) had gotten to Mumbai a few days early and had spent the last couple of days visiting all the touristy places. We also met Uttara, who is the Resident Director and made us feel right at home.

The next morning, Tuesday, at breakfast most of the rest of the program had arrived and I met about twenty more people, who I'm going to only describe as they come up, and then we went to this retreat place called Durshet, which is between Mumbai and Pune and near Pali. Pali, which we visited, has one of the eight major Ganesha temples of Maharashtra. It is in the foothills of the Deccan Plateau, as is Durshet. We also visited a small village about half an hour up the mountain from Durshet, where there were rice paddies, irrigation systems, and chickens. Those of us in the program wandered around taking touristy pictures and learned how to separate rice from chaff and grind rice into flour.

The three nights we spent at Durshet, however, did take me by surprise. That is, I completely missed the memo that we'd be spending multiple days in a cabin without access to a store or internet. (Well, except for those in the program who already had phones; apparently it's possible to get incessant Skype calls in a rice paddy in a small mountain village, as one of my program-mates discovered. Welcome to the 21st century!)

In short, I should have purchased shampoo at least and possibly a phone while I was with my family in Mumbai, rather than assuming I could just buy such things in Pune. Or packed it or something.

Other than my forgetting to bring things, though, the retreat area is gorgeous. We're surrounded by green all the time, except when it's raining and we're surrounded by wet. The food is great too; we've not had a repeat dish yet because the program wants us to all know what dishes we like and don't like.

We also got to play dancing games with some of the women who work at Durshet; as far as I can tell clapping and dancing in a circle is the equivalent of American line dances, and instead of Cotton-Eyed Joe Maharashtrian women sing about Krishna throwing gulal.

My roommates here are literally every guy who's a student in this program, which is to say the other two guys in our twenty-four person program, Ryan and AJ. They both go to Georgetown and are pretty chill. Ryan brought a bunch of American films along, just in case, and thought it would be cool to see a tiger in the woods here. (He wasn't the only one; Rachel also mentioned tigers and how cool it would be to see them. Apparently I'm the only one who doesn't want to encounter a wild cat large enough to bite my head off.) I don't know AJ's opinions on tigers, but he can do yoga, which is cool. I'm pretty sure he and Ryan were friends before this program, which is probably good because they're sharing a homestay.

Speaking of homestays, my host family contains one of Abishek's best friends, though he's not going to be there. Abishek is a huge fan of them; for the Ganapati festival, which is starting today or tomorrow, they invite all of their kids' friends over, and since their youngest is my age that means I'm going to be meeting a bunch of awesome people. I also heard rumors of ice cream.

I am, however, the first student this family has hosted, so we'll be learning together, I guess. My family is the only one that hasn't hosted before, though, and I'm the only one staying with them, though a couple other students live down the street, so I doubt it's a big deal.

Since today we're going to Pune, so I'm going to ask this question of you, dearest darlingest readers: Have you ever been on a long journey and finally reached your destination? How did you feel when you got there?

Update: The views on the way to Pune look like someone jacked up the saturation. There's just these casual gorgeous green mountain vistas. I think this is what's called the Aravali Range.

Update 2: My host family is amazing. The eldest son (who is going to France in a couple days) showed me around and says he'll take me somewhere the next couple of days, his sister makes the most amazing kerela fry I've ever had, and their parents are super nice and welcoming. I'll write a post about Ganapati tomorrow.

Pre-program interlude: Mumbai

Hello lovely readers! Judging by the traffic reports Blogger sent me, it seems a lot of you are making your way here from the Alliance website! Welcome! I'm a little sad that no one left me comments on the last post, but I suppose there's still time!

Anyway, I arrived in Mumbai last night after flying sunset to sunset [with the windows closed most of the way, unfortunately], which means I was here a day early for the program. Luckily, one of my bhaiyas lives in Mumbai [he's technically a second cousin in American terms, but whatever], in Kandivali, and I'm staying with him, bhabhi [his wife], and my bade papa and badi* mummi [his parents, who are my Pop's bhaiya and bhabhi, I believe]. It's been something like nineteen years since I last saw them, but ever since I woke up this morning I felt at home. [Last night I was exhausted and confused. It'd been dark far too long at that point, I think.]

Bade papa, bhaiya, badi mummi, bhabhi, all having tea.

Bhaiya and bhabhi also have an adorable baby, who I believe is named Grivant [I hope I'm spelling that right] but is nicknamed Guppy. I believe that makes me his 'chacha' because I'm his father's younger brother, more or less.

Baby pictures are an important part of any blog.

Bhabhi made sure I knew that I was welcome to come visit them if I had weekends off, and they'd show me Mumbai. Apparently bhaiya works in the media industry so I might see famous people and movie sets, which would be cool. When/if that happens, I'll definitely keep y'all updated.

This morning I've been using bhaiya an bhabhi's computer to get a better idea of Mumbai, so I think I understand the geography pretty well now. The entire city is built on a large island (which is many times the size of Manhattan and bigger than the central land mass of Seattle, as far as I can tell. The apartment I'm in is in Kandivali West, a suburb quite far north of the old city center. This area has been built up mainly in the past 8 years or so. Mumbai has been rapidly expanding north in recent years. The airport is about an hour [40 km] south of here but still north of the center. I feel like I should have done more research earlier, but then I wouldn't have been able to ask questions to bhaiya and bhabhi, so I guess it works out.

A map of Mumbai.

From their apartment I could see this golden temple-looking structure, which I took a picture of with my zoom lens. Bhabhi says that it's the Vipassana Pagoda, a Buddhist site where people can retreat for a week or two and focus on meditation and thought exercises without any material distractions [which means no wifi, but I guess that's the price you must pay for deep self-knowledge]. It's on the other side of some mangrove forests and right on the coast.

The Vipassana Pagoda. [The weird patterning in the sky is actually the window grate I took the picture through.]

And now a question for you readers: Have you ever visited family that you haven't seen since you were too young to remember well? What was that like for you?

*It always sounds like 'bury' to me, but there's no accounting for transliterations, I suppose. बड़ी मम्मि I think is the Hindi spelling. My relatives are all North Indian Hindi speakers, except my dadi [grandmother] who speaks bhojpuri.

First Post!

Hello friends, countrymen, countrypeople of various genders, people who share no country with me, and assorted others! This is my first post in my Study Abroad blog. I haven't gone anywhere yet, though. I'm writing this from my Charlotte, North Carolina living room, rather than Pune (or Mumbai or wherever else I'll be).

I'm going to be studying abroad in India. (Excitement!) I'll be taking ten weeks classes about the current state of affairs in India (from a primarily technocratic perspective, as far as I can tell) with the Alliance for Global Education. The classes will be at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics and mostly taught by them, from what I understand, but I will not, strictly speaking, be enrolled in the institute.

I just got back from Turkey (where I spent eight weeks learning Turkish; şimdi konuşabiliyorum, inşallah), so I have to admit that my anticipation of the program is colored a lot by my experience there.

I suspect there will be less communing with cats in Pune than Istanbul.

The coursework looks to be interesting in a very different sort of way, though. I don't know for sure what I'm taking (because I won't until I get there), but there's a good chance that I'll be taking classes related environmental issues, social justice, and other leftist topics. (The economics classes looked cool too, but I could only take so many.) Oh, and Hindi. I'm going to be learning my fathertongue. (As opposed to my mothertongue, which is English. Haha, mixed-race jokes. Hilarious.)

And then there's the research. I did some research last summer on what I'm just going to blythely call "LGBTQ+ issues" (though I also interviewed evangelicals; it's complicated), and I'm going to start working next year with a professor who does research in "Transnational Sexualities" (which is really everything you could want in a buzzword). So, I suppose doing some sort of work related to, say, how people's everyday lives have been affected by the changes and reversals of section 377 of the Indian Penal Code would be relevant.

Then again, I also have strong feelings about agricultural policy in India after reading The Beautiful and the Damned for a class last spring. Basically, over the past 20 years the Indian government has stopped providing seed and buying excess food for farmers, which means farmers have had no insurance. Meanwhile, environmental devastation (sometimes caused, as in one well-known case in Kerala, by the exploitation of water by foreign companies) lowers crop yields and high-interest loans related to seed-purchasing and irrigation system improvements. This is partially responsible to a rash of farmer-suicides (P. Sainath at The Hindu also has a documentary on the subject).

What about you, dear reader? Are there any social issues you feel REALLY PASSIONATE about that you want to study?