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?