A day in the life: September 30th

Good morning!

 This morning I woke up to the smell of smoke, which was a little bit alarming, but was probably just burning trash fumes wafting through my open windows. Such is life once the rainy season is over, I suppose, though I hear scrap can be a lucrative business if you use it right (see the paragraph about SWACH in the last post).

Speaking of valuable scrap, look what Soren found on the ground on our way to the rickshaw! She had to stop and go back for it. She later found 100 rupees. Perhaps the two are related.

After I got ready and met up with Soren and Casey, we set out to find a rickshaw. We wandered through a bright warm morning, which is apparently typical of the hot season after the rainy season, and searched for a rickshaw. Our normal place was empty of three-wheeled transport, so we ended up walking a good kilometer to the main road, where we found a rickshaw and piled in.

This is what Soren calls a "Casey-Soren Sanjwich", us three sharing a rickshaw. It would be more funny if my name wasn't SUNjay.

At school, we had meditation, breakfast, and our Contemporary India class, in which we discussed language. Specifically, we talked about the choice of Hindi as a national language. On one hand, Nehru and others who were instrumental in the founding of the nation did not want English to be the official language because it was a foreign legacy of imperialism. On the other, there was no language spoken by the majority of Indians. Thus much of the population would see the imposition of Hindi as privileging the North Indian states where Hindi was the majority mother-tongue.

The definition of a language can be complicated. Many languages share common roots, like this banyan tree outside Phule Wada, and it can be hard to tell whether something is a dialect or a separate tree. Regardless, we can all agree that trees, they are us. More or less.

The constitution officially named 12 (now 18) languages as official languages, and each state took the majority language as the language of administration. On the national level, however, since the Indian National Congress was primarily constituted of North Indian, high caste, Hindi-speaking people, their leadership of the independence struggle had been primarily through a Hindustani (lingua franca of North India; if written in Arabic script with Persianate vocabulary it is called Urdu, and in Devanagari with Sanskrit vocabulary, Hindi) or Hindi medium. When they put the issue of a common administrative language to vote, Hindi edged out Hindustani by one vote (presumably because after partition Pakistan's official language was Urdu). This angered Indians not from these northern states, who preferred English, and eventually (and this took until Indira Gandhi's ministry) a compromise was reached in which both Hindi and English were used in an official context and all students were required to learn Hindi, English, and either their mother-tongue or (if they spoke Hindi or English) another Indian language. We discussed whether a stronger effort to make Hindi the lingua franca would have helped or hurt Indian nationalism, and also the relative merits of English- Hindi- or other-medium schools. (We ended up deciding that the teachers should know the language in which they were teaching, which is hardly universal and kind of important, maybe.)

Rachel, Jenny and I near Phule Wada. We got there early.

After that class I had Hindi, in which I learned how to use he particle ही and the verb लगना. So that was cool. Then our Social Justice class went to Phule Wada. There was some initial confusion about rickshaws which led some of us to arrive before the others, and so we discussed the Illuminati and various people's membership within it. I argued that it was irrational to argue who was in the organization specifically, because in reality the organization's membership has to be secret in order to protect it from the lizard people who actually run our society. Who of course don't exist either.

Mahatma Phule Wada

Jotirao Phule, whose house we were visiting, was a Maharashtrian social reformer and critic of the caste system. He envisioned a coalition of resistance between shudras, ati-shudras, and other non-Brahmin castes against the Brahmin caste-based hegemony. He also championed women's rights, viewing women of all castes as a part of the coalition of oppressed people who needed to rise up against Brahmin dominance. It's a couple of steps short of intersectional feminism, but considering that he was active in the 1860s and '70s he was pretty radical.

Busts of Jotirao and Savitribai Phule, social reform and caste-anarchist power couple. Savitribai was a Marathi poet in addition to being an epic social reformer in concert with her husband.

We weren't allowed to take pictures inside his house, so I mostly took pictures of the outside. However, I did take a picture of the well, which was the first well that was shared communally by people of different castes in this part of Maharashtra. Traditionally (and this still continues today in some rural village areas) people who are considered “untouchable” are not allowed to dip their vessels into wells, and instead other people have to draw the water for them and pour it into their vessels without letting them touch. One of Phule's main points was that this sort of segregation is wrong and dehumanizing and was a result of a purity-based high-caste dominance. So, he made a well on his property that all people could draw from. He also provided food for many of the people near him during famines and such.

Our Social Justice class (professor in the back row with the face) making good use of the touchability of the well. And yes, my camera does not take panorama views.

As we were returning from Phule Wada, I had a short conversation with my Social Justice professor where we decided to bring up the subject of class-discussion of readings rather than lectures in class on Wednesday. Apparently in the past there's been a problem with people not doing the readings, and so she lectures instead. That should be cool.

Rachel demonstrating how great FroYo is.

A group of us from the field trip then when back to Ferguson College road, which is close to our program center at Gokhale, and went to a Chinese restaurant. In addition to noodles, we had some delicious pepper-cabbage pickle (or whatever the Chinese equivalent is), and afterward we went to get frozen yogurt. On the way there, we ran into a group of people from the University of Chicago, who are studying abroad for their “civilizations” requirement, which I don't understand but is probably a distribution requirement of some sort. They seemed cool, and we hadn't seen them before because they had just arrived, so perhaps we'll hang out with them some more.

Rachel, Jenny, and AJ demonstrating why we actually went to get FroYo.

Back at the program center, the power went out and all the fans stopped. Since it's quite warm, this was somewhat unpleasant. However, the internet was still working, as were some of the lights, since they were on a back-up generator. Then Katie, Ryan and I had sitar lessons (which I have no pictures, though I might add one from next week). We learned how to play three-note sequences up and down the scale, which is great, though I have yet to develop calluses on my fingers so it was a bit painful. Actually quite painful, but theoretically that should go away over time, right?

Mohammed, Khalid, Naseem, Casey, and I at KFC.

After sitar lessons, Ryan and I went to meet our friend Casey and some of her friends (a couple with one member each from Iran and Iraq, and their friend who is Kurdish but from Iraq) at KFC. They are cool people, and we talked about the things to do around Pune and how much we all love it here. Then we had fried veggie sticks, because it's India so KFC can't just serve chicken (hooray!).
I went home at that point. While I was taking a shower, I was visited by a messenger from the lizard people, who had heard me talking about them earlier (and may cause this blog post to be taken down or me to be disappeared, just to warn you). I didn't have my phone with me at the time, of course, and when I grabbed my towel the messenger scurried across the wall to the window. Luckily I was able to grab my phone and get this picture for you. That I was able to take this picture is proof that I have been chosen by the lizard people to let you all know that while they may be a shadow organization running all the world's governments, they also are watching you. Which should be some comfort, I guess.

A messenger. Possibly a warning, possibly an endorsement.

For all of you reading, here's today's question: Whether your life is affected by hegemonic oppression in the form of high-caste religiously hypocritical patriarchy, like the people Phule helped mobilize, random coincidences like finding 100 rupees, or the politics of language and education, how do you take that opportunity to improve your own lives and those of people around you? Does that mean changing the system through coordinated action, a willingness to accept what cannot be affected, or, most likely, both?