4 days

That's about how much longer I will be in Jaipur. It's weird to think about. Somehow I've felt very at home in this city; everything - the lifestyle, the people, the occasional monkey tearing down our electric wires - all of it seems to be part of my daily life now. And while I'm definitely excited to go home to non-stale cereals and drinkable tap water, my main thoughts right now are about how much this summer has changed me.

Was it a tough choice? Of course. Making the decision to leave friends and family for 10 weeks is one that I can never take lightly. Choosing to miss out on people's birthdays, my brother getting his license, the first two weeks of preseason football, accepting the fact that I will have 3 days with my family before heading back up to school - these are all opportunities that I decided to leave behind when I came to Jaipur. But do I regret the choice? Not in the slightest.

Being by myself this summer taught me a lot. Discovering my own India let me find my own connections to the country I love. It showed me that my parents' relationship with India doesn't have to be (nor should it be) mine. And that was a huge step - seeing my own relationship with my mother country change and mature. I titled this blog "Adventures in the Motherland" as something of a joke, but I think the last 10 weeks made me fully appreciate what the motherland really is.

The connection between a second generation kid and their ancestral home is one that's difficult to describe. I had always consciously accepted the fact that I was Indian American, tied to both cultures in different ways. But this summer really taught me what it means to be an NRI. It means feeling at home in two cultures. It means loving what both your nationality and your ethnicity have to offer. And, more than anything, it means uniting the part of you that will always be Indian with the part of you that will never fully be. And that's why I think the description of us second generation kids as being "caught between two cultures" is flawed. We're not caught between the two, as if forced to make a choice and accept one culture as our full identity. If the summer has taught me anything, it's the opposite. No matter what I do, I will always be a cross of dosas and doughnuts, papadam and pasta -- India and America. So I guess I should end this post with a thanks to my parents for uprooting themselves and coming alone to a new country, all to give me the amazingly unique cultural experience I have now. Thanks, Amma and Achan. I don't know if I have the courage to do what you did.

Thanks to all my readers who have laughed at my bad jokes, cared about my summer, and in general read the musings of this wandering 20 year old. You all are the best.

To the dogs on the street in front of my window:

We get it, you're in heat. Please try to keep your volume down so the rest of us can sleep.

Thanks,

Ashok

I should know better than to expect to get stuff done

This past weekend I was dead set on doing work (namely, starting on my final research paper, a ten page monstrosity that needs to be entirely in Hindi). I made a schedule for how I was going to spend the 3 day weekend (Friday was the program organized trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and I figured that, having already seen it, I could use the time to actually get started on the most significant assignment of the proram), decided on a project idea, and actually started doing a little work. But of course, just when I was on the cusp of diligence, Caleb ruined everything.

Turned out that his friend Abhishek Singh was having some of his art displayed in an exhibition in Delhi on Saturday. Caleb is essentially writing his Ph.D. thesis on this guy (and was sort of responsible for this art show?), so he was heading to Delhi to be there for the opening. Annnnd for some reason, he's really good at pressuring me into things, so before I knew it I had agreed to go with him.

This trip reconfirmed three things:

1) Agra is a terrible city. From the mobs of tourists to the rickshaw drivers who demand Rs. 100 for a 5 km ride (metered fare should be around half that), nothing about the city appeals to me.

2) Art is pretty darn cool. The art show was amazing. Caleb's friend is sick - he does religious comic art, but not in the way one typically expects comics to be. Take a look at some of his stuff here - I think most (if not all) of you will appreciate it. Also, his large-scale paintings for the exhibition were so much more impressive than those on his blog. He was presenting two: one of Rama and one of Krishna. Both were incredible.

3) Caleb is kind of cool, I guess. I don't know how many people in the program I could sustain pretty good conversation with for the 4-hour ride to Delhi and the 6-hour ride back to Jaipur, but Caleb is one of those (pretty rare) genuinely good people. Plus he's also a creeper, which gives us easy things to bond over.

While the trip was fun, I'm now realizing that I have my entire final paper to write in the next 2 days. So... probably won't post till next week some time. I know you're all crushed.

Watch out, ladies

As some of you loyal readers may know, India has changed all of us here at AIIS deeply. I can't seem to find the words to describe these changes accurately... so I'll just let the pictures do the talking.
Disclaimer: Although we look like tonight's Dateline stories, this is in fact totally normal in India. I like to think of it as cultural sensitivity, to quote my friend Tareq.

Also, I tried to sort these in order of creepiness, but you'll see why I found the task a little too difficult, to say the least.

Anish

Jimmy

Matt

Andre

Jack

Tareq

Vince

Caleb

And... me

Shout out to Tareq for the pictures!

Mustaches

I now have one.

Pushkar

So I'm finally trying to catch up on my blogging with highlights from the last three weeks, but I'm feeling kind of lazy right now and sort of just want to upload pictures. The weekend of July 10th, the program had arranged for an overnight field trip to Pushkar, a nearby town notable for its significant Brahmin population. I think the teachers may have said somewhere close to 70% of the population are of the holy caste. On top of that, there's a significant Israeli Jewish population, which plays out interestingly on the ground. In short: there's a whole lotta God everywhere. Continuing with the theme of Indian religious landscape, here are a few of the statues that were put up around our hotel:

Pushkar is also famous for its ghats, which are essentially entrances into Lake Pushkar that carry religious significance. On the ghats, one can get a brahmin to carry out a puja in one's name. Or, in the case of Pushkar, one can try their hardest to avoid getting scammed by the literally hundreds of brahmins who hang around the ghats to try to trap tourists by starting a puja and demanding payment after the fact (happened to a friend of mine)

I'm also feeling pretty lazy about finishing this post, so here are some miscellaneous pictures of Pushkar:

One of 52 or so ghats leading to Pushkar Lake

... so maybe they're not all that exciting, but I really liked them

My attempt at a cool picture

So after arriving in Pushkar and briefly taking in our surroundings, our first scheduled event was up: watching a camel decoration. I think I can summarize my thoughts in two main points:

1) Camels are actually surprisingly beautiful animals.

Forget puppies, man

2) Camels, when decorated, actually are more stylish than I am

My desire to be a Mamluk has been increasing since this moment

After the camel decoration, we had some free time before we got to see Kalbelia dancers perform. Kalbelia dance comes from the eponymous tribe, famous in Rajasthan as the main snake charming community. One of the snake charmer elders came to our class to talk and perform a bit of snake charming for us on a later date, but that's for another post. The dance we saw in Pushkar was performed by 4 women, all of whom were incredible dancers. Here are a few shots I got (that do no justice to their talent):

Now, something that I had not realized was that the Kalbelia community is freaking sweet in more ways than one - aside from the obvious awesomeness entailed in snake charming, the community also specializes in this:

They charm snakes. Oh yeah, and on their free time they just, you know, breathe fire. Amma, Acha - I think I've found my backup plan for life if I fail out of college/can't get a job. I even got the contact information of the fire-breather. I think this is called maturity: most kids want to run away and join the circus, but few ever take active steps of preparation.

Independence

The last two weeks have been crazy. Too crazy, in fact, for one post. So I'm going to split it into two parts - being American (4th of July weekend) and being Indian (going to Pushkar to experience some Brahmin living, going to Kerala to see my family). If the title wasn't a hint, this will be about America.

As you all (hopefully) know, two weeks was American Independence Day. And as Americans in a foreign country, it was our national duty to celebrate in as loud and ostentatious as possible. So my flat decided to throw a party. Now this seems like a fairly simple task (or at least it did to me), but I didn't really consider the fact that we would be inviting all 60 kids in the program over to our building for the big event. And 60 college-/grad-school-aged kids means a whole lot of preparation: drinks, food, entertainment, etc.

So first order of business was entertainment: what's 4th of July without fireworks, anyway? So we decided to put together a little show for everyone. As it turned out, Caleb (for those of you who have yet to hear about the different people in the program, ask me sometime) turned out to be something of an expert (according to him, every child who grows up in the south has to learn how to set off fireworks. Of course, this was also followed by a few stories of how he severely injured his friends in fireworks battles, so I'm not sure how credible/safe this theory is), so he and Vince were put in charge of the show. They got a little out of control... and by a little I mean a lot. This is part of what they came back with:


Side note: the level of precision that went into posing this picture was truly remarkable. But this is Caleb (left) and Vince (right). They're pretty cool guys.
But anyway, with entertainment taken care of, the next order of business was drinks and snacks. This was an entire group effort - getting ice, drinks, chips, and an American-flag-shaped caked took all of our man (and woman) power. It was worth it in the end, however; the party was pretty successful, if I do say so myself. It was a good way for everyone to come together just to hang out without any academic pressure or anything. Here are some highlights:

Our fancy flag cake

Setting off fireworks

Lesson of the party: nothing turns grown men into children like explosions and beer. Nothing.

Back!

So I know I haven't posted anything in the last week or so (I know all of you have been crushed), but my computer had stopped working for some unknown reason. I assumed it was the result of a power surge, but today it suddenly started up just fine. So a detailed post about the week will follow later!

Also, if anybody knows how to center text on Blogger, help would be appreciated.

Celebrate good times, come on!

It's a celebration... no, seriously, this week has been filled with lots of celebrations, festivals, and general happiness. From a pilgrimage/carnival with hundreds of people to a series of great conversations with various flatmates, I've been in a really great mood all week. So basically, here's a rundown of what all has happened:

Wedding processions in the street:
So one night, all of us were studying in the common room of the first floor when someone heard what sounded like a marching band procession. We were all a little confused (who has a parade at midnight?), so we decided to head to the roof to see what was going on. It was pretty dark, so we couldn't really see anything except this:


Naturally, we were pretty curious. All sorts of theories, ranging from holiday parade to protest march, were put forward, but I wanted to get a closer look. So me and 3 of the guys ran down to the street, where we realized that this was no parade: it was a wedding procession!


It moved on pretty quickly, so I couldn't get too many pictures, but here are two I did manage to get:

Cool lamps!

The groom, I think

World Trade Park Construction:
So for those of you who don't know (I didn't before last week), the Rajasthani government is constructing the World Trade Park as a center of South Asian international trade in Jaipur right now, so we saw the unveiling ceremony. No, I didn't go the the model unveiling ceremony (at which Shah Rukh Khan spoke, for the record), but I did get some close-up pictures of the current state of the WTP:




Pilgrimage comes to Jaipur!
This was one of the most surprising events of the week. A few of my friends decided to randomly go to the carnival on a day with a particularly light workload. Upon their return, they told us (incredibly excitedly - they're all religious studies grad students, a.k.a. your future, Kaitlyn) about the Amarnath Yathra they had gone through. Now, I'm no expert, but I was pretty sure the yathra was supposed to end up at the Amarnath Caves in Kashmir. A slight problem? Not for the clever Rajasthanis, who built A MINIATURE VERSION OF THE ENTIRE PILGRIMAGE INSIDE THE CARNIVAL. Seriously. So amidst the ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds (all of which went far too fast to be child-appropriate), there was this huge enclosure:


attached to the main carnival office:


Now I'm a sucker for anything with a huge serpent hanging over the entrance:


so I had to go on this little yathra. Once I got in, I was... actually really impressed/scared. They had essentially recreated (or attempted to) the Kashmiri landscape, as well as the various checkpoints (I don't really know the proper word for this. Stops? Noteworthy locations?) along the way. I wish I could have gotten more pictures, but as soon as I snapped this one of the entire pilgrimage from the entrance, a guard yelled at me that taking pictures was banned. So here's the first impression:


And if you want to see more, I guess you'll just have to come to Rajasthan and go on the pilgrimage yourself!

Pictures? Hopefully?

So the first series of pictures I have is themed around the Indian religious landscape (Kaitlyn, eat your heart out). It's definitely something which, at least in my experience, is much less common in America than in India. Here, it seems like nearly everywhere we go there's some kind of religious imagery going on. It started off at the Taj Palace Hotel, the 5-star international hotel we stayed at for the first few nights in Delhi. Right there in the lobby, I found this waiting for me:

Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. By far the most common deity I have seen in Jaipur and Delhi, Ganesha is depicted in a different way in nearly every representation. A particularly old statue stands outside our school:

To continue along the representations-of-Ganesha line, there is a pretty large Ganesha temple on the way to school. I didn't try to take a picture of it (it might be considered disrespectful to take pictures inside the actual shrine), but the main idol in there is a huge orange statue - probably about 7 feet tall, 3-4 feet across, and bright orange. It was crazy.


But Ganesh is far from the only religious figure I've encountered while being here. Here are a few other statues seen at various locations (read: mostly outside people's houses. These were major creeping jobs):









Now, part of the reason religious landscape was so interesting to me was definitely the omnipresence of religious iconography. But the other side to religious landscape is the plurality of faiths that exist side by side here. In Kerala, the interplay between Hinduism and Christianity has always struck me as the key religious coexistence. In Jaipur, however, there seem to be many more faiths that interact and often, find a way to mix together. I've seen a lot of Jainist statues, a good amount of Buddhist influence, and solid amounts of Muslim and Christian influence. I want to look into this more as the summer goes on, but here are some preliminary pictures I have:



These three statues (though all of different size, composition, and location) are all Jain (I think). The prevalence of Jainism here is definitely interesting. From my understanding, at least, Jainists were supposed to be very detached from worldly things. But here, there seems to be something of an emphasis placed on the physical representation of Jainism, which seems sort of contradictory. I don't know, maybe I just don't understand Jainism well enough (cue Kaitlyn to the rescue?)



So I'm not entirely sure what the first picture is - I thought it looked like a mosque, but a friend said he was pretty sure it was an orthodox church. Input appreciated. But the second one I'm pretty sure is a mosque. I would write something more here, but it's late and I'm tired and I have so much homework to do (still). More to come later, folks.