3 things not to forget about india

are1) Yesterday I came to school in an auto rickshaw that had 3 GIANT blocks of ice in it--melting at my feet. Huge and dirty. A new kind of air conditioning system, maybe? India you're so smart. This means that not only was I riding in a tiny, yellow golf cart-like scooter/car, decked out in furry purple tiger stiped interior and ceiling covering, looking at a poster of "Bollywood Movie stars" and listening to excessively loud techno music....i was also sitting in a puddle of freezing water. go india!

2) libraries, in their essence as fundamentally based on the principles of organization, are not in any way applicable to the country of India.

3) you know how trucks and buses in the States go beeep-beeep when they back up? Here in india, all cars have (purchased? comes standard with the car? i dont know) built in songs that play when the car (ALL cars) are put into reverse. The songs are all in monotoned (ie one note at a time) and are all things like Jingle Bells and Happy Birthday. Inevitably, as the song progresses, the tune goes out and the notes get distorted.

ps. new pictures are up on picasa

Goa

Firstly, Frank is back. (!!!) It’s sad, but true. Or maybe it’s good really. I mean, he’s only a lizard and I am in India. He was here first. I am also now positive he is way more scared of me than I am of him: I found my nose 6 inches from his nose and screamed at the top of my lungs into his tiny, ugly face. I think he is now morphing into the Beethoven-type because he has probably gone deaf on my account. He will soon grow long scraggly white hair, and begin writing concertos dedicated to the memory of the recently departed Charlotte (and if you don't know who that is, I can't help you).

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Secondly, recent adventures: Last Thursday some friends and I got onto a bus headed for Goa, a small state on the western coast of India. The bus itself was interesting: 20 hours long and smelly and hot. In all seriousness, I can't believe it didn't rattle apart. Anyway, Goa was once a Portuguese colony back in the day, so it has a different feel to it than the rest of India that I've seen so far. It is beautiful and open, breezy, with clean beaches, and really warm water, lots of green palm trees, and blue skies. We did yoga in the mornings, slept in a straw hut on the beach, ate delicious food (I now like tomatoes! huge news), bought pretty clothing, and watched the sun set while swimming in the surf. On the first day we walked up a dune onto the main beach, paid the first hut we saw for 2 nights and didn't walk down that dune until we left to go home.

I ate a pineapple with my leatherman knife (thanks Spence!) white sitting in the sand. And I went swimming in the Arabian Sea (now added to bodies of water I've touched my toes to).

But Goa, while relaxing and beautiful, is also really strange, and somewhat disconcerting. The whole state has become the hot-spot destination for extreme hippies from all over the world. Being white there isn’t special: not to Indians because there are so many other white people living there; and not to the other white people, because, well that’s where they live and I just look like a poser trying to have a nice weekend, and why would they be interested in getting to know me? While it is nice not to be stared at for a change, it place has an unfriendly, too-cool-for-you feel to it. It does not feel like a part of India. The types of clothing, the manner of behavior, the entire system itself, functions like a vacationers island paradise, not a state in India. While relaxing and beautiful and a nice break from the insanity of usual India, Goa itself is almost sickening in how cool it is, (or how cool it thinks it is). It filled with one dread-locked, tan, fit, yoga-doing hippie after another (Will you would have been sick). It felt like a new kind of pressure to look the part of this other type of being trendy. While there are elements of that world which are intriguing to me (to most people I'm sure: I mean, who doesn’t want to move to an island paradise and do yoga for the rest of their life?), I can’t help but feel that the Goan life is a cop out—that it falls short of really doing anything.

Let me explain. In my time in India so far, thoughts about what I want to do with my life are always popping into my head. I am torn between the ideas of a successful life and a happy life. And is financial stability necessary for happiness? What about a combination, please? But somehow the two (happiness and success) don’t coexist in my image of my future (though I am sure that such a combination will—no, HAS to—happen). Anyhow, I would love to jet out of all responsibilities, move to an island where I could work on a farm, teach yoga and live the rest of my life meditating on a beach. But that’s not really productive; on top of which, I don’t have the resources to make that feasibly happen. It strikes me also, that such a life, while enjoyable, is in fact extremely selfish. I have gifts to offer the world in that I have visions of ways that things can be better, and I have two hands which I can use to make those changes come true. So it is selfish to put my own yogic bliss above doing something real with my life.

This sounds preachy again. Why all my blogs are about these huge questions about my life and my future, I don't know. If someone knows how to turn that part of my brain off, please let me know. I apologize, but Goa makes me think more about all this. It is full of people who are purely enamored with the idea of peace, unity, relaxation; and it seems to have become too caught up in it’s own chill vibe; to have forgotten what it wanted to do in the first place. It is not a part of the country in which it exists. It is a bubble for white people to retreat to and forget what they left behind. It is selfish and it hogs the beauty of the west Indian coast for rich white travelers with deadlocks and tattoos instead of fanny-packs and cameras.

This is not to say that all of Goa is like this; not to mention that after 3 days I really shouldn’t be making such bold and universal statements. So Sophie, shut up...No, sorry I can't. and it's MY blog anyway, so psh. stop reading if you want.

Right. Like I say, the fundamentals of that life are intriguing to me; I guess what I find so unappealing is how the ideals of peace, harmony, and spiritual realization have become warped as they are realized in the Goan world (as I observed it). And of course, none of this is to say that I did not full heartedly love every minute I spent just lying on the beach, eating organic food, doing yoga in the sand and swimming in the ocean as the sun set. It was remarkable and lovely and I would do it again. and stay longer next time.

But I would never live there. If one day I have the means and desire to forget about the real world and move to a place where I can just relax and do my own thing, in search of the meaning of my life, I will choose a place that allows me to integrate into the world, people, culture, ideas and customs of that place; not a place that does it's best to pretend it's not part of India.

I'll be putting photos up soon, until then, I hope everyone back home is having a good end of February (it's a leap year, so all you 4 year old leap year babies, finally get to turn 5!) I miss home, both New York and Boston, and I miss the familiarity of faces that I love in those places; but this experience is wonderfully challenging and stretching and I am increasingly happier that I chose to come here.

Love from all the way over here to all the way back there (where ever your THERE is, whoever YOU are).

Om shanti
xoxoxo
sb

pondicherry, and life

We went with the whole group to Tamil Nadu, the southern most state in India, to the cities of Chennai and Pondicherry. I've put some pictures up of the trip. We saw lots of really ancient temples still active today, went to a beach (which smelled and was covered with poop. delightful!), went to an ashram, visited a school that teaches children both standard education and all types of art forms, and we visiting this place called Auroville, which is a utopian community started in the '60s in honor of Sri Autobindo--it function without money, is all communal, and is home to people from all over the world who have decided to dedicate their lives to living locally and in harmony. they drink dynamized water, which means it has been played bach and mozart to remove impure bacteria that comes from the pollution of the planet. The weekend was really fun, surprisingly since we had so many people, and we were traveling by a huge bus, all organized by CIEE. I loved getting away again from Hyderabad. and this time coming home felt great, though sad once more since it made me think of home-home. But I am so happy to be here. I am thinking about myself, and thinking about what I want to do with myself, what I really want to pursue and what seems important to me.

Everyone's first question is, 'Why India?' Here's how I feel about that: I'll tell you when I leave. As time begins to pass I am realizing small reasons--hopefully by the time I leave I will actually know why I came here. For now, besides the obvious "I want to experience another culture" answer, here's what I've realized: I am in India because I want a break to think, to grow, to smell bad, to eat curry, to watch Bollywood movies, to BE in tollywood movies (that's right, im working on it...), to listen to insane Indian pop music, to ride in dance party autos rickshaws. I am here and I am thinking more and more about what I want to get out of this process--what I want it to be like. and I am lucky because I can shape it how I want to. I can travel as much or as little as I want. I can paint every night, every day, if i want to. I could learn sitar, or dance. I could stop using a computer. I have stopped eating meat (though that is more because of avian flue, etc.) I am here and I can take a break from the life at Columbia that can be so stressful and overwhelming. I am here to take a step back and think about what I want my education at this stage of my life (whatever kind of education that even means) to be like. maybe even so i can come back and actually use Columbia--or my life for that matter--for all I can.

I see mounds and mounds of garbage everywhere--there are no trash cans in this city. none. there are more trash cans in my house and at the university than there are in all of Hyderabad probably. Even when I do put things in the trashes around where i live and go to school, the next day I see my trash out in the middle of the field or outside my house in the ditch. So what is the point? There is no recycling system in this whole country. It puts all my efforts at being as carbon neutral as possible back home in the states, into perspective. What possible good can me unplugging my coffee maker do, when here in India, plastic bags, bottles, and trash are burned everywhere. There are garbage fires everywhere--it's how they get rid of the piles of trash here. This world is so much bigger than the United States. It is polluted, and it is dirty, and there are cows on the roads, and trash on the streets. it depresses me

I found out a few days ago that the children who come running up to our cars at red lights, baby siblings in their arms, crying for money or food, are forced by 'pimp' like older kids to get money, give it to the pimp, who then does...what ever he wants with it. I also found out that sometimes beggers here will break the limbs of their children to make them more pitiable so people will give them more money. these kinds of things could never occur to me. i'm still not sure i can believe that people could actually be that terrible to one another--let alone to their children. I don't know what or how I am meant to react to these kinds of fact. They are reality.

******
It is becoming ever more frustrating being a woman in this country. I feel the restrictions on my sex from all sides. I can't make eye contact with men that i see; I certainly can't smile at them. I can't make friends with Indian guys, and women seem aloof and uninterested. I can't bike to school, but my house-mate Tim, can. I can't travel anywhere alone, but all the guys on my program can. I can't even go to the nearest town, or into Hyderabad on an exploration-adventure by my self, but the guys can. A few nights ago a couple of us went out to dinner with some Indian guys we met at a bar one night. They were really nice, but so disgustingly wealthy that I could barely believe it. One of them is getting 3 planes at the end of the month and, would we like him to fly us around India? (i mean sure, but what kind of question IS that??) I can't help feeling like these guys, rather than being interested in anyway in who I actually am even getting to know, becoming my friend, are only interesting in impressing me with massive displays of money and influence. It feels so wrong, when we step however briefly, into the world of the rich of the rich within India because that world is just so over the top wealthy. Even trying to compare or rationalize, or believe even, that THAT world is coexisting with the one where children's arms are being broken to make a few extra rupees each day, is horrifying, unbelievable...what it is really I don't know exactly, but it is certainly something that feels wrong and unfair beyond the limits of my normal brain activity.

*****

love to all.