This semester is just rolling along and the days and weeks are passing in a blur. The only way to mark time is to keep track of the many due dates and xkcd posts (xkcd.com - it's awesome, trust me) that are guiding me towards the end of this semester and the brief two weeks we get off for Christmas. Just a few weeks ago I was holed up in Bridge Street Cafe (our quaint, and only, cafe in Sackville) studying from open to close and pumping myself full of that great drink of champions, peppermint tea. I wrote three midterms in two days, had just enough time to catch up on lost sleep, and I was back with my nose to the grindstone churning out the next set of papers and assignments. I feel like things are falling out of my head as fast as I can force them in and I can barely remember the theory I studied for a test a day after I've written it. And I'm not the only one. This seems to be a problem that plagues most students I've spoken to. I know this is what we're here for, but surely there's a better way?

Luckily I have some semblance of a life outside of school. I was on a softball team for the first part of the semester and we ended up winning the intramurals tournament. I'm now on a volleyball team that looks extremely promising and I look forward to the distraction that our games provide.

Every Thursday my roommate Rhiana and I meet and go over to our friends' place to take their puppy Isabella out for a walk. There is no single greater joy than having a puppy shower unconditional love on you after a long and tiring week and Izzy is by far the biggest ray of sunshine in my life right now.

My roommates and I have redecorated our apartment to make it look like much more of a home. There are plants in the living room, the furniture has been rearranged, and we found paintings and photographs for the walls.We also just signed a lease to stay on in this apartment for next year. For the first time in the three years that I've been at Mt A I feel like I finally have a home. My two rooms in Thornton and even this room so far this year have been fine, and I've definitely made them my own space, but there was always an air of impermanence to the whole thing. Now I know that I'm going to be here in this apartment till April 2011, I can really put roots down. It's a good feeling. I think people sometimes underestimate the bizarre situation that university students are in where they are always in limbo, always waiting for the next thing to come along, never really settling down.

Halloween was last weekend and I finally bit the bullet and let my friends dress me up as Princess Jasmine from Aladdin. Halloween isn't something we do in India and so I've always felt like a bit of an idiot having to dress up for it. The last two years I've put absolutely no effort into it, had awful or non-existent costumes, and managed to get by without too much trouble. This year my roommate Cate is all about costumes and I was almost doing her a favour by letting her work on mine. What I feel about it comes down to the fact that I don't care enough to put time into working on a costume when I have so many other more important things to be doing. But hey, if someone wants to make a costume for me, that's great! And that's exactly what happened. Cate made the perfect hair band, worked out a pretty fantastic hair piece, I put on some voluminous 'hippie' pants and matching top (acquired years apart those two pieces of clothing are made of exactly the same material and the serendipity of it all bewilders me), and got all Jas(min)ed up. Cate dressed as Marie Antoinette;Noah was a panda; Nathan glued a cereal box to his chest, stabbed a knife through it and went as a 'Cereal Killer'; and Rhiana dressed up as Cleopatra. Once we were all decked out I ended up feeling really good about it and I have a feeling the whole incident will make me much less negative about Halloween next year. Yay for cultural assimilation!

In other news, it appears that the plague (the dreaded Swine Flu) has hit Mt A. I'm surprised it's taken so long and I'm sure we'll come through it fine. I was talking to someone today about it and we decided it's good that it has a fancy name because it means that professors are being far more considerate about students having to miss class than usual. One just has to say the words and profs are practically begging students not to come to class and are going out of their way to make sure students don't miss anything. So far, I've seen a few friends go down with the flu and my classes are slowly losing people, but it's not looking too bad. In fact, I had a class canceled today and I'm completely fine with that. I did stay up half the night to write a paper for his class, but class being canceled meant that I took a sweet nap this afternoon which made everything better. And the best part of this whole thing is that I haven't been hit by the plague yet. I have a bit of a cough that bothers me most when I'm out in the cold, but that's about it.

I'm in a strange, nostalgic, homesick sort of mood this evening. I visited a friend who's also down with the flu and we ended up talking about music while he messed around on his guitar. At some point James Taylor and his song 'Carolina in My Mind' came up. I love James Taylor. His songs make me think of my parents and I realised after talking about it that I didn't actually have any James Taylor on my computer. So as soon as I got home, I got to work finding the songs that I liked and downloading a couple of classic albums. I've now listened to all of them a couple of times and put together an 'Oldies' playlist on iTunes. Paul Simon, the Eagles, America, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Billy Joel, John Denver ... all good stuff. It's definitely taking the edge of this whole homesickness thing. It's not something that happens to me very often since I rather enjoy my life at university, but if I were at home, I'd be listening to this music all the time and listening to it now made me miss it.

It's now 10:00 and I just might - for the first time this semester - curl up in bed with a book and read till I want to go to sleep. I started off the evening with the full intention of getting some reading done and a paper written, but I was feeling way too mellow and distracted. Plus, after the way-more-than-I-bargained-for excitement of Halloween, I think I'm going to have a quiet weekend that shall be spent at Bridge Street with more peppermint tea as I begin to slowly chip away at the massive papers I have due at the end of this semester.

Stay well, good readers. Remember to wash your hands and don't forget the awesome arm-sneeze/cough (as opposed to the hand-sneeze/cough) that Mt A is rocking so hard.

And because it's my feel-good song of the night, here's an awesome live version of James Taylor singing his song, 'Fire and Rain'.

India Coming Out?

Hi folks! I'm going to cheat a little bit this week and instead of writing something new, I'm going to share something I wrote for the Argosy (our student newspaper) this week, instead. The Argosy is a fantastic publication that I look forward to every week. Sometimes the writing is poor, sometimes the stories are weak, but we at Mt A love it regardless. And this week I get to be part of it. For all of my Mt A readers, chances are you skipped my section and now you can't avoid it. And for all you non-Mt A folk, you get a sweet article! So here it is:

Last week Canada, the US, and a number of European countries celebrated ‘Coming Out Week’. Catalyst – Mt A’s LGBT alliance on campus – invited the university community to participate in the celebrations and discussions surrounding LGBT issues. Having grown up in India – a strongly heteronormative society – the open expression and discussion of LGBT issues is not something I’ve seen often. As a nation India is still wrestling with these issues and only recently have people begun to speak up and speak out against the archaic laws and policies the Indian Penal Code outlines.

The widespread discomfort surrounding these issues is not exclusive to LGBT issues; talking openly about sex and sexuality in any context is enough to mortify the average Indian. This societal awkwardness is apparent at the level of both general society and the government. All of this seems rather ironic given that India is home to the ancient traditions of the Kama Sutra and Tantra, but things are changing for the better.

In 1996, Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter Deepa Mehta, released Fire, the first film in her Elements trilogy (the film was not released in India until 1998). Fire is set in India and was the first Indian film to explicitly depict homosexual relations. Its release in India was met with wide-spread and often violent protests by right-wing Hindu groups, though this isn’t to say that conservative Hindus are the only people in India opposed to open expression of (homo)sexuality. Forcing the issue into the public eye, Deepa Mehta spurred a wider debate around homosexuality and freedom of speech in the country.

Barkha Dutt, an award winning journalist for one of India’s leading news channels, NDTV, furthered the LGBT discourse in India by addressing LGBT issues, sexuality, and intolerance on her weekly audience-driven show We the People. Dutt and her colleagues in Indian journalism are finally bringing these issues out into the open and challenging the nation’s outdated societal norms and taboos.

Drafted by Lord Macaulay in 1861, the Indian Penal Cold (IPC) is a powerful piece of legislation, a code to which all subjects of the British Empire in India (those of both Indian and British origin) would be held accountable. Notable within this code is Section 377 – an archaic clause that criminalises sexual activity deemed to be “against the order of nature,” a crime punishable at the very least by a substantial fine or at worst by life imprisonment. Nearly 150 years after its inception, the law has finally been challenged. The issue was first brought to the High Court in 2001 in a public interest litigation demanding the legalisation of consensual homosexual intercourse, and in a surprisingly short eight years, it has made it through the tangle of Indian bureaucracy. In its historic decision on July 2, 2009, the Delhi High Court amended Section 377 of the IPC so as to decriminalise homosexual activity among consenting adults. A transcript of the 105-page judgement is available online via the District Courts of India Judgement Information System. The judgement reads,

“If there is one constitutional tenet that can be said to be underlying theme of the Indian Constitution, it is that of 'inclusiveness' … Those perceived by the majority as “deviants' or 'different' are not on that score excluded or ostracised.

In our view, Indian Constitutional law does not permit the satutory criminal law to be held captive by populat misconceptions of who the LGBTs are. It cannot be forgotten that discrimination is the antithesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster the dignity of every individual."

The battle isn’t over yet. The amendment has been passed in the High Court but it will be appealed to Supreme Court and has already met with huge opposition from a range of political groups, including the Ministry of Home Affairs and a far-right political party, the Shiv Sena. The fact that the amendment passed through the High Court at all is a sign, however, that the Indian psyche is moving into an era of enlightenment and freethinking. People of our generation in India will soon begin to establish groups like Catalyst and the thousands of others like it and they will continue to challenge our government and our society to broaden its mind. Sixty-two years after Independence, the decision made by the Delhi High Court was one of many steps signaling the beginning of a new period in India’s growth and it bodes well for India as an emerging force in the global arena.

Getting Back Into It

It's been close to three months since I last blogged. Things started to happen and I just didn't find the time. I'm using this blog as a segue way into blogging regularly again. But here's a bit of a summary of all that's happened since my last post.

When I last wrote my family was soon to head out on a epic trip all across India. We were first in a city called Ahmednagar for a week running a field trip for a group of American high school students. The work was based in an organisation called Snehalaya which works with people affected with AIDS/HIV. This includes sex workers, children of sex workers, and children orphaned by AIDS. The trip was dedicated to learning about AIDS/HIV in a biological context as well as a social context so we had classroom-based discussions about the disease as well as visits to NGOs, brothels, and social workers. The trip was in parts shocking and heartbreaking, but it was also wonderful to see the kind of work that is going into this area and the immense strength that many of the women and children showed despite the huge odds they're up against.

From Ahmednagar we traveled on to New Delhi to meet a second group of students. This trip took us from Delhi to Dharamsala. In 1959 when the Tibetan people were forced to flee Tibet at the time of the Chinese invasion, India gave them refuge and allowed them to settle in Dharamsala and establish their Government in Exile there in 1960. Today that is where the Dalai Lama has his residence and is essentially the home of the Tibetan people in exile. Dharamsala is known as "Little Lhasa", after the name of the capital city in Tibet. We spent some days in Dharamsala exploring Tibetan culture, medicine, language, and Tibetan Buddhism. We headed back to Delhi via another town called Dalhousie and ended the academic portion of the trip. We were in Delhi for a short time and then drove to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. We were in Agra for a day and before returning to Delhi. My family stayed in Delhi a few days after the students flew out and then got the train back to Kodai. That took almost an entire month and by the time we were back, it was August 17th and I was leaving for Sackville in two weeks. On the left is map of where my travels took me.

I spent the my last two weeks meeting all the people I needed to say bye to, doing all the last-minute shopping I needed, and organising my things.

I flew out of Chennai on the 5th of September at 1:00 am. I flew Chennai-Frankfurt-Montreal-Halifax and it took me over 24 hours. I arrived in Halifax at 4:00 pm on the 5th. I got a shuttle bus from the airport to the city and checked in at a hostel on Gottigen St - the sketchiest part of Halifax, as far as I'd been told. I had a sleepless night because I was terrified I wasn't going to wake up to get my cab at 6:30 to the bus terminal and that I would miss my bus. It turns out that everything went fine and I was in Sackville at 10:30 am on the 6th morning and Nathan and Victoria were waiting for me with Vic's car. I was thrilled to be back in Sackville. I missed it very much this summer.

Rhiana, Cate and Noah were waiting for me when I got to our apartment with Nathan and from then on, it was just like being home. That was Sunday and school started on Tuesday. I just about managed to get unpacked by Monday night and being back in classes so soon after arriving was a bit of a shock. This semester definitely started at an insane pace and has hardly let up since it started, but I'm generally enjoying the classes I'm taking and most of my profs are great.

Our apartment situation is also going incredibly well. Nathan, Rhiana, Noah, Cate and I are good friends and living together is very easy. It's been everything and more than I hoped it would be and it turns out that my apprehension was completely unwarranted.

I'm part of a number of student groups this semester and they're all keeping me fairly busy. I'm running SAN - the Society of All Nations, and I'm part of EcoAction and Unicef Mt A. It's a really interesting range of activities because they're all very different and I get to work with completely different groups of students on completely different projects. It's going to be a lot of fun, if a bit hectic.

I was on a field trip on the weekend of the 2nd of October to St Andrews, a town right on the border of New Brunswick and Maine in the US. The trip was for my Marine Biology class and we were studying intertidal zones and the plants and invertebrate animals found there. The trip was a lot of fun and great experience in data collection in the field. We were up at 5:00 am one morning so that we could be down on the beach at 6:00. We were out sampling for about two hours and then we headed straight to the lab to begin keying out and identifying our samples and recording all our data. We were on the beach again for the second low tide that evening and again, once we were done, we went straight to the lab to identify our samples and record our data. We ended the night by taking our aquarium of creatures back down to the beach near our lab and releasing them back into the ocean. It was a great experience and I got to see all kinds of neat stuff like starfish, sea urchins, sponges, sea anemones, crabs, mussels, barnacles, limpets, little shrimp-like creatures, a variety of gross worms, and one group saw a nudibranch but I (heartbreakingly) didn't manage to find one myself. It was a great reminder of why I love biology so much.

This weekend is Thanksgiving and Nathan and I drove to PEI with our friend Stephen to spend the weekend with him and his family. It was one of the most relaxing weekends I've had in a long time and it was absolutely lovely. I've been to PEI before but I didn't really get to see much of the island so it was great having Stephen to show us around since he grew up in PEI and gave us an insider's view of Charlottetown. The first night we wandered around the downtown area and looked a all the great old buildings, bought books at a used book store, had dinner at a great placed followed by drinks at this sweet Scotch lounge. We ended the night with a long walk on the boardwalk on the bay. We spent the next day trying to get work done and had a really nice Thanksgiving dinner. Yesterday we drove out to the beach and wandered around and then went back into town. We walked around Province House with Stephen giving us the grand tour, got ice cream at 'Cows' which is famous in PEI, and then drove around the downtown a bit. We left PEI at around 6:00 and we were back in Sackville by 7:30.

Today is Thanksgiving proper and we're having a massive potluck this evening. Nathan's in the process of basting the turkey, Rhiana made pumpkin cheese cake, Cate's making chicken pot pie, and Noah and I'll be doing veggies and mashed potatoes later. We have about 14 people who we're expecting over and we'll probably get a few other people who show up and it's going to be great.

And that's essentially all that's happened to me since I last wrote. I should be writing more often from now on. Happy Thanksgiving, folks! I'll check in again soon.

Kodaikanal: PT Road, 3:30 pm, 19th July 2009

I thought I'd try something a little different for the next little while. I'm going to be out of Kodai doing new things and going new places, and maybe I should tell my stories in a new way. For as long as I can keep it up, I'll give you little snap-shots of my life. Glimpses of the places I've been and the things I saw that have in some way moved me. It also gives me a chance to write in a way that "Today I did this and this and this ..." doesn't quite do. Bare with me. I've been writing this blog for two years and I need to try new ways of expressing myself.

Anyway. Here goes:

I can't remember the last time I've been in town on a Sunday. It's not for lack of opportunities but that's just how it goes. Life falls into a rhythm, we get into our comfortable grooves, and interesting things stop happening.

I'm waiting and watching the world go by. From my vantage point I can see up and down the street and, except for an occasional pair of eyes that strays up to look back at me, I remain unnoticed. It's about to rain but the people milling around below me seem oblivious.

A man has arranged the school bags he's selling in a circle. In the middle of the circle is a stick of incense burning slowly down to its base. He's sitting next to the bags occasionally getting up to dust one or adjust another - but like me, he mostly watches.

A man and his wife are selling grapes. When the last bunch has been exchanged for payment, he beings to clear away his things. He sits down and counts the money he has earned that day. Soon an old man appears at his side - I presume it's his father. The family continues to pack away their make-shift stall: they fold the tarp, clean up the boxes and packing paper, and carry away the cot they were using to display the fruit on. In a few minutes' time, they have left nothing but bare ground behind them.

People come to his stall in a steady stream. He digs among the piles of jeans and trousers he has and pulls out just the right item to show his customer. He seems to know where everything is and he never hesitates. But no one buys anything. I wonder what he's thinking.

Occasionally a car drives through the surging mass of people. There's a feeling that the cars are unwelcome and the people move reluctatntly aside as the horns urge them out of the way. They part like water before the prow of a ship and then they slip back into place, showing no sign of the disturbance that had moved them seconds before.

A man is sweeping the ground in front of his stall. When he's finished he walks over to the neighbouring stall and tosses the broom onto a pile of others. The woman selling them shows no indication that she is bothered by him using her broom. She ignores him and continues her conversation with a passer-by.

A man and his wife walk past with their three daughters. There doesn't seem to be more than two years separating each child; the youngest is no older than two. Does the father feel sorry that he has no sons? Does the mother feel guilt?

Across the street a vegetable vendor answers her cell phone. Her display of produce is modest, but neatly arranged. I smile at the apparent irony of India: cell phones in the hands of those who didn't go to school and whose children may never go to school either.

The noise dominates. It is the sound of many voices speaking at once: people chatting with friends, old women haggling over a few rupees, fruit sellers calling attention to their yellow mangoes and foam-packed apples. Soon the noise seems to form more of a background to the sights and smells, colours and movements that make up this moment of pure, unadulterated life.

I have a funny feeling in my chest today. Maybe it's because of all this traveling that's ahead of me. I feel like it isn't. Part 2 of my summer break is over. There's change in the air ...

This summer has been good for me. It has been full of fairly high highs and some very low lows, but I feel like I've been slowly transformed by it. I've learned things about myself that weren't obvious before. It's interesting how different things become clear depending on the context in which they're placed. It's sort of like when you have a favourite book that you read every few years. Every time you read it, certain phrases will pop out at you in a way they didn't before, you'll learn different things and take away new meanings. Coming back to India this summer was like having to confront an image of the person I was when I left, and having to reconcile it when the person that I am now.

Tonight my parents, my brother and I are leaving town for just under a month. My mum is the director of a company (India Educational Tours) that runs fieldtrips for (often IB) students from all over the world. Between now and when we come back in August, there'll be two fieldtrips - one in Ahmednagar (about 200 km west of Bombay) and one in Dharamsala (about 200 km north east of Lahore, Pakistan and the same distance west of Tibet). Between the two trips, we're going to be out of Kodai for almost a month. It's a tiring thought, and my brother and I made a feeble appeal to be allowed to stay behind, but it's too late for that. A friend told me to imagine that it's an episode of Survivor. I hope it won't be too bad. It's just going to be a lot of buses, trains, unfamilar beds, and living out of a bag. And when we come back, I'll only have two weeks left in India before I head back to Sackville.

My brother ended up coming back to India. We weren't planning on having him back this summer but things changed and it turned out that he was going to be saving a lot of money by coming back, rather than saying in Daytona (Florida). He's probably going to be here a month longer than me.

I'm not sure what my internet access will be like when I'm gone, but I'm going to try and blog if I can. I might have more interesting things to write about when we're traipsing around the country, than here in Kodai. As much as I love being in Kodai, it doesn't provide much material for interesting blogs.

I had another post in mind for tonight but I have to pack still, so I'm going to stop. I'll save it for another day.

Till later ...

Pictures

Here's the link I promised. Someone leave a comment if you can't see them. I'm pretty sure it's a public album, but who knows .

http://picasaweb.google.com/ashra.kolhatkar/HomeHousePuppiesKittensAndShades#

Of Elephant Rides and Identity Crises

I just got back from my visit with Noah in Mysore. It was a good trip. We got to catch up on stories of our respective summers, news about our other friends, gossip from Sackville, and we talked a lot about plans for next year when we'll be living together. I'm about half-way through the summer and I don't think this trip could have been timed better. I gave me a break from life at home and Kodai as well as a chance to touch base with the other (probably more than) half of my life in Sackville.

The trip had a perfect mix of going out, sitting around and talking, and doing stuff on our own. I went to most of the classes with Noah and that was nice because I got to sit and listen without any pressure of having to remember what I heard or worry about taking notes or anything. I can't remember the last time I had a classroom experience like that. Some of their professors and guest speakers were extremely impressive I learned a lot. I spent most of the afternoons reading, watching movies, or napping. I spend a lot of my time on my own here in Kodai and I definitely needed that time in Mysore, too. As did Noah, I'm sure. We spent the late afternoons and evenings going out and doing things. We went out with the whole group a few times as well as just Noah and me going out on our own for drinks or walks.

We all went out for dinner on the 1st of July which is Canada Day. I thought it was pretty funny to be back in India, visiting my American friend, with a group of Canadians celebrating Canada Day. Wikipedia says, Canada day is "Canada's national day, a federal statutory holiday celebrating the anniversary of the 1 July 1867 enactment of the British North American Act, which united Canada as a single country, which was in turn composed of four provinces [Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario]. Canada Day observances take place throughout Canada as well as internationally." Internationally is right! Thankfully we didn't go so far as to signing 'O Canada' or something like that. I don't even know the words ...

On Sunday we decided to go to the Mysore Palace. Since group is in their last two weeks in Mysore most of them decided to stay at the hostel and write papers and as a result only five of us went to the Palace: Noah, Louisa, and Louisa's parents Dr Strain and Michelle. The entire Palace is covered in light bulbs and on Sundays at 7:00 they light up for an hour. Seeing the Palace illuminated against the darkening sky is quite spectacular. We went around 4:30 to see the Palace during the day as well as to see if we could find an elephant so that Louisa could fulfill one of her biggest "When I'm in India" wishes which was to ride an elephant. We found an elephant, bought four tickets (Noah, Louisa, Michelle and myself; Dr Strain opted out and took pictures and a video of us instead). I asked the Mahut (the guy who 'drives' it) what it's name was and he said that her name was Raji and that she was 18 years old. The guys who run the rides took the cameras that we had and took pictures for us. They also gave each of us a chance to climb onto her neck so that we could get a picture of us 'riding' her. I thought about it and I've concluded that the 15 minutes I spent on top of Raji were about the most touristy 15 minutes of my life. It took me a while to stop feeling silly about being there in the first place but unless I had been with four foreigners in India, I don't think I would have ever ridden an elephant. Two thoughts made me feel less stupid: 1) "None of you know me, so whatever." (Anonymity is an excellent cure for embarrassment) and 2) "Suck it! Have any of you ever ridden an elephant?!" In the end, it was a pretty sweet experience.


Noah and me at the Palace. This is the only picture of us together from the trip and I insisted that we take it so that we had evidence that I was actually in Mysore.


The Palace light up. Under the third arch from the left is a police band playing Western concert music - I thought that was pretty cool.


But, all these things aside, my most prominent experiences in Mysore can be summed up with two words: basically Indian. For Noah and Dr Strain and the rest of the people on the trip, I sort of became the local expert on Indian culture and any time someone had a question about why Indians did something, or what a word meant, or what went into an Indian dish with an unpronounceable name, they asked me. But it soon became very apparent that the way they saw me, and the way other Indians saw me were completely different. For example:

One evening we all got taken out to dinner to a fancy place by their professor Dr Rao. All of us were sitting at one end of the table and whenever anyone had a question about what Aloo Gobi or Saag Gosht or Palak Paneer were, they asked me. When I was telling the waiter what we wanted, he kept telling me what was in each dish after I said the name; it was obvious that he thought that I would have as little idea about what I was ordering as the rest of the group.

When we were at the Palace we bought tickets to go in. The entrance fee is Rs 20 for Indians and Rs 200 for foreigners. I wasn't sure if the ticket seller would believe me if I said I was Indian and since I didn't have any ID on me, I didn't stand in line with Noah and the rest but instead waited a bit and went amongst a group of Indians. The guy at the counter looked at me when I stepped up and asked with mild skepticism, "You're Indian?" When I said yes he made a vague noise and handed me my ticket. Later, when we were getting ready for the elephant ride, the guy asked Noah how many people were going. Noah said, "Three foreigners and one Indian." The guy looked at me, pointed, and asks with a laugh in his voice, "You're Indian?" When I said yes he burst out laughing.

On another day we went to a home for destitute women called Shakti Dhamma. When we first arrived we stood around a bit awkwardly with the woman who runs the home while Dr Strain introduced us and told her where we were from. When we got to me and Dr Strain explained that I'm Indian but I study at Mount A in Canada she woman says, "So you're basically Indian?" I said yes and she says in a somewhat triumphant tone, "I could tell!" I smiled and said nothing but I was thinking, "What tipped you off? Maybe the brown skin?" We spent about two hours there, most of which time we spent sitting on the floor in small groups and talking to the women. I ended up using what little Tamil and Hindi I know to talk to a few of the ladies. When we were leaving a girl who is a law student and is working at Shakti Dhamma as an intern for the summer came over to me and asks, "So ... you're basically Indian?" I was speechless. Her too? Why do people keep saying that? Basically Indian? What does that even mean?!

So now, people can't understand what I'm saying, they assume I don't know what I'm eating, I get suspicious looks when I say I'm Indian, people think it's hilarious when they find out I am, and I'm - apparently - only basically Indian. I try and make myself feel better by saying that I only got these reactions because I was with a group of foreigners and they just figured I was one of them. I mean, NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) aren't uncommon any more. To an extent that's actually the truth ... but not the full extent. You know how Asian people are sometimes called Twinkies - yellow on the outside and white on the inside? What am I ... a Bounty? Brown on the outside, white on the inside? God. I sincerely hope not. I certainly don't feel white on the inside. Regardless, my crisis continues. Maybe the problem isn't with me but rather with other Indians. Just because I speak English and wear jeans, why does that make me less Indian than a woman who only speaks Hindi or Tamil and only wears saris? What defines Indian?

It's just so bizarre. The bus incident was funny but this is starting to get a bit out of control. I guess I still have a lot of figuring out to do ...