This has been home for the last 2 weeks.Adjusting has not been as easy as I’d hoped. I don’t sleep through the night most nights, and I don’t know why. The heat is still bearable. It was warmer this week than last, but we’re not in the heat much either. The worst is driving through the city in a van without air conditioning. My eyes dry out quickly, not helped by the dust and fumes in the air. Most of my teammates and I developed some kind of allergies or sinus congestion. We’re making it though.
When it comes to laundry, I have 2 options: (1) manual or (2) pay about $10 a week to have someone do it for me. I am not enjoying the manual option. After a couple attempts, I gave in and went to the cleaners down the street. It cost me about $.60 per item. A picture of the bucket I use to do laundry is below.
Interestingly, most people in Chennai seem to prefer being active in the early morning. 6 to 8 am are the busiest times for the clinic, and when my teammate, Katy, and I run at 6:00 am the streets are bustling. There is a park nearby where hundreds of locals go to exercise in the morning. The first time I saw them taking laps around the park, I about fell over. I didn’t know if this was a riot mob or what. They seem to really care about their physical health.
I have noticed many small clinics all over the place. It’s different than in the US where there are a small number of large hospitals. Most businesses seem that way: small shops on every corner, instead of larger, fewer businesses. In terms of healthcare, Indians seem to utilize the hospitals, but they are also just as ready to try alternative remedies, such as herbal medicines. I see a lot of corner health clubs too.
Chennai is surprisingly flat. I don’t think I’ve seen a hill yet.
Working across cultures has been interesting. It is very difficult for me to adapt to this different way of doing things. I am someone who needs structure, but this group requires flexibility, both in schedule and decision-making. I do not know who is supposed to do what nor what my Indian coworkers actually prefer half of the time. Learning to adapt to this will be a more important education for me than the result of our project.
My teammates:
Katy: (on the right) Addicted to coffee, loves Apple products (the computer company), and runs every day. She is my running partner. She is a planner, Type A personality.
Joan: (on the left) She is direct. Very logical and technical. She is oddly calm all of the time and not easily flustered.
Shruthi: (in the middle) always seems willing to help out and very flexible. Her family is from Chennai, and she speaks the local language. She seems like an empathetic person (maybe that's why she is studying sociology) and organized.
An Indian wedding:
I had the chance to visit a wedding here in India. It was a great experience.
In this picture, some kids are literally ripping up the stage for play. It's good this stage won't be used until the second morning of the wedding.
I had the chance to dance with the Indians. The groom actually requested that we join the mix. Luckily, I had some practice at Emory for Indian dancing.
I got some Indian tea and coffee too. Here they use two cups to cool the coffee, by pouring it back-and-forth.
The girls use henna as body art, usually on the hands or feet. It is a sort of body paint that last for several weeks. I grabbed some pictures of a girl's hands, which I thought were especially artistic.
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And finally, here is a picture of the actual ceremony. It was at 6:00 am on Sunday (we also went to the reception the previous night, where we danced the night away). In these ceremonies, visitor come-and-go as they please. They are constantly serving food downstairs, and you go there any time during the ceremony for breakfast or a snack. We weren't expecting so much food, so we weren't able to eat much, and the servers were worried we didn't like it.
Every morning at 6:00 am, this truck comes by to take our sewage. It sounds like a jackhammer.
Below is a picture of one of the patients we interviewed. He is 91 and travels the world playing music (see picture to the right of him showing him playing some kind of accordion-looking thing). He gave me one of his albums. Indians are very hospitable toward foreigners.
The next few paragraphs are about religion and history. If you are not history-types, you may want to skip the rest of this post.
I had a couple people comment on whether Hinduism is monotheistic. I am not sure what the answer is. My teamate, Shruthi, quoted from a friend’s research paper that Hinduism is a “polymorphic monotheism”. Does that help?
One of the interesting parts of reading about India’s history is learning about the Aryans. I discovered that a group of people, known as Aryans, moved into India around 1500 BC. They invaded Northern India, and their beliefs seem to have formed a foundation for Hinduism and the caste system. The Hittites in the Bible were related to this group. They originated in Southern Russia/Eastern Europe, and a similar group might have moved from that region west into Europe.
Studying the beliefs about this group is very interesting. Some historians proposed that a superior, “Aryan” race (really a Nordic ethnicity with ancestors who spoke a similar language to the Indo-Aryans who moved into Asia) existed some time in the past. Technically, however, the “Aryan” label is better applied to a group of languages than to a genealogy.
The people who developed this Aryan race theory also used the swastika as a symbol to represent the race. Swastikas In fact, appear in a lot of cultures. You will see the symbol used frequently in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cultures, as well as Hittite, Persian, and Greek artifacts. In Eastern religions the symbol just means good luck, and if you travel to India or Buddhist countries, you’ll probably see it.
Interesting asides: Himmler (a Nazi leader) used some of the teaching from a Hindu text (the Bhagavat Gita) to give him confidence that his genocide of Semitic peoples was right. Also, the British used Aryan racism along with the caste system in India to support their right to rule over Indians during the British Raj.
It is always interesting for me to learn about ancient civilizations and cultures and how they lead to current practices and culture.
