Dear dedicated reader,
I thought that perhaps it would be prudent to do a small follow up on my previous “would you rather” question to say that one problem in our house, at least for the moment, has been solved.
“The mouse” as Auntie-ji has taken to calling him (though I suspect that he is one soul in several bodies), is at last dead. Though his corporal form may have expired, his story will live on, however, in the form of this blog.
Every night, around 8:30 or 9 pm, my host family and I eat dinner in front of their favorite Hindi serials, a past-time that I enjoy as nowadays I understand enough to follow their dramatic and often implausible plot-lines. Their favorite, Pavitra Rishta, has recently revolved around some drama regarding the young wife’s ability to speak English to her husbands’ business partners. While ensconced within this enthralling story, I saw out of the corner of my eye a small, brown form dart out from underneath the shelf which holds their television and dash towards the sofa on which Auntie and Pappa-ji were seated.
“Ah, Auntie-ji,” I hesitated and she looked up from her roti. “I don’t mean to alarm you but the mouse is underneath your seat…”
The reaction was immediate – Auntie-ji leapt up spryly and called for Mamta to come and dispense with the mouse, running to close the doors that led to the hall, the kitchen, the bedrooms, and the children’s room.
A moment later, Mamta arrived, ready for action with a long toilet brush in hand. Toilet brushes in India are really a collection of a sort of reed all bound together, something like a broom, and therefore, apparently, ideal for mice-killing (?).
Mamta crouched down near the sofa and stuck the toilet brush underneath, tapping it and her feet in a mouse-killing rhythm. The mouse must have been terrified, because it darted out from the sofa, and for a moment all was complete confusion as we all jumped, Mamta towards the mouse and Auntie-ji away from it. I, for my part, pulled my feet up on the sofa on which I was seated.
The process of tapping and poking/prodding began again underneath the TV shelf, and finally, the mouse ran out and scampered around the room, frantically looking for a way to avoid Mamta’s toilet brush of death. Mamta, however, was too quick and with a merciless blow she stunned the mouse into inactivity. Another blow was enough to render it completely helpless, and after a few more quick blows in succession, she pronounced it dead.
With a deft scoop, she picked it up with toilet brush and began to carry it outside, as per Auntie-ji’s command. Auntie-ji, for her part, had her hands over her ears and was hiding behind the couch on the other side of the room. Once Mamta had disappeared outside, Auntie-ji came out as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, took her place on the sofa, and resumed eating her roti-sabzi.
I followed suit, silently wondering why on earth I ever thought traps would have been easier.
Best,
Cat
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Independent once again
Dear dedicated reader,
I have now celebrated my fourth 4th of July here in India. On reflecting, I think that while the others that I have celebrated here may have been more involved (you may remember reports of fireworks and fire hazards over the Himalayas, an awkward but ultimately entertaining party with the Principal and his family or bottle rockets set off over the Bajipura Highway that came this close to causing an accident), this one I believe will be no less memorable.
My fourth of July consisted of only one American simplicity this year: making an apple pie from scratch for my host family. I told them a few days ahead of time that I’d like to make something for them to celebrate my Independence Day. With some trepidation, my host mother told me that that would of course be fine.
“I’m not a great cook,” I warned, “but I know how to make a few things.” No reason to get expectations too high.
In the days leading up to D-day, my host sister, Ayusha told me with delight of things that past students who had stayed with her family had made. “Didi [big sister]," she told me, "I have had cookies,” she recounted, “and cake, and pancakes, and … I don’t know, so many things.”
Great, I thought to myself, I can see that the bar had been set very low.
I racked my brain to think of something that I could make that everyone in the family could eat. At first, I thought perhaps that I would make cake – however, on inquiring, I found out that Pappa-ji, my host patriarch, does not eat eggs and I did not want him to feel left out.
Luckily, I had past holidays in India to draw upon and the day before the 4th, I remembered a Thanksgiving many years ago celebrated here in India where everyone in our apartment contributed something that their family traditionally eats. Mine was apple pie.
I also remembered, with some satisfaction, that this dessert was completely vegetarian in the Indian sense.
The afternoon of the 4th, I set out to collect the ingredients that I would need to make my pie: flour (simple), butter (simple), baking sugar (easily located in the grocery store), apples (out of season but still locatable), and cinnamon, called dalchini here in India. Since dalchini is usually used whole within dishes here, like in tea or with vegetables, I wandered from store to store, looking for what I found out was called “dalchini powder”. No place had it, and after much sweat, rain and frustration, I found myself returning home without it.
Of course, I should have realized that the reason that there is no dalchini powder available is because everyone in the middle class has someone who can grind their dalchini into powder for them. This week, our grammar review is on the causative verb form, a unique form in Hindi that connotes one not performing an action itself, but causing an action to be performed. "The servant verb," Swami-ji laughingly told us, "though you won't find that name in any grammar book. As if to demonstrate this principle, on hearing of my difficulty, my host mother immediately called our maid, Mamta (who, in general, regards me with a wary amusement), to grind some of their stock of whole dalchini into powder for me.
As I set to making the pie, my host brother Arjun and my host sister Ayusha gathered around eagerly, sitting on the counter and watching as I cut the butter into the flour, added ice water and massaged the ingredients into a loose dough. Mamta helped me cut the apples into tukare (small pieces, as I learned!) and inquired curiously into what I could possibly be making.
“It’s a pastry,” I tried to explain, “I’ll roll it out like roti and then put these apple pieces inside it.” I held up the thali (round metallic dish with high sides used for eating dinner) and indicated that I’d put everything in there.
She looked at me dubiously, but continued to cut and peel apples.
“You know how to cook?” She asked, slowly turning an apple in her hand and digging into with the peeler.
If only it were that simple, I thought, like riding a bicycle. You either know or you don’t. How could I explain that I was somewhere in between?
“Sometimes,” I answered, truthfully. “I know how to make this.”
She gave an non-committal headshake as if to say, “We’ll see” and continued to peel.
The apples having been arranged carefully in to the rolled out dough, I gave some to Ayusha and Arjun to munch on while I worked with Mamta on rolling out the top lattice pieces. Once it had been assembled, it was time to cook it in the large, somewhat glorified toaster oven that my family had, an item not often found in an Indian house. As I got ready to put the pie into the oven, Auntie-ji came into the room and looked pleased. I asked her how she had come to have an oven, such an unusual thing in India.
She laughed for a long time, then she said, “Two years ago, I thought, you know, that I would be making all these things, like pizza, pies, cakes, pastries. And Pappa-ji, he said to me, why have you taken this thing? But now, you see, the only people who have used this oven are all you people [students]!”
I laughed. “Well, then it was worth it!”
After 40 minutes, the pie was ready to eat. My host-family waited excitedly for me to cut it and add a dollop of vanilla ice cream that I had brought from the market. As I served it to Pappa-ji, he looked at me and said, “Ah, yes, Happy Independence Day!” and held out his hand for a handshake.
“Happy Independence Day to you too!” I replied, very self-satisfied.
Best,
Cat
I have now celebrated my fourth 4th of July here in India. On reflecting, I think that while the others that I have celebrated here may have been more involved (you may remember reports of fireworks and fire hazards over the Himalayas, an awkward but ultimately entertaining party with the Principal and his family or bottle rockets set off over the Bajipura Highway that came this close to causing an accident), this one I believe will be no less memorable.
My fourth of July consisted of only one American simplicity this year: making an apple pie from scratch for my host family. I told them a few days ahead of time that I’d like to make something for them to celebrate my Independence Day. With some trepidation, my host mother told me that that would of course be fine.
“I’m not a great cook,” I warned, “but I know how to make a few things.” No reason to get expectations too high.
In the days leading up to D-day, my host sister, Ayusha told me with delight of things that past students who had stayed with her family had made. “Didi [big sister]," she told me, "I have had cookies,” she recounted, “and cake, and pancakes, and … I don’t know, so many things.”
Great, I thought to myself, I can see that the bar had been set very low.
I racked my brain to think of something that I could make that everyone in the family could eat. At first, I thought perhaps that I would make cake – however, on inquiring, I found out that Pappa-ji, my host patriarch, does not eat eggs and I did not want him to feel left out.
Luckily, I had past holidays in India to draw upon and the day before the 4th, I remembered a Thanksgiving many years ago celebrated here in India where everyone in our apartment contributed something that their family traditionally eats. Mine was apple pie.
I also remembered, with some satisfaction, that this dessert was completely vegetarian in the Indian sense.
The afternoon of the 4th, I set out to collect the ingredients that I would need to make my pie: flour (simple), butter (simple), baking sugar (easily located in the grocery store), apples (out of season but still locatable), and cinnamon, called dalchini here in India. Since dalchini is usually used whole within dishes here, like in tea or with vegetables, I wandered from store to store, looking for what I found out was called “dalchini powder”. No place had it, and after much sweat, rain and frustration, I found myself returning home without it.
Of course, I should have realized that the reason that there is no dalchini powder available is because everyone in the middle class has someone who can grind their dalchini into powder for them. This week, our grammar review is on the causative verb form, a unique form in Hindi that connotes one not performing an action itself, but causing an action to be performed. "The servant verb," Swami-ji laughingly told us, "though you won't find that name in any grammar book. As if to demonstrate this principle, on hearing of my difficulty, my host mother immediately called our maid, Mamta (who, in general, regards me with a wary amusement), to grind some of their stock of whole dalchini into powder for me.
As I set to making the pie, my host brother Arjun and my host sister Ayusha gathered around eagerly, sitting on the counter and watching as I cut the butter into the flour, added ice water and massaged the ingredients into a loose dough. Mamta helped me cut the apples into tukare (small pieces, as I learned!) and inquired curiously into what I could possibly be making.
“It’s a pastry,” I tried to explain, “I’ll roll it out like roti and then put these apple pieces inside it.” I held up the thali (round metallic dish with high sides used for eating dinner) and indicated that I’d put everything in there.
She looked at me dubiously, but continued to cut and peel apples.
“You know how to cook?” She asked, slowly turning an apple in her hand and digging into with the peeler.
If only it were that simple, I thought, like riding a bicycle. You either know or you don’t. How could I explain that I was somewhere in between?
“Sometimes,” I answered, truthfully. “I know how to make this.”
She gave an non-committal headshake as if to say, “We’ll see” and continued to peel.
The apples having been arranged carefully in to the rolled out dough, I gave some to Ayusha and Arjun to munch on while I worked with Mamta on rolling out the top lattice pieces. Once it had been assembled, it was time to cook it in the large, somewhat glorified toaster oven that my family had, an item not often found in an Indian house. As I got ready to put the pie into the oven, Auntie-ji came into the room and looked pleased. I asked her how she had come to have an oven, such an unusual thing in India.
She laughed for a long time, then she said, “Two years ago, I thought, you know, that I would be making all these things, like pizza, pies, cakes, pastries. And Pappa-ji, he said to me, why have you taken this thing? But now, you see, the only people who have used this oven are all you people [students]!”
I laughed. “Well, then it was worth it!”
After 40 minutes, the pie was ready to eat. My host-family waited excitedly for me to cut it and add a dollop of vanilla ice cream that I had brought from the market. As I served it to Pappa-ji, he looked at me and said, “Ah, yes, Happy Independence Day!” and held out his hand for a handshake.
“Happy Independence Day to you too!” I replied, very self-satisfied.
Best,
Cat
Monday, July 4, 2011
Video Follow Up
Dear dedicated reader,
I know some of you were anxious to see what I've been writing about, so here is a short video of the recent visitor that we had at the institute so you too can experience the rollercoaster of emotions having a cobra in the room with you brings.
Best,
Cat
I know some of you were anxious to see what I've been writing about, so here is a short video of the recent visitor that we had at the institute so you too can experience the rollercoaster of emotions having a cobra in the room with you brings.
Best,
Cat
Friday, July 1, 2011
Full of Charm
Dear dedicated reader,
The staff of AIIS, the institute at which I’m studying, work exceedingly hard to keep us on our toes. While we routinely leave at 3 or 4, they stay until 7 at night, diligently preparing for the next day. Yesterday for my weekly “lecture” I talked about Margaret Atwood, my favorite author, and was struggling for the word for fiction. This morning, the teacher who was presiding over that class came and found me as I drank my morning chai and told me the correct word.
“It was bothering me all night,” she told me in Hindi.
When I say they keep us on our toes, I also mean literally. Every other week, we have a “monolingual” guest who comes to be interviewed by our class. Our first week, it was an autorickshaw-wala who recounted to us the irritations of taking around foreigners who aren’t able to speak in Hindi and who gave us advice on the best places to catch a rick in Jaipur.
This week, our guest was a snake charmer, in Hindi a “sapera”, who politely answered our questions about the perils and intricacies of snake-keeping. His story was an interesting one: He was raised in the snake-charming tradition and lives in an area of Jaipur where many folk artists stay – not only snake-charmers (though he says there are many others) but also folk dancers and artisans.
Most interestingly, according to his guru, snake charmers from his tradition only keep the snakes for a month because he believes it will bring bad luck to keep them for longer. This is one of the reasons that they don’t defang the snakes – they are going to release them into the wild again so they need to keep their teeth.
He discussed the way in which the venom is extracted from the snake’s fangs by means of a balloon attached to a small vial. The snake, biting the balloon, releases venom into the vial since it believes itself to be biting a small animal. He told us that from then on, they can only feed the snake cooked or raw meat – to feed it a live animal will cause it to release venom again.
Despite these precautions, we asked him if he’d ever been bitten when the snake was poisonous and he said that he had been taught to make a special medicine for when that happened. They apply a tourniquet to wherever the bite has occurred, most likely the hand or the foot, and then he takes this medicine which, in his description, sounded a lot like an ipecac made of herbs and tobacco. It causes him to throw up repeatedly, and in this way, they are able to avoid being killed by snake poison.
He talked a little bit about working the “tourist line” as he called it here in Jaipur. Snake charmers, we came to understand, used to exist primarily in the villages, going from house to house to collect donations from villagers who, in their devotion to Lord Shiva (whose animal is the snake), would support the craft of the saperas. These days, however, it’s not like that anymore and most snake charmers have shifted to the cities to work in tourist areas.
While summer is not the tourist season (due, as you may have guessed, to the extreme heat), he said that in winter he’ll see anywhere between 500 and 1500 tourists in a day. This, of course, is not limited to foreign tourists though obviously there are many – people come from all over India to see the City Palace which is where he usually sits. I asked him if he needed a license to secure a place, but he said no: overtime, if you go to the same place enough, other people will simply move away from you, and since he’d been going for the last 15 years, that was what had happened. Furthermore, he said, there is no license; however, occasionally a policeman would come and he’d have to pay them a bribe to continue to sit there without being harassed.
Finally, we asked him if he was teaching anyone else his craft. He said without much emotion that no, he wasn’t. He’d taught people to handle snakes but teaching them to catch them was tricky because they had to be very fast. One girl in our class asked if his children would become saperas like he had but he said that nowadays fewer people are becoming snake charmers, maybe only 10% of those who were before, and that his children were reading and studying for other professions.
When his interview was finished, he slowly took a basket from his plastic bag and placed it on the floor. We all leaned forward at our desks to see as he uncovered the basket and two large cobras emerged, hissing and striking at him, showing what seemed to me to be their extreme displeasure at being forced to lie on top of one another in this tiny basket.
He brought out his peculiar looking instrument made of a hollowed out gourd and began to play, swaying the end in time to his music. The snakes stood at attention, following the ends of the instrument with their eyes and enormous hooded heads and every so often striking out at it with a loud “hissssssssss”.
A crowd gathered as students from other classes came in to watch the tamasha (spectacle) before us. Everyone was possessed with a wary kind of excitement, bubbling up from their nervousness at the idea of two live cobras in the room!
When he had finished, he allowed a few students to come and touch the cobras. As one of our group put it “When else will be I be able to touch a cobra and live?”
Best,
Cat
The staff of AIIS, the institute at which I’m studying, work exceedingly hard to keep us on our toes. While we routinely leave at 3 or 4, they stay until 7 at night, diligently preparing for the next day. Yesterday for my weekly “lecture” I talked about Margaret Atwood, my favorite author, and was struggling for the word for fiction. This morning, the teacher who was presiding over that class came and found me as I drank my morning chai and told me the correct word.
“It was bothering me all night,” she told me in Hindi.
When I say they keep us on our toes, I also mean literally. Every other week, we have a “monolingual” guest who comes to be interviewed by our class. Our first week, it was an autorickshaw-wala who recounted to us the irritations of taking around foreigners who aren’t able to speak in Hindi and who gave us advice on the best places to catch a rick in Jaipur.
This week, our guest was a snake charmer, in Hindi a “sapera”, who politely answered our questions about the perils and intricacies of snake-keeping. His story was an interesting one: He was raised in the snake-charming tradition and lives in an area of Jaipur where many folk artists stay – not only snake-charmers (though he says there are many others) but also folk dancers and artisans.
Most interestingly, according to his guru, snake charmers from his tradition only keep the snakes for a month because he believes it will bring bad luck to keep them for longer. This is one of the reasons that they don’t defang the snakes – they are going to release them into the wild again so they need to keep their teeth.
He discussed the way in which the venom is extracted from the snake’s fangs by means of a balloon attached to a small vial. The snake, biting the balloon, releases venom into the vial since it believes itself to be biting a small animal. He told us that from then on, they can only feed the snake cooked or raw meat – to feed it a live animal will cause it to release venom again.
Despite these precautions, we asked him if he’d ever been bitten when the snake was poisonous and he said that he had been taught to make a special medicine for when that happened. They apply a tourniquet to wherever the bite has occurred, most likely the hand or the foot, and then he takes this medicine which, in his description, sounded a lot like an ipecac made of herbs and tobacco. It causes him to throw up repeatedly, and in this way, they are able to avoid being killed by snake poison.
He talked a little bit about working the “tourist line” as he called it here in Jaipur. Snake charmers, we came to understand, used to exist primarily in the villages, going from house to house to collect donations from villagers who, in their devotion to Lord Shiva (whose animal is the snake), would support the craft of the saperas. These days, however, it’s not like that anymore and most snake charmers have shifted to the cities to work in tourist areas.
While summer is not the tourist season (due, as you may have guessed, to the extreme heat), he said that in winter he’ll see anywhere between 500 and 1500 tourists in a day. This, of course, is not limited to foreign tourists though obviously there are many – people come from all over India to see the City Palace which is where he usually sits. I asked him if he needed a license to secure a place, but he said no: overtime, if you go to the same place enough, other people will simply move away from you, and since he’d been going for the last 15 years, that was what had happened. Furthermore, he said, there is no license; however, occasionally a policeman would come and he’d have to pay them a bribe to continue to sit there without being harassed.
Finally, we asked him if he was teaching anyone else his craft. He said without much emotion that no, he wasn’t. He’d taught people to handle snakes but teaching them to catch them was tricky because they had to be very fast. One girl in our class asked if his children would become saperas like he had but he said that nowadays fewer people are becoming snake charmers, maybe only 10% of those who were before, and that his children were reading and studying for other professions.
When his interview was finished, he slowly took a basket from his plastic bag and placed it on the floor. We all leaned forward at our desks to see as he uncovered the basket and two large cobras emerged, hissing and striking at him, showing what seemed to me to be their extreme displeasure at being forced to lie on top of one another in this tiny basket.
He brought out his peculiar looking instrument made of a hollowed out gourd and began to play, swaying the end in time to his music. The snakes stood at attention, following the ends of the instrument with their eyes and enormous hooded heads and every so often striking out at it with a loud “hissssssssss”.
A crowd gathered as students from other classes came in to watch the tamasha (spectacle) before us. Everyone was possessed with a wary kind of excitement, bubbling up from their nervousness at the idea of two live cobras in the room!
When he had finished, he allowed a few students to come and touch the cobras. As one of our group put it “When else will be I be able to touch a cobra and live?”
Best,
Cat
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Would you rather...
Dear dedicated reader,
Sometimes, in college, when we were bored on long car rides going to and from debate tournaments, we would play this game “Would you rather…?” The chooser is presented with two options and has to choose between them. A favorite was “Would you rather have a ketchup dispensing bellybutton or a pencil sharpening nose?”
In that vein, dear reader, I would like to tell you a little bit about my homestay. I live with a lovely joint family not far from the institute and am carefully looked after by the mother of that family, Auntie-ji, who sees to all of our needs here in house. She is soft-spoken and sweet, speaks English exceptionally well (I actually wish she did not speak it quite so well) and has two adorable children, Ayusha, age 8 and Arjun, age 6. Her husband has a position in the Indian military and is stationed in another city in Rajasthan, though he has been home for the past week, on leave from his job. The house is rounded out by Pappa-ji, the 84 year old grandfather who was a lawyer for the Rajasthan High Court and still practices law out of his office at the back of the house.
Because they have two extra rooms with their own bathrooms, they have often taken study-abroad or AIIS students into their care over the past few years. When Rachel and I arrived on our first afternoon in Jaipur to make their introduction, they greeted us with a detached politeness that was welcoming while at the same time belying their previous experience with foreigners coming and going in their home.
The day we arrived to move in, we quickly chose our rooms, Rachel taking the one at the back with its own entrance, I taking the one through which Rachel must pass to get to the rest of the house. Our induction to the house, however, came when Rachel discovered a dead rat in her closet, which the family quickly called the servant to come remove. This, we were to learn, was merely foreshadowing.
A few nights back, I was awoken by a hysterical Rachel who had crept into my room and perched herself on my bed, recounting to me that she had awoken with a similar uninvited intruder: a small brown mouse had taken it upon itself to crawl into the crook of her arm and nestle itself in her armpit. When she woke up to find her new friend, she screamed and flung her arm out, causing the mouse to fly through the air and then run, terrified, into the bathroom. Rachel, herself terrified, had then run into my room and spent the rest of the night in my bed (which is quite large). The next morning, when we repeated this story to our Auntie-ji, she assured us that she would administer some “medicine” strategically to the various mouse holes in the house.
“There is only one mouse,” she said, “and we have been trying to catch it for several weeks.”
I explained that, having had much success with traps back in the states, I wondered if those were commonly used here in India.
“They are,” she said dubiously, “but this mouse is very clever.”
The medicine having been administered, we believed that we could sleep easily. We were wrong.
Two nights ago, I awoke with an itch on my stomach, which I groggily moved my hand towards, searching for some relief. Putting my hand to my stomach, however, my whole body tensed as I heard the familiar crunching sound that accompanies a large bug being mashed to death. Paralyzed, my hand clutched whatever it was that I had unwittingly captured through my shirt, unwilling to let go, unsure in the dark whether the thing which I held was fully dead or not. After a moment of thought, I got out of bed and turned on the light, shook out my shirt and watched in horror as a the body of a large, dead cockroach fell down and landed on my bare foot. Shaking my foot with a full body shudder, I jumped back and hopped from one leg to the other for a bit for my involuntary shaking subsided.
Knowing I had to sleep, and that there was little I could do to prevent this happening again, after a few moments of thought I determinedly tucked my t-shirt into my pajama pants and got back into bed. All night, I could feel phantom cockroaches crawling up and down my legs.
So, dear reader, I present you with the question: Would you rather the mouse or the cockroach? It is a subject which has sparked some lively debate amongst my peers here and I would love to know your opinion.
Best,
Cat
Sometimes, in college, when we were bored on long car rides going to and from debate tournaments, we would play this game “Would you rather…?” The chooser is presented with two options and has to choose between them. A favorite was “Would you rather have a ketchup dispensing bellybutton or a pencil sharpening nose?”
In that vein, dear reader, I would like to tell you a little bit about my homestay. I live with a lovely joint family not far from the institute and am carefully looked after by the mother of that family, Auntie-ji, who sees to all of our needs here in house. She is soft-spoken and sweet, speaks English exceptionally well (I actually wish she did not speak it quite so well) and has two adorable children, Ayusha, age 8 and Arjun, age 6. Her husband has a position in the Indian military and is stationed in another city in Rajasthan, though he has been home for the past week, on leave from his job. The house is rounded out by Pappa-ji, the 84 year old grandfather who was a lawyer for the Rajasthan High Court and still practices law out of his office at the back of the house.
Because they have two extra rooms with their own bathrooms, they have often taken study-abroad or AIIS students into their care over the past few years. When Rachel and I arrived on our first afternoon in Jaipur to make their introduction, they greeted us with a detached politeness that was welcoming while at the same time belying their previous experience with foreigners coming and going in their home.
The day we arrived to move in, we quickly chose our rooms, Rachel taking the one at the back with its own entrance, I taking the one through which Rachel must pass to get to the rest of the house. Our induction to the house, however, came when Rachel discovered a dead rat in her closet, which the family quickly called the servant to come remove. This, we were to learn, was merely foreshadowing.
A few nights back, I was awoken by a hysterical Rachel who had crept into my room and perched herself on my bed, recounting to me that she had awoken with a similar uninvited intruder: a small brown mouse had taken it upon itself to crawl into the crook of her arm and nestle itself in her armpit. When she woke up to find her new friend, she screamed and flung her arm out, causing the mouse to fly through the air and then run, terrified, into the bathroom. Rachel, herself terrified, had then run into my room and spent the rest of the night in my bed (which is quite large). The next morning, when we repeated this story to our Auntie-ji, she assured us that she would administer some “medicine” strategically to the various mouse holes in the house.
“There is only one mouse,” she said, “and we have been trying to catch it for several weeks.”
I explained that, having had much success with traps back in the states, I wondered if those were commonly used here in India.
“They are,” she said dubiously, “but this mouse is very clever.”
The medicine having been administered, we believed that we could sleep easily. We were wrong.
Two nights ago, I awoke with an itch on my stomach, which I groggily moved my hand towards, searching for some relief. Putting my hand to my stomach, however, my whole body tensed as I heard the familiar crunching sound that accompanies a large bug being mashed to death. Paralyzed, my hand clutched whatever it was that I had unwittingly captured through my shirt, unwilling to let go, unsure in the dark whether the thing which I held was fully dead or not. After a moment of thought, I got out of bed and turned on the light, shook out my shirt and watched in horror as a the body of a large, dead cockroach fell down and landed on my bare foot. Shaking my foot with a full body shudder, I jumped back and hopped from one leg to the other for a bit for my involuntary shaking subsided.
Knowing I had to sleep, and that there was little I could do to prevent this happening again, after a few moments of thought I determinedly tucked my t-shirt into my pajama pants and got back into bed. All night, I could feel phantom cockroaches crawling up and down my legs.
So, dear reader, I present you with the question: Would you rather the mouse or the cockroach? It is a subject which has sparked some lively debate amongst my peers here and I would love to know your opinion.
Best,
Cat
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Hindi Class Begins
Dear dedicated reader,
Our Hindi classes have begun in earnest and each day, I wait with Rachel, my housemate, outside of our gate for the appointed autorickshaw carpool to arrive and take us to school. Waiting with my satchel given to me by the program and my little water bottle dangling from my hand, I feel l like a small Indian school girl. The reality, of course, is that I am a big, clumsy, sweaty American girl who is often tongue-tied as I reach for the correct Hindi works to express my complicated English thoughts.
Since last Friday, these classes have kept us exceptionally busy – the first day, we were told that each week, we would prepare to complete the following:
5 pages of Hindi journal writing
2 page film review
2 hours conversation with our Hindi language partner
1 20 minute oral presentation
2 hours of listening comprehension
1 magazine article
1 piece of literature
This, of course, is in addition to 20 hours of instruction a week and countless vocabulary lists that support all of these different activities. By the end of the first day, Friday, I had already learned close to 150 new words. The pace has not lessened and I find myself studiously emulating my former students and their grueling schedule: waking early to go over my flashcards, spending my afternoons reading and diligently looking up words that I don’t know, and spending my nights reviewing and writing in my journal. I liken the approach of AIIS (American Institute of Indian Studies) to an attack on my language skills from all sides. Any weakness is eradicated as my skills are strengthened in a plethora of different ways.
One of the best parts about being in the Advanced class is that the expectation is never that we simply translate or read aloud together. We are expected to arrive at class, ready to have conversations about whatever it was that was assigned to us, be it a movie or literature or a magazine article. In this way, I’m beginning to understand the foundations of having an academic Hindi vocabulary – the difference between speaking properly and speaking in the street. Additionally, my street Hindi is benefiting as I begin to iron out what I know and what I need to know.
It can be frustrating to want to comment on the complicated themes of a Hindi film and to want to use my academic vocabulary to express my ideas concisely, only to find that my tongue and mind will not cooperate, that it is as if a thick blanket is constantly hanging over my head through which I must make myself understood. However, I have never been pushed or challenged in this way and am enjoying it immensely. There are no slackers here – everyone is in this game to reach that elusive goal: fluency.
Best,
Cat
Our Hindi classes have begun in earnest and each day, I wait with Rachel, my housemate, outside of our gate for the appointed autorickshaw carpool to arrive and take us to school. Waiting with my satchel given to me by the program and my little water bottle dangling from my hand, I feel l like a small Indian school girl. The reality, of course, is that I am a big, clumsy, sweaty American girl who is often tongue-tied as I reach for the correct Hindi works to express my complicated English thoughts.
Since last Friday, these classes have kept us exceptionally busy – the first day, we were told that each week, we would prepare to complete the following:
5 pages of Hindi journal writing
2 page film review
2 hours conversation with our Hindi language partner
1 20 minute oral presentation
2 hours of listening comprehension
1 magazine article
1 piece of literature
This, of course, is in addition to 20 hours of instruction a week and countless vocabulary lists that support all of these different activities. By the end of the first day, Friday, I had already learned close to 150 new words. The pace has not lessened and I find myself studiously emulating my former students and their grueling schedule: waking early to go over my flashcards, spending my afternoons reading and diligently looking up words that I don’t know, and spending my nights reviewing and writing in my journal. I liken the approach of AIIS (American Institute of Indian Studies) to an attack on my language skills from all sides. Any weakness is eradicated as my skills are strengthened in a plethora of different ways.
One of the best parts about being in the Advanced class is that the expectation is never that we simply translate or read aloud together. We are expected to arrive at class, ready to have conversations about whatever it was that was assigned to us, be it a movie or literature or a magazine article. In this way, I’m beginning to understand the foundations of having an academic Hindi vocabulary – the difference between speaking properly and speaking in the street. Additionally, my street Hindi is benefiting as I begin to iron out what I know and what I need to know.
It can be frustrating to want to comment on the complicated themes of a Hindi film and to want to use my academic vocabulary to express my ideas concisely, only to find that my tongue and mind will not cooperate, that it is as if a thick blanket is constantly hanging over my head through which I must make myself understood. However, I have never been pushed or challenged in this way and am enjoying it immensely. There are no slackers here – everyone is in this game to reach that elusive goal: fluency.
Best,
Cat
Friday, June 17, 2011
Kingdom of Dreams
Dear dedicated reader,
Apologies for the radio silence – A week has passed and I’ve often opened my laptop with the intention of writing to assure you that I am safe, that I have arrived and that all is well; however, each time that I found myself in this situation, something found a way to intervene and prevent my completing this letter to you.
We’ve been kept exceptionally busy since we arrived – from stepping off the plane, we were whisked into the waiting, competent arms of the American Institute of India Studies (AIIS) program staff. For a few days, we moved about hurriedly and awkwardly, a monster with 60 heads, as the Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi programs were all oriented together before being bussed, flown and driven to our various destinations. We were oriented and re-oriented – the mad lib of Indian orientations was repeated once again, the blanks filled in the same way – and generally led about by the nose to various tourist destinations.
This included but was not limited to a much built up visit to the “Kingdom of Dreams”. I had seen a sign at the airport for this mysterious place: it was a picture of a large Indian-esque palace with a life size picture of Shah Rukh Khan, arms outstretched, in front of it. In truth, the place is something of an Indian Disneyland – food from every part of the country is represented in stalls like a kind of Indian Epcot center. Overpriced souvenirs culled from each part of India abounded, as well as suitably thematic decoration, finishing with a large sandbox meant to replicate a beach from Goa.
The arrival of our large tourist bus was greeted with a welcoming committee of men with drums standing in front of a huge life-size ornate golden elephant. Upon entry, a demure woman with a tray of red paint greeted us and placed a graceful finger-full on our faces, pressing rice into the wet red mixture with care. The sweat which slicked the surface of my forehead immediately caused this gentle welcoming gesture to become a full on uncontained run of red down the bridge of my nose.
It was clear that our program organizers were very excited about taking us here so I did my best to remain optimistic as we paraded past men and woman in ornate, elaborate costumes meant to replicate dress from many different parts of India. We were given a credit card with 650 rupees that could only be spent at this location and told to find dinner. A few of us wandered until we found a Mumbai chaat stand and availed ourselves of its menu to eat some delicious papri chaat (fried crackers with potatos, lentils, tamarind sauce, yogurt and green chutney).
The strangest part of the experience was that this outrageous tourist attraction, this false recreation of a reality that only exists in travelogues written by colonialists, was filled not with foreign tourists, but with Indians from every corner of the country.
Truly, the experience is best communicated by video:
Now, we are in Jaipur and I’ve moved in with my host family, the Mehrishis. I’ll save their introduction for my next letter, dear reader.
Best,
Cat
Apologies for the radio silence – A week has passed and I’ve often opened my laptop with the intention of writing to assure you that I am safe, that I have arrived and that all is well; however, each time that I found myself in this situation, something found a way to intervene and prevent my completing this letter to you.
We’ve been kept exceptionally busy since we arrived – from stepping off the plane, we were whisked into the waiting, competent arms of the American Institute of India Studies (AIIS) program staff. For a few days, we moved about hurriedly and awkwardly, a monster with 60 heads, as the Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi programs were all oriented together before being bussed, flown and driven to our various destinations. We were oriented and re-oriented – the mad lib of Indian orientations was repeated once again, the blanks filled in the same way – and generally led about by the nose to various tourist destinations.
This included but was not limited to a much built up visit to the “Kingdom of Dreams”. I had seen a sign at the airport for this mysterious place: it was a picture of a large Indian-esque palace with a life size picture of Shah Rukh Khan, arms outstretched, in front of it. In truth, the place is something of an Indian Disneyland – food from every part of the country is represented in stalls like a kind of Indian Epcot center. Overpriced souvenirs culled from each part of India abounded, as well as suitably thematic decoration, finishing with a large sandbox meant to replicate a beach from Goa.
The arrival of our large tourist bus was greeted with a welcoming committee of men with drums standing in front of a huge life-size ornate golden elephant. Upon entry, a demure woman with a tray of red paint greeted us and placed a graceful finger-full on our faces, pressing rice into the wet red mixture with care. The sweat which slicked the surface of my forehead immediately caused this gentle welcoming gesture to become a full on uncontained run of red down the bridge of my nose.
It was clear that our program organizers were very excited about taking us here so I did my best to remain optimistic as we paraded past men and woman in ornate, elaborate costumes meant to replicate dress from many different parts of India. We were given a credit card with 650 rupees that could only be spent at this location and told to find dinner. A few of us wandered until we found a Mumbai chaat stand and availed ourselves of its menu to eat some delicious papri chaat (fried crackers with potatos, lentils, tamarind sauce, yogurt and green chutney).
The strangest part of the experience was that this outrageous tourist attraction, this false recreation of a reality that only exists in travelogues written by colonialists, was filled not with foreign tourists, but with Indians from every corner of the country.
Truly, the experience is best communicated by video:
Now, we are in Jaipur and I’ve moved in with my host family, the Mehrishis. I’ll save their introduction for my next letter, dear reader.
Best,
Cat
Friday, June 10, 2011
Filling in the Blanks
Dear dedicated reader,
“Think of your worst trait and magnify it by ten – that is what you will turn into on your worst day in India.” The woman speaking to us paused to let this sink in. I looked around the hotel conference room, full of prospective Critical Language Scholarship recipients heading to India, and I wondered if everyone else was thinking the same thing as me: what *is* my worst trait?
While conducting this reflection, I realized that, at this point in my life, I have attended no less than four orientations preparing me for life in India – one with Brown, Princeton in Asia, Nanubhai, and now the State Department. Therefore, I have decided that the best way to communicate what the common denominator experience of being oriented for India is like is to provide you with an “India Orientation” Madlib!
“Congratulations ________ (name of group of hopefuls) on your decision to go to India. I’d like to provide you with _______ (amount) of advice about living in India based on my _____ (number) of years of experience. First of all, let’s talk about safety. You should never go out at ______ (time of day) because of _________ (weather/wild dogs/monkeys/rapists) or, if you do, make sure that you have travel in packs or have a male friend with you. Also, please let us know where you are because we are afraid of ______ (threats to your personal safety/litigation).
Now, it is likely that you will fall ill during _____ (some/part/all day everyday) of your visit and therefore you should be prepared with _____ (immodium/doxycycline/advil/lopamine/larium/probiotics/Tylenol pm/Sudafed/cipro/airborne/tums), but, make sure not to self-medicate: go the _______ (qualified medical professional)! One thing that usually makes participants sick is the _____ (food/smells/heat/change in climate/bacteria). Therefore, you should watch what you eat and make sure you never eat _______ (fruit/uncooked vegetables/street food/unfiltered water/anything tasty looking). This will most likely make you feel like ______ (nasty horrible thing). Also, I checked the high in _______ (city of arrival) and it is _____ (three digit number) degrees, so make sure to drink plenty of ____(a liquid).
Getting around in India will also present some challenges. The roads in India are like _______ (something crazy). The most common transportation (unspoken assumption: for foreigners) is the ________ (three wheeled device with an engine taken from a lawnmower). You can take these, but not after ______ (time of day).
You may know that the culture of India is very different from ours, and you may experience some culture shock on your arrival. Men, don’t wear ________ (typically informal American piece of clothing) and women, we suggest that if you don’t want your _______ (Part of the body) stared at or touched that you wear ________ (typically traditional piece of clothing).
Lastly, we’ve purchased travel insurance on your behalf and I’d like to go over it. It provides benefits fo most things, but not ________ (a contact sport), ________ (a pre-existing condition), or _______ (an act of terrorism). So, please keep those restrictions in mind.
We hope you have a great time in India this ______ (summer/year/semester)!
Safe travels!”
Here’s hoping you all now feel fully oriented. We head out to the airport in just a few hours for our flight! The next time that I write to you, dear reader, I will be staying at the Taj Ambassador in Delhi.
Best,
Cat
“Think of your worst trait and magnify it by ten – that is what you will turn into on your worst day in India.” The woman speaking to us paused to let this sink in. I looked around the hotel conference room, full of prospective Critical Language Scholarship recipients heading to India, and I wondered if everyone else was thinking the same thing as me: what *is* my worst trait?
While conducting this reflection, I realized that, at this point in my life, I have attended no less than four orientations preparing me for life in India – one with Brown, Princeton in Asia, Nanubhai, and now the State Department. Therefore, I have decided that the best way to communicate what the common denominator experience of being oriented for India is like is to provide you with an “India Orientation” Madlib!
“Congratulations ________ (name of group of hopefuls) on your decision to go to India. I’d like to provide you with _______ (amount) of advice about living in India based on my _____ (number) of years of experience. First of all, let’s talk about safety. You should never go out at ______ (time of day) because of _________ (weather/wild dogs/monkeys/rapists) or, if you do, make sure that you have travel in packs or have a male friend with you. Also, please let us know where you are because we are afraid of ______ (threats to your personal safety/litigation).
Now, it is likely that you will fall ill during _____ (some/part/all day everyday) of your visit and therefore you should be prepared with _____ (immodium/doxycycline/advil/lopamine/larium/probiotics/Tylenol pm/Sudafed/cipro/airborne/tums), but, make sure not to self-medicate: go the _______ (qualified medical professional)! One thing that usually makes participants sick is the _____ (food/smells/heat/change in climate/bacteria). Therefore, you should watch what you eat and make sure you never eat _______ (fruit/uncooked vegetables/street food/unfiltered water/anything tasty looking). This will most likely make you feel like ______ (nasty horrible thing). Also, I checked the high in _______ (city of arrival) and it is _____ (three digit number) degrees, so make sure to drink plenty of ____(a liquid).
Getting around in India will also present some challenges. The roads in India are like _______ (something crazy). The most common transportation (unspoken assumption: for foreigners) is the ________ (three wheeled device with an engine taken from a lawnmower). You can take these, but not after ______ (time of day).
You may know that the culture of India is very different from ours, and you may experience some culture shock on your arrival. Men, don’t wear ________ (typically informal American piece of clothing) and women, we suggest that if you don’t want your _______ (Part of the body) stared at or touched that you wear ________ (typically traditional piece of clothing).
Lastly, we’ve purchased travel insurance on your behalf and I’d like to go over it. It provides benefits fo most things, but not ________ (a contact sport), ________ (a pre-existing condition), or _______ (an act of terrorism). So, please keep those restrictions in mind.
We hope you have a great time in India this ______ (summer/year/semester)!
Safe travels!”
Here’s hoping you all now feel fully oriented. We head out to the airport in just a few hours for our flight! The next time that I write to you, dear reader, I will be staying at the Taj Ambassador in Delhi.
Best,
Cat
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Back again
Dear dedicated readers (or those of you who still remain),
I’ve long since left Nanubhai and Kadod behind but I am thinking of reviving this blog as I enter into yet another Indian adventure, this time under the purview of the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship program (www.clscholarship.org). I’ll be moving to Jaipur for ten weeks this summer and after a year of doctoral study I’m very much looking forward to seeing my old friend India again, this time, with different eyes.
I remember the very first time that I made the transition across the ocean as a sophomore in college, venturing to this place that I had studied but never seen – the alternating waves of elation and terror were so overwhelming that I considered, on disembarking for my connecting flight in London, simply turning around and going home. When I think back to that first experience, my memory catches on the surface level things – the smells, colors – those things that India is known for. I remember outrageous arguments with autorickshaw drivers and dust and heat and occasionally an elated rain. I remember thinking, “There is no reading about this place. There is only being here.” I still feel that way, even after three years of Indian residency.
The things I read in graduate school about India seem flat – two dimensional. Regardless of the quality of their empirics – their method, their contribution to the literature – it feels far away and somehow lacking. As I’m only a beginning scholar, I struggle sometimes for the proper words to intimate the why behind my feelings of distaste for these studies. Maybe it is that when I think of India, I think of my students, my close friends, the place I lovingly refer to as my village. My mind seems unable to comprehend India in aggregate.
In many ways, my understanding of India is like my Hindi. At first, formally schooled, I studied Hindi and India at a distance, from afar. I immersed myself in its study and believe myself knowledgeable. I was wrong. I couldn’t keep up in a conversation and while I could argue fine, I was miles away from true knowledge of the language. In Kadod, I achieved a sort of unschooled comfort with language and with India – I had to relearn many things that I thought I knew, be always ready for the cognitive dissonance of living in an unfamiliar place. My tongue became accustomed to producing the sounds on command and my mind found a way to reconcile itself to a new palette of experiences by inventing explanations for what I saw that gelled with my American way of understanding the world.
This combination of schooled and unschooled experiences are what I bring to my journey this summer. My relatively fluid Hindi needs grammatical supports – structure – to improve and my mind needs the combination of reflecting on my experiences in reference to theory in order to move forward in my scholarship.
I am hoping to document my attempt to do both of these things. While I cannot promise the array of characters that you came to know and love in my previous blog, I will do my best to communicate my experience with thoughtfulness, honesty, and with some luck, humor.
Best,
Cat
I’ve long since left Nanubhai and Kadod behind but I am thinking of reviving this blog as I enter into yet another Indian adventure, this time under the purview of the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship program (www.clscholarship.org). I’ll be moving to Jaipur for ten weeks this summer and after a year of doctoral study I’m very much looking forward to seeing my old friend India again, this time, with different eyes.
I remember the very first time that I made the transition across the ocean as a sophomore in college, venturing to this place that I had studied but never seen – the alternating waves of elation and terror were so overwhelming that I considered, on disembarking for my connecting flight in London, simply turning around and going home. When I think back to that first experience, my memory catches on the surface level things – the smells, colors – those things that India is known for. I remember outrageous arguments with autorickshaw drivers and dust and heat and occasionally an elated rain. I remember thinking, “There is no reading about this place. There is only being here.” I still feel that way, even after three years of Indian residency.
The things I read in graduate school about India seem flat – two dimensional. Regardless of the quality of their empirics – their method, their contribution to the literature – it feels far away and somehow lacking. As I’m only a beginning scholar, I struggle sometimes for the proper words to intimate the why behind my feelings of distaste for these studies. Maybe it is that when I think of India, I think of my students, my close friends, the place I lovingly refer to as my village. My mind seems unable to comprehend India in aggregate.
In many ways, my understanding of India is like my Hindi. At first, formally schooled, I studied Hindi and India at a distance, from afar. I immersed myself in its study and believe myself knowledgeable. I was wrong. I couldn’t keep up in a conversation and while I could argue fine, I was miles away from true knowledge of the language. In Kadod, I achieved a sort of unschooled comfort with language and with India – I had to relearn many things that I thought I knew, be always ready for the cognitive dissonance of living in an unfamiliar place. My tongue became accustomed to producing the sounds on command and my mind found a way to reconcile itself to a new palette of experiences by inventing explanations for what I saw that gelled with my American way of understanding the world.
This combination of schooled and unschooled experiences are what I bring to my journey this summer. My relatively fluid Hindi needs grammatical supports – structure – to improve and my mind needs the combination of reflecting on my experiences in reference to theory in order to move forward in my scholarship.
I am hoping to document my attempt to do both of these things. While I cannot promise the array of characters that you came to know and love in my previous blog, I will do my best to communicate my experience with thoughtfulness, honesty, and with some luck, humor.
Best,
Cat
Friday, February 19, 2010
Cultural Transition
Dear dedicated reader,
As many of you know, I am no longer residing full-time in India and have largely abandoned this blog. I'm afraid that due to the nature of my new position, it is difficult to a) keep up with it and b) to tell the stories of events from my everyday life with the same voice that I used to employ. I think, in many ways, I have changed over the past year and in some ways the behaviors that used to baffle me no longer cause so much confusion.
I am now residing in Brooklyn, however, and I have to say that I may have to redirect my critical lens to some of the bizarre cultural patterns that I am now being subjected to as a returned ex-pat.
Regardless, this post is to alert you to an article that I had published in Education Times, a sub-section of the Times of India, about my experience as a teacher. The article can be found here:
http://education.indiatimes.com/educationTimes/getArticleDetail.do?sectionid=79&articleid=200911252009112515283162d464467a
Though below is the text, reprinted for you all.
Best,
Cat
Students' Speak: Lost in Translation
On my first day as an English teacher at Kadod High School (in Gujarat), I found myself at the front of a dim classroom in front of over 60 pairs of confused, unblinking eyes. It was June, the fans had slowed to a halt with another electricity cut and I was vainly searching for a piece of chalk and a duster. In America, these staples of the teaching profession are kept in the classroom; I hadnt thought to bring them with me. I was there as a teacher through the Nanubhai Education Foundation, an NGO which works to bridge the gap between rural and urban Indian schools by sending American trained teachers to teach in rural vernacular-medium government schools to improve students English and technology skills.
Lack of amenities
Upon asking, I found that the school had no photocopier and only sponsored photocopies for its teachers with special permission from the principal. The school textbooks were beyond the means of many of my students. In the US, the school I taught at in the poor part of Boston had been deemed under-resourced. Looking around at my current classroom, at the cracked blackboard, the cramped benches and the crumbling walls, I wondered if we in the US could ever understand what under-resourced truly means.
About the students
Despite this, I found that after some shyness my students were practically jumping out of their seats to answer my simple questions that first day. Their eagerness belied their excitement to learn. They hungered for knowledge in a way that I had never seen in my students in America. Furthermore, their respect for their teachers, their respect of the knowledge that their teachers offered them, was unlike anything I had ever seen while teaching in Boston or even in my own days as a student.
However, I was soon to learn the constraints within which this eagerness is regularly channeled. “Teacher, should we copy our essay in a blue pen or a black pen,” asked one diligent student, as I worked at writing away on the blackboard. I cringed inwardly and instructed the student, as I myself had been instructed by the other teachers, to copy the essay in a blue pen. Turning back to the board, I continued to copy an essay on the dull topic ‘Computers and the Future’ from a cheaply printed exam guide.
Copying, I had been told by other teachers, is a necessary evil. The annual exam is graded harshly and mistakes are not tolerated in student’s essays. The level of English expected from class IX students does not match their current ability level, after years of learning English from government teachers, who barely speak the language themselves. Many of the students I taught could barely read English, couldn’t speak at all and yet, somehow still managed to pass the annual exam because of teaching practices such as these. Is this a triumph of ingenuity of the schools to make up for what they lack or a symptom of a much bigger disservice to its students by the Indian government or is it both?
Comparing classrooms
As for myself, I could only capitulate to the system. The methods that I learned as a teacher, in the US, for engaging the students in an interactive environment, were meant for classes of 30 in classroom spaces that allowed for some freedom of movement. These methods did not translate to my classes of 60 with barely enough room for me to pass between benches to check my students work. Furthermore, the school administration did not appreciate my attempts at classroom interactivity. I was often told to control my classroom better and that Indian students learned better sitting at desks and copying things off the board than by playing games.
For me, this begged the question - did the students learn better or memorise better? Does memorisation denote true understanding?
As an American, I can sing the words to popular Hindi songs without understanding them. Can English be learned as merely another subject like math or science where one memorises the relevant facts and regurgitates them for the annual exam or does the language require a certain special treatment that the government syllabus has yet to accord it?
Concluding questions
On a policy level, I hear that things are changing. At a conference I attended last week, run by the English Language Teachers Association of India, a Gujarati policymaker informed the participants that reforms in the way English is taught are being pushed forward. For example, Gujarat now requires an oral test of the class VIII and IX students. These fabled reforms have indeed filtered down to the practice level. However, I’ve watched these oral exams actually administered. The teacher asks the student to recite a poem or an essay that they have memorised and then grades them on how well they remember it. Is this what policymakers had in mind?
In the end, I think the question is - what does learning look like? As an American educator working in the Indian context, it is a question that I found myself asking every day. I find that I do not have an answer, instead I have one last question - will these methods prepare these motivated students for life outside the school?
(The writer is the Executive Director of Nanubhai Education Foundation and a former full-time teacher at Kadod High School. Her interest in Indian development began at Brown University, where she double majored in South Asian Studies and History and spent her junior year studying at St Stephen’s College in Delhi while interning for the NGO TARSHI)
As many of you know, I am no longer residing full-time in India and have largely abandoned this blog. I'm afraid that due to the nature of my new position, it is difficult to a) keep up with it and b) to tell the stories of events from my everyday life with the same voice that I used to employ. I think, in many ways, I have changed over the past year and in some ways the behaviors that used to baffle me no longer cause so much confusion.
I am now residing in Brooklyn, however, and I have to say that I may have to redirect my critical lens to some of the bizarre cultural patterns that I am now being subjected to as a returned ex-pat.
Regardless, this post is to alert you to an article that I had published in Education Times, a sub-section of the Times of India, about my experience as a teacher. The article can be found here:
http://education.indiatimes.com/educationTimes/getArticleDetail.do?sectionid=79&articleid=200911252009112515283162d464467a
Though below is the text, reprinted for you all.
Best,
Cat
Students' Speak: Lost in Translation
On my first day as an English teacher at Kadod High School (in Gujarat), I found myself at the front of a dim classroom in front of over 60 pairs of confused, unblinking eyes. It was June, the fans had slowed to a halt with another electricity cut and I was vainly searching for a piece of chalk and a duster. In America, these staples of the teaching profession are kept in the classroom; I hadnt thought to bring them with me. I was there as a teacher through the Nanubhai Education Foundation, an NGO which works to bridge the gap between rural and urban Indian schools by sending American trained teachers to teach in rural vernacular-medium government schools to improve students English and technology skills.
Lack of amenities
Upon asking, I found that the school had no photocopier and only sponsored photocopies for its teachers with special permission from the principal. The school textbooks were beyond the means of many of my students. In the US, the school I taught at in the poor part of Boston had been deemed under-resourced. Looking around at my current classroom, at the cracked blackboard, the cramped benches and the crumbling walls, I wondered if we in the US could ever understand what under-resourced truly means.
About the students
Despite this, I found that after some shyness my students were practically jumping out of their seats to answer my simple questions that first day. Their eagerness belied their excitement to learn. They hungered for knowledge in a way that I had never seen in my students in America. Furthermore, their respect for their teachers, their respect of the knowledge that their teachers offered them, was unlike anything I had ever seen while teaching in Boston or even in my own days as a student.
However, I was soon to learn the constraints within which this eagerness is regularly channeled. “Teacher, should we copy our essay in a blue pen or a black pen,” asked one diligent student, as I worked at writing away on the blackboard. I cringed inwardly and instructed the student, as I myself had been instructed by the other teachers, to copy the essay in a blue pen. Turning back to the board, I continued to copy an essay on the dull topic ‘Computers and the Future’ from a cheaply printed exam guide.
Copying, I had been told by other teachers, is a necessary evil. The annual exam is graded harshly and mistakes are not tolerated in student’s essays. The level of English expected from class IX students does not match their current ability level, after years of learning English from government teachers, who barely speak the language themselves. Many of the students I taught could barely read English, couldn’t speak at all and yet, somehow still managed to pass the annual exam because of teaching practices such as these. Is this a triumph of ingenuity of the schools to make up for what they lack or a symptom of a much bigger disservice to its students by the Indian government or is it both?
Comparing classrooms
As for myself, I could only capitulate to the system. The methods that I learned as a teacher, in the US, for engaging the students in an interactive environment, were meant for classes of 30 in classroom spaces that allowed for some freedom of movement. These methods did not translate to my classes of 60 with barely enough room for me to pass between benches to check my students work. Furthermore, the school administration did not appreciate my attempts at classroom interactivity. I was often told to control my classroom better and that Indian students learned better sitting at desks and copying things off the board than by playing games.
For me, this begged the question - did the students learn better or memorise better? Does memorisation denote true understanding?
As an American, I can sing the words to popular Hindi songs without understanding them. Can English be learned as merely another subject like math or science where one memorises the relevant facts and regurgitates them for the annual exam or does the language require a certain special treatment that the government syllabus has yet to accord it?
Concluding questions
On a policy level, I hear that things are changing. At a conference I attended last week, run by the English Language Teachers Association of India, a Gujarati policymaker informed the participants that reforms in the way English is taught are being pushed forward. For example, Gujarat now requires an oral test of the class VIII and IX students. These fabled reforms have indeed filtered down to the practice level. However, I’ve watched these oral exams actually administered. The teacher asks the student to recite a poem or an essay that they have memorised and then grades them on how well they remember it. Is this what policymakers had in mind?
In the end, I think the question is - what does learning look like? As an American educator working in the Indian context, it is a question that I found myself asking every day. I find that I do not have an answer, instead I have one last question - will these methods prepare these motivated students for life outside the school?
(The writer is the Executive Director of Nanubhai Education Foundation and a former full-time teacher at Kadod High School. Her interest in Indian development began at Brown University, where she double majored in South Asian Studies and History and spent her junior year studying at St Stephen’s College in Delhi while interning for the NGO TARSHI)
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Training Begins
Dear dedicated reader,
It is only proper that I begin with the context: a number of the more athletically motivated fellows staff have decided that they are going to run a half marathon in February to raise money for Nanubhai and as a way to keep fit and motivate themselves. While seated around the dinner table in the Bajipura apartment, infected with their raucous enthusiasm, I decided that if my staff could do it, well by golly so could I.
Since that time roughly two weeks ago, the general upheaval which characterizes my life in this country has come in to play and by fate’s roll of the dice I no longer live in our Bajipura apartment and have moved into the downstairs bedroom of our two fellows who live in Surat, the nearest city where we have one site at P.R. Khatiwala High School. Now that I’m located in a city, I have access to all sorts of amenities within a 5 minute autorickshaw ride of the house such as a real grocery store, a mall, a coffee shop, and most of all, a gym.
All of this contributed to the optimism which prompted me to decide to go running in the area surrounding our house.
I start out blissfully content with the morning sun shining down on our porch, the act of stretching bringing on that sense of enlightened anticipation that it always fills me with. With a flick of my finger, my ipod brings the upbeat strains of Natasha Bedinfield into my ears, telling me that not only is this morning beautiful, but ‘no one else could feel it for [me]’ and that I should ‘live my life with arms wide open.’ Sentimental state that I am in, it only heightens my euphoria.
After a brief stretch of the limbs, I set out gently from our porch, jogging my way through gated society and observing the mid-morning activities of our neighbors: hair-brushing, hanging clothes on the line, talking on the phone. I feel almost transported back to the Porter Street hill in Somerville down which I had to go for all my morning and weekend runs, that sense of energy filling my limbs as I strode downhill, until I finally hit the turn onto the main Highland Ave and set off on the real test of endurance. It is like that this morning, hitting the road that leads past Khatiwala High School (which we live behind) until I arrive at the main highway.
The first reservations set in as I observe a group of men sitting shirtless by the side of the road, the pick axes by their side indicating previous intense physical labor, the glistening of their skin the sun corroborating this assumption. As I put one foot in front of the other and naturally speed up as if to prove something, I can’t help but register the absurdity of my running to compensate for me sedentary lifestyle. No matter, I think, push on.
The real uncertainty hits as I realize that I am going about the same speed as a stringy man in a torn shirt ahead of me pushing a loaded down flatbed pushcart to which he is applying all his bodily strength to move its reluctant wagon wheels forward. To avoid comparison, I speed up, which of course leads to my lungs starting to burn and the slowing of my pace as I turn around and head back in the other direction.
Surat, you should know, dear reader, was 7 years ago proclaimed the most polluted city in India. While that title since has been bestowed upon some other hardworking and deserving city, the smog stained buildings and the thick haze hanging over the highway despite the sunny morning make it easy to see how that might have been the case. Like Providence, everyone claims that Surat has come so far, but I can attest that they are a long way from ‘Water-Fire’ like rebirth.
At this point in the run, despite Katy Perry enticing me onwards, I slow to a walk, my lungs really burning and the remnants of last week’s cold blocking my nose. Whether this halt is a result of my general poor level of fitness or Surat’s smog or the rising temperature of India at mid-morning or that cigarette I smoked when I was Thailand, it is hard to know; but at this point I am definitely feeling my optimism begin to curl into a ball and hide behind the cloudiness building up in my head.
According to my rough estimate, I have been running for 10 minutes.
I begin to do a sort of compromised run-walk that pacifies my sense of determination as well as my failing body until through the motivating beats of Jordin Sparks I hear jeering coming from the side of the road. I turn my head in time to see a bus full of private school boys, arms flailing out of the window to catch my attention, urging me onwards. I begin to miss the sweet, adorable faces of my students at Kadod and mentally curse the obnoxiousness of the over-privileged adolescent. Until, of course, I remember that I was one.
The nail in the coffin is a number of Rajasthani women, heads covered with the tails of their saris, giving me a look of horror as I shuffle onward. I smile in a lopsided way and slow to a real walk, turning back down the road to the house in embarrassed defeat and mentally filing this under “Notable experiences” in sub-category “Reasons I need to join a proper gym.”
Best,
Cat
It is only proper that I begin with the context: a number of the more athletically motivated fellows staff have decided that they are going to run a half marathon in February to raise money for Nanubhai and as a way to keep fit and motivate themselves. While seated around the dinner table in the Bajipura apartment, infected with their raucous enthusiasm, I decided that if my staff could do it, well by golly so could I.
Since that time roughly two weeks ago, the general upheaval which characterizes my life in this country has come in to play and by fate’s roll of the dice I no longer live in our Bajipura apartment and have moved into the downstairs bedroom of our two fellows who live in Surat, the nearest city where we have one site at P.R. Khatiwala High School. Now that I’m located in a city, I have access to all sorts of amenities within a 5 minute autorickshaw ride of the house such as a real grocery store, a mall, a coffee shop, and most of all, a gym.
All of this contributed to the optimism which prompted me to decide to go running in the area surrounding our house.
I start out blissfully content with the morning sun shining down on our porch, the act of stretching bringing on that sense of enlightened anticipation that it always fills me with. With a flick of my finger, my ipod brings the upbeat strains of Natasha Bedinfield into my ears, telling me that not only is this morning beautiful, but ‘no one else could feel it for [me]’ and that I should ‘live my life with arms wide open.’ Sentimental state that I am in, it only heightens my euphoria.
After a brief stretch of the limbs, I set out gently from our porch, jogging my way through gated society and observing the mid-morning activities of our neighbors: hair-brushing, hanging clothes on the line, talking on the phone. I feel almost transported back to the Porter Street hill in Somerville down which I had to go for all my morning and weekend runs, that sense of energy filling my limbs as I strode downhill, until I finally hit the turn onto the main Highland Ave and set off on the real test of endurance. It is like that this morning, hitting the road that leads past Khatiwala High School (which we live behind) until I arrive at the main highway.
The first reservations set in as I observe a group of men sitting shirtless by the side of the road, the pick axes by their side indicating previous intense physical labor, the glistening of their skin the sun corroborating this assumption. As I put one foot in front of the other and naturally speed up as if to prove something, I can’t help but register the absurdity of my running to compensate for me sedentary lifestyle. No matter, I think, push on.
The real uncertainty hits as I realize that I am going about the same speed as a stringy man in a torn shirt ahead of me pushing a loaded down flatbed pushcart to which he is applying all his bodily strength to move its reluctant wagon wheels forward. To avoid comparison, I speed up, which of course leads to my lungs starting to burn and the slowing of my pace as I turn around and head back in the other direction.
Surat, you should know, dear reader, was 7 years ago proclaimed the most polluted city in India. While that title since has been bestowed upon some other hardworking and deserving city, the smog stained buildings and the thick haze hanging over the highway despite the sunny morning make it easy to see how that might have been the case. Like Providence, everyone claims that Surat has come so far, but I can attest that they are a long way from ‘Water-Fire’ like rebirth.
At this point in the run, despite Katy Perry enticing me onwards, I slow to a walk, my lungs really burning and the remnants of last week’s cold blocking my nose. Whether this halt is a result of my general poor level of fitness or Surat’s smog or the rising temperature of India at mid-morning or that cigarette I smoked when I was Thailand, it is hard to know; but at this point I am definitely feeling my optimism begin to curl into a ball and hide behind the cloudiness building up in my head.
According to my rough estimate, I have been running for 10 minutes.
I begin to do a sort of compromised run-walk that pacifies my sense of determination as well as my failing body until through the motivating beats of Jordin Sparks I hear jeering coming from the side of the road. I turn my head in time to see a bus full of private school boys, arms flailing out of the window to catch my attention, urging me onwards. I begin to miss the sweet, adorable faces of my students at Kadod and mentally curse the obnoxiousness of the over-privileged adolescent. Until, of course, I remember that I was one.
The nail in the coffin is a number of Rajasthani women, heads covered with the tails of their saris, giving me a look of horror as I shuffle onward. I smile in a lopsided way and slow to a real walk, turning back down the road to the house in embarrassed defeat and mentally filing this under “Notable experiences” in sub-category “Reasons I need to join a proper gym.”
Best,
Cat
Friday, July 31, 2009
Alternative Transport System
Dear dedicated reader,
After many aborted attempts to get my driver’s license so I could buy a motor scooter and zip happily and efficiently between the schools I must visit to observe our Fellows, I must bow to the monolith of Indian bureaucracy and admit defeat. Why I cannot get my license is an overdue story for another time: needless to say, I have discovered another way to jet between schools and it is not the bumbling local bus system.
I stumbled upon the “chakra” system of transportation by accident: I never had any reason to discover it when I lived in Kadod because I never had any reason to travel anywhere that wasn’t regularly serviced by buses. A chakra is an over-sized autorickshaw: basically like a normal auto-rickshaw but with a backseat. I’ve sometimes heard them referred to as tempos in other places around the country. Locally, they are the source of controversy and with reason: I thought it was only my American sensibilities that found the idea of cramming 14 people into space meant comfortably for 7 and watching the driver drive with four men sharing the front seat with him ludicrous, but it turns out the locals feel this way as well. Darshanbhai, Kadod’s local phone booth owner, warned me off the chakras, citing the state of Indian roads: “Driving is crazy! In buses, government will give you money for accident and hurt. Government will give you nothing if you are hurt in chakra!”
Sadly, I must take my chances. The entrepreneurial spirit of the chakra drivers appeals to me and furthermore, the bus only comes about once every one and a half to two hours. To take a chakra is the same price as the bus and they leave much more often. What is the catch, I hear you ask? Well, they drive like maniacs, overcrowd the vehicle to the point of people hanging off of it and they won’t leave until they’ve reached hanging off capacity, which means you could be waiting for the chakra to go almost as long as the bus, depending on the time of day. However, its added modicum of efficiency is enough to convert me to traveling using the system daily.
I found myself waiting today, as I often am, at the Madhi bus station. In order to get from my current residence in Bajipura to visit my old home town of Kadod and the new teachers stationed there, I must change chakras at the Madhi bus stand, which is located in between Kadod and Bajipura since there are no direct chakras that go from Bajipura to Kadod. This change can take anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes, depending on the time of day and the whim/greed of the chakra drivers.
The drivers themselves, despite their insistence on ignoring my pleas to please leave when they have sufficient passengers, have taken an interest in me. Because I’m often at the station by myself in the middle of the day waiting in the back of one or another of their vehicles, in the beginning, they took to standing around at a safe distance and gawking at me. When the word spread that I could speak Hindi (the chakra network updates almost as quickly as Twitter, or so it would seem), they dared to take a step closer and ask me a few questions, mostly predictable: where are you from? Why are you here? Do you know those other girls teaching at Madhi? Do you like India? Etc.
At first, I answered cautiously, unsure of their motivation. I was still new at the system, I hadn’t yet learned which drivers go between which villages and who lives where and who will take you home if you get stuck near nightfall at the Madhi bus station or who will let you pay later if you don’t have a five rupee coin. Each passing day, I’ve learned more: who listens to old hindi music and which drivers like the poppy new versions, who has children, who can read. Each day, they’ve asked me more about myself: why did I come here? Why do we teach in the schools? Do I miss my family? Who is in my family? The camaraderie between myself and these men, young and old, was totally unexpected.
It still won’t get them to leave with only 13 passengers though. Rupee beats relationship, or so it would seem.
Best,
Cat
After many aborted attempts to get my driver’s license so I could buy a motor scooter and zip happily and efficiently between the schools I must visit to observe our Fellows, I must bow to the monolith of Indian bureaucracy and admit defeat. Why I cannot get my license is an overdue story for another time: needless to say, I have discovered another way to jet between schools and it is not the bumbling local bus system.
I stumbled upon the “chakra” system of transportation by accident: I never had any reason to discover it when I lived in Kadod because I never had any reason to travel anywhere that wasn’t regularly serviced by buses. A chakra is an over-sized autorickshaw: basically like a normal auto-rickshaw but with a backseat. I’ve sometimes heard them referred to as tempos in other places around the country. Locally, they are the source of controversy and with reason: I thought it was only my American sensibilities that found the idea of cramming 14 people into space meant comfortably for 7 and watching the driver drive with four men sharing the front seat with him ludicrous, but it turns out the locals feel this way as well. Darshanbhai, Kadod’s local phone booth owner, warned me off the chakras, citing the state of Indian roads: “Driving is crazy! In buses, government will give you money for accident and hurt. Government will give you nothing if you are hurt in chakra!”
Sadly, I must take my chances. The entrepreneurial spirit of the chakra drivers appeals to me and furthermore, the bus only comes about once every one and a half to two hours. To take a chakra is the same price as the bus and they leave much more often. What is the catch, I hear you ask? Well, they drive like maniacs, overcrowd the vehicle to the point of people hanging off of it and they won’t leave until they’ve reached hanging off capacity, which means you could be waiting for the chakra to go almost as long as the bus, depending on the time of day. However, its added modicum of efficiency is enough to convert me to traveling using the system daily. I found myself waiting today, as I often am, at the Madhi bus station. In order to get from my current residence in Bajipura to visit my old home town of Kadod and the new teachers stationed there, I must change chakras at the Madhi bus stand, which is located in between Kadod and Bajipura since there are no direct chakras that go from Bajipura to Kadod. This change can take anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes, depending on the time of day and the whim/greed of the chakra drivers.
The drivers themselves, despite their insistence on ignoring my pleas to please leave when they have sufficient passengers, have taken an interest in me. Because I’m often at the station by myself in the middle of the day waiting in the back of one or another of their vehicles, in the beginning, they took to standing around at a safe distance and gawking at me. When the word spread that I could speak Hindi (the chakra network updates almost as quickly as Twitter, or so it would seem), they dared to take a step closer and ask me a few questions, mostly predictable: where are you from? Why are you here? Do you know those other girls teaching at Madhi? Do you like India? Etc.
At first, I answered cautiously, unsure of their motivation. I was still new at the system, I hadn’t yet learned which drivers go between which villages and who lives where and who will take you home if you get stuck near nightfall at the Madhi bus station or who will let you pay later if you don’t have a five rupee coin. Each passing day, I’ve learned more: who listens to old hindi music and which drivers like the poppy new versions, who has children, who can read. Each day, they’ve asked me more about myself: why did I come here? Why do we teach in the schools? Do I miss my family? Who is in my family? The camaraderie between myself and these men, young and old, was totally unexpected.
It still won’t get them to leave with only 13 passengers though. Rupee beats relationship, or so it would seem.
Best,
Cat
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Poor Substitute
Dear dedicated reader,
I am sorely behind in my accounts to you. I don't make my apology lightly - I think about you almost daily and hope that my anecdotes of daily life here can resume once things become a little more settled. In the meantime, I present the following to you as a poor substitute for my usual detailed updates.
I had an article published in the Indian paper DNA recently that provides a more rounded reflection on my experience than I usually provide. If you are interested, it can be found here:
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/interview_indian-student-works-hard-but-isn-t-prepared-for-jobs_1273822
Best,
Cat
I am sorely behind in my accounts to you. I don't make my apology lightly - I think about you almost daily and hope that my anecdotes of daily life here can resume once things become a little more settled. In the meantime, I present the following to you as a poor substitute for my usual detailed updates.
I had an article published in the Indian paper DNA recently that provides a more rounded reflection on my experience than I usually provide. If you are interested, it can be found here:
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/interview_indian-student-works-hard-but-isn-t-prepared-for-jobs_1273822
Best,
Cat
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Parallel Universe
Dear dedicated reader,
This feeling of déjà vu is unmistakable. It was only a year ago that I lay here in the middle of the night writing on this same cot, pulled out in the center of the room so as to be under the fan (and in the process defying all Western rules of space use which don’t apply in such insidious heat anyway). The feeling, however, is somewhat unwarranted as while the circumstances for laying on this cot might be the same, the difference is that our comfortable house in Kadod which we turned into a home has been completely stripped of everything except for this cot and the massive cupboard which houses our English children’s library. The refrigerator is still here, housing one lone bottle of water which I brought with me from the train. The water is almost gone. Tomorrow I will have to buy more.
Bracketed by returning to Kadod, my experiences of the past two months in the US feel strangely foreign. Is foreign the word I want? Or is it parallel? Like another universe, perhaps.
Vimalbhai, our friend who rents his car and driving services for a living, came to pick me up from the train station, bottle of water and flowers in hand, looking for all the world like my grandparents did at airport when they met me not two months before. “Sister, you are the big boss now!” He exclaimed, making me laugh with embarrassment. He followed this assertion with an insistence that he treat me to some roadside sugarcane juice made by running sticks of sugarcane through a manually operated press that squeezes the juice out. As I took my first sip of the sweet, green colored liquid out of a dubiously clean plastic cup, my mind flashed back to the time that I had spent at the Princeton in Asia orientation last month in order to meet our new Kadod fellows. Sitting in on the ‘Health and Wellness’ session, the head of PIA had detailed how you lose the necessary antibodies to protect you from disease when you leave the country for a few weeks.
Vimalbhai looked at me expectantly. “Tastes like India!” He shouted, partially as a question.
Looking into his expectant face, I gave a hearty “Yes!” and a mental shrug, washing it down with my sugarcane juice.
The drive back to Kadod didn’t feel real until we reached the part of the highway that is only sugarcane fields as far as the eye can see. Amongst this expanse of sturdy, leafy stalks, I knew that somehow I had found my way back here, resisting the siren call of all the major cities on the East coast I had visited while home. As we approached the final stretch of the interior road the leads into the village, I started to see faces that I recognized: Anish, my 9E student on his motorbike, the woman who runs one of the local restaurants at the bus stop next to the man who runs the nearby shop whose t-shirt always reads “Work like a dog; Sleep like a log.” Turning from the main road onto Bazaar street, I felt a sudden pang of anxiety. What if… what if I missed Kadod more than it missed me? What if this was going to be one of those sequels that isn’t as good as the original movie?
I guess I shouldn’t have worried.
Vimalbhai stopped the car in front of the local phone booth and yelled to Darshanbhai to come out. All of a sudden, the car was surrounded by Darshanbhai’s family reaching through the window to grab my hands and say a welcome home. My smile widened until my face couldn’t contain it. It was a feeling that repeated itself often today as I reunited with Kamleshbhai the tailor and his family, Vimalbhai’s wife, daughter and nephew Avinash, Vikrambhai and his family, Taiyaba and her family.
How is it possible to feel so at home when it’s home that I’ve just left?
Best,
Cat
This feeling of déjà vu is unmistakable. It was only a year ago that I lay here in the middle of the night writing on this same cot, pulled out in the center of the room so as to be under the fan (and in the process defying all Western rules of space use which don’t apply in such insidious heat anyway). The feeling, however, is somewhat unwarranted as while the circumstances for laying on this cot might be the same, the difference is that our comfortable house in Kadod which we turned into a home has been completely stripped of everything except for this cot and the massive cupboard which houses our English children’s library. The refrigerator is still here, housing one lone bottle of water which I brought with me from the train. The water is almost gone. Tomorrow I will have to buy more.
Bracketed by returning to Kadod, my experiences of the past two months in the US feel strangely foreign. Is foreign the word I want? Or is it parallel? Like another universe, perhaps.
Vimalbhai, our friend who rents his car and driving services for a living, came to pick me up from the train station, bottle of water and flowers in hand, looking for all the world like my grandparents did at airport when they met me not two months before. “Sister, you are the big boss now!” He exclaimed, making me laugh with embarrassment. He followed this assertion with an insistence that he treat me to some roadside sugarcane juice made by running sticks of sugarcane through a manually operated press that squeezes the juice out. As I took my first sip of the sweet, green colored liquid out of a dubiously clean plastic cup, my mind flashed back to the time that I had spent at the Princeton in Asia orientation last month in order to meet our new Kadod fellows. Sitting in on the ‘Health and Wellness’ session, the head of PIA had detailed how you lose the necessary antibodies to protect you from disease when you leave the country for a few weeks.
Vimalbhai looked at me expectantly. “Tastes like India!” He shouted, partially as a question.
Looking into his expectant face, I gave a hearty “Yes!” and a mental shrug, washing it down with my sugarcane juice.
The drive back to Kadod didn’t feel real until we reached the part of the highway that is only sugarcane fields as far as the eye can see. Amongst this expanse of sturdy, leafy stalks, I knew that somehow I had found my way back here, resisting the siren call of all the major cities on the East coast I had visited while home. As we approached the final stretch of the interior road the leads into the village, I started to see faces that I recognized: Anish, my 9E student on his motorbike, the woman who runs one of the local restaurants at the bus stop next to the man who runs the nearby shop whose t-shirt always reads “Work like a dog; Sleep like a log.” Turning from the main road onto Bazaar street, I felt a sudden pang of anxiety. What if… what if I missed Kadod more than it missed me? What if this was going to be one of those sequels that isn’t as good as the original movie?
I guess I shouldn’t have worried.
Vimalbhai stopped the car in front of the local phone booth and yelled to Darshanbhai to come out. All of a sudden, the car was surrounded by Darshanbhai’s family reaching through the window to grab my hands and say a welcome home. My smile widened until my face couldn’t contain it. It was a feeling that repeated itself often today as I reunited with Kamleshbhai the tailor and his family, Vimalbhai’s wife, daughter and nephew Avinash, Vikrambhai and his family, Taiyaba and her family.
How is it possible to feel so at home when it’s home that I’ve just left?
Best,
Cat
Friday, June 5, 2009
Return At Last
Dear dedicated reader,
Sitting in the Mumbai airport waiting for a dawn departure to the train station en route to Kadod, I finally have time to compose my thoughts to you, dear reader . My lapse in communication these past few months is inexcusable: Over stimulated by my last month in Kadod as a teacher and subsequently overwhelmed with a whirlwind two month visit to the US during which I assumed the responsibilities for my new position with the Foundation, I can tell you that this unaccounted for time left me happy but in turns frazzled, anxious, and unable to write. Know that I have not forgotten you, nor do I intend to as I return to India.
The past 24 hours have had the makings of a most curious transition. The outward markers of my Indian existence which I shed so easily while at home amongst family and friends in the US have been slowly reassumed and the feeling of transformation was most unusual, inextricably linked to the legs of my journey back.
Like transformational waves lapping at the edges of my mind, the first washed gently over me as I sat in front of a chatty Indian girl on the first leg of my flight to Frankfurt. She spoke to her seat-mate, a fellow Philadelphian bound for a German beer festival, of her life growing up in India and what it was like in Bangalore. As I listened distractedly, I felt strangely disconnected from her experience and to soothe and immersed myself in catching up with the blockbuster hits from this past year, feet firmly planted in America.
The next wave was stronger, firmer and more unsettling. I walked through the spidery, dark halls of the Frankfurt International Airport passing an international myriad of hurried and leisurely walkers to my gate (I myself fall squarely in the former category). At the end of the hall, I spotted the sign I had spent half an hour following signs and searching for: C16. Upon turning into the gate, I was greeted by a sea of brown faces peppered here and there with a few foreigners like me. The strange familiarity of this pierced my consciousness – the strength of my recognition and the depth of my discomfort surprised me. However, like pulling on an old pair of jeans folded in the back of the closet, after squirming for a minute of so I found that my discomfort left me and I sat down on a bench to wait for boarding. The recollection of the feeling, however, that definitive shift of mind, stayed poignant.
And then I was fully drenched as yet another wave crashed over me: The airline attendant presented me with my specially ordered vegetarian meal, which on a flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai can only be Indian food. Know, dear reader, that I’ve been on an Indian food ban since I left Kadod, knowing that upon my return this would be my only fare for the next year.
At first, as I peeled back the sides of the aluminum top and revealed the tripartite dish underneath (rice, saag, and rajma arranged like a tiny reproduction of the Indian flag in my easily reheatable airline food container), I reluctantly eyed the contents. Running my eye over the rest of the tray left me feeling similarly disappointed: a small salad with limp, diseased looking lettuce, some suspicious looking raita (yogurt with vegetables mixed in) and a dessert which took my unexercised eye a minute to finally identify as a type of halwa (milky Indian dessert) with pureed pistachio.
I took up my plastic fork with trepidation and for a moment poked idly at the rice in the center of my tray. I took a bite. Not atrocious. I took another. The buttery feeling the rice left on my tongue brought back a picture of the daily blue bowl of rice, sitting on my kitchen table in Kadod. I took another, this time taking a little of the patriotic green saag. Too soon, I decided as I swallowed the spicy bite with distaste and took a bite of my neutral looking roll to soothe my unamused mouth.
Next I decided to turn my delicate attentions to the halwa. My spoon dove gently into the soft mass and brought up a bite. Things were beginning to look up, I decided as my tongue agreeably caressed the spoon, searching for more sugary halwa. For an airline approximation, this was good. I promptly ate half of it and, spurred by this victory, decided to attempt the suspect raita which I also found surprisingly pleasing.
It was then that I spotted the small packet of mango acchar (pickle). Acchar is a commonly used Indian table condiment that is like a spicy jellied fruit that you eat small portions of in conjunction with your main dish for flavor. There are many kinds, but spicy mango is popular and common. Normally, acchar is one of my favorite parts of the meal. However, on this occasion, I found myself twirling the sealed butter packet sized container between my hesitant fingers. My fingers passed over the pull tab that would open the lid. It felt like a . . . . commitment. It was so unarguably Indian and as I watched the oil shift from side to side through the clear plastic packing in time with the ministrations of my fingers, I balked, thought, breathed and pulled back the tab, spreading the contents over the top of my main dish.
The linguistic transition seemed simple after my commitment to the cuisine. Watching Billu Barbar (SRK Bollywood blockbuster from earlier this year) during the latter half of my flight was like splashing on the sandbar compared to the mental steps I’d made over the previous sixteen hours. My mind played with the Hindi phrases in my head, puzzling over some of the more complicated ones and storing others for later use.
And now I have arrived: after being checked diligently for swine flu by men in white breathing masks, fighting eager Indian passengers awaiting their luggage at the belt and changing my money from dollars into rupees, my transformation is complete. I’ve even changed back into Indian clothing thanks to a conveniently located bathroom near customs.
Only two more hours to go till I’m en route to Kadod. I can’t wait.
Best,
Cat
P.S. I just killed my first mosquito.
Sitting in the Mumbai airport waiting for a dawn departure to the train station en route to Kadod, I finally have time to compose my thoughts to you, dear reader . My lapse in communication these past few months is inexcusable: Over stimulated by my last month in Kadod as a teacher and subsequently overwhelmed with a whirlwind two month visit to the US during which I assumed the responsibilities for my new position with the Foundation, I can tell you that this unaccounted for time left me happy but in turns frazzled, anxious, and unable to write. Know that I have not forgotten you, nor do I intend to as I return to India.
The past 24 hours have had the makings of a most curious transition. The outward markers of my Indian existence which I shed so easily while at home amongst family and friends in the US have been slowly reassumed and the feeling of transformation was most unusual, inextricably linked to the legs of my journey back.
Like transformational waves lapping at the edges of my mind, the first washed gently over me as I sat in front of a chatty Indian girl on the first leg of my flight to Frankfurt. She spoke to her seat-mate, a fellow Philadelphian bound for a German beer festival, of her life growing up in India and what it was like in Bangalore. As I listened distractedly, I felt strangely disconnected from her experience and to soothe and immersed myself in catching up with the blockbuster hits from this past year, feet firmly planted in America.
The next wave was stronger, firmer and more unsettling. I walked through the spidery, dark halls of the Frankfurt International Airport passing an international myriad of hurried and leisurely walkers to my gate (I myself fall squarely in the former category). At the end of the hall, I spotted the sign I had spent half an hour following signs and searching for: C16. Upon turning into the gate, I was greeted by a sea of brown faces peppered here and there with a few foreigners like me. The strange familiarity of this pierced my consciousness – the strength of my recognition and the depth of my discomfort surprised me. However, like pulling on an old pair of jeans folded in the back of the closet, after squirming for a minute of so I found that my discomfort left me and I sat down on a bench to wait for boarding. The recollection of the feeling, however, that definitive shift of mind, stayed poignant.
And then I was fully drenched as yet another wave crashed over me: The airline attendant presented me with my specially ordered vegetarian meal, which on a flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai can only be Indian food. Know, dear reader, that I’ve been on an Indian food ban since I left Kadod, knowing that upon my return this would be my only fare for the next year.
At first, as I peeled back the sides of the aluminum top and revealed the tripartite dish underneath (rice, saag, and rajma arranged like a tiny reproduction of the Indian flag in my easily reheatable airline food container), I reluctantly eyed the contents. Running my eye over the rest of the tray left me feeling similarly disappointed: a small salad with limp, diseased looking lettuce, some suspicious looking raita (yogurt with vegetables mixed in) and a dessert which took my unexercised eye a minute to finally identify as a type of halwa (milky Indian dessert) with pureed pistachio.
I took up my plastic fork with trepidation and for a moment poked idly at the rice in the center of my tray. I took a bite. Not atrocious. I took another. The buttery feeling the rice left on my tongue brought back a picture of the daily blue bowl of rice, sitting on my kitchen table in Kadod. I took another, this time taking a little of the patriotic green saag. Too soon, I decided as I swallowed the spicy bite with distaste and took a bite of my neutral looking roll to soothe my unamused mouth.
Next I decided to turn my delicate attentions to the halwa. My spoon dove gently into the soft mass and brought up a bite. Things were beginning to look up, I decided as my tongue agreeably caressed the spoon, searching for more sugary halwa. For an airline approximation, this was good. I promptly ate half of it and, spurred by this victory, decided to attempt the suspect raita which I also found surprisingly pleasing.
It was then that I spotted the small packet of mango acchar (pickle). Acchar is a commonly used Indian table condiment that is like a spicy jellied fruit that you eat small portions of in conjunction with your main dish for flavor. There are many kinds, but spicy mango is popular and common. Normally, acchar is one of my favorite parts of the meal. However, on this occasion, I found myself twirling the sealed butter packet sized container between my hesitant fingers. My fingers passed over the pull tab that would open the lid. It felt like a . . . . commitment. It was so unarguably Indian and as I watched the oil shift from side to side through the clear plastic packing in time with the ministrations of my fingers, I balked, thought, breathed and pulled back the tab, spreading the contents over the top of my main dish.
The linguistic transition seemed simple after my commitment to the cuisine. Watching Billu Barbar (SRK Bollywood blockbuster from earlier this year) during the latter half of my flight was like splashing on the sandbar compared to the mental steps I’d made over the previous sixteen hours. My mind played with the Hindi phrases in my head, puzzling over some of the more complicated ones and storing others for later use.
And now I have arrived: after being checked diligently for swine flu by men in white breathing masks, fighting eager Indian passengers awaiting their luggage at the belt and changing my money from dollars into rupees, my transformation is complete. I’ve even changed back into Indian clothing thanks to a conveniently located bathroom near customs.
Only two more hours to go till I’m en route to Kadod. I can’t wait.
Best,
Cat
P.S. I just killed my first mosquito.
Friday, February 27, 2009
An Exciting Announcement
Dear dedicated reader,
It seems strange to qualify anything that I write to you, dear reader, as ‘personal’ since my account of my experiences here can only be described as personal. But I have a personal update that doesn’t have to do with anecdotes of delightfully incorrect sentence structure or classroom management or even cheating on exams.
I’ll be staying here in India for another year and even better than that: I’ll be staying here in Kadod! Our Foundation is expanding our program model to two additional schools in the surrounding area next year and over the past few months has been discussing the possibility of hiring an India Director to manage its operations in country. I’m happy to share that as of this morning, that person will be me! While the decision to trade in my chalk and duster for a mobile and mobility is my own, it does seem strange to choose a student-less existence after three years of working with students full-time.
Oddly enough, in an unpredictable twist to my own story, it seems I cannot get enough of Gujarat. That, however, will not stop me from returning to the U.S. from April 8th to June 2nd. I will be in Philadelphia, New York and Boston during that time, so if that is in your general direction, let’s connect.
Best,
Cat
It seems strange to qualify anything that I write to you, dear reader, as ‘personal’ since my account of my experiences here can only be described as personal. But I have a personal update that doesn’t have to do with anecdotes of delightfully incorrect sentence structure or classroom management or even cheating on exams.
I’ll be staying here in India for another year and even better than that: I’ll be staying here in Kadod! Our Foundation is expanding our program model to two additional schools in the surrounding area next year and over the past few months has been discussing the possibility of hiring an India Director to manage its operations in country. I’m happy to share that as of this morning, that person will be me! While the decision to trade in my chalk and duster for a mobile and mobility is my own, it does seem strange to choose a student-less existence after three years of working with students full-time.
Oddly enough, in an unpredictable twist to my own story, it seems I cannot get enough of Gujarat. That, however, will not stop me from returning to the U.S. from April 8th to June 2nd. I will be in Philadelphia, New York and Boston during that time, so if that is in your general direction, let’s connect.
Best,
Cat
Sunday, February 15, 2009
You Coming Sister Marriage?
Dear dedicated reader,
I came into my Spoken English class a week ago to find my boys huddled in a group around one bench, whispering feverishly to one another in Gujarati. I heard a snatch of “Melisha ma’am” and “Ketrin ma’am” as they spoke. What were they up to?
The huddle broke as they saw me and I saw Hitesh, my small, rambunctious and usually unprepared student from 9D hide something quickly behind his back. Oh god, I thought, I hope this tete a tete isn’t yet another attempt to scare me with a very realistic looking plastic lizard.
He walked slowly forward and a wide, toothy grin broke out in a shine across his face.
“Miss,” he said in his voice which is surprisingly scratchy for a kid, bringing his hand out from behind his back and presenting its contents to me, “you come in my sister’s marriage?”
I looked down at what he was holding out to me. It was a card upon which “Melissa ma’am and Cathrine ma’am” had been scrawled on the neat blank line designated for names and inside it was full of the Gujarati of a formal wedding invitation: our first.
“Of course,” I replied, delighted.
Apparently, Melissa and I had graduated from crashing weddings with Sejalben to being invited in our own right. Of course, this presented a new problem: were we ready to strike out on our own? I mean, an Indian wedding is not exactly the minute to minute affair of a New York wedding: there is lots of idle time between dinner and the ceremony, sometimes hours, for guests to roam and chat and somehow everyone (except for the clueless American teachers) knows how long this time is supposed to be. How would we fare without our crutches?
It turns out I needn’t have worried.
“We’re going to be late,” I whined as we readied ourselves to leave the house this afternoon for the wedding. As we threw the bolt closed on our front door, I ran my eye over Melissa’s sari and my own bangled arms, hoping we would be up to the measure of the critical Indian aunty’s eye.
We made our way as quickly as we could up the main road of Kadod and back into the neighborhood where Hitesh and his family live. I had often seen him when I was out on my bike, running around his plaid play shirt and school uniform pants. As we reached the road where I knew he lived, I realized I didn’t know where we were supposed to go. As many times as I had threatened to go to his house and tell his father about his Gujarati jokes, his missing text book, his constant lack of a pen, I had never actually done it because of his disarmingly adorable smile and so I didn’t actually know where he lived.
Confused, we stopped just outside the large temple which dominates this part of town and contemplated our next move. Kids and adults in finery were milling around, but there was no sign of any of our students. Melissa and I looked at each other. We were failing our first closed-book cultural test.
Luckily, our cheat sheet arrived.
“Miss!” Hitesh bounded out of a house up the street where a large tent had been set up for the wedding proceedings. He was dressed in a flat pressed blue collar shirt with a sewn in slogan on the back proclaiming ‘No Fear!” and a pair of tight jean pants. His hair had been slicked back and despite his diminutive size he was almost looking fourteen years old (which he is).
He stopped bounding just in front of me. “Hungry? You eat?” He asked me, smiling excitedly with eyes darting back and forth between me and Melissa. He immediately started leading us towards a large gravel yard at the end of the street where long bolts of cloth had been laid in parallel with large platters and bowls made from dried leaves placed in front. He indicated that we should sit, so after a moment of weak hesitation we did, and he plopped down right next to me.
As soon as we sat, the other mass of children who’d started to follow us out of curiosity and it turns out would follow us all night, also sat. By now, eating dinner had gained momentum and adults were following our lead and sitting to receive the portions that were being doled out by local boys (all my students, incidentally) onto the leaf plates.
“Miss,” Hitesh said, catching my attention and pointing, “this is my aunt, and that one, my uncle and that one my grandfather and there my grandmother.” It was the longest English sentence I had ever heard him speak.
“All your relatives are here?” I asked him.
“Yes, miss, and my sister, her marriage, she is in house for beauty parlor!” He said laughing at his own wit. As Mayur, one of his classmates, threw down a large spoonful of unidentified cooked and spiced vegetables onto my platter with a plop, Hitesh pointed at it.“In Gujarati, saag,” he said seriously and I nodded with a smile in appreciation for his identification, watching out of the corner of my eye as the boys who moved down the closely packed line of plates serving food kicked up dust as their shoes shuffled down the row. I then watched it settle on my food, smiled at Hitesh, and dug my fingers into the saag to take a bite.
After dinner, Hitesh took us and the cadre of seven to ten year olds who’d decided that they’re new occupation was trailing American teachers like lemmings to his uncles’ house where his sister was being readied for the wedding. He tried to shoo away the kids but they persisted in staying and staring at us with their big eyes so he merely blocked the stairwell as we made our way up the rickety steps to the second floor where his twenty year old sister Pritee was being adorned with jewels by her best friends. She tried to get up as we entered. “No no!” we insisted as we indicated she should sit. Both her arms were covered from the sleeve of her sari blouse all the way to her finger tips with deep, dark intricate mehndi.
Hitesh, who after a few minutes came running into the room after successfully stopping the onslaught of pre-teens introduced us to his sister as “my American teachers.” After a short congratulations, we left the house. As we got outside he said, “Now I am fresh, miss.”
I stopped, confused I stumbled to put our discarded sandals back on just outside the doorway of his house. “What do you mean?” I asked him.
He threw up his arm and exposed his freshly scented armpit to me. “Full Perfume!” He shouted happily.
“Oh, ah yes,” I said, as the scent of white jasmine floated towards me, “very nice.”
Undeterred by my tepid response, Hitesh charged forward into the street, motioning for us to follow. “She sister marriage nine and coming my house now groom and you see!” He smiled over his shoulder as he marched onwards.
Confused but trusting that he had everything in hand, we followed him (and the seven year olds followed us) out across the street to a house a little further down next to the gravel yard in which we had enjoyed our carefully narrated wedding banquet.
Leaving our sandals at the threshold, we ducked our heads past the low dark doorway and found ourselves in a room full of glittering saris and embroidered kurtas with relatives of the groom inside them. The groom himself lay sprawled out on the floor on a mat in the corner, relaxing but looking nervous. We gave a quick palms together ‘Namaste’ to everyone as moved through the room to the back, following the excitable Hitesh.
Inside the room, an old wrinkled woman in a purple silk sari indicated that we should sit, saying “Please seat yourself,” over and over to us in Gujarati. She came and sat next to us and took Melissa’s arm in her firm grip. One of the clan of seven year olds was sent dutifully for cold drinks.
She began to speak in a rhythmic, slow Gujarati, her tongue caressing each sound carefully. Her care, unfortunately, was lost on us as we looked at her blankly and then at Hitesh, who glancing quickly at the ceiling with a concentrated look, began to try and translate.
“You, married? She ask?” He said. We told her no.
“You… liking India?” His scratchy voice intoned again with intense concentration. This question and answer continued and each time he dutifully translated so the groom’s mother would be able to comprehend our answers.
I was ecstatic, but not because of the conversation or because of India. With every sentence of English Hitesh uttered, I became even more so. Here was a student who never, and I mean never, spoke English in the classroom if it could be avoided. Despite coming to Spoken English class everyday, he’d loll around at his bench, tell me in Gujarati that he didn’t bring a pen, and then after I gave him one wouldn’t open his notebook or follow directions and after it all would look at me sadly and say plaintively, “Miss, outside game?”
This was different, however: perhaps born out of a desire to meet the demanding rules of Indian hospitality and also his happiness at our coming to the event, Hitesh was now presented with a genuine communicative goal. And hence flowed forth the English!
I guess it was all he needed.
Best,
Cat
I came into my Spoken English class a week ago to find my boys huddled in a group around one bench, whispering feverishly to one another in Gujarati. I heard a snatch of “Melisha ma’am” and “Ketrin ma’am” as they spoke. What were they up to?
The huddle broke as they saw me and I saw Hitesh, my small, rambunctious and usually unprepared student from 9D hide something quickly behind his back. Oh god, I thought, I hope this tete a tete isn’t yet another attempt to scare me with a very realistic looking plastic lizard.
He walked slowly forward and a wide, toothy grin broke out in a shine across his face.
“Miss,” he said in his voice which is surprisingly scratchy for a kid, bringing his hand out from behind his back and presenting its contents to me, “you come in my sister’s marriage?”
I looked down at what he was holding out to me. It was a card upon which “Melissa ma’am and Cathrine ma’am” had been scrawled on the neat blank line designated for names and inside it was full of the Gujarati of a formal wedding invitation: our first.
“Of course,” I replied, delighted.
Apparently, Melissa and I had graduated from crashing weddings with Sejalben to being invited in our own right. Of course, this presented a new problem: were we ready to strike out on our own? I mean, an Indian wedding is not exactly the minute to minute affair of a New York wedding: there is lots of idle time between dinner and the ceremony, sometimes hours, for guests to roam and chat and somehow everyone (except for the clueless American teachers) knows how long this time is supposed to be. How would we fare without our crutches?
It turns out I needn’t have worried.
“We’re going to be late,” I whined as we readied ourselves to leave the house this afternoon for the wedding. As we threw the bolt closed on our front door, I ran my eye over Melissa’s sari and my own bangled arms, hoping we would be up to the measure of the critical Indian aunty’s eye.
We made our way as quickly as we could up the main road of Kadod and back into the neighborhood where Hitesh and his family live. I had often seen him when I was out on my bike, running around his plaid play shirt and school uniform pants. As we reached the road where I knew he lived, I realized I didn’t know where we were supposed to go. As many times as I had threatened to go to his house and tell his father about his Gujarati jokes, his missing text book, his constant lack of a pen, I had never actually done it because of his disarmingly adorable smile and so I didn’t actually know where he lived.
Confused, we stopped just outside the large temple which dominates this part of town and contemplated our next move. Kids and adults in finery were milling around, but there was no sign of any of our students. Melissa and I looked at each other. We were failing our first closed-book cultural test.
Luckily, our cheat sheet arrived.
“Miss!” Hitesh bounded out of a house up the street where a large tent had been set up for the wedding proceedings. He was dressed in a flat pressed blue collar shirt with a sewn in slogan on the back proclaiming ‘No Fear!” and a pair of tight jean pants. His hair had been slicked back and despite his diminutive size he was almost looking fourteen years old (which he is).
He stopped bounding just in front of me. “Hungry? You eat?” He asked me, smiling excitedly with eyes darting back and forth between me and Melissa. He immediately started leading us towards a large gravel yard at the end of the street where long bolts of cloth had been laid in parallel with large platters and bowls made from dried leaves placed in front. He indicated that we should sit, so after a moment of weak hesitation we did, and he plopped down right next to me.
As soon as we sat, the other mass of children who’d started to follow us out of curiosity and it turns out would follow us all night, also sat. By now, eating dinner had gained momentum and adults were following our lead and sitting to receive the portions that were being doled out by local boys (all my students, incidentally) onto the leaf plates.
“Miss,” Hitesh said, catching my attention and pointing, “this is my aunt, and that one, my uncle and that one my grandfather and there my grandmother.” It was the longest English sentence I had ever heard him speak.
“All your relatives are here?” I asked him.
“Yes, miss, and my sister, her marriage, she is in house for beauty parlor!” He said laughing at his own wit. As Mayur, one of his classmates, threw down a large spoonful of unidentified cooked and spiced vegetables onto my platter with a plop, Hitesh pointed at it.“In Gujarati, saag,” he said seriously and I nodded with a smile in appreciation for his identification, watching out of the corner of my eye as the boys who moved down the closely packed line of plates serving food kicked up dust as their shoes shuffled down the row. I then watched it settle on my food, smiled at Hitesh, and dug my fingers into the saag to take a bite.
After dinner, Hitesh took us and the cadre of seven to ten year olds who’d decided that they’re new occupation was trailing American teachers like lemmings to his uncles’ house where his sister was being readied for the wedding. He tried to shoo away the kids but they persisted in staying and staring at us with their big eyes so he merely blocked the stairwell as we made our way up the rickety steps to the second floor where his twenty year old sister Pritee was being adorned with jewels by her best friends. She tried to get up as we entered. “No no!” we insisted as we indicated she should sit. Both her arms were covered from the sleeve of her sari blouse all the way to her finger tips with deep, dark intricate mehndi.
Hitesh, who after a few minutes came running into the room after successfully stopping the onslaught of pre-teens introduced us to his sister as “my American teachers.” After a short congratulations, we left the house. As we got outside he said, “Now I am fresh, miss.”
I stopped, confused I stumbled to put our discarded sandals back on just outside the doorway of his house. “What do you mean?” I asked him.
He threw up his arm and exposed his freshly scented armpit to me. “Full Perfume!” He shouted happily.
“Oh, ah yes,” I said, as the scent of white jasmine floated towards me, “very nice.”
Undeterred by my tepid response, Hitesh charged forward into the street, motioning for us to follow. “She sister marriage nine and coming my house now groom and you see!” He smiled over his shoulder as he marched onwards.
Confused but trusting that he had everything in hand, we followed him (and the seven year olds followed us) out across the street to a house a little further down next to the gravel yard in which we had enjoyed our carefully narrated wedding banquet.
Leaving our sandals at the threshold, we ducked our heads past the low dark doorway and found ourselves in a room full of glittering saris and embroidered kurtas with relatives of the groom inside them. The groom himself lay sprawled out on the floor on a mat in the corner, relaxing but looking nervous. We gave a quick palms together ‘Namaste’ to everyone as moved through the room to the back, following the excitable Hitesh.
Inside the room, an old wrinkled woman in a purple silk sari indicated that we should sit, saying “Please seat yourself,” over and over to us in Gujarati. She came and sat next to us and took Melissa’s arm in her firm grip. One of the clan of seven year olds was sent dutifully for cold drinks.
She began to speak in a rhythmic, slow Gujarati, her tongue caressing each sound carefully. Her care, unfortunately, was lost on us as we looked at her blankly and then at Hitesh, who glancing quickly at the ceiling with a concentrated look, began to try and translate.
“You, married? She ask?” He said. We told her no.
“You… liking India?” His scratchy voice intoned again with intense concentration. This question and answer continued and each time he dutifully translated so the groom’s mother would be able to comprehend our answers.
I was ecstatic, but not because of the conversation or because of India. With every sentence of English Hitesh uttered, I became even more so. Here was a student who never, and I mean never, spoke English in the classroom if it could be avoided. Despite coming to Spoken English class everyday, he’d loll around at his bench, tell me in Gujarati that he didn’t bring a pen, and then after I gave him one wouldn’t open his notebook or follow directions and after it all would look at me sadly and say plaintively, “Miss, outside game?”
This was different, however: perhaps born out of a desire to meet the demanding rules of Indian hospitality and also his happiness at our coming to the event, Hitesh was now presented with a genuine communicative goal. And hence flowed forth the English!
I guess it was all he needed.
Best,
Cat
Friday, January 30, 2009
An Overdue Haircut
Dear dedicated reader,
When I first met Mr. Tailor’s androgynous offspring, Krishna, I was stymied.
“Your… child is so cute,” I said, calling out the reserve word I formerly used when making cold calls to parents in the Boston Public School system when I couldn’t determine the sex of their child.
“Oh Thank You!” Kamleshbhai (Mr. Tailor’s true name, or so we’ve discovered) exclaimed with his usual exuberance. No follow up, no pronoun use. I couldn’t ask any questions about the small cute kid now running haplessly around the shop without giving away that I didn’t know his sex and since Krishna is both a girl’s and a boy’s name here, I wasn’t getting any help from that quarter either. So, I simply smiled and nodded emphatically.
Krishna, for his (or was it her?) part, burst into tears on sight of me. I seem to have that effect on small kids around here.
Since that encounter in Mr. Tailor’s crowded and colorful workshop, Melissa and I uncovered the answer to this elusive question through a recent invitation: I had stopped by Mr. Tailor’s shop as I sometimes do to sit in the back near the foot powered sewing machines whose whirring needles punch the fabric in a rhythmic way while Mr. Tailor looks on, now and then stopping to cut a piece of material.
We had been discussing the coming of Narendra Modi and the business acumen of the Gujarati people when he abruptly veered away from these topics.
“You…will…” he began in a sort of stop and start English, struggling to force the language to express his thoughts. I peered at him curiously until he switched into Hindi and the words began to flow. “You will come to our house on Thursday for the babri?”
“Babri – matlab (meaning)?” I asked him, not understanding.
“Er,” he paused, thinking of the best way to say it, “the haircut of my son,” (ah ha!) “he is cutting his hair for the first time.”
“Isn’t he like, two years old?” I said, confused.
“Yes, it is our tradition, no haircut until he is so old and then we will shave his head.” Suddenly, I remembered: I had seen photos of the ceremony at people’s houses and read about it in my religion class in college, but this would be the first time that I would see it for myself.
When we arrived on the appointed day, an awning had been set up over the street, blocking any traffic making the mistake of trying to get through on this special day. Chairs had been set up in rows outside for no one in particular’s use. All the men were simply standing around outside talking to each other while the women sat sequestered on the floor in the small main room of the house. Kamleshbhai smiled widely as he saw us walking up the street: when we arrived under the awning, after some warm ‘namastes’, he motioned for us to go inside with the rest of the women and take our seats. The room was packed wall to wall with women ranging from the beautifully wrinkled faces of old women with crooked teeth and wireless spectacles to young black-haired women bedecked in sparkling bangles and colorful, jeweled saris.
There was one open space on the floor which, after a moment of hesitation, we decided was the perfect size for two American teachers. When Kamleshbhai saw that we had elected to sit on the floor, he motioned to an empty bench in the corner where we could sit comfortably, but since none of the other women were sitting in such a manner, we protested and said that we would be fine on the floor. What we did not realize was that his generosity was not for our benefit but rather for his, since the open space in which we had elected to sit was right in front of the shrine to Ganesha where the family would need to sit for the ceremony. By the time we realized our mistake, it was too late: the arm of Indian hospitality had swung into action and rugs were being pulled from the other room and placed in front of us to give the parents and Krishna somewhere to sit as they performed the necessary pooja. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, but by the time I protested and said we would be happy to move it was far too late. I mentally added it to the ever-growing list of faux-pas by the American teachers.
Kamleshbhai and his wife sat on either side of small Krishna, whose hair had been loosed from the pony tail holder that usually keeps it out of his face in a tight sprout from the top of his head. When the priest began to chant, Kamleshbhai smiled down at his tiny son and put his hands together in a gesture of prayer; Krishna followed suit, straightening his tiny fingers into a gesture of piety, looking up at his father for approval.
The ceremony itself was merely a prelude to the big show which followed: once the rice had been powdered and thrown at the shrine of Ganesh-ji and two one rupee coins had been pasted to the wall using ghee, Kamleshbhai’s sister, as per tradition, grabbed a lock of Krishna’s hair and used a large blessed pair of shears to cut off a huge hunk of Krishna’s hair. Looking at the hair in her hands, Krishna began to loudly cry and was taken outside where the rest of his hair was shorn short so that it would be easier to shave.
The guests followed and I watched as both of Krishna’s parents had to physically restrain him as the barber brandished his sharp razor over Krishna’s screaming head. I gasped and bit my lip with nervousness each time the razor was brought towards his head:
Krishna was wildly bucking and kicking in his parents arms, screaming a frenzied plea to all the delighted adults assembled to watch. Despite his parents cooing, and promises of forthcoming chocolate, he raged on; meanwhile, I found myself impressed by the skillfulness of the barber who always seemed to move the razor away from his rearing scalp at just the right moment, averting potentially bloody accidents left and right. The poor kid had cut hair covering every part of his exposed face, his neck, his arms. I would have bucked and screamed too, in that situation.
Just after the barber ran the razor artfully down the last curve of Krishna’s scalp, leaving him completely bald, Krishna was whisked away in the arms of his aunt inside to have the stray hair washed from his face and to have his clothes changed. When he emerged again, this time clad in a golden colored kurta pyjama, he was still bawling in her arms, refusing the comfort of all his well meaning relatives. When a sympathetic aunt handed him a Cadbury chocolate bar, he screamed even louder and threw the chocolate bar with all his might back at her face, narrowly missing her nose.
Perhaps as a way to distract from the ill-mannered reception of the his first haircut, Kamleshbhai drew our attention away from Krishna and his adoring relatives with an invitation of lunch. Two runners had been laid down on the street under the awning upon which, as with many feasts we have been to here, we were to sit. The rocky, gravelly street did not make for the most comfortable vantage point for eating lunch; however, I did not want to offend Kamleshbhai, so I maneuvered my legs around in my sari so that I could sit and eat the thali-style meal which was being served to us by jean-clad teenage boys (a theme for feasts here).
Just as everyone had gotten settled in neat rows of hands digging into food and mouths chewing thoughtfully at their Gujarati delicacies, an unexpected visitor arrived to partake in the proceedings. I looked up from my plate, hand poised in front of my mouth to deliver a tasty portion of papad when I saw a large cow with overgrown horns sauntering right into the middle of the tent.
For a moment, everyone just stared at it and for the briefest of seconds I thought it was going to be allowed to walk as it pleased through the tent. It stopped, looked, and then swung its head dangerously towards the left and stuck out its large, hammy tongue dripping with oozing saliva to indulge in some sabzi from the platter of a woman sitting across from me. She leapt up with a scream of fright and Melissa and I started back as well, thinking the scream would force it to head in our direction. Immediately, the men descended upon it, thwacking it and making clicking noises until it was run out from under the tented awning and made to promenade itself back up the street.
As we savored our meal, Krishna, tears freshly dried and smiling now as if all was indeed forgiven (I have my suspicions about the role the chocolate may have played in this decision), made is way in the company of his cousins down the row of guests, smiling and gurgling attentively as the perfect host. His newly bald head shone in the noon sunlight and as he passed me, he even put out a little hand.
As strange as the whole thing seemed at the time, on reflection, how natural is it to dress up male babies in white dresses and sprinkle water on them? I’m just saying, is all.
Best,
Cat
When I first met Mr. Tailor’s androgynous offspring, Krishna, I was stymied.
“Your… child is so cute,” I said, calling out the reserve word I formerly used when making cold calls to parents in the Boston Public School system when I couldn’t determine the sex of their child.
“Oh Thank You!” Kamleshbhai (Mr. Tailor’s true name, or so we’ve discovered) exclaimed with his usual exuberance. No follow up, no pronoun use. I couldn’t ask any questions about the small cute kid now running haplessly around the shop without giving away that I didn’t know his sex and since Krishna is both a girl’s and a boy’s name here, I wasn’t getting any help from that quarter either. So, I simply smiled and nodded emphatically.
Krishna, for his (or was it her?) part, burst into tears on sight of me. I seem to have that effect on small kids around here.
Since that encounter in Mr. Tailor’s crowded and colorful workshop, Melissa and I uncovered the answer to this elusive question through a recent invitation: I had stopped by Mr. Tailor’s shop as I sometimes do to sit in the back near the foot powered sewing machines whose whirring needles punch the fabric in a rhythmic way while Mr. Tailor looks on, now and then stopping to cut a piece of material.
We had been discussing the coming of Narendra Modi and the business acumen of the Gujarati people when he abruptly veered away from these topics.
“You…will…” he began in a sort of stop and start English, struggling to force the language to express his thoughts. I peered at him curiously until he switched into Hindi and the words began to flow. “You will come to our house on Thursday for the babri?”
“Babri – matlab (meaning)?” I asked him, not understanding.
“Er,” he paused, thinking of the best way to say it, “the haircut of my son,” (ah ha!) “he is cutting his hair for the first time.”
“Isn’t he like, two years old?” I said, confused.
“Yes, it is our tradition, no haircut until he is so old and then we will shave his head.” Suddenly, I remembered: I had seen photos of the ceremony at people’s houses and read about it in my religion class in college, but this would be the first time that I would see it for myself.
When we arrived on the appointed day, an awning had been set up over the street, blocking any traffic making the mistake of trying to get through on this special day. Chairs had been set up in rows outside for no one in particular’s use. All the men were simply standing around outside talking to each other while the women sat sequestered on the floor in the small main room of the house. Kamleshbhai smiled widely as he saw us walking up the street: when we arrived under the awning, after some warm ‘namastes’, he motioned for us to go inside with the rest of the women and take our seats. The room was packed wall to wall with women ranging from the beautifully wrinkled faces of old women with crooked teeth and wireless spectacles to young black-haired women bedecked in sparkling bangles and colorful, jeweled saris.
There was one open space on the floor which, after a moment of hesitation, we decided was the perfect size for two American teachers. When Kamleshbhai saw that we had elected to sit on the floor, he motioned to an empty bench in the corner where we could sit comfortably, but since none of the other women were sitting in such a manner, we protested and said that we would be fine on the floor. What we did not realize was that his generosity was not for our benefit but rather for his, since the open space in which we had elected to sit was right in front of the shrine to Ganesha where the family would need to sit for the ceremony. By the time we realized our mistake, it was too late: the arm of Indian hospitality had swung into action and rugs were being pulled from the other room and placed in front of us to give the parents and Krishna somewhere to sit as they performed the necessary pooja. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, but by the time I protested and said we would be happy to move it was far too late. I mentally added it to the ever-growing list of faux-pas by the American teachers.
Kamleshbhai and his wife sat on either side of small Krishna, whose hair had been loosed from the pony tail holder that usually keeps it out of his face in a tight sprout from the top of his head. When the priest began to chant, Kamleshbhai smiled down at his tiny son and put his hands together in a gesture of prayer; Krishna followed suit, straightening his tiny fingers into a gesture of piety, looking up at his father for approval.
The ceremony itself was merely a prelude to the big show which followed: once the rice had been powdered and thrown at the shrine of Ganesh-ji and two one rupee coins had been pasted to the wall using ghee, Kamleshbhai’s sister, as per tradition, grabbed a lock of Krishna’s hair and used a large blessed pair of shears to cut off a huge hunk of Krishna’s hair. Looking at the hair in her hands, Krishna began to loudly cry and was taken outside where the rest of his hair was shorn short so that it would be easier to shave.
The guests followed and I watched as both of Krishna’s parents had to physically restrain him as the barber brandished his sharp razor over Krishna’s screaming head. I gasped and bit my lip with nervousness each time the razor was brought towards his head:
Krishna was wildly bucking and kicking in his parents arms, screaming a frenzied plea to all the delighted adults assembled to watch. Despite his parents cooing, and promises of forthcoming chocolate, he raged on; meanwhile, I found myself impressed by the skillfulness of the barber who always seemed to move the razor away from his rearing scalp at just the right moment, averting potentially bloody accidents left and right. The poor kid had cut hair covering every part of his exposed face, his neck, his arms. I would have bucked and screamed too, in that situation. Just after the barber ran the razor artfully down the last curve of Krishna’s scalp, leaving him completely bald, Krishna was whisked away in the arms of his aunt inside to have the stray hair washed from his face and to have his clothes changed. When he emerged again, this time clad in a golden colored kurta pyjama, he was still bawling in her arms, refusing the comfort of all his well meaning relatives. When a sympathetic aunt handed him a Cadbury chocolate bar, he screamed even louder and threw the chocolate bar with all his might back at her face, narrowly missing her nose.
Perhaps as a way to distract from the ill-mannered reception of the his first haircut, Kamleshbhai drew our attention away from Krishna and his adoring relatives with an invitation of lunch. Two runners had been laid down on the street under the awning upon which, as with many feasts we have been to here, we were to sit. The rocky, gravelly street did not make for the most comfortable vantage point for eating lunch; however, I did not want to offend Kamleshbhai, so I maneuvered my legs around in my sari so that I could sit and eat the thali-style meal which was being served to us by jean-clad teenage boys (a theme for feasts here).
Just as everyone had gotten settled in neat rows of hands digging into food and mouths chewing thoughtfully at their Gujarati delicacies, an unexpected visitor arrived to partake in the proceedings. I looked up from my plate, hand poised in front of my mouth to deliver a tasty portion of papad when I saw a large cow with overgrown horns sauntering right into the middle of the tent.
For a moment, everyone just stared at it and for the briefest of seconds I thought it was going to be allowed to walk as it pleased through the tent. It stopped, looked, and then swung its head dangerously towards the left and stuck out its large, hammy tongue dripping with oozing saliva to indulge in some sabzi from the platter of a woman sitting across from me. She leapt up with a scream of fright and Melissa and I started back as well, thinking the scream would force it to head in our direction. Immediately, the men descended upon it, thwacking it and making clicking noises until it was run out from under the tented awning and made to promenade itself back up the street.
As we savored our meal, Krishna, tears freshly dried and smiling now as if all was indeed forgiven (I have my suspicions about the role the chocolate may have played in this decision), made is way in the company of his cousins down the row of guests, smiling and gurgling attentively as the perfect host. His newly bald head shone in the noon sunlight and as he passed me, he even put out a little hand.
As strange as the whole thing seemed at the time, on reflection, how natural is it to dress up male babies in white dresses and sprinkle water on them? I’m just saying, is all.
Best,
Cat
Thursday, January 29, 2009
The Oral Test
Dear dedicated reader,
I sat in the wooden chair that is present in each and every classroom behind the small wooden desk where I usually rest my teaching materials for the brief half hour that I have to make an impression on each class during a normal teaching day. Teaching while seated is acceptable here, but I just can’t do it: I always teach standing, moving frequently in between the benches if I can and trying to keep the students engaged by having to track me with their eyes.
However, today, from my new vantage point in this chair, I looked up into the eyes of 9th standard girl who was so nervous I could see the sweat beading on her forehead (though this could easily be attributable to the 80 degree average that Kadod seems to run regardless of the season). Pushing a piece of stray hair behind her ear and then quickly returning her hand to crossed arms tightly hugging the front of her body, her eyes nervously flitted to mine and then to the back of the classroom and then out the classroom door. She chewed on her lip, then stamped her foot, impatient with herself. Finally she shook her head. “No, miss,” she said, defeated.
I looked at her reassuringly. “It’s okay,” I said. “Can you recite an essay for me? On any topic?”
The girl launched in on an essay entitled “My Favorite Game”: “There are many types of games,” she began, “but they are mostly indoor games like playcards, karam, or chess. Outdoor games include football, volleyball and cricket. Cricket is a sport played with 11 players to a team, it –“
“That’s fine, thank you, you may sit,” I told her. What I had just heard was a regurgitated version of an essay I had taught (ie. been forced to write on the board while the students copied into their notebooks) several months back. Before that, I had asked this girl, roll number 39, to recite one of the poems from the book for me. Next to her roll number I noted a terse “poor” under the poem heading and “good” underneath the essay heading, just as Tabussum had showed me to do earlier.
“Roll number 40?” I called out, looking up across the classroom which was a buzzing sea of moving lips and hands in ears as each girl stared down intently at her textbook to try and do last minute practice before their fateful number was called.
My tendency towards melodrama is getting away from me. The results of this oral exam in actuality is not that ‘fateful’, thanks the seedy underbelly of the Kadod High School exam scheme. The way the system works is thus: The students take their second trimester exams, the teachers give them marks out of 40. After this, the students are required to take an “oral exam” to determine their competency in spoken English. What this really means is that they are required to recite a poem of their choice from the textbook and memorize an essay on a topic of their choice, also to be recited.
Wanting to actually play the part of a real teacher, I asked Tabussum to let me administer the oral exams in my classes and she obligingly taught me how to do it. She told me to take down their scores as “poor”, “average”, “good” or “very good” and informed that later she would ‘translate’ this into marks.
When I pushed her to let me just assign them marks, she blushed and explained what this ‘translation’ actually entailed. She would look at the rating that I gave the girls and assign a mark based out of ten to the rating I had given them, except in the case of the girls who had failed in the exam. In their case, she would simply give them the requisite number of marks to pass.
“You see,” she said, “They need seventeen marks to pass. So that girl who has taken ten marks, I will give her seven marks,” she said with an embarrassed smile.
On seeing my look of horror, she blushed even further. “I know it’s not right,” she said. “But if the girls fail, it’s a difficult for us, later.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, still shocked.
“There is so much paperwork,” she explained, “if the students fail. It’s not good, I know, but teachers do like this.” She shrugged.
After a tense moment during which I could see her awaiting my reaction, I raised my eyebrows and gave her one of my what-will-be-will-be smiles. It was no use arguing: even if I think it’s wrong, what do I know about these things? The whole exam system is so beyond my comprehension that what use is it to fight even this one cog in the system? She and I had already disagreed when I’d tried to get her to agree to let me give them a real oral exam.
“Why don’t we just ask them questions? Like the kind they’d encounter in a real conversation or that I ask them in class?” She’d shaken her head and argued that Sejalben had already told them how we’d testing them on the exam: strict memorization and recitation only.
So, as I sat in my chair and looked up at roll number 40 (otherwise known as Priyanka) in her nicely pressed blue jumper, knitting her fingers together while she looked into the distance and recited “The Rain, The Beautiful Rain” I hoped that perhaps one day someone asked her a question to which she could reply:
“Thunder crashing / rain slashing / brings the rain, the welcome rain!”
Best,
Cat
I sat in the wooden chair that is present in each and every classroom behind the small wooden desk where I usually rest my teaching materials for the brief half hour that I have to make an impression on each class during a normal teaching day. Teaching while seated is acceptable here, but I just can’t do it: I always teach standing, moving frequently in between the benches if I can and trying to keep the students engaged by having to track me with their eyes.
However, today, from my new vantage point in this chair, I looked up into the eyes of 9th standard girl who was so nervous I could see the sweat beading on her forehead (though this could easily be attributable to the 80 degree average that Kadod seems to run regardless of the season). Pushing a piece of stray hair behind her ear and then quickly returning her hand to crossed arms tightly hugging the front of her body, her eyes nervously flitted to mine and then to the back of the classroom and then out the classroom door. She chewed on her lip, then stamped her foot, impatient with herself. Finally she shook her head. “No, miss,” she said, defeated.
I looked at her reassuringly. “It’s okay,” I said. “Can you recite an essay for me? On any topic?”
The girl launched in on an essay entitled “My Favorite Game”: “There are many types of games,” she began, “but they are mostly indoor games like playcards, karam, or chess. Outdoor games include football, volleyball and cricket. Cricket is a sport played with 11 players to a team, it –“
“That’s fine, thank you, you may sit,” I told her. What I had just heard was a regurgitated version of an essay I had taught (ie. been forced to write on the board while the students copied into their notebooks) several months back. Before that, I had asked this girl, roll number 39, to recite one of the poems from the book for me. Next to her roll number I noted a terse “poor” under the poem heading and “good” underneath the essay heading, just as Tabussum had showed me to do earlier.
“Roll number 40?” I called out, looking up across the classroom which was a buzzing sea of moving lips and hands in ears as each girl stared down intently at her textbook to try and do last minute practice before their fateful number was called.
My tendency towards melodrama is getting away from me. The results of this oral exam in actuality is not that ‘fateful’, thanks the seedy underbelly of the Kadod High School exam scheme. The way the system works is thus: The students take their second trimester exams, the teachers give them marks out of 40. After this, the students are required to take an “oral exam” to determine their competency in spoken English. What this really means is that they are required to recite a poem of their choice from the textbook and memorize an essay on a topic of their choice, also to be recited.
Wanting to actually play the part of a real teacher, I asked Tabussum to let me administer the oral exams in my classes and she obligingly taught me how to do it. She told me to take down their scores as “poor”, “average”, “good” or “very good” and informed that later she would ‘translate’ this into marks.
When I pushed her to let me just assign them marks, she blushed and explained what this ‘translation’ actually entailed. She would look at the rating that I gave the girls and assign a mark based out of ten to the rating I had given them, except in the case of the girls who had failed in the exam. In their case, she would simply give them the requisite number of marks to pass.
“You see,” she said, “They need seventeen marks to pass. So that girl who has taken ten marks, I will give her seven marks,” she said with an embarrassed smile.
On seeing my look of horror, she blushed even further. “I know it’s not right,” she said. “But if the girls fail, it’s a difficult for us, later.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, still shocked.
“There is so much paperwork,” she explained, “if the students fail. It’s not good, I know, but teachers do like this.” She shrugged.
After a tense moment during which I could see her awaiting my reaction, I raised my eyebrows and gave her one of my what-will-be-will-be smiles. It was no use arguing: even if I think it’s wrong, what do I know about these things? The whole exam system is so beyond my comprehension that what use is it to fight even this one cog in the system? She and I had already disagreed when I’d tried to get her to agree to let me give them a real oral exam.
“Why don’t we just ask them questions? Like the kind they’d encounter in a real conversation or that I ask them in class?” She’d shaken her head and argued that Sejalben had already told them how we’d testing them on the exam: strict memorization and recitation only.
So, as I sat in my chair and looked up at roll number 40 (otherwise known as Priyanka) in her nicely pressed blue jumper, knitting her fingers together while she looked into the distance and recited “The Rain, The Beautiful Rain” I hoped that perhaps one day someone asked her a question to which she could reply:
“Thunder crashing / rain slashing / brings the rain, the welcome rain!”
Best,
Cat
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Obamarama
Dear dedicated reader,
The Obama-fever has reached all the way to our village where everyone wants to stop me and congratulate me on the ascension of our new president. “Obama, yeah, he is good man,” Sagar, one particularly outspoken student in my Spoken English class, commented yesterday while making the Gujarati sign of approval, interrupting an activity that had nothing to do with the current president or his personal merits.
“Uh, thanks for that contribution, Sagar,” I said dryly while trying to get the class back on track. His strangely timed comment merely reflects the prevailing mood around here: Obama is featured daily on the front of both English and Gujarati newspapers and while I’m sure the level of coverage is nowhere near the frenzy that it must be at home, the hunger for knowledge about this man has led the students and our friends in Kadod to stop and grill us for information. One student even stole my biography of Michelle Obama off my desk when I wasn’t looking so he could take it home and show the pictures to his family.
As I walked into my 11th standard class on the day after the inauguration which Melissa and I watched from the comfort of the principal’s office (which in one corner conveniently houses a big screen TV under a crocheted dust-cover), I could hear the murmurs of the seemingly hallowed name under the breath of the students. The class clown, Bhavin, suddenly shouted, “Teacher! OBAMA!”
I smiled at him. “Yes,” I said after I reached the front of the class and the students had finished their ritual “Good morning teacher” and sat down, “it is the beginning of a new age in America, I guess.”
Earlier in the month, we had spent some class time diverging away from the fascinating topics the curriculum has to offer, such as excerpts from a 12th century poem and a nonsensical story about a boy with a stammer who enters a debate competition, in order to read an op-ed from The Indian Express comparing America and India’s human rights legacy and history of minorities in political offices. India came out very favorably in the comparison and so I thought it would be nice amidst all the hype for the students to read something to make them proud of their own country. Along the way, I had to explain the history of slavery in the US, the Jim Crow laws and the current racial dynamics of the US in English, none of which I’m sure was faithfully translated into student understanding, but the students did have some thoughtfully worded opinions to express about the subject after we finished the reading and so all in all it seemed like a worthy exercise.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons that the students seemed particularly excited to discuss the inauguration speech. “Did you watch?” I asked them, incredulously
“Yes, ma’am,” a good portion of the room replied. I was surprised. So many of these young men and women cared about the swearing in of this president on the other side of the world?
“And you understood it?” I continued, trying not to sound dubious.
“Not all, ma’am. Ma’am, please explain?” They looked at me pleadingly.
And so I found myself scrapping my lesson and being charged with the daunting task of making accessible to these students the eloquent words of our new president. The students, prone to chatting and side conversation, sat very silently with an intense kind of gaze as I tried to remember his speech and make it understandable to them point by point. I left out some things which had little do with Kadod, but overall, they seemed to catch the meaning.
The maturity with which the 11th standard students approached gaining knowledge could not be expected from my ninth standard boys, who, aside from stealing my books when I am not looking and passing them around excitedly to look at pictures of Sasha and Malia, have become obsessed with the similarity between “Obama” and “Osama”.
“Obama! Osama! Teacher!” They shouted at me as they hung around after school waiting for our Spoken English class to begin.
“Teacher,” one student with a relatively high level of Spoken English said, “Obama is a killed Osama.”
“Uh, what?” I said, puzzled.
“Obama Osama is killed,” he tried again. Try saying that five times fast.
Hitting him on the arm, his friend called him an idiot in Gujarati and tried again on his behalf. “Teacher, Osama say he kill to Obama.”
“Osama wants to kill Obama,” I repeated, becoming ever more confused. “Or Obama wants to kill Osama?”
“Ah, yes teacher,” they nodded, “like this.”
“Well,” I replied with a shrug, “I guess that makes sense.”
The obsession has escalated to the point where it is present even in our Spoken English dialogues. Our unit this week is focusing on formal/informal speech and polite ways of saying things versus impolite ways. I asked the boys to create a dialogue in which a famous person is invited to their house and they serve them tea and breakfast.
After much huddled whispering and a refusal to show me their Spoken English notebooks before performing, I and the rest of the Spoken English class were subjected to the following:
Student 1: (pretends to knock on door)
Student 2: Ah, come in, is it you, Osama?
Student 1: (enters, wearing two handkerchiefs tied around his face and head so only his eyes are visible) Oh yes, it is me, Obama.
Student 2: Please sit down. May I offer you some chai or chocolates?
Student 1: No, please. No chai.
Student 2: You are come to visit me. Is dangerous. You bring a pistol?
Student 1: No pistol I bring. This time.
Student 2: You wanted man.
Student 1: Yes, I am a wanted man. Okay, I go now.
Student 2: Okay, goodbye Osama.
Student 1: Goodbye, Obama!
Fin.
Let’s hope such a Dr. Seuss-esque meeting never occurs.
Best,
Cat
The Obama-fever has reached all the way to our village where everyone wants to stop me and congratulate me on the ascension of our new president. “Obama, yeah, he is good man,” Sagar, one particularly outspoken student in my Spoken English class, commented yesterday while making the Gujarati sign of approval, interrupting an activity that had nothing to do with the current president or his personal merits.
“Uh, thanks for that contribution, Sagar,” I said dryly while trying to get the class back on track. His strangely timed comment merely reflects the prevailing mood around here: Obama is featured daily on the front of both English and Gujarati newspapers and while I’m sure the level of coverage is nowhere near the frenzy that it must be at home, the hunger for knowledge about this man has led the students and our friends in Kadod to stop and grill us for information. One student even stole my biography of Michelle Obama off my desk when I wasn’t looking so he could take it home and show the pictures to his family.
As I walked into my 11th standard class on the day after the inauguration which Melissa and I watched from the comfort of the principal’s office (which in one corner conveniently houses a big screen TV under a crocheted dust-cover), I could hear the murmurs of the seemingly hallowed name under the breath of the students. The class clown, Bhavin, suddenly shouted, “Teacher! OBAMA!”
I smiled at him. “Yes,” I said after I reached the front of the class and the students had finished their ritual “Good morning teacher” and sat down, “it is the beginning of a new age in America, I guess.”
Earlier in the month, we had spent some class time diverging away from the fascinating topics the curriculum has to offer, such as excerpts from a 12th century poem and a nonsensical story about a boy with a stammer who enters a debate competition, in order to read an op-ed from The Indian Express comparing America and India’s human rights legacy and history of minorities in political offices. India came out very favorably in the comparison and so I thought it would be nice amidst all the hype for the students to read something to make them proud of their own country. Along the way, I had to explain the history of slavery in the US, the Jim Crow laws and the current racial dynamics of the US in English, none of which I’m sure was faithfully translated into student understanding, but the students did have some thoughtfully worded opinions to express about the subject after we finished the reading and so all in all it seemed like a worthy exercise.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons that the students seemed particularly excited to discuss the inauguration speech. “Did you watch?” I asked them, incredulously
“Yes, ma’am,” a good portion of the room replied. I was surprised. So many of these young men and women cared about the swearing in of this president on the other side of the world?
“And you understood it?” I continued, trying not to sound dubious.
“Not all, ma’am. Ma’am, please explain?” They looked at me pleadingly.
And so I found myself scrapping my lesson and being charged with the daunting task of making accessible to these students the eloquent words of our new president. The students, prone to chatting and side conversation, sat very silently with an intense kind of gaze as I tried to remember his speech and make it understandable to them point by point. I left out some things which had little do with Kadod, but overall, they seemed to catch the meaning.
The maturity with which the 11th standard students approached gaining knowledge could not be expected from my ninth standard boys, who, aside from stealing my books when I am not looking and passing them around excitedly to look at pictures of Sasha and Malia, have become obsessed with the similarity between “Obama” and “Osama”.
“Obama! Osama! Teacher!” They shouted at me as they hung around after school waiting for our Spoken English class to begin.
“Teacher,” one student with a relatively high level of Spoken English said, “Obama is a killed Osama.”
“Uh, what?” I said, puzzled.
“Obama Osama is killed,” he tried again. Try saying that five times fast.
Hitting him on the arm, his friend called him an idiot in Gujarati and tried again on his behalf. “Teacher, Osama say he kill to Obama.”
“Osama wants to kill Obama,” I repeated, becoming ever more confused. “Or Obama wants to kill Osama?”
“Ah, yes teacher,” they nodded, “like this.”
“Well,” I replied with a shrug, “I guess that makes sense.”
The obsession has escalated to the point where it is present even in our Spoken English dialogues. Our unit this week is focusing on formal/informal speech and polite ways of saying things versus impolite ways. I asked the boys to create a dialogue in which a famous person is invited to their house and they serve them tea and breakfast.
After much huddled whispering and a refusal to show me their Spoken English notebooks before performing, I and the rest of the Spoken English class were subjected to the following:
Student 1: (pretends to knock on door)
Student 2: Ah, come in, is it you, Osama?
Student 1: (enters, wearing two handkerchiefs tied around his face and head so only his eyes are visible) Oh yes, it is me, Obama.
Student 2: Please sit down. May I offer you some chai or chocolates?
Student 1: No, please. No chai.
Student 2: You are come to visit me. Is dangerous. You bring a pistol?
Student 1: No pistol I bring. This time.
Student 2: You wanted man.
Student 1: Yes, I am a wanted man. Okay, I go now.
Student 2: Okay, goodbye Osama.
Student 1: Goodbye, Obama!
Fin.
Let’s hope such a Dr. Seuss-esque meeting never occurs.
Best,
Cat
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