Air India, please change your name so you don't represent this country. I don't care for your surly, middle-aged stewardesses or your inefficient touch-screen TV. Your bathrooms made me sick to my stomach -- a vicious cycle, I might add -- and every connection was delayed and announced only through mumbling. Not to mention, your scrawny check-in guy hit on me.
I wish I could say that the body odor made me nostalgic, or the pee-drizzled bathrooms reminded me to be tolerant. Maybe the greater purpose of a turbulent, gritty flight was to end any sugar-coated ideas I had of my journey. Whatever the message, flying for twenty hours on Air India was an experience I could've skipped. I even stepped on my glasses, broke them in half, and almost skipped immigration as a result of my blindness. And I lost my copy of "The Last Song", but I don't regret that.
While "Incredible India" posters start to peel off of your walls, and the Hindi announcements drag on at least two times longer than the English, I have to remind myself of the impeccable hospitality that pervades Indian homes, stories and people -- the glasses of coke as you gaze at sari silks, the overfeeding of sweets glistening with ghee.
Dhanyavad.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Monday, August 9, 2010
Desh-tination
In fifteen hours I will be in India. In five days I'll be at Indicorps orientation. In one month I'll lay my backpack down at my new home in Chandigarh, India for an entire year.
All of this and how am I feeling? Largely normal with a dash of nerves and a handful of achy sadness after leaving my family in Tampa. Not bad with my history of freak-out-stomach and spiraling thoughts.
I know it will catch up -- probably the first night that I sleep alone, surrounded by strangers, in a city that I can only picture on Google maps. For now I'll take the calm.
Mental gymnastics is what my grandpa calls my wanderlust. Studying in Italy, yoga training in New York, assignments in Brazil, internships in Pennsylvania and DC. And now 355 days in India.
But my mind has never felt clearer. First, because India is not a new, romantic land of opportunity, a city to push my resume, or a class to workshop my writing. My friend Nithya and I stayed up last week talking about our connection to India -- a weird, deep, ancestral fulfillment. A comfort in a sea of faces like mine. Tasting and smelling and touching without personal space or metaphorical gloves.
And second, because of my task at hand. That daunting title of "slum development" seems removed, impenetrable and hopeless from an air-conditioned room in Florida. But last summer dealt me just a sliver of the love and hope that moves and evolves in the harshest of homes, and I can't give up on that feeling.
Months of answering questions about India, thinking about India, talking about India, getting yelled at by my sister for going to India -- the day has come. And I am unsure, and I am a little scared, and I am excited, but my expectations have bowed humbly to the knowledge that this year has no blueprint.
Hopefully you will join me in my adventures, and hopefully I will tell them with as much truth and heart as I can. And at last, hopefully they will prove my decision fruitful.
Love.
All of this and how am I feeling? Largely normal with a dash of nerves and a handful of achy sadness after leaving my family in Tampa. Not bad with my history of freak-out-stomach and spiraling thoughts.
I know it will catch up -- probably the first night that I sleep alone, surrounded by strangers, in a city that I can only picture on Google maps. For now I'll take the calm.
Mental gymnastics is what my grandpa calls my wanderlust. Studying in Italy, yoga training in New York, assignments in Brazil, internships in Pennsylvania and DC. And now 355 days in India.
But my mind has never felt clearer. First, because India is not a new, romantic land of opportunity, a city to push my resume, or a class to workshop my writing. My friend Nithya and I stayed up last week talking about our connection to India -- a weird, deep, ancestral fulfillment. A comfort in a sea of faces like mine. Tasting and smelling and touching without personal space or metaphorical gloves.
And second, because of my task at hand. That daunting title of "slum development" seems removed, impenetrable and hopeless from an air-conditioned room in Florida. But last summer dealt me just a sliver of the love and hope that moves and evolves in the harshest of homes, and I can't give up on that feeling.
Months of answering questions about India, thinking about India, talking about India, getting yelled at by my sister for going to India -- the day has come. And I am unsure, and I am a little scared, and I am excited, but my expectations have bowed humbly to the knowledge that this year has no blueprint.
Hopefully you will join me in my adventures, and hopefully I will tell them with as much truth and heart as I can. And at last, hopefully they will prove my decision fruitful.
Love.
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