Wed. June 27, 2012 “A month into my vacation”

It’s been a month now into my vacation and I am beginning to really enjoy and appreciate the time here in India. The transition back to my roommates in Pashan is a lot more than I have bargained for and I am very happy how things have actually turned out. Living with Rahul and Sunil give me a lot of insights into the Indian mindset. There’s a lot of things that I have learned, accepted, and grateful for this second time around in India.

view of the sunset on the balcony of the apartment. There's a nice breeze at night that cools everything and makes it so nice and pleasant...because of living all the way on the top of the apartment complex, it doesn't feel anything like India.

Rahul is a really good friend. I like talking to him a lot. He spent a year working in Canada and so has a really good idea of what western culture is like.

the alley-street that i walk everyday to get to an auto-rickshaw. There's always plenty of mangoes and lots of other vegetables...rarely any meat unlike the seafood market in Vietnam.

the Sunday food market where farmers take up the entire street...however they do sell most of the same thing. It's too bad that I don't speak Marathi and they don't speak English. I bet they have a lot of interesting things to talk about.

Some of the things that any travelers must accept when living in India. (1) the concept of time is very different from the west. The majority of Pune residents eat dinner anywhere from 9-11pm, 9 is considered somewhat early...that makes breakfast at 7:30 wishful thinking. (2) things do not get done immediately so it requires a lot of patience and frustration so much so that I have given up on expecting things to get done around here in India. Things will get done on its own time.

But there’s a lot of things that I am grateful for. My roommates have helped me activate my cellphone which is an extremely pain in the ass experience. It’s very hard to get anything here in India...so you definitely need to rely on other’s people help. And now after a week of waiting, my wireless internet is connected and I can connect wireless-ly with my laptop which is VERY useful here in India if you want to be able to find something you want or at least to be able to pin-point out to others what you want.

I can’t emphasize enough how privileged I feel just to be able to come to India and to study with my sanskrit teacher Vinaya Dev. And also I’ve been coming back to Bhandarkar Institute which is again one of the premier Sanskrit research institute in India. There are scholars here who probably put American-Sanskrit scholars to shame with their extreme erudition. I was also fortunate enough to have met Madhav Deshpande who is from Pune but has been teaching at the University of Michigan for the past 30 years. He gave a lecture about some grammarians from Varanasi which I did not comprehend but really appreciate the fact that he seems to be a really down to earth scholar. I actually used his book when I was learning Sanskrit since he presented the grammar in a very easy and understandable manner...unlike the book that I was forced to study from when I was learning Sanskrit at Berkeley.

Madhav M. Deshpande.

the great Dr. M.G. Dhadphale...his erudition is shall I say unfathomable!

Today was the first time I saw someone who was badly injured on the road. I did not see the accident or how it happened but there was a crowd of people and I saw them carrying a big woman whose skin was torn off from her lower-left leg. It was disgusting and it always makes me wonder just how horrible the traffic in Pune really is and everyday it really feels like I’m putting my life in jeopardy walking on the streets of Pune. I’m sure that traffic is not so bad elsewhere in smaller cities but here in Pune it’s just plain horrible. I mean heck, the driver who picked up me from Mumbai after my Vietnam trip was going around 90-100 mph on the Mumbai expressway in the rain! Shit I sometimes wonder whether I will get back home in one piece.

Aside from the dirt, noise, and pollution, there are so many beautiful things here in India. The clothing is one of a kind, and the Bollywood music that I wake up to every morning is also really entertaining. The mangoes are really delicious and every single one of them is so much better than any of the mangoes that I have ever eaten in the US. The home-cooked food, however, leaves a lot to be desired but my roommates are totally fine with its plainness. I think they are actually fond of it because it is considered to be more healthy than the food purchased in a restaurant. They are afraid that it contains too much oil or that the oil used is not of good quality. From my perception at least, I eat a lot more than my roommates and I think that it has something to do with metabolism. I think that Indian people have grown so accustom to the weather and the lifestyle that they have very low metabolism and so they don’t need to eat as much or they do have many snacks throughout the day and so it's okay for them not to eat dinner until very late.