It's been nearly five months since my arrival in India. I've managed to stay very busy here all the while enjoying an incredibly unique culture and participating in new learning experiences.
During our brief August break, Natalie arrived in Delhi. After visiting a few historical sites, we traveled to Darjeeling before heading back to Jaipur. Darjeeling, dubbed "Queen of the Hills", is a beautiful city situated in northernmost West Bengal near the Nepali border. From the rooftops you can watch the historic toy train wind through the mountains, and see Kanchenjunga (third highest mountain in the world) towering over the hills in the distance. Most people visit tea plantations--Darjeeling's most famous attraction. While we did wander through a few tea plantations and spoke with some tea laborers, we spent most of our time trekking village to village and staying with small farmers. Not only was this great practice for my Hindi, it was also a time of observation and exploration into how different the mountainous agriculture systems are, especially compared to those in my current region of Rajasthan. In the mountains, agro-diversity is greater; they grow a number of crops, including: squash, potatoes, onions, corn, mountain rice, wheat, etc. They also have cows, buffalo, and goats. All of these crops and livestock work together in an integrated system, wherein there is little waste and virtually no mechanization. In these mountainous regions, crops are planted together, livestock manure is the only form of fertilizer, and labor is all by hand. I was able to experience first hand some of these farming practices and talk with farmers about how weather influences their decision-making.
After Darjeeling, we returned to Jaipur where Natalie set to work on her own projects, and I returned to my Hindi studies at the institute. My typical week consists of 20 classroom hours in Hindi, and another 10-20 hours of Hindi homework. In our classes, we study grammar, watch movies, listen to radio shows and news stories, and read articles and literature. We also write five pages per week in a Hindi journal and have conversations on various cultural topics such as: love marriages vs. arranged marriages, LGBT rights, international development, etc. I'm now in advanced classes, but progress seems much harder to come by. I feel like I'm facing a long plateau in the language learning process, but trust that staying the course will bring me to yet another level of understanding.
I've used my journal every week to translate a consumer questionnaire into Hindi. This has been a fantastic, though challenging experience for me. Luckily, I've had continuous encouragement and help from my advising professors in the States, and from my Hindi instructors here. At the end of the year, students must write a twenty page paper, and present the topic for 30-45 minutes in Hindi. My consumer questionnaire will provide a great foundation for these Hindi projects and will prepare me to present the findings in both Hindi and English language settings. I plan to administer the questionnaire to more than 300 people in Jaipur, so I've certainly got my work cut out for me between now and early May. I will have the questionnaire translated by mid-November, and expect to have my first responses back in just a few short weeks.
Outside of Hindi and research, we've recently gotten the opportunity to attend several cultural events. Deshera and Diwali took place a few weeks back. Natalie and I visited Udaipur for Deshera and watched several wild and colorful parades in the street. A statue of the goddess Shiva is mounted in a pickup truck or tractor with puja (worship) music blaring over very loud speakers. For Diwali, our neighbors invited us over for local sweets and prayers to the Goddess Lakshmi for wealth and happiness in their homes. We followed families back and forth to one another's homes as they did puja together. Like most experiences in India, Diwali was a "non-linear" occasion. People show up in the middle of prayers, answer their phones, and talk about how hot and/or long the ceremonies are. It was actually pleasant to see the honesty and unrestrained humanity in such a religious setting.
This past weekend we went to Pushkar (one of the places I visited this summer) for a camel festival. The Pushkar festival is supposedly one of the largest livestock fairs in the world. We saw camels, horses, and cows for sale. The real event, though, was seeing the camels and horses dressed up in true Rajasthani colorful garb as they danced for the crowds. It was reminiscent of a state fair in the US, only with larger crowds, wilder carnival rides, and suffocating dust in the air. We listened to camel-wallas haggle over prices, and rode what I'm sure was a completely unregulated, not to mention terrifying, Ferris wheel. It was a wonderful weekend filled with intense cultural elements neither of us had ever experienced. We returned to Jaipur on a train that was overbooked, where there were two people to each seat and people standing in the aisles. After four hours on a train that was supposed to take two hours, we finally made it back to our apartment, exhausted. I still had to get up early this morning to prepare for my Hindi classes.
Living here requires a lot of self-awareness. I've found that in the midst of all the intense cultural interactions, I need to balance them with time to reflect on what I'm doing here and why. It's easy to stay busy all the time--there's never a lack of things to do. But in order to reap the benefits of studying here, I have to make time for solitary activities like: early morning reading and journaling. This part of my routine is, and will increasingly be, invaluable for my ability to focus on administering my survey, maintaining the motivation to study Hindi, and continuing my data analysis on droughts across India's districts. Though I've spent nearly three years abroad, 10 months of which have been in India, I am still overwhelmed by the challenges of cross-cultural communication. I have to remind myself of the long-term goals I set out to accomplish, and must continuously re-examine these goals in light of my everyday experiences here. It is from this perspective that I am able to answer the "so what" question in my research. So what if I publish papers on drought and agriculture production in India? How will that change things here on the ground? How will it have an impact on the livelihoods of farmers and others I meet? That's why I'm here: to explore answers to these questions and think about how to create the greatest impact through my research.
During our brief August break, Natalie arrived in Delhi. After visiting a few historical sites, we traveled to Darjeeling before heading back to Jaipur. Darjeeling, dubbed "Queen of the Hills", is a beautiful city situated in northernmost West Bengal near the Nepali border. From the rooftops you can watch the historic toy train wind through the mountains, and see Kanchenjunga (third highest mountain in the world) towering over the hills in the distance. Most people visit tea plantations--Darjeeling's most famous attraction. While we did wander through a few tea plantations and spoke with some tea laborers, we spent most of our time trekking village to village and staying with small farmers. Not only was this great practice for my Hindi, it was also a time of observation and exploration into how different the mountainous agriculture systems are, especially compared to those in my current region of Rajasthan. In the mountains, agro-diversity is greater; they grow a number of crops, including: squash, potatoes, onions, corn, mountain rice, wheat, etc. They also have cows, buffalo, and goats. All of these crops and livestock work together in an integrated system, wherein there is little waste and virtually no mechanization. In these mountainous regions, crops are planted together, livestock manure is the only form of fertilizer, and labor is all by hand. I was able to experience first hand some of these farming practices and talk with farmers about how weather influences their decision-making.
After Darjeeling, we returned to Jaipur where Natalie set to work on her own projects, and I returned to my Hindi studies at the institute. My typical week consists of 20 classroom hours in Hindi, and another 10-20 hours of Hindi homework. In our classes, we study grammar, watch movies, listen to radio shows and news stories, and read articles and literature. We also write five pages per week in a Hindi journal and have conversations on various cultural topics such as: love marriages vs. arranged marriages, LGBT rights, international development, etc. I'm now in advanced classes, but progress seems much harder to come by. I feel like I'm facing a long plateau in the language learning process, but trust that staying the course will bring me to yet another level of understanding.
I've used my journal every week to translate a consumer questionnaire into Hindi. This has been a fantastic, though challenging experience for me. Luckily, I've had continuous encouragement and help from my advising professors in the States, and from my Hindi instructors here. At the end of the year, students must write a twenty page paper, and present the topic for 30-45 minutes in Hindi. My consumer questionnaire will provide a great foundation for these Hindi projects and will prepare me to present the findings in both Hindi and English language settings. I plan to administer the questionnaire to more than 300 people in Jaipur, so I've certainly got my work cut out for me between now and early May. I will have the questionnaire translated by mid-November, and expect to have my first responses back in just a few short weeks.
Outside of Hindi and research, we've recently gotten the opportunity to attend several cultural events. Deshera and Diwali took place a few weeks back. Natalie and I visited Udaipur for Deshera and watched several wild and colorful parades in the street. A statue of the goddess Shiva is mounted in a pickup truck or tractor with puja (worship) music blaring over very loud speakers. For Diwali, our neighbors invited us over for local sweets and prayers to the Goddess Lakshmi for wealth and happiness in their homes. We followed families back and forth to one another's homes as they did puja together. Like most experiences in India, Diwali was a "non-linear" occasion. People show up in the middle of prayers, answer their phones, and talk about how hot and/or long the ceremonies are. It was actually pleasant to see the honesty and unrestrained humanity in such a religious setting.
This past weekend we went to Pushkar (one of the places I visited this summer) for a camel festival. The Pushkar festival is supposedly one of the largest livestock fairs in the world. We saw camels, horses, and cows for sale. The real event, though, was seeing the camels and horses dressed up in true Rajasthani colorful garb as they danced for the crowds. It was reminiscent of a state fair in the US, only with larger crowds, wilder carnival rides, and suffocating dust in the air. We listened to camel-wallas haggle over prices, and rode what I'm sure was a completely unregulated, not to mention terrifying, Ferris wheel. It was a wonderful weekend filled with intense cultural elements neither of us had ever experienced. We returned to Jaipur on a train that was overbooked, where there were two people to each seat and people standing in the aisles. After four hours on a train that was supposed to take two hours, we finally made it back to our apartment, exhausted. I still had to get up early this morning to prepare for my Hindi classes.
Living here requires a lot of self-awareness. I've found that in the midst of all the intense cultural interactions, I need to balance them with time to reflect on what I'm doing here and why. It's easy to stay busy all the time--there's never a lack of things to do. But in order to reap the benefits of studying here, I have to make time for solitary activities like: early morning reading and journaling. This part of my routine is, and will increasingly be, invaluable for my ability to focus on administering my survey, maintaining the motivation to study Hindi, and continuing my data analysis on droughts across India's districts. Though I've spent nearly three years abroad, 10 months of which have been in India, I am still overwhelmed by the challenges of cross-cultural communication. I have to remind myself of the long-term goals I set out to accomplish, and must continuously re-examine these goals in light of my everyday experiences here. It is from this perspective that I am able to answer the "so what" question in my research. So what if I publish papers on drought and agriculture production in India? How will that change things here on the ground? How will it have an impact on the livelihoods of farmers and others I meet? That's why I'm here: to explore answers to these questions and think about how to create the greatest impact through my research.
