India!

It is an interesting place. With good people! Which is probably about as much as you can ask for.

I found a peacock

amongst the solar panels

pecking reflection

I arrived at 10 o'clock on the morning of the 1st of September. Customs was a little stressful, as the immigration form required me to write down my address in India, and I didn't have that information on me. So I just wrote “SIT Study Abroad Program [which is the name of the program, as you may have guessed], New Delhi.” And it totally worked! I was counting on my rather lengthy hair from my visa picture to distract the immigration official (who generally seem to be vulnerable to that sort of thing), and lo and behold: immigration consisted of answering “What is your middle name?” followed by a series of comments about how beautiful of a girl I looked like and why did I cut my hair?

After that, I had expected to wait around a while, as I was arriving 6 hours before they had said that they would meet people. But Promod-ji ( I am definitely and unfortunately misspelling that) was there to meet me with a helpful sign, and another student was arriving around the same time and instead of lazing around the airport for 6 hours I was whisked away (after waiting around the airport for only a few hours). And then there was traffic and dogs and chaos and India! There is a lot of traffic in India (the incessant honking forms a kind of atonal symphony while all road lines are ignored and there are people driving on the wrong sides of the streets and bikes loaded up with chickens and cows standing in the middle, calmly chewing some grass and pedestrians casually walking across four-lane highways with 8 lanes of traffic), and a lot of dogs (they are very cute, but they are feral so I try and refrain from petting, but they are very cute! I have not petted one yet) and a lot of chaos.

Which is why the Sri Aurobindo Ashram we stayed in was pretty nice: calmness. The building itself was incredibly interesting, consisting of hexagonal units with hexagonal courtyards in the middles; there were 12 of these hexagons each touching in such a way as to have a large central hexagonalish courtyard. It was all grey cement, but had beautiful greenplants and flowers everywhere that contrasted quite nicely, and the occasional peacock and peahen wandering around. It is amazing how an animal such as the peacock, which various evolutionary pressures or smiling deities so clearly designed for aesthetic purposes, can have such an impressively ugly call, a crooning GAWK that sounds at various odd hours throughout the night, with a preference for that time when you are nearest to sleep. I digress though. Disregarding somniphagous squaks, it really was a quite relaxing place. Watching the sunset from the roof amongst the solar panels, with giant planes flying loudly overhead and devotees performing a candle-related ritual in perfect silence down in the garden while traffic honked less than 100 meters away was amazing.

I think this fusion of chaos and calmness will prove key to comprehending India.

(Also: photography at the Ashram is forbidden. I managed to do one watercolor painting, which almost but does not quite completely fail to convey what the building looked like. Hopefully I will improve a bit over time. Also: I did take a few pictures of peacocks, but they definitely wanted me to do so)