Conclusions of Study

Ok, so in the interests of continuity I decided to go back and write a bit; I haven't been writing for a while.

After Mumbai, I stayed in Delhi for a while. Slowly, students filed back into the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from various adventures. Most seemed to have had a great time, and all learned some really cool stuff! And all had procrastinated a good deal. But! We got the papers in on time, more or less! Give or take a few hours. It was pretty hectic at the end there, though, as we had to wrap up our papers and start putting together a presentation and make frantic last required visits to our advisors when we didn't have much to talk about.

My paper turned out… decently? I was happy with the subject matter, but I had bitten off more than I could chew, really. The influences of the Ajanta caves kind of permeates much of Indian artistic theories starting right the turn of the 20th century, and lots of really fascinating people had a lot to say about it. And so I ended up studying more the flow of the contemporary Indian artistic identity around that period, and pointing back when necessary to say how Ajanta fitted into all of these thoughts. I read about 200 pages of a biography on a really cool artist, Amrita Sher-Gil; she ended up getting about a paragraph in my final paper. It was crazy. It was fun. I did learn something. So: success? Despite the presumably numerous typos and grammatical errors and poor organizational choices that persist in my hastily put-together final draft.

During the last days in Delhi before the paper was due, we did a nice thing, for procrastinating students: we hung out in a bed and watched a lot of movies. Better to absorb mindless entertainment than to actually be productive. One night we watched Spirited Away and Anastasia. The next we watched Taken and Easy A. We're a group of eclectic tastes.

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The Paper was due on Friday, December 10th. The next day, early in the morning, we boarded the train to Dehradund, the capital of the state of Uttarakhand. It was a rather long train ride. As usual, my travel buddy was Ally; as usual, she slept through almost the entirety. It was to be a beautiful train ride: I had been reminding people throughout the week how awesome it would be, the sun rising up as we enter into the foothills of the Himalayas just X hours away, the stresses of paperwriting a distant memory. Instead: it was foggy. The fog delayed the train by 2 (maybe 3) hours? Lunch was not had, the tedium grew, the view was lacking. But the sun did climb, eventually, and slowly burned away the fog, making visible some of the ghostly tall tall beautiful trees with leaves spotted here and there and it wasn't all bad.

From Dehradund, after a particularly mediocre lunch and too much chicken chow mein (Indian Chinese food is an interesting thing), we boarded a taxi thatdid take us up into the hills, around some hairpin turns with cars rushing towards us and for those more senstive to motion sickness or those trying to sleep or those with an unfortunate headache, it was not a great ride. I nhad fun, though! The sun, by this time, was approaching the horizon. You could see for miles, around sharp peaks, and little towns grew in the hills (these ones deserving to be called mountains much much more than those measly things I saw down in Maharashtra, but also dwarfed by the distant snow-capped Himalayas, visible only occasionally on the drive). And you couldn't see the horizon: the fog or smog or what have you blurred the lines when you looked over the edge, and the flat plains below melted into a greyish smudge. At times it felt like you were looking over the edge of the world, as all that was visible was the steeply declining slopes. The sun eventually kissed the horizon, several degrees above where I was picturing it, right about as we drove in to Mussoorie, our destination.

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Our hotel was adorable. Mussoorie was the first stop the Dalai Llama made after leaving Tibet. (Interestingly, it was also where Heinrich Harrer of Seven Years in Tibet was imprisoned before he walked off to Tibet.) That left behind a sizeable Tibetan contigent in the area, and our hotel seemed to have sprung from that ideologically or somehow, but it was warm and loudly colored and excessively Tibetan, in between pictures of Native Americans and old Hollywood film posters. Additionally, the Indian Army owns most of the land up there and so for the past many years has prevented any construction of new structures or enlargement of buildings, so the hotels that do exist are all tiny little things made out of houses: all of the students on the program took up the entire hotel, while the SIT staff occupied a bit of a much fancier hotel up the hill.

We were in Mussoorie for about 48 hours, during which I slept about 8. I just walked, and not that far. Just about, the same paths, over and over. There was a figure 8, near the top, from which you could see every directions, the city of Dehradun, the Himalayas, cute little old churches and relics of the colonial past. I saw them at sunrise and at sunset and with friends and groups and alone and with a virtual menagerie of animals that were curious and followed me about. I had missed the mountains, and it was good to see them again. And meanwhile I was trying to sieze every last moment of remaining company with the students with whom I had grown so close, who were such wonderful people and who for the most part I worry that I might never see again. We are, after all, such different people, the lot of us. Taken and Easy A, east coast and west. I hope though.

During the days, there were presentations, and everyone was nervous and fretting and proceeded to give wonderful presentations. They had done some amazing things and their topics I knew almost nothing about, and it was good to sit in a room and just listen to lectures all day. It was an educational program, yeah, but I hadn't really learned about more than one thing per day at any other point in the program. People were passionate about what they were speaking of, and they had excellent photographs and dang! Those were a good handful of days. At nights we drunk a bit and smoked a bit and ate good food and fretted a bit but it all went well, and in the morning TK woke up earlier than I and caught more of the sunrise and generally was better at things, but I caught some sunrise too! And other kids did too, and we wandered the morning mountains when everyone else was asleep and we had the roads to ourselves.

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We returned to Delhi for the last two days of the program. It was to be a time of merriment ad lachrymose goodbyes. But there was one final boss: spoken, interactive evaluations with our Academic Director, Professor Storm.

I don't really know how to write about those. It was awful. I waffled about, we tried to avoid the fact, but just generally the interactions between us and her had 7been rather poor. Our dislike of her was definitely not a great thing, and it did seem to feed on itself and make it part of too many of our conversations. But she was not without fault. From day one, there had been tensions and she had just kind of put us down or criticized us in many ways, had been petty and impatient while reading aloud to us from the Boddhicharyavatara, an 8th century Buddhist text about how not to be petty and impatient, and proceeded to ask us how it and how the program had changed our lives for the better, how it had in fact been a pilgrimage (we had to write an essay in answer to that last bit). And: it was a good program. Her discussion-based classes did not go very well, and I think in general the question of National Identity (important as it is within a course on National Identity & the Arts) was touched on to a minor extent. But I did learn a lot of interesting art-historical content, and the guest-lecturers she found, professors from around Delhi were almost entirely extremely interesting and thought provoking, with a fount of knowledge and a perspective on things that is just entirely different from one I've encountered back in the states (although, to be fair, I have taken very few classes in the Arts). And the travel! I saw soo many places, and she did do a good job of guiding us through those. And the rest of the staff at SIT in Delhi have been absolutely amazing. Arjunji and Prahladji and Fatimaji and Kohldeepji and everyone else (although I interacted with everyone else less) have been supportive and kind and excellent people, above and beyond their jobs and wonderful to be around.

I don't think this full extent was really talked about, and the negative things spiraled in Professor Storms head and in the conversations and it was an ugly discussion. I was worried that it would throw a pall over everything, and in a way it kind of did. The fancy party was moved from Professor Storms house to the program center, and she was initially not going to show up. When she changed her mind and did show up, it was somewhat awkward. Taposhiji, who showed up for the first few hours, described the tension on the rooftop terrace as a somewhat physical thing, immediately noticeable.

But it was a good night! I got rather more tipsy than I had intended. Perhaps drunk is the right word. In retrospect, I don't know if I should have: Lindsey departed that night around midnight, flying off to South Africa, and I am always confused about how sober one should be at such an occasion. It was sad, of course, to see her go, but she was the first of many. Meanwhile and before that, though, we had food and festivities, dancing and champaign, a secret santa in which Ilan got me some Dora the Explorer stickers, a bedazzling kit, and a bobble headed dog, and generally: a good night. With maybe too much alcohol.

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People filtered out, as they do. The next day, we dispersed, more or less. Pieces of the night were gathered up. I managed to get up for my 7 o'clock breakfast at the Ashram to say goodbye to Kendall, flying out early to meet his parents in Udaipur, but it was a struggle. Margaux left for England around 11, where she was to meet with some friends and hang out for a bit before returning home to California and a hopefully warm winter season. I noticed that my satchel was gone; eventually, it would come to pass that it had been left in the taxi the night before. My wobble headed dog was left somewhere, never to be found. My Nook, I guess, was left behind? I had assumed it was in my satchel, and continued to do so after reclaiming the bag a mere half an hour before we left for the airport, but I later discovered: no. So that was unfortunate/just dumb.

And but I mean, that wasn't a great series of events for me. But really it wasn't as bad as all these people leaving. I really did enjoy the program, and I really did enjoy all of their company and I'll miss them.

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Ilan and I were dropped off at the airport slightly too late to catch our plane, we got the the check-in kiosk slightly too late to check-in, and got to the boarding gate slightly before it too closed. But we caught our plane to Goa. And Ally, Simona, and Eni, who rode the taxi with us, also just caught their plane, a 14 hour flight from Delhi to Newark that they all happened to share. TK stayed behind to spend a week (soon elongated to weeks) exploring towns up in the foothills of the Himalayas. Rachel was looking for her father, who theoretically was maybe arriving in Delhi that day? She found him eventually.

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And thus, the program was over..