Being white in America I have never experienced being a minority. Here, I am a blatant minority. Furthermore the concept of ‘minority’ takes on a whole new meaning in India. America is the ‘melting pot’ and therefore while there is a clear caucasian majority, there are people of all different ethnicities everywhere you look (of course this depends on where you are in the country but you get the point). The same is not true of India at all. Everyone here is of Indian descent, not just the majority, everyone. So therefore being white is a novelty. When we walk down the street there is no end of staring, and this comes in all forms: men making gestures at us, saying obnoxious things to us, asking for our numbers, everyone trying to sell us things in extremely broken English, beggars grabbing us, pointing to their children’s mouth and making a head movement as if to say, “come on, she’s hungry!!”, people taking pictures of us, people alerting their family members that there are white people in the area. This excessive attention can definitely be draining, at some point it just makes you feel like a circus act. I just want to say, “we get it, I’m white, now can we move on?”. Of course with the language barrier this would accomplish nothing, except perhaps more starring. As a result I being out in public for extended periods of time when I’m not really ready to deal with this can be stressful.

With all of this unwanted attention one of the methods of dissuading it is theoretically attempting to dress like the local people. This is not a simple task as the local people wear all sorts of things. Married women tend to wear beautiful saree, even the beggar women seem to have these lovely ensembles. The women also wear salwar suits (a big shirt with baggy cloth pants and a scarf) and occasionally curtas (tunic tops with leggings and a scarf). However the women of my own ‘unmarried’ age bracket wear much more westernized clothing such as jeans and a t-shirt. If they are really dressing up, or just like to look nicer they generally wear the curta ensemble, but they sometimes just couple the tunic with a pair of jeans. So needless to say there is not a correct wardrobe. We’ve basically decided that if you feel comfortable in it, it’s fine, and that either way people are going to stare. By comfortable I don’t mean sweatpants, rather I mean if you feel like you are covered up enough to not elicit sexual attention. So that means no legs showing, no cleavage, and if you are going to wear a tank top you better bring a scarf to cover up if you go in to a really crowed area. So girls have been wearing all sorts of things, I’ve basically just been sticking to long skirts and t-shirts because that’s what I have found be to the most comfortable.

One annoyance that has been growing for me is the constant begging. At home I normally find myself sympathizing with those who are impoverished. I completely understand that argument that there are people who are in that state due to their own accord, but I also know that there are many people that are impoverished because they have fallen on hard times and hard circumstances and lack of opportunity. Therefore I tend to be in support of tax money helping to fix the problem as well as donating my own time and money towards the cause. Here, with the caste system and religious views, their whole social stratification is completely different. People are born in to their caste and social standing and believe that is the card they have been dealt, that social standing is what they are and what they will always be, and it is right and good to fully perpetuate that standing throughout their lifetime. Thus, the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and each person believes that is what they are supposed to do and therefore they are able to be content. So with that, if you are born begging on the streets, you die begging on the streets, and you don’t try to make a better life for yourself. Because of this the beggars look at you as if you owe them something, that our duty as the privileged people is to feed them and give them spare change. I haven’t yet looked in to the social support that the government offers the impoverished, or if they offer them anything, as I assume that they get no support. But for the most part it’s clear that due to this mind set that the country as a whole shares social mobility is difficult, if not impossible, so maybe it is our duty to help these people on the streets?

Unfortunately I don’t buy it at all, and I feel bad that I don’t. I theoretically understand why things are the way they are, that these people don’t understand that there are other options, but I don’t think I emotionally can contend with it because it seems so irrational. And I feel guilty; because I think like this because I have been offered education that these people can only dream about. At the heart of the matter I think my issue is that I know that these people begging on the street are not trying to help themselves and not trying rectify their social standing, so I can in no way feel right about supporting them. Perhaps that mindset makes me a total jerk, as in no foreseeable future is their government going to help make social mobility a much more manageable task, but for the time being that’s where I’m at.

In other news, we’ve now come to the end of the second week of classes here. It’s an odd feeling of elementary school infused with college level material. All of the students have to show up at 9:30 in the morning for our first class, which is international development Monday through Wednesday. This class is taught in lecture format and has thus far basically focused on the economics of international development. It’s slightly difficult to listen to a lecture in a foreign accent but the material is rather interesting. The most interesting aspect is that this class is being taught in a developing country, by a native of that country. I find it interesting and informative because in a class like this in the States a student would have to take in to account that the class is probably being taught with an American self-superiority complex perspective. Instead, I get the perspective of the premiere developing country (okay, okay so they are neck and neck with China, but I’m in India so I’m allowed to show some loyalty). Our second class of the day is Hindi. This has been quite difficult. A lot of things don’t really translate, such as ‘thank-you’. They have a word for ‘thank-you’, but it is not to be used as liberally, or in the same circumstances that we use it for. For example, if I were to invite you over for dinner I would thank you for allowing me to be hospitable to you; you wouldn’t thank me for the dinner. So that’s a whole different culture-language boundary as we are trained to say thank-you for just about everything. Our final class of the day is a country-analysis class, which so far has just chronicled the history of India. It’s told sort of in storybook fashion with lots of digressions, but overall quite interesting.

Aforementioned I noted that it felt a little like elementary school. We keep the schedule I detailed Monday through Wednesday, with a tea break between the first two classes, a lunch between the second two, and tea served during the third. On Thursdays, at least so far, we have watched Bollywood films in replacement of our country analysis class and international development class. Bollywood films are quite the treat. Technologically speaking they are on par, the biggest difference is the writing and the acting. In a Bollywood film, the cheesier the better. Every obnoxious look, or inspirational line, or ridiculously cliché and tear jerking ending is sure to be written in. Thus, overacting goes hand in hand with this style. They are sure zoom in on every over acted expression. The best part about these films is how much the Indian people don’t really seem to find them corny, but rather they think they are fabulous. When we have watched them at our host family’s house (well when I have watched them watch them as they don’t watch their tv with subtitles) every member of the family is glued to the television and laugh and cry at all of the appropriate times. I’d suggest you put a Bollywood film in the netflix queue so you can just experience these films for yourself.

So Friday is fully of Bollywood loving, and Friday we have Hindi class and then a field trip. Last week we went to a papermaking factory that distributes beautiful hand made paper to companies like Wal-Mart. It is a little unnerving to see face to face those people who you have heard your whole life about who do back breaking labor for about two dollars a day. When we asked our professors about it they didn’t seem too disturbed by it, but I guess that is just the reality of life here. And apparently that is a livable salary? Anyways, today we are going to a factory that makes prosthetic legs. While they haven’t completely explained the purpose of these trips I think the idea is to show us organizations and businesses in the area as in a month we will all be placed in our internships for the remainder of the semester.