For two months I will be an exchange student at the Daly College in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India. A border, sharing a room with an exchange (Carl) from the Louisenlund school in Germany, he and I have a room in Ashok House. Our room is the only room on the ground floor, and the only room with its own bathroom. Our room also has a camera mounted on the wall. Daly College is a Round Square school with a 200-acre campus. It was founded in 1870. While in India I am supposed to keep up with my work in two classes: Dante’s Divine Comedy and Advanced Biology.
***
I had slight trouble reading The Divine Comedy until the sections with the Opportunists were reached. Then the visual descriptions allowed me to become more invested in the story because I could visualize Dante’s progress. Though the descriptions became less graphic, they still allowed for a good grasp on the story.
When my plane first landed in Indore, there was a very thick yellowish fog that coated the small landing strip, obscuring any sign of my surroundings. Once I got my baggage and got into the car of the man who recognized me as the only non-Indian in the airport, I was immediately
bombarded by an obscene amount of honking. If I were basing the frequency and aggression of the sounds on what I was familiar with in America, I would have assumed that I was in the process of contributing to a seven-car pileup, but here that is just how people drive. I guess the theory behind it is to always have everyone aware that you are there so they will avoid hitting you, though that does not seem to influence any of the other drivers who wildly swerve to-and-fro on either side of the road.
To accompany this stressful journey to the school, there was common scenery of starving cows, dead dogs, dilapidated buildings, and tremendous amounts of trash decorating the sides of the road. When I arrived at the school, I was surprised with the fortifications that were focused inwards, such as bent razor wire, spiked gates, armed guards, and tall walls. Across the road from the main entrance was another compound with similar fortifications, which I later found out to be the state’s largest prison. For breakfast I had some small yellow fragments with ketchup. I originally thought it to be some form of potato, but it turns out that it is smashed rice called poha.
I found the Ancient Giant really interesting as it was so detailed for such a passing reference.
***
They are not having me go to any classes because according to them I am too old. I am two years older than every other student, but I am not really sure why that prohibits me from learning with them. They did mention they may have me teach biology because I mentioned I am taking advanced bio currently. I continued my reading of Dante today, and I have decided I will read a minimum of three Cantos a day, which will hopefully keep me caught up with the class.
***
A few days in and I am beginning to realize that Wi-Fi is going to be a larger issue than I had originally anticipated. The one area where I am allowed to use Wi-Fi is in the library, and the connection there is limited to around 7kb/s down, which unfortunately has made it impossible to log into Microsoft OneNote and this is where all of the biology work that I am required to do is kept. Besides the limitation of speed, the library closes every day at 11 am, which severely affects my daily productiveness.
When I first talked to Sarita Badhwar, the Mark Friedman of their school, it sounded as if I was not required to wear a uniform, and this seemed logical because the boy I am staying with has never been asked or told to wear one. I told her that I had the grey pants and the white shirt, three pair of each, as I was required to bring with me, but no blazer or tie, which were to be provided, and she replied with a “don’t wear it then.” So I was rather surprised when she called me into her office to complain to me for 15 minutes about my lack of uniform.
***
I have taken to going to the library as soon as it opens at 9:00 am to attempt to access my email and contact people. Once it closes I go to the ‘tea time’ until it ends at 11:15 am, then reading until lunch at 1:40 pm. After this I go to my room and change out of my long-sleeve shirt and long pants uniform as it tends to reach 90-100F in the afternoons. After this, if I had managed to download any of the biology my classmates had sent me in the morning, I work on that until ‘sports’ at 3:00 pm. Those continue until the second ‘tea time’ at 4:20 pm, and then there is a “cafe” where you can purchase snacks and talk to people. The girls are required to return to their houses (dorms) by 5:30 pm and stay there until 8:00 pm, while the boys have no afternoon timing requirements that I am aware of.
***
For the sports section of the day I tried a few different things. I found out that I am incredibly poor at soccer, and the coach was upset by me messing up their practice. I also went to the shooting range, but they used air rifles and I lost interest in 15 or so minutes.
***
It turns out that they have school on Saturdays as well, which is quite unfortunate, so I did my usual schedule. I have now finished the three novels I purchased in the airport on the way here, which I did not expect to move through so quickly. I read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and a short book from the Discworld Chronicles, which I used to enjoy as a kid.
***
It also seems that girls are not allowed to leave their houses besides meals on Sundays. From the other students I have heard that if the faculty see two people of the opposite gender talking to each other for longer than a few minutes they will not allow them be within any distance of each other for a few months.
***
They just informed me that they will be sending me and two other exchanges on a trip with one of the parent’s of some current students. I am not supposed to bring my computer, so I will update this when I return.
***
I brought The Divine Comedy with me, though I was unable to do any reading for the entire trip, which I fear will put me a bit behind as we were gone for six days. On the first day we were told to meet the host parents who we would be staying with at 2:00 pm. They did not show up until 3:15 pm, which is unfortunate because we had to wait outside the entire time, but that sort of thing is culturally acceptable here. It turned out that the father was some form of police officer as his car had lights and a siren, but the way he described his job, it sounded more similar to a warden for multiple prisons. We first went to a nearby house in Indore where they temporarily stayed while visiting their children at school, who were both borders and did not come with us. We then departed for the seven-hour drive to a village that they said that they owned. We left the main road around 9:00 pm and continued along dirt roads until around 11:00 pm when we reached a relatively small stone “fortress” for lack of a better word. We had some very tough and lean chicken for dinner, and immediately went to sleep. The father left to catch a train directly after dinner, so the next day was just the mother and their driver.
At around 4:00 am there was some very loud drumming and yelling in the village that persisted for two hours, when we were scheduled to have breakfast. We had some chapatti bread that their servants had made directly from whole wheat thrashed right then. On a semi-related note, the way that people treat their servants here is completely appalling. We then got in the car and they showed us around their village and what crops their people were growing. We saw bananas, wheat, mustard, onions, opium, and some stuff called fenugreek that I am unfamiliar with. We then drove for 11 hours, stopping briefly for lunch at a roadside place with questionable sanitation. When we got to their house in Jaipur, we found out that me and the other male exchange, Carl, would not be staying there. The father was also waiting at the house, having arrived a few hours earlier. They brought us to a place that they kept referring to as a “Police Club,” but seemed to pretty much be a hotel.
They sent us three to have dinner there while they went to meet friends. Dinner was a very strange experience as none of us speak Hindi and none of the wait staff spoke English. Once all the other customers had left and it was just us, they replaced the general ambient music with some Hindi rap music and turned the televisions onto some sport that I had never seen before that consisted of bulky men holding hands and running towards a single man from the other team feigning back and forth. We were completely unable to figure out the goal or the goals of the game. After dinner Carl and I went to our room, while the other exchange, Paula (from Markham College in Peru), returned to their house. We were rather dismayed to find that the hot water did not work at all, and we both had freezing cold showers and went to sleep.
The next day we were handed off to one of the father’s personal body guards to drive us around to different palaces and forts, which was interesting, but repetitive after a while. That night we went to dinner at a bizarre theme park sort of place that they claimed would give us the
“Authentic Indian Experience.” It was full of crudely done plaster statues, stores that sold cheap souvenirs, elephant rides, and performers. We had a decidedly poor dinner, and went back to our hotel. That night Carl was violently ill, and I ended up sleeping in the hallway.
The next day we were far too ill to go along with what was originally planned for us, and we stayed the entire day in bed at our hosts’ house with their staff taking care of us.
The following day we woke up at 5:30 am to catch a train to Agra. They had booked us a sleeper car, which was fortunate as it was a very long train ride. There are three levels of beds on either side of each compartment, and two across the hallway at right angles to the other six. Once we got to the train station we got a cab to the Taj Mahal, which was interesting. After walking around the Taj for a while, we got into a rickshaw and went to what was apparently the center of the city, which was by far the worst place I had been so far. There they seemed to have no concept of sanity, as the entire street was flowing with sewage. There were toddlers begging, dead dogs, starving cows, and an abundance of human and animal excrement. Our guide brought us to a place for lunch, but we did not eat after seeing the conditions of the kitchen and the source of the water the food was cooked with. We then went to catch another train to Delhi, where we would be spending the night. The train ride was only four hours long this time, but we were in normal seats so it was less comfortable. We got to Delhi and were attacked by dozens of people trying to give us rides somewhere or trying to sell stuff to us, which we were pretty used to by this point. Our guide disappeared to go get a rickshaw even though there were hundreds right in front of us. He wanted a very specific one it seems. Half an hour later he came back and we got into one that was identical to all the others right next to us. By the time we got to the hotel it was around 11:00 pm and we were all tired. The hallways smelled like cigarettes and urine.
The next day we went to a garden, which was very pretty, and then we went to the airport. Despite me asking both our guide and our driver to drop us off at Terminal 3, we were dropped off at Terminal 1, which is seven kilometers away from Terminal 3. So we had to catch another taxi, which we were ripped off for, but it still was a lot less than you’d pay in the US. We bought a pizza to eat on the plane, and had a relatively uneventful flight back to Indore. When we left the airport the driver tried to leave without Paula because he had only been told to pick up me and Carl, but he was persuaded to bring her as well.
***
Today I read three Cantos and wrote down what had occurred on our trip, and besides that today was pretty uneventful. In Canto 18 the situation of the flatterers greatly reminded me of my experience in Agra, which was a kind of interesting connection as one of the most prevalent things that I have encountered in India is intense narcissism, which is only related enough to flattery to make me think of the connection.
***
Today I was given a schedule and told I would be teaching biology to middle schoolers for a bit over a week starting yesterday. I had walked out of the office and was immediately accosted by a large and loud woman who reprimanded me for not showing up to her class yesterday. She had me sit down in the back of a group of 7th graders and listen to her “teach.” Her teaching consisted solely of her reading the textbook word for word, repeating each word 2-3 times, and then repeating the sentence as all of the students wrote what she was saying down. I was then told to come back the next day to her class, which was during a different period.
***
Today I realized that the schedule has no times and no classrooms listed on it, so I just have to ask people and wander around until I get lucky and stumble into the correct teacher. One of them asked me to prepare a presentation on the heart and the other asked me to present on a section of a book she gave me. Tomorrow is Sunday, so I am supposed to work on the presentations then. With all of these classes it’s getting hard to fit in three cantos a day, and I am way behind that from the last trip.
Sundays are very boring for the most part. It also turns out that breakfast is at a different time, but not at 9:00 am as I was told, so I missed that. The only redeeming factor of a Sunday is that at lunch they serve ice cream, though it tastes a bit odd. I read six cantos today and worked on a presentation and learned the information in the section of the book I am supposed to teach. In Canto 30, Dante compares the French and the Sienese in a way that criticized both cultures, and seemed out of tone with the rest of the book so far. I wonder if it is a personal issue or more of a general thing to reference during the time.
***
Today I taught both lessons several times. The students couldn’t understand most things that I was saying. They did not respond well to my trying to teach concepts as opposed to blank memorization. They call me “Sir”.
***
The last few days have been fundamentally the same. I have been teaching classes and trying to read three Cantos a day. Today I was told that there is a service project that me and Carl are required to do. Tomorrow we are supposed to go do something after lunch for it.
***
I am now reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and a few times the manner of description has reminded me of what I have read in The Divine Comedy. As I was reading I began to look for comparisons in the story that I could draw upon, and unfortunately I found none, though there have been references to the term “accident” as we used in class, and a direct reference to Dante’s works; “I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived”. These don’t really have anything to do with my understanding of the book, but it is interesting nonetheless.
***
It turns out that the intent of the service project is to give out eye glasses to poor people who wouldn’t otherwise know they have bad eyesight. For the last few days we’ve been walking around slums in Indore handing out fliers to people to try to get them to come. I don’t speak Hindi, so I was next to useless for this. There will be a group of students from the Ermitage school in France coming tonight for the actual camp, and on Sunday we set up the location with them.
***
Today, Saturday, we walked around one of the slums with the students from Ermitage, but we’d already gone through it earlier in the week handing out posters, but as everyone already had one it seemed that the main goal of doing this was so Daly College could get pictures of them doing things. It seems as if the school cares about appearance, and not effect.
***
We set up the tent, and it is obvious that there is no concept of efficiency here. They only allow one job to happen at a time, and try to get everyone to do that even though that number of people its mostly everyone getting in the way of each other. I wasn’t able to read anything today, and I don’t think I’ll be able to read anything for the rest of the eye camp either.
***
Today is Sunday again. As I predicted, I wasn’t able to do any reading or writing for the past week. Most of my time was spent pointing at ‘C’s’ on a chart as someone who spoke Hindi asked them which way the ‘C’ was pointing. The days were incredibly long and very inefficient. Everything had to be separated into male and female sections, so even in the middle of the day while there were no men and the women’s line and seating where overflowing, they could not sit where the men do. I think around 4000 glasses were handed out though, so I guess it was pretty productive. We worked every day from 8:00 am to around 7:00 pm.
It turns out that neither me or Carl were on any of the attendance lists because Daly College forgot that we were there, so we were unable to go on any of the trips the French students did in small groups throughout the week. I was also only informed today that there is another service project starting tomorrow that I am also required to do, this time with British students from Du Montfort University. I suspect that I won’t be able to read or write until after that also.
***
I was correct in that assumption. It’s now a week and a half later, on Wednesday. This service project was aiming to make a washroom (restroom) for girls at a poor school. This was even less efficient than the last project, and we did not even complete the washroom, which Daly College refuses to acknowledge. For the first few days we pretty much just passed bricks around the building from the road to where it was being built, and towards the end of that section some of us placed bricks, but the vast majority of the work was being done by two men that the school had hired. When we would get there in the morning, the walls would be a lot higher than when we left, so they were doing a lot of work after we were gone. On the last day the walls were a bit higher than my head. Inside was just mud, and there was no roof or plumbing. That’s where Daly College decided to leave it. They wrote down that we created a washroom, took pictures of people building it, and when doing a huge presentation to the entire school overlooked the fact that it was never finished.
The next day they had us and the British students do mandatory arts and crafts at Daly College to give insight to India’s “culture”, which consisted of painting wooden owls and coasters. The next day they had us get up at 5:00 am, to get on a bus for 11 hours to go to a place called Bhopal. On the way we stopped at an ancient Buddhist structure, the Great Stupa of Saatchi, which was actually very interesting. There were carvings that represented legends and stories, and a section that depicted Greeks, which reflected the Greek art style, which was fascinating. We also briefly stopped at a hotel that was owned by a student’s parents. They cleared out a floor for us so every few of us could use a room to shower, then they gave us some relatively good food. We then went on a boat “tour” which consisted of going in a small circle for 40 minutes on a lake in the dark, which cost us 700 rupees each. Then they took us to where we would be staying, which was another school. As soon as we got there, armed guard separated us by gender and put us in separate sections of a building, with bars on the windows, and doors that locked from the outside. Two of the British students were engaged, and when they tried to talk to each other the guards brought in three more guards and a dog. Unlike my room at Daly College, there was not a video camera pointed at my bed, but never fear, there was a window in the door through which a guard watched us all night.
The next day the showers were freezing cold, and no one would tell me where to go for breakfast because no one spoke English. So me and the rest of the people in my room got yelled at for being late. After this we had a five-hour bus ride to what they kept calling caves, which were not caves at all, just large rocks. It turns out it was the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, from the Paleolithic period. They did have some very cool rock paintings on them. The guide claimed that they were the second oldest discovered, which was wrong, but they are still very ancient, about 30,000 years. We then took another excruciatingly long and bumpy bus ride back to school where I immediately went to sleep, sans guard but with the incredibly unnerving glow of the infrared camera.
***
I’ve been reading as many Cantos as I can a day in groups of three, but besides that there’s not much of interest happening. During Canto 4 of Purgatorio, Dante refers to sloth as female, which was interesting. Does this connect to the whole blaming all females for eve picking the apple thing that was prominent during those times? Or is it a completely unrelated situation?
It’s the end of the trip now, and I barely managed to get to the end of Purgatorio because I was so far behind. I am in terrible shape for biology, but hopefully I can catch up during the few days I have before I return to school.
***
The trip back was exhausting. The first plane I took was a prop plane, and one of its motors distinctively stopped twice. The terrified look on the face of the flight attendant as we were landing did not help either. After an eight-hour layover in Delhi where they would not allow me through security until four hours after I landed there, I had a 15-hour flight to Newark. While in Newark my credit card stopped working, which I didn’t realize until after I had ordered a coffee. When I asked the barista to cancel it because my card had stopped working, he asked if I would still like it and gave it to me for free. He was by far the kindest person I met on this trip, and I think this was my best experience as well.
The Athenian School Exchange Blog 