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Published: November 28th 2008
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November 28, 2008.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Um, what else? Blog blog blog… I’ve been obviously having trouble with this thing lately. I have been finding that reading or going to sleep or watching reruns of Seinfeld on ‘Star World’ is easier than dealing with my online journal, something I never thought I’d have. Anyway, I’ve been trying to keep this to my basic day-to-day happenings over here but I, more often than not, let my personal stress or excitement or bias leak into my recount of my study abroad experience.
Right- Experience. That’s what we’re really talking about. Not just what living here and doing things here and walking around, going on trips, doing homework, seeing touristy sights, working at my service site, but what it does to me. How I perceive it in combination with and in relation to my own personal experience, pre-India. For as removed as I still feel from the reality of Kolkata (this could be do to plain confusion, exhaustion, the everydayness of my previous life that is so different from my everydayness here, or my relatively protected living situation with my host family) I am also feeling right in the middle of things.
The most recent events in India, the attacks in Mumbai, are all that is consuming Indian news, papers, TV, etc… but at the same time my host family seems not too concerned about it. I’m not really sure what I should be thinking about it, and I guess, practically, what it means for me and my situation: supposed to leave Kolkata in three days and travel by train for almost two weeks. I’m not really sure how unwise that is, given my geographical location and general distance from the ‘ground zero’ of it all. When I think about it more closely, I realize that there have been a lot of (compared to my usual vicinity to terrorist activities) of violent activity in the four months I’ve been here—Delhi, Assam, now Mumbai. There was more localized, I guess, activity in Orissa, as well… Newspapers are comparing this recent attack on Mumbai to the US’s 9/11—but the other reality, for my own personal safety circumstances, is that the distance between Mumbai and me is like New York to—Colorado or something.
I’m not expressing myself very well—I feel pretty removed, like I said, kind of like the danger of this isn’t
really setting in? Maybe it’s because I’ve been waiting for so long to take this trekking trip I’ve got planned, I don’t want to process any more confusing information, I wanted the end of study abroad to end on a thoughtful and sort of positive note, I don’t know? I’m also just frustrated: I woke up yesterday morning, expecting a call from home, and am informed of the shit storm (it happened while I was sleeping and I hadn’t seen the paper or TV yet at 7:00 am), I’m stressed out about begin here, thinking of travel complications, either home or for fun, worried that I am overreacting or underreaecting, It was Thanksgiving which meant phonecalls from friends at home who I really didn’t want to talk to while I was processing and they were being merry and drinking wine… And even when my slightly neurotic, or at least pretty Type A roommate starts just worst-case-scenario-izing everything I get even more annoyed, even if I was doing the very same thing in my head a second before she opened her mouth. This is adding to, not in a positive or constructive way, the culmination of my mental preparation for going
home.
I’m stressed out too about going home. Oh, did I mention that? Ha. I’m wigging out because I feel like the last four months of class with this totally bogusly organized and administrated program (IPSL) was a waste of my precious quarters (or semesters if you will) in college. And the incomprehensibility or inane quality of them doesn’t worry me about finishing my requirements or major specs or anything like that—it’s that I fear I have wasted nearly 15 hours of class a week not really learning anything, not being mentored by available and fabulous minds of professors (not that these profs weren’t intelligent and brilliant, its that they’re very closed off and not as open for student picking as I am used to at K, at least). I can draw though from my just living experience and my time at Kalighat, right? But I sort of feel like I’m not sure if I was working so hard for so many weeks for something I truly believed in. I talked about this last time, I know—yes I was involved in a really deep, personal level of social/service work; it was very specific work (tending to the ailing, destitute,
and poor people of Kolkata, granted just a miniscule fraction of them) and all and I should feel good about it, or as though all of the volunteers there were doing something beautiful and progressive. And that’s true, we were, but I don't know why I have to be so snobby about my service and my intentions to serve and picky about the end product of this work, or where the effects of me giving my time are felt. Do my efforts do anything beyond the walls of the building I went to every day, or the bodies of the ladies I saw every day? I know I can believe in some kind of collective feeling—like one little thing I do in one isolated place in the world sends out some kind of positive vibe, to put it colloquially or like a stoner liberal arts kid, to the rest of the world and inspires this collective consciousness, for people to generally be more caring or observant and reactive, or something… but that’s a hard mentality for me to take right now. It makes me feel like that do-gooder. Kind of like the social worker Kim Cummings warns his building blocks students to NOT be. Not only is that mentality kind of counterproductive in the eyes of community work, but it gets doors slammed in your canvassing face.
I don’t know- I’m also trying to use my experience working for a religious organization, and living in a very religiously diverse country as a time to just see and feel “religion” or “god” or whatever for the experience that it is. I can’t help but think about it in a more academic sort of way, thinking about Bellah or Geertz or Anderson or something—applying overused and overstressed social theories (in the Religion and Anthropology department) to what I see here.
The rest of my time here, the traveling part of it, lies in question as of now. Regardless, I’ll be home in about two and a half weeks.
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Lynn
non-member comment
Glad you are safe!!!!!!!!! I,of course, thought of you.