Vanakkam! வணக்கம்!

How are we all doing? It’s time for the “India Blogs!”….” India Diaries”?….”India Saga”….Epic?..

We’ll decide on a name later, but I am happy to begin sharing with you what will be a series of posts detailing my thoughts, troubles, and experiences during my stay in India! (also late, yes I know)

And we are back to the written blogs! Hopefully, this is not a bad thing, but feel free to let me know in the comments!

I was nervous to go to India given that I knew that culture shock was likely going to set in at some point. I have never really experienced culture shock before in my life with the exception of going to college at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin; that was a pretty intense culture shock for me. But I digress…The one thing I wasn’t expecting for India was the culture shock to hit me so soon, almost immediately as I got off the plane. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t slept in almost 24 hrs (I cannot sleep on planes, if anyone has any tips on how the hell to sleep sitting up, please let me know…seriously) but I was simply not prepared for how different India was going to be from the west.

Now is a good time to make a disclaimer…I understand I come from a background of privilege in the US and I want to be respectful of different ways of life and acknowledge that most of the world's population lives in the eastern hemisphere so if any of my observations or comments come as offensive please understand this is not intensional, but rather my raw thoughts and likely a result of my western ignorance of different ways of life.

Okay, back to the scheduled programming. I was not ready for how the airport looked. Not to get ahead of myself, but my friend Adya told me that in her opinion, Chennai airport is one of the worst airports in India. It’s one of the few government-owned airports so the budget is very limited for the airport. I was just shocked. I mean, my raw thoughts were, “oh my god, this looks like a warehouse where planes land…what am I doing here…” I was already stressed given my lack of sleep, but on top of that it was 2:45 am, there was no wifi at the airport or anywhere nearby, I had no local currency, my sim card wasn’t working, and all I had was the name of a taxi company to use and the address of the place I would be staying. Needless to say, I am not a good planner. (this will be a recurring theme throughout my blogs).

My first priority was to go to a cash exchange to get some of the local currency before going to the luggage carousel and waiting for my bag while desperately trying to get my sim card to work. After about an hour of waiting for my luggage and turning my phone on and off (yes that was my best bet, I am not a tech genius…) I got my sim card to work! The first person I called was my best friend. When I tell you, I was so stressed, the overwhelming sense of relief to hear the voice of someone familiar nearly brought me to tears. Again, I was 24hrs without sleep, so my mental capacity for stress was greatly reduced.

After about another 45 minutes, I retrieved my bag and set off to find the taxi service. I didn’t quite understand how a prepaid taxi service worked, maybe that's the fault of my generation, but I told him the address and he just gave me a slip and charged me 600 rupees (about 7-8 US dollars) for the ride and told me to go outside where I would find a taxi driver to take me to the place where I was staying. I walked outside and immediately was overwhelmed. I had never seen so many people outside, let alone outside of an airport at what was almost 4:30 am. It was quite the crowd. I tried to act as though I knew what I was doing, although I’m sure I wasn’t fooling anybody. I walk through the crowd and towards a sign that says “Prepaid Taxi Service.” I barely made it to the sign when I saw this group of men in brown matching uniforms standing around speaking amongst themselves. One of them walked up and took my slip from me without saying a word and got the other men into a huddle, I assume to see who wanted to take me. One of them eventually broke the huddle with my slip in hand and gestured for me to go with him. Not having any other choice and being too tired at this point to care, I went with him. We got in the car and he handed me his phone. I was very confused, thinking to myself, “it's not every day a taxi driver asks for your number.” Although that moment of flattery subsided when I realized he was asking me to put the address into google maps for him! I just remember thinking, “shouldn’t taxi drivers know where to go? if he doesn’t know where this is, how the hell am I supposed to know?! I just got here!” nevertheless we played the game of “hand gestures” to communicate and were off. (I forgot to mention the small fight I skirted around to get to the taxi but it was more of a “you had to be there” to appreciate it sorta thing)

As we were driving I couldn't help but feel a sense of awe but also one fear, fear of the unfamiliar. I was amazed at the sites that I saw on the road to the residence at which I would be staying but a sense of fear if not apprehension about the fact that nothing around me seemed familiar inhibited the ability to place myself amidst the context of it all, something which I would find to be very important to my ability to feel grounded; context. It was at this moment that I began to feel the weight of my “American” identity, an identifier that I felt never truly fit. I am not speaking in a political sense but in a homeward one. I remember thinking thoughts of home to comfort myself at this moment and realizing that those things were “American” in nature; what I found familiar, what I held on to, the people that I thought of. It was my version of America and what home meant to me.

After a time we eventually made it to the residence I would be staying at. It was owned by a woman whom I referred to as “Padma Aunty” whom I was introduced to by a friend and Lawrence University student. We arrived at the residence and a man was sleeping inside the compound of Padma's house this mildly alarmed me but the calm demeanor of the security guard gave me the sense that this was something that was fairly normal or at the very least did not bother him. Wanting to go to sleep, I looked for the key which I was told would be in a lock box, but whose location I was never actually told. Growing mildly panicked as the security guard was eyeing me pace around the compound, I tried calling Padma’s neighbors to see if they had a spare key. After some time and managing to call Padma, her neighbor's husband arrived with the key, but with the sad news that one of the relatives that just passed away. I'm very grateful that they still took the time to come from the hospital to bring me the key and the time that I'm sure for them was that great stress and sadness.

Upon entering the house Padma gave me a quick virtual tour of where everything was and how everything worked. For those of you who don't know much about India, at least for foreigners, the tap-water is not safe to drink. She has a reverse osmosis filter in her home but she recommended using bottled water to brush my teeth, shave, and drink. Tap water is okay to use for showering, and washing clothes and dishes. She has a beautiful home although I couldn't help but feel the isolation of being in a foreign place in a stranger's home all alone on the other side of the world. I did find comfort however knowing that someone like Padma was going to such lengths to help make such a stay in India possible and to make it as seamless as possible. After calling my friends and family and, to be honest, decompressing from the stress and the culture shock which I knew was going to last a few days if not weeks longer, I went to bed reflecting on my first few hours in India.

I woke up to the pleasant surprise of my SIM card not working again. (I was using my American SIM card while traveling between countries before finding a local SIM card.) I again felt my anxiety rise as the feeling of being alone in a foreign place where you don’t speak the language and don’t know where to go is frustrating, to say the least. After a failed attempt to restart my SIM, I decided that I couldn’t just sit around and wait for something to happen so I decided to go outside and try to find some food.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, driving in India is not like driving in the US. When driving in India, these are not my own words but the words of many of my new-found friends, “there are no rules, it is a free for all.” Traffic lights are sometimes respected, but pedestrians do not have the right of way. It is very dangerous to cross the street if you don’t know what you’re doing. After feeling this danger immediately (they were doing construction on the sidewalks so everyone is walking along the side of the street) and as a result almost getting hit (it was definitely my fault as I was the foreigner who did not know what I was doing) I decided to call it a day, turn around, and go back home. I gave myself a pat on the back for trying and then crawled back into bed.

After some time my data turned back on on my phone and I was able to call back home calm myself down and also call my host. I forgot to mention that the electricity was not working properly so I had to schedule an appointment with her electrician, a very nice man whose name is Balaji. Believe it or not, I was so desperate for someone to show me around that I ask this poor young man if he would be willing to show me around the city of Chennai; I could tell by the look on his face that he thought that I the question was as ridiculous as I had thought. Nevertheless now I had electricity and was able to follow up with a contact.

Do you all remember Julia from Vienna Austria, the fantastic pianist vocalist, and composer with whom I played within several venues and who was the main reason why my Spain trip was even possible? Well, she helped me out again and I was able to get in contact with her friend Goutham, who lives in Bangalore, in a different state/province of India, but frequents Chennai. It just happened that day Goutham was in Chennai hanging out with one of his dear friends who he said I had to meet. He described him it was a great film composer as well as a guitarist who was very cosmopolitan in his approach to music. This was a welcome surprise as I was fully planning on spending the day at home alone trying to garner the courage to explore outside as well as try to figure out what my next steps would be.

They came to pick me up for some coffee and I was able to meet Goutham’s friend, Sean Roldan. Sean and I instantly connected and began talking about music and how it transcends language and boundaries and life in connection with those topics and everything in between. I quickly learned that is a well-known and very well-accomplished film composer here in India and an equally as good singer-songwriter who is deeply in love with the blues. I find it very beautiful that many of the people that I met on this year-long trip, specifically the musicians, have been some of the most open and sharing people that you can ever come across, and as I said before I believe that musicians have to be this way, they have to be this vulnerable in order for them to be able to communicate with others through this transcendent language.

I learned that Sean himself comes from a long line of Carnatic musicians and he himself is a well-accomplished Carnatic singer this led us to conversations about what culture is what people think culture is and how to distill real culture from bastardized culture to what is perceived culture. We found ourselves talking a lot about how so much of culture not just in India but around the world has been bastardized and turned into nothing more than a gilded façade; How often, especially in times of great change, people hold on to this façade and what it stands for without knowing the meaning and underlining traditions that it's originally based upon. We talked about how often one of the most destructive forces society can face is when a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the culture is upheld and maintained from within, while perhaps the “original” culture or at least one more true to the tradition is slowly starved and destroyed; this is often colonialism’s legacy. To believe in something for the sake of itself without understanding why is no better than to propagate a lie as truth.

We finished up coffee and snacks with the understanding that this conversation was only the tip of the iceberg and that there would be more to come. To add some levity to the story as I feel like there are a lot of heavy topics at play, although that is going to be a theme much throughout my conversations with people here in India, I took an opportunity on the ride home to ask Sean how he learned how to drive in India. He responded to me as such "I never learned how to drive! If I had, I surely would be dead by now.”, as effortlessly weaved in and out of traffic in between cars, motorcycles, and rickshaws.

The day was not over yet, I had agreed to meet Padma's best friend Archana outside and she was going to take me to the grocery store as well as teach me how to cross the street. (I know, you think someone who is 24 years old wouldn’t need to be taught how to cross the street…but there we were) she came by the house to come to take me to the grocery store we bought some small things as I didn't need much as Padma had ordered me a week's worth of groceries delivered to the house earlier that day. We had a good small conversation as she advise me what to buy what not to buy when to buy and, most importantly, taught me how to cross the street. Let's just say that's the highest my adrenaline has been in quite some time. She then showed me her house and the dogs that she had and invited me over for breakfast the next day. I thanked her for generously offering her time to help this poor foreigner with something as simple as crossing the street and told her I would see her the next morning. I got home, cooked some ramen, decompressed, and got ready for bed as I closed what was my first full day in India.

I decided to start my second day in India by accepting Archana’s invitation for breakfast that morning at 9 am. I felt somewhat awkward taking up what at first was this stranger's invitation for breakfast but I thought that it was a good opportunity to immerse myself in the culture right away. I walked to her house and took off my shoes to go inside, as is the custom, and came in to find her husband and mother-in-law sitting at the table already eating. She first asked a question I had not expected; “Do you rather eat with cutlery or are you comfortable using your hand to eat?” At this point, I looked over and realized they were all eating with their hands at the table. Excited at the opportunity to use my hands to eat I accepted to use my hands. She informed me to use my right hand to eat, as the left hand was not suitable for touching food (it is used for something else…), and how to scoop the food in my hand and eat. It was awkward at first as I literally can’t remember the last time I ate porridge and lentils with my hand but I found it not only easy after a few minutes but also efficient. We lightly chatted over breakfast as we talked about cultural differences between India and the US, as their son was currently living in New York. After eating her maid served us chai and I washed my hands after eating.

At the end of breakfast, her husband offered me a box of sweets from which to try various south Indian pastries. Archana tried warning me as to how sweet they are to which I replied, “I grew up eating American candy and cereal, which most of the world thinks is barely even food. I’ll be surprised if this is more sugary than that.” I was right, it was not that sugary but damn were these some of the best freshly made sweets I have ever had in my entire life. I was still very new to India at the time, but I knew one thing then; These were the made the best sweets anywhere I have been in the world so far!

I spent the next few days practicing crossing the street and navigating within a block radius of the compound where I was staying at. I quickly found it easier to go out and walk along the side of the road, how to confidently cross the street, having some close calls (but I usually wait for locals to stand next to me so I could cross the street), and go to the grocery store and buying what I needed.

My first big adventure alone was getting my Indian SIM card which was one of the first times I had to book an Auto Rickshaw (Auto) by myself and go out alone in Chennai! My host had told me it was near Santhome Cathedral, which I would later learn, and I’m sorry to all my devout Catholics out there, was a very famous and old church in south India where St. Thomas the Apostle is buried. I successfully got to the Airtel store, one of India’s largest cell companies, and quickly realized that to get a SIM card you have to provide more documentation than you do to get a Visa to get into the country! I mean damn, I didn’t think getting a SIM card would take 3 hours and I would have to get my photo taken, provide two addresses, two phone numbers, a copy of my visa, my reason for being there, and then have one of those two phone numbers called to verify who they were and who I was!

I was also mildly shocked at the state of the store. This was the corporate headquarters in Chennai for Airtel, yet the store was not furnished or finished, and the employees did not have desks or chairs but a cubby to sit inside and a stool to put their laptops on while they worked. Even though I had only been in India for about four days at this point, I quickly began to realize just how privileged and western I actually was. I was forced to address quickly the elitist and classist thoughts that I had when first witnessing life in South India. I share this with you not to disparage or put down how life is here because it is beautiful and more importantly people live here and this is their daily life there are many factors as to why life has taken this shape in Chennai, but I share it to help you have an insight into my mind and thought processes as I am traveling the world, specifically here in India. Confronting these predispositions is going to be a theme of my time here in India and will be one of the ways I use to place myself within the culture and new environment.

Stay tuned for many more posts as this is only my first couple of days in Chennai and we have two more months of India to share!