First a brief background on the name of my blog. I don't know about my fellow Alliance students, but before going to this great nation I knew next to nothing about India aside from what I had learned from the movies Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire, which my host family have since informed me are about the two worst representations of India they've ever seen. So I guess that leaves me with zero prior knowledge. And while I had also not had the pleasure of sampling much Indian cuisine before I came, I did know one dish that was definitely Indian: chutney. Now I confess to not having had the faintest idea of what chutney might actually be before I came (my knowledge basically stopped at dip-type dish) but I was struggling for a creative title and it seemed as Indian a word as any. And as my former AP Lit teacher Fritz Mast knows all too well, I'm a sucker for alliteration, and thus The Chutney Chapters.
I can't possibly hit all the highlights of my first week in India in this first post, but I'll try and comment on my most poignant impressions so far. Having first arrived in Mumbai, not Pune which I now reside and will continue to be for the next three and a half months, my impressions start there. For all of you that have ever felt endangered driving down a busy road, or frustrated by the slow molasses of the afternoon commute, let me assure you that you are living in automobile heaven when compared to India, at least in the streets of Mumbai. "Driving lanes," if there are any to begin with, are little more than the faintest of suggestions. Moving down just about any major street in India can best be compared with a Nascar race on steroids: everyone jockying to be the first one to an unspecified finish line, with the smaller cars and motorbikes being particularly agile. Somehow I've yet to see even a minor collision but you'd never believe how close people get to one another. As such, honking is less an expression of agitation here and more of a survival tactic, with everyone letting each other know that "Hey! I'm coming up behind you and I have no intentions on slowing down, so kindly move to the side!" As you can no doubt imagine, this makes crossing the street feel like a real life game of Frogger but I'm already getting accustomed to the Indian practice of simply banishing all fears for your life every time you step out into the road.
Another substantial revelation I've come across here is that Indians have a very notable distaste for utensils. All meals are eaten with the hands, and more specifically the right hand, since the left hand is considered unclean (and rightly so based on the customary toilet habits here, but I digress). Basically every Indian meal is a five-year old's dream, as almost all dishes are meant to be eaten by scooping them into the hand. Fortunately almost all meals are also served with some sort of bread which can used in a utensil-like fashion, saving one's hands from being a complete mess.
While staying at our Orientation location I also got my first exposure to traditional Indian "games." I say "games" because none of them were actually competitive but none could be described as lacking in entertainment value. The first one was a jacks type game played with five pebbles, one of which you throw up in the air while grabbing the other ones scattered on the floor below. To the best of my knowledge it seemed completely up to your discretion as to how many you picked up at a time, but the kind Indian woman teaching me the game seemed more impressed when I picked up more than one at a time. The second game was an exercise in nausea control, as it consisted of anywhere from two to four people linking arms and trying to spin in a circle as fast as humanly possible. Unsurprisingly it was a ton of fun, and even had the thrill of danger thanks to the very real possibility of someone letting go while spinning. The third game was of a more discriminatory nature, since it required one to have exceedingly long hair. To demonstrate the game to us, the Indian women teaching us undid their braids or buns and began to spin their hair in big circles, not unlike you might see at your favorite Poison concert. Unfortunately my locks were not of a sufficient length to participate in this activity, but I could always forgo a haircut for the next several months...
As I'm prone to do in verbal communications, I've already begun to ramble. Hopefully this first post has given the dozen or so of you a vague idea of everyday Indian life, but if not I encourage you to return for the subsequent posts, if for nothing else than for the pretty pictures!
