My life as an Indian sitcom

Just in the past couple days, I’ve run into a number of situations that have either completely frustrated me or that I have to laugh off for lack of a better reaction. This, I suppose, is the essence of India.

Classic Reads
For my NGO, I work with an Indian girl named Devaki, who is 25. She has just finished her masters degree in French (more about what I think of Indian masters degrees later, let’s just say that everybody has one), and she is leaving in September to spend 9 months in Paris teaching English. Go figure.

Anyways, we are currently visiting schools to set up dates that we can come back and give our workshops about cycle awareness. We want to try to convince kids to ride cycles to school and at the same time use this increased demand to convince the local government to improve road conditions for cyclists. During our presentation, we show this very interesting video about cycle-friendly cities in the Netherlands and Columbia. Click here to watch it on Youtube… it was quite inspiring and made me want to move there!

Devaki and I visited one nearby school the other day with Prashant, my very well-connected program director. Even though we were just intending to meet with two people for a combined total of 20 minutes, because of the nature of Indian business, we met the a good portion of the administrations of both the Marathi-medium and English-medium branches of the schools, received a complete tour of the premises, and were able to step in on 10 minutes of a solo singing competition as part of guru appreciation day (guru is just their word for teacher… but it still kind of makes me giggle).

Indian singing, to me, sounds very nasal and sometimes is hard to listen to, but I do like that good singers are able to slip between pitches very easily. A very cute boy of about 10 years old sang, and he made me think of Danny as a little Indian kid. What was irritating about the presentation though is that we entered right in the middle of one girl’s piece, and everyone turned around to gawk at me. The students were all talking and staring, but this poor girl had to keep on singing even though no one was paying attention to her! ☹ I tried to sit quietly and not draw attention, but the teachers present still thought it was important to take my picture while I sat next to the headmistress, watching. PICTURES NOT OKAY PLEASE (this is a play on Horn Okay Please, the message many Indian trucks have painted on the back… still don’t quite know what it means).

But none of this is relevant to my ACTUAL funny story! It happened while we were touring the small school library. A certain autobiography shelf caught my eye—it was labeled something like “Teacher Non-Fiction.” There were a couple prominent books featured including (right next to each other) Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and The Diary of Anne Frank. Tactless… and WHO HAS MEIN KAMPF IN THEIR SCHOOL LIBRARY?!? I told Devaki anyone in the US caught checking out that book for some light reading would probably be deported. Apparently India does have some strange Hitler fascination… I’ve run into it before. They like to admire him for the nationalism he inspired in Germany, while at the same time condemning that slight extremist vein of thought that produced the Holocaust. The Jewish lobby over here needs to get their act together.

Oh yes, and just below the Hitler and Anne Frank, another equally momentous, historic, and awe-inspiring autobiography was featured…

…I must tell the Indian children what Americans really think about Hillary Clinton. BLECH.

…WALL-E!!!
Carolyn, Jessie and I watched it… that’s pretty much the whole story. But in itself that is an awesome story. ☺

However, we DID watch it on VCD, which is essentially a lower-capacity DVD disk. They are much cheaper than DVDs, and the only downside is that you have to switch the disks a couple times during the movie because it can’t all fit on one. The quality is also supposed to be not as good, but I couldn’t tell off the computer. I’m all for movies at low prices.


I Could Get Used to Kickboxing
Devaki and I get along very well, even though we’ve only been working together for a short time. She’s already let me visit her house, and we ride around the city on the back of her motor-bike (so fun!). Anyways, she found out that I liked to exercise and invited me to come to kickboxing class with her at another gym.

The class ended up being really hard, but it was fun because I was doing it with a friend. However, what I liked most about going to the gym with Devaki was getting to meet all her friends. She grew up in Pune, so she knows a lot of people, but also a lot of (attractive) college kids seem to come to this gym. I still like doing most of my workouts on my gym, which has air conditioning and slightly nicer equipment, but the social aspect of Devaki’s gym is great. Our kickboxing instructor was the tallest Indian man I’ve seen so far, but he was built like a football receiver and had the strongest hip flexors! I was pretty blown away when he demonstrated a perfectly circular standing roundhouse kick for us… I can barely make small circles with my leg 6 inches off the ground. >.< He was pretty good-looking though, and definitely unnecessarily ran past Devaki and I while we were resting outside after the session—Devaki laughed that he was showing off.

She especially liked going to the gym with me because she said that people paid attention to us because of my appearance. “Yea, those guys were staring at us and looked like they wanted to come say something,” she was saying. “I’m so happy I get noticed!” The sad thing is, I don’t even notice anymore because I’m spending all my time trying to stay OFF the radar.

We also met Devaki’s friend Satti (sp?), who seems to be a semi-professional cricket player. He was also a good-looking, athletic guy, and he bought us coffee and chatted a bit after the kickboxing session. He recommended that we mention our kickboxing class to any poor innocent guys who tried to befriend us… mwahaha. I finally felt like I was getting to meet other Indians my age in Pune. Most of the time I am either working, working out, or studying, so we don’t get around town to meet new friends. Indians don’t seem to be as obsessed with going out on weekends either (neither Devaki or my roommates go out more than once a month), so I was getting worried that I wouldn’t really get to know people outside the program. This gym seems like a nice window to the rest of Pune…. can’t wait to go back today!

Oh ps: All the Indians I talk to are convinced that we are all slutty party girls because we act shocked when they tell us they never go to bars or clubs on weekends. It makes me laugh at my supposed bad reputation.

This took so long to type, I will have to get to my other stories on another day. Last week’s pictures are also on the to-do list. Hope everyone in the US is enjoing summer! Pray to the rain gods that Pune receives some precipitation soon (the weather forecast on the sidebar is not quite accurate)... oh! I can start a grim countdown to the day when we’re supposed to be completely out of water!

…7 days to go…