heureusement
Snow Day!
That’s a lie… it’s a sunny 80 degrees in Hyderabad today. However, yesterday there was a student suicide having to do with the Telangana movement which has resulted in the institution of a 48 hour bandh. My teachers evidently were not able to make it to campus today. (Cancellations aren’t announced of course - you have to figure them out.) One of my friend’s class was canceled because U of H students decided to protest inside the academic building making it too difficult to hear! Another friend had her classroom stormed by protesters who started throwing chairs when the professor refused to end class. They began pointing at the two Americans in the room and expected everyone to join them once the professor finally dismissed the class.
Since I have some free time and cannot go into the city as I was planning to do, I thought I’d catch up on this blog! I’ve sat down a couple times with the intention to do so but then realized I’ve done so much since the last entry that I didn’t know where to start!
So here’s a start:
Classes began and I had my schedule worked out perfectly but when I actually went to classes, I could not understand the professors. I wouldn’t have known they were speaking English if I didn’t have prior knowledge of that fact. I ended up having to drop Caste in Modern India and Religion in Society. I’m now taking Yoga: Theory and Practice, Kuchipudi Dance, Conversational Hindi and Ecological Anthropology. In India you are expected to call your professor “sir” or “madam” and stand when they enter the room. I like yoga the best. It’s not just doing the movement but also talking about chakras and states of mind and history etc. Ecological Anth is kind of hard to sit through even though it’s a topic that interests me because the professors lectures the entire time, expecting us to copy down many many detailed slides from a powerpoint. Hindi is already hard since as I know from experience I am very bad at foreign languages. According to one local they are teaching us to speak as if we are in the 1800’s. That’s not very “conversational”.
