News from Bassi Pathana

It has been a while since you have received any blog post from us, and in a certain way quite a few things have happened even if in general I would define our life as still being mostly very stable. The only main changes might be that we are not thinking anymore about how we could get more liberty, but rather on how to inform the staff that we are not sure we are going to be able to stay for more than a month. I believe it’s simply that a strong North wind began to blow... and we have to move on, discover the rest of India!

What has happened since the last time we wrote will be very difficult to put into a few words, I will therefore apologise in advance for either a very long and boring post or for forgetting some elements of what happened to us. I will probably try to go for the second option since this will give you more curiosity about our wonderful life over here!

1. For Christmas and also my birthday, we managed to have a little holiday to Delhi for 4 days which then became actually 5 or maybe even 6? I believe that if we take away the hours we spent at the airport it was a  maximum of 4 and a half days! Anyway, very excited about this whole new adventure, as we finally had the possibility to go around a city on our own and have a nice romantic week end, with a combination of adventure and simple decadence. In addition I had a possible internship interview, which is important as it also kind of influenced what we then experienced during our stay in Delhi.

Hence as we leave in the morning to get our flight to Delhi, we get welcomed at the airport, without big surprise from a 2 hours delay of our flight because of cold morning fog. This caused that I arrived approximately 3 hours later to my interview. But since its India this had no particularly negative impact apart from us missing out from the Christmas lunch at the office! During my interview Jess made some connaissance and was able to get some addresses we should go to, or places we should visit, as well as an invitation to a stand up comedy show on that same night, from Shishin (I am not sure this is the right spelling of the name...) who worked there. We therefore met up with him and he gave us an amazing first taste of a nice Delhi evening, from starting up by having some drinks and eating pancakes at an American diner, to going to an stand up comedy show just 20 minutes before the end of the show, to then go to another bar where we had extremely nice mojitos toped up with a shisha and some dim sum (which became our favourite meal during our stay in Delhi). The night ended up by everybody being extremely happy, tipsy and driving back to our guest house in a Wonderful Otto, even if we were freezing.

I should probably give you a short definition of an Otto. An Otto can be comparable to an ape piaggio, this might help people who have an idea of an ape piaggio... anyway it’s a small three wheeled motorised vehicle which serves as small taxis. It has a front bench for the driver and then a back bench for the passengers and it is just covered up on the top, the sides are open, which explains why we were freezing. I have no particular rational explanation for my love for them, I don’t know why I love going around with them, maybe it is a good combination of going by foot and going by car. Not as closed up as a car, but still you go faster than by foot, and in Delhi going around by foot is almost impossible. The negative aspect of them is that it is extremely complicated to find a good price with an Otto, as the drivers never want to put the meter on and normally triple the price if not quadruple it, which creates always some quite intense bartering act between 3 different Otto drivers so that one might decide to lower the price .

The day after we spend the whole day shopping in an enormous mall, so we would be able to exchange present on Christmas day. With a little intermezzo of Dim sum and mojitos, this ending up in Jess simply walking into a glass door and pretending nothing happened. Sadly I did not had the honour to experience this moment as she went back on her own to the restaurant to pick up a bag she had forgotten with all the present she was going to give me the next day (Hence an extremely important bag!). In the evening we again met up with Shishin, and a friend of him, we met up for drinks and Jess and I again had some Chinese food. We then had a mission around Delhi in an Otto to get something to drink from one house to then go to another house and just spend to rest of the evening drinking listening to music, chill and to learn some Indian dance moves. Until the light went off and we decided it might be better to go home to our cosy married couple bed.

The next day was Christmas and we started by opening our Christmas socks! Our stockings! First stocking for me! Very nice! I liked it! And this was topped up by our arrival in our 5star hotel room, and ended up in us not leaving the hotel for 2 whole days. The bed was soft and cosy, the shower was a shower and was hot, there was a bath, there was alcohol, there was international food. I would describe these 2 days as a regression of our very beloved decadence. A decadence orgy. A private birthday party, very exclusive with only two participants and an extremely relaxing massage. Decadence again.

Based on the fact that we spend two days doing nothing, we decided to stay another day to actually see a little bit of Delhi (luckily since the flight company changed our flight times, we could call and change our flight timing from exactly one day, without any additional costs). We therefore went back for the last night to the guest house, and spend the afternoon trying to visit some of Delhi (I say try because we managed to get slightly lost, and therefore arrived at our first tourist destination when it was getting dark) by starting to eat some samosas just sitting on a bench a getting observed by hungry dogs. But thankfully managed to have the privilege to see the Lohdi gardens in their mystic darkness of the sunset and its two monuments which were just appearing in the darkness. This continued in a nice last evening even if we were extremely broke (caused by the decadence orgy) with the company of Shishin, who also showed us the India gate by night which we reached with an Otto.

Short impression on Delhi: I would probably truly define Delhi as a metropolis, an immense city, with an enormous amount of people, cars and Otto’s. It would probably take someone one month to be able to have some idea of where you are and in which direction you are travelling, as a newcomer you feel totally lost in this city, with almost no conception of distances. As possibilities to get around you either have taxis, Otto’s our an extremely new metro which has an airport security level in addition to a wagon only for women (which most of the time is empty in contrast to the fully packed other wagons of the metro). I truly don’t know whether I would like to live in Delhi, but in a certain way I am sure I would love to be able to try to live there, this is maybe because there is something curious about this city, probably also related by all its contrasts, from richness to poorness, from modernized to some extremely rustic parts. It is an extremely confusing city and hard to simply love it or simply hate it, but this is probably what makes it interesting and hence even if you generally find the city mostly ugly and you think you would not be able to live there, you still have a curiosity of how it would be to live there and actually experience this city for a longer period. Some European cities compared to Delhi seem a wonderland, where everything is extremely cute; Delhi in contrast is very crude.

2. New Years Chandigarh: As we wished to be able to do something on New Years and try to avoid spending it closed up in our apartment, we therefore ended up having a quite interesting evening which started by meeting a Warwick Uni colleague, who took us firstly to the annual New Year’s Chandigarh golf club party. It was very interesting (I believe this is the right description...).  From Jess’ and my point of view there was a lot of networking going on even at a very young age, but very shortly we got accepted by some to become business men who took care of our drinks. We therefore had our jump into the year trying to get slightly tipsy and being asked to dance with some very new encounters, but thank god as much as I stay faithful to my dear wife she is faithful to me, as a result we decided to dance our way through the new year together without inviting any new encounter.

But this was only the start and we then drove towards a junior house party, this event looked fairly amusing, probably some alcohol available which would make us tipsy and some nice music to groove to. But a chilled idea of amusement was transformed into some weird “throw alcohol down these white chicks’ throat”. Very strangely everybody was not only offering us drinks but literally obliging us to drink letting us only the possibility to choose between having our face, hair and clothes full of whisky our limiting the accident by absorbing some through swallowing it (this is what we did most of the time...). Hence there was some very strange movement of getting us extremely drunk, or in a state where we would hopefully start some kissing charity, thankfully the small amount of alcohol enzymes we still have, managed to keep us to be only into some wonderful Indian/western dance performances (even if we enjoyed some very embarrassing tunes, which I will not name here for different reasons, one being memory issues...). The put it very shortly the evening ended by me having to depurate myself on the toilet and Jess lying on the bed and having some circular experiences. All this was topped up by us having to get up at 9 o’clock the next morning for a hockey function for the Trust’s hockey nursery. Sadly I don’t think we managed to give a good impression by having a last night’s corrected make-up, as well as being in a fairly strong so called ‘vegetable state’.

3. The third celebration during this period was the Lohri festival, something which I believe you can compare to our Christmas. It’s mostly a family celebration where you have music, a fire, food and some dancing. As usual we were slightly worried whether we might be invited or not, but thankfully one of our colleagues invited us at his place to celebrate it with his family. We therefore went there very excited and happy, as it is always a good excuse to be able to have a look at a new neighbourhood of Bassi Pathana (you might thing Bassi Pathana is small, but each time we manage to convince someone to take us out to the market, we discover a whole new street, where we never were before. I believe more than Bassi Pathana being small, is our knowledge of Bassi Pathana which is very limited...). We therefore walked through the streets of Bassi Pathana to reach Robin’s house, and you could really see the Lohri feeling invading the street through small bon fires and some Indian music coming from different corners of the town.

The evening started as usually in India, with some food... Jess and I were extremely hungry so we kind of let ourselves go into the different little dishes offered, as we thought this must be the dinner. Sadly we discovered around 10 pm that what we had consumed as food until now were only some starters and the dinner was very soon to be ready... During the whole evening there was a mix of silent moments in which you don’t really know what to speak about, mostly due to the language barrier, as well as some street musicians visiting us. I would compare these musicians to what is often done in Italy as well during Christmas time, the so called ‘piva’. This is when a small group of musicians just walks around the town or village and plays some music hoping that a house would invite them to receive either some refreshments or some money. As a result we had a mini drums band playing some music, which started up some dancing action from Robin’s wife and the rest of the Family followed up. The mixture of the beats of the drums and the Indian dancing were something truly wonderful, your inner dancing dwarf wished that your feet could follow the specific rhythm which seemed so natural and simply performed by the others. I tried to start once or twice to grasp the feeling of the music, but when I started I felt how ridiculous it was compared to the rest of the dancers; I therefore decided to confine myself to observe this amazing 10 minutes of crazy drum music. The evening then continued sitting around the fire in which we had to throw seeds (these seeds need to be thrown into the fire in exact 7 little tosses) and walked around singing some Lohri songs. A gift was also given to us, something which is always done in India when you are invited to someone’s house for the first time, as a welcome symbol.

In addition to these 3 little adventures, we still have our routine, but with some new activities such as doing some carpet exercises through which we hope to miraculously manage to limit the effect of non-movement, as well as learning some traditional stitching named Phulkari. I would have never thought that Jess would one day be the one wanting to do exercises in the evenings, and I believe both of us would never have thought that we would be sitting on the couch at 11 o’clock in the evening after our movie and dinner, drinking some rum and finishing off our stitching homework in our ‘house-clothing’ and gossiping/discussing about some incredibly irritating students during today’s English lesson or simply loosing ourselves in the complexity of this stitching practice which sometimes breaks some nerves due to the lack of patience in relation to such activities.

These are a part of the news from Bassi Pathana, and hopefully some further news will be coming up very shortly! For the moment I wish all the best from over here and...

...Bohot changa din haen! {Have a nice day!} 

Om Shanti

Hello world. Long time no see…

The walls are closing in. It was only last week that I thought there was nothing worse than the lack of freedom and close friendships. I’ve changed my mind now. I would like to add Foucauldian power networks to the list. Orwell’s Big Brother, if you will.

So you weren’t expecting such a dark beginning after such a long wait. Well, shit happens. I thought for a second that I should probably wait. Wait to be in a better mood. Wait till I’ve guzzled down a good dose of rum. Maybe I should have. But I think it’s time you got a good dollop of what’s going on here.

Essentially, we’re thinking. Locked in the house, locked in our own personal existential conundrums. Forbidden to look out, we’re forced to look within. So we ponder. We ponder about what we want to do, who we want to be, who we are now and what we might be capable of. We force ourselves into some sort of necessary postmodern self-decomposition, before we can begin to recompose and reconstruct. Jess and Alizé, 2.0.  I can feel the new parts starting to fall into place. I was terrified I might be losing my essence, my itty-bitty-je-ne-sais-quoi for a second, but I’ve come to realise I’ve still got it. I know this because of this last week’s events.

And so, the story continues:

It’s now been two Saturdays that we’ve been up at 5am, riding through the empty streets of Punjab, off to our next diabetes and blood pressure victims. Sitting in the freezing cold fog, needle in hand, waiting for our guests to come. It’s not a particularly exciting experience, but it is absolutely worth the village breakfast we get in the end. Roti (wheat chapatti), filled with onion and potatoes, cooked on an outside stove fuelled by cow dung with whipped buffalo butter melted on the top, it’s absolutely delicious. And you get to eat it in a real Punjabi home, at the heart of the community. If only it wasn’t so cold.

But we have God’s light to keep us warm. We had the privilege of being invited to a homemade Hindu temple last Tuesday. We squeeze into a small room on the roof of a neighboring house, where our caretaker is a “Godly student”, or rather a Godly teacher, or maybe Godly reader. She sits and reads long stories to illiterate women, from what I suppose is a Godly pamphlet. I wish I could tell you a little more about what it was about, but I couldn’t understand a word. So there we sit, Alizé and I, in silence, letting ourselves be lulled into dreamland by this woman’s slow and deliberate voice, allowing our minds to drift. I soon begin to understand that house arrest hasn’t sucked all the life out of me.  I remember only too well having gone to see Chris play in a Church a couple of years ago, and not being able to suppress my laughter as the choir heartily sang “I’m a trainnn”. Well, I found this context just as funny. There’s something about religious places and religious followers, something about the way they take themselves so seriously, which makes it all seriously amusing. To make it all the more serious, this temple has a red electric light with “Supreme soul” written on it, which gives off red streaks of light meant to represent God. This light is turned on when it is time to meditate so that with the Godly music playing, all the women sit in the dark facing the light and praying in silence. A young girl whispers to us that if we look into the light we will get God’s powers… oohhh ok. When meditation is over, the light is switched back on again, and the slow and serious lecture commences. Sat there pondering over the seriousness of it all, I can feel my smiling mouth twist into a devilish grin, as I come to the realisation that God is staring at me through an electric light and I am finding it absolutely impossible to place a clean and respectable thought in my head. So I’m still me. Still tainted with what I have termed the Warwick library syndrome. The more you attempt to force your mind into what Mill’s wrongfully termed the “higher pleasures”, the more it rejects it by thinking of the “lowest” possible pleasures. It haunted me during exam time, but then and there, I found it incredibly refreshing. But time to Snapple out of it, we have to sit on the floor now; it’s personal lecture time.

A Godly brochure is handed to us, and we are shown an illustration of the topGod, symbolised by light, I didn’t catch his name, so we shall call him supremesoulman. He is inside absolutely every one, whether you believe in him or not, he is stuck somewhere between your eyebrows (as per the white speck Hindus sometimes draw on their forehead). And then there are the underGods, who represent our future cosmic existence. First, comes Brahma the creator, whose role it is to create a new beautiful Godly world, then comes Vishnu the preserver, and finally Shiva the destroyer, who destroys the old ugly manworld. The Earth is depicted held down by a dirty hand characterized by the 5 human vices: ego, lust, attachment, greed and anger, which prevent our world from attaining its Godly form. On the following page, we find a cartoon drawing of a man sitting in an old school American car. When we enquire as to what its religious signification might be, we are told that it symbolises the way humans need souls in the same way that cars need motors. Oh. Ok. We are then shown a photograph of a beautiful mansion, sat on the top of a hill, which is apparently where their guru lives. Doesn’t seem much different to many other religions then. A religious leader leads a rich and comfortable life while his poor followers starve and go to temple everyday. To add the cherry on top, we are given the Guru’s assistant’s skype and facebook details, so that we can contact their God. Once again, we witness tradition and globalisation using and abusing of each other in mysterious ways.

It’s later now. After a film and a couple of drops of the Old Monk, I’m back for the last chapter of our story. We’re now late Monday afternoon. Alizé and I go upstairs to our room for the umpteenth time, sit down at our respective electronic devices and begin to stumble, facebook or gmail, while exploring the web for the perfect degree, tattoo or travel destination, when two women of about our age walk in. We are told that they are the big boss' granddaughters, that they had had exams earlier on but were now on holiday and were here to be our friends and take us out at night, even tonight. So be it. Within ten minutes our routine movie night turned into a jeep race through Punjab. We had been joined by a brother and two cousins, and for the first time ever, we stepped out into the Bassi Pathanan night. I can barely describe the excitement we felt as we piled into the car, the smile we had plastered on our faces as we sped through the night at a life-threatening speed, driven by a 16-year-old boy who had a mind to become the first Indian formula 1 driver. The evening was truly intense, continuously punctuated by family teasing and big arguments. On the way back, we stopped off at McDonalds for the boys to get a Mc Maharaja and at a local shop for Alizé and I to get a bottle of our babaji Monk. Finally, we got to have a taste of the Punjabi youth’s lifestyle. However, it soon became clear that we were solely dealing with the Punjabi middle-class youth, who may long to be Westernised but still have certain values which we have a lot of trouble sharing.

To begin with, they were absolutely flabbergasted by the fact that we clean our flat, and especially our own toilets, when we should be “making the most of India and use the servants”. Then, as the night went on and conversation flowed, India’s bleak territorial history starts to seep through. We slowly come to discern the daunting black paws of nationalism and the darkened, frightened face of ignorance, as we commence our discussion on the Muslim religion. It’s at this moment that I realised I still had it, I haven’t made that step between youthful hope and adult hopelessness just yet, I haven’t grown numb, I’m still me, I’m safe. I can feel my veins throbbing with the desire to argue, I can sense my breath quickening with my own personal branch of religious fervour and I can feel that brutal shudder down my spine as I understand the importance of what is being said within this particular socio-political context. Luckily, it remains a contained discussion not a war, and finally we agree to disagree. Nothing to worry about then, even if I said something wrong, or they noticed we could do with a little more butter or that our flat is freezing, they’re friends now, what could possibly happen. Or so we thought. Indeed, it was made fairly clear the next morning that our supposedly personal conversation had swiftly trickled through the MBCT web of authority. My opinions may or may not be safe, but we were presented with heaters and butter the following morning, when we asked for neither. Welcome to India. It seems, all methods are permissible if the ultimate goal is to please the guests. While intentions were good, we are now left a little dumbfounded as to what we should or should not say, what is private and what is not, and what could potentially be held against us one day.

Most of the time still, we sit around, holding each other up, sat on the couch watching old films. At night, we lie in bed like a good old married couple, Alizé reads Wettgenstein in the candlelight while I very slowly make my way through War and Peace on my Ipad. It’s quite nice I guess, to have the time to watch films you ought to have seen ages ago and read books you’ve never even had the time to open. But I think we can safely say that we would both be ready to give it all away, if only we could go for a walk, just the two of us, hand in hand, off in the Punjabi sunset.

This brings me to the end of my story, which happens to be the beginning of a new one. We finally get to make our first toddler steps into the wilderness of India, a New Delhi Christmas Carol: four days to escape the Mehar Baba Big Brother. We may not have a Christmas tree, stockings and mince pies, but we have Santas in turbans, freedom and each other. So really, what more could two girls ask for?

On that jolly note, Alizé and I wish you all a very very merry Christmas and I bid you good night!

Lots of festive love,

Jess and Alizé

The mundane and the captivating

29th and 30th November 2011

I believe I will firstly have to apologise for the lack of further posts. This time the reasons were not lack of time, but rather a lack of inspiration. This can happen quite often when you start entering into a routine, and our routine has been our main occupation in the last week or even more. We wake up in the morning (first alarm Jess’ very nice iPad relaxing alarm sound), snooze once. 10 minutes later my more mundane alarm clock from my blackberry starts imitating an Asian morning and genuinely fails. This is followed by a very nice little morning schedule of shower, tea, breakfast, English lesson planning, with some electricity problems intervals.  At 10 am the first English lesson starts, normally this class has to cope with either our half sleepy brains or with the lack of security on how we should explain this grammatical form, a writing style or reading comprehension exercise. By the end of the morning we are slightly warmed up even if occasionally touched by a so called “coup de barre” in the post lunch lesson. After 3 o’clock we normally try getting some education on embroidery or just decide to eclipse ourselves in our suite at the last floor of the trust for the rest of the day and in some occasion have the possibility to practice our badminton skills which are not so bad in the end considering the last time we played it.

As much as every human being always wishes some stability, a so called routine to repeat the term, but imagining to have to be closed up in this trust and doing this everyday becomes a quite brutal thought in the mind of two girls having travelled all the way from over there to discover a new place. The new place is transformed in a routine and slightly looses the whole charme it had in the beginning. The first impressions and experiences fade in relation to this routine and an always more oppressing non-liberty starts troubling you as well as a sensation of imprisonment begins worrying your westernized liberty right. Directly the first thought is, we need to go and discover India! When will we be able to go on holiday on our own and experience crazy new things, be put in a new challenging situation, when will we be free to decide what we want to do? Go where we want to go?

It is very strange how we are in a completely new context, but in this new context we have a very stable, almost mundane existence. Everyday we see our students, sometimes they are just exhausting and literally annoying, and the next day you are in love with them and your teaching profession. In the evening you either are correcting dictation or homework, but what you always do is talking to your partner about the horrible or amazing day you just experienced. And I think this full immersion in a routine has in a certain way scared us, a sensation of un-liberty of limitation, of a boring routine, probably exactly the opposite you imagined from entering a completely new environment.

But I am not sure whether we can define what we are experiencing as being simply a dull routine, without being fed by this environment. Or in other words this routine is not as tedious as we are afraid of it to be. It might seem that we are not anymore in this crazy trip to India, but this is replaced by being always more part of this place. People are getting used to you, you are getting used to the people, you start being able to talk about work and you take slowly part in the general gossip which always decorates the work environment. You are always less the visitor and increasingly become a stable person here in Bassi Pathana/Chandigarh. But I believe that one of the main factors which still makes us visitors/tourist someone not totally from here is the language barrier, we are trying very slowly to learn Punjabi, but there is still a lot to learn to be able to form a proper sentence, hence communication remains limited apart with some occasional member of the Trust. And this language barrier will probably haunt us for quite a while. In the same way that we have trouble not being able to simply go around on our own to buy the very important candles which light our evenings or oranges and other fruits for which we always have to ask our host to bring us some. All these little things limit our possibility to be totally emerged in the new culture we are experiencing and make us feel like two hostages of the Trust. I don’t know whether it’s just very hard for us to be dependent on other persons to be able to do something, but through the fact that we can’t simply leave the room and have a walk, we tend to imprison ourselves in our room rather than having the impression to oblige someone to come with us to buy some fabric. I think we have trouble continuously having to ask someone to do something for us, to show us around, to take care of us, as nice as it is it becomes very difficult when you realise that you are genuinely dependent on this niceness of the others.

But all this difficulty to understand where your standing, if you are a tourist or not, whether you have liberty or not, does not eliminate all these little Punjabi inputs you receive everyday, all these little experiences and most of all of these little sensations. You still observe, discover and elaborate so many new things, as for example how a man greets a respectable man by touching his knee. Or have the possibility to explore Nek Chand’s Rock garden in Chandigarh (even if rushed by a mother and her daughter who were our accompanying couple on that day) and very important learn almost daily some new Punjabi words, that you actually quite often forget straight away if you don’t have a notebook and a pen 24/7 to capture them on a piece of paper. You still wake up in the darkness of the morning through the Morning Prayer, you still get up and can observe from the toilet window some wonderful scenes of the Bassi Pathana life and you still get to visit a breathtaking lunch palace (hence a small palace) which has something enchanting even if half abandoned and considerably falling apart as well as being inhabited by 2 families. And last but not least you still have the possibility to taste some incredible dark rum which melts your stomach through its delightfulness and is produced from the sugar canes of the fields you drive by on your way to Chandigarh (Or at least this is my romantic interpretation).

All the best from Bassi Pathana

"I like your nature!"

Hi. My name is Jessica. And I'm a pornstar.

(hiiiiiii Jessssssssicaaaaa)

By "pornstar" I mean I like to play badminton in a tee-shirt. A high-necked and half-sleeves, but not high enough, not long enough and not-sleeved enough. Turns out, my lower back was showing as I went to pick up the "shuttlecock", and this was a highly erotic moment for Bassi Pathana. Most of the people looking at us were kids meant to be playing hockey. But a few men were now all suddenly sitting the wrong way around on their benches, a young teenager thought it cute to take "a snap" with his phone, and more and more of these gentlemen seemed to have come play badminton. On a less sexy-time note... I could breathe! My Punjabi fag-rationing is allowing me to do fairly energetic exercises for 30min or more. Same girl who couldn't jog around the block a few months ago..... oooo jaaaaa! 

And yet, we're maybe not doing such a good job of rationing the smuggled-in Rum. We first had it in honour of my late-deceased grandfather, with buffalo milk and tea. I somehow had an inkling that this was the way he would have wanted me to do it....The tea for his life in England, the 50% rum for his Irish ancestry, and the buffalo milk.. well it's just pretty distasteful on its own. And yet this is a cocktail recipe  I intend on importing to Europe (although fresh un-pasturised buffalo milk may be hard to come by...). After that, we drank a little every time there was another huge party outside. So, I would say …approximately… every goddamn night. We have resorted to sitting outside on our terrace bench to watch the fireworks and listen to the music and the drums

We complain like grannies that the music is too loud and that they should really be turning it down by 2am. And then we moan and grumble like kids that we would rather be grounded. At least, when you were grounded there was some leeway for negotiations. If your chores were done, and you poured a few drops of wine down your mother's throat, or threw a few good grades on your father's desk and theatrically spat back a good old "work hard/party hard" moto at those who made the mistake of teaching it to you all those years back, you were good to go! Here... not so good. Still on hard-core house arrest. And unless we had a make-up kit worthy of Mrs. Doubtfire, some henna died extensions, some bangles, plastic gel-type shoes and a good old punjabi-suit we could not step out without being sent right back in. And this is assuming we have managed to bypass the "spy" who sleeps in front of the front door. We made the first step today by going out and choosing fabrics and designs. However, by the look the charity's designer gave us, we really have absolutely no taste in punjabi suits and would not last a second trying to "blend in" at any one of these so-called "religious processions".  This is not a religious procession. This is not a bunch of bold men swaying slowly down a street groaning. This... this is different. This is MC punjabi-style beats, M.I.A voices and the clink of bangles and bojangles sounding through the streets. Religion is sounding pretty awesome to me.

Indeed, religions here have nothing to do with their Western counterparts. I would like to call Hinduism and Sikhism "socialist" religions (in the Indian custom-limited sense of socialism). By socialist I mean that all religions are not only tolerated, but embraced and encouraged. They say that "God is light, God is one, God is everywhere". In other words, God is not this outside entity that you can question. And as such, there is no room for this Westernised paradigm war of to-god or not-to-god, because god is within you, not outside of you. It's an energy that you don't really have to accept or disaccept, it's just…well… there and everywhere. And God is a socialist energy. Not a protestant-save-yourselves character. Not a catholic-confess-yourself-my-child being. Not an Islamic-pray-to-me-morning-noon-and-night man. And not a Jewish-jealous-you-like-someone-else-and-shouldn't-you-feel-guilty-you-don't-have-a-country kind of God. God here is inside of you. He's the voice telling you to help the poor and give an education to those who need it. He's the force which makes all these people voluntarily work at "lungers"(community kitchens), cooking food 24/7, doing millions of dishes and boiling gallons of hot water for tea for the thousands who come everyday. God is a guide within you who makes you do the right thing and be true to yourself. This allows for all Gods to be accepted, as they are seen to be some sort of inside light to do good.

This, first off, shows how limited Punjab's knowledge is of some religious people (as far as I am concerned). And second, poses a problem for all those of us who do not have God inside of us. Ultimately, the Punjabis we have talked to cannot even fathom that we (or I) could not believe in God and do not feel him moving in our godless bellies. That we might actually believe, that the beauty of science and the wonders of nature may have bumped together in mysterious ways. And yet they see that we are here. For free. Always on time. Always helping. Always smiling. That we may not be religious, but the force is still within us. 

It is as volunteer Jedi-knights that we were summoned at 5am on thursday morning for a village roadshow. If you are picturing a huge parade, full of bright lights, with wild animals and women who can fit in boxes, then snap out of it. We got in a  plastic-topped jeep in this freezing foggy mysty air, so compact it felt like you could slice a slit through it like Will in Northern Lights. We roll down the empty streets with Indian rap blearing through the speakers. And we end up in this tiny little stone enclave, where we put up a big poster: Diabetes and Blood Pressure Roadshow!"And we wait. We wait for the old and the young, the healthy and the sick, to come pouring in one by one. And thanks to my god-given height, I was assigned to "weighing and measuring" villagers, while Alizé satisfied her genuinely sadistic tendencies by pricking people in the finger and pressing their wounds to make blood ooze out. I also reluctantly stepped onto the weighing machine and under the measuring stick to get my BMI calculated…found out that out of the 150 people who came that day, I was in the bottom 3 "underweight". Give me a few more months of chapatti bread and I’ll soon be tipping into “normal” I’m sure. All in all, the villagers were so kind, with that now familiar wide-eyed curious look stuck on their faces at our (very) pale skin and our pigeon Punjabi. And it was good to be out of the house. Although way too early for my liking.

We came back and went straight to class. This consisted of returning the dictations we had given the night before. Good times. We made a "Priceless mistakes" paper (I have always suspected teachers of owning one of these). This document includes afro-American sounding words like "Queezeens" for "cuisines", or "all ways" for always (wonder where they got that one from). Then "Italy" might become "Litly" and "Alpine lakes" might turn out as "Alphens legs". From "high art" to "hey art" and, best of all, "Southern Europe" could be mistaken for "Sadam Urope". Epic. We also had the most minimalist charades game in the world, so minimalist you aren't actually doing anything. Tired was depicted by standing with your hip a little bent. Singing was portrayed holding a whiteboard pen by your side. And crazy was acted out by throwing that same pen at someone in the classroom with a nonchalant look on your face. And yet, they all guessed it. Minimalism is in.  We need to get with it.

We also need to get used to the compliments. I would lay odds Alizé and I have heard some pretty odd compliments in our time, but neither of us were prepared for the level here. We collect comments like "you have a beautiful person", "you are very very beautiful maam teacher" or, best of the best, “I like your nature”. Awkward? Not at all….Worst of all these are genuine and sincere, but also imply that you have just become a potential wife (funny. I've only just rarely been a potential girlfriend back home). And yet, if you were to smile and say, I like yours too, you might be seen as trash.

There is also a quite different conception of sexy here. Our new friend who comes nearly every night and calls us dear at the end of each sentence admitted to us that she eats a lot because she wants to put on more fat. She needs more curves and so she used to take medication to make her breasts grow. Right, so I will not go into detail on my ever lasting big-bosom-reality-check campaign. But chest-growth hormones are just plain right stupid. But then what can you say? People back home starve themselves (on purpose. As opposed to this country), pump steroids and cosmetically "enhance" every inch of their body. But here, "au naturel" and slightly plump is sexy. And we have given them the hormones to induce it: a fairly sizeable pill of pharmaceutical globalisation to swallow.

However, gender expectations for men are quite the opposite. I could go on for years as regards the gendered nature of Indian custom, law, education, religion and tradition. But let's just stick to MTV for a second. Homosexual may be out. But homosocial is so in! The majority of male singers have mafioso sleeked back hair, rock the tanked-topped Boyzone look and dance like Michael Jackson on X. They might just be singing up on the wing of a moving airplane with their "homies" wearing turbans or with darker skin (read Muslim) singing a chorus of "My brother from a different mother", with vanilla iced rap breaks and all. And the girls? How come my lower back is so exciting when the saris on tv are very seriously sexy. With beautiful women belly dancing their way through clubs with the  lights shimmering off the glitz of their fabrics and the gloss stuck to their lips. As for Cartoon Network: amazing. The bad guy dresses like a Hindu God to dupe the people. There is a blue genie boy, who fits right into the secular humanoid primary school. And to top it off, Ben 10 is dubbed… in Indian-accent English! And so are all the American ads! Crazy... Just crazy....

This whole trip is.... We're finding ourselves buried neck- deep in a culture clash. But a wonderful one. Like Alizé said, you never ever feel like you don't belong here. Like you are not accepted. You are never ever looked up and down. You are just accepted because you are human, and because the God inside of them likes all humans. And that, is just revolutionary. I've said it many times before, and I will say it again, human interactions should always be a two way street. Our students come into our class with big smiles on their faces, screaming "byyeeeee maaammm" as they walk out, feeding off our knowledge and our differences. On the other side of the room, Alizé and I devour their religious customs and reluctantly get a taste of some of their gendered ideals. We've been here 2 weeks now. And this is already the experience of a lifetime. 

I hope I have managed to describe even half of the trip we're on ......

Yours truly, 
Jess and Alizé

From Bassi Pathana to Chandigarh

We are on the 15^th of November and it’s 10 to 11 at night.

We probably just had the most home feeling evening consisting of a couch, a laptop with a very cheesy movie (I will not even name the movie as it might put me into a certain embarrassing situation), some rum, sneaked in with our connection s (thanks to Jesse’s need of nicotine) and a little candle which actually transformed the whole ambiance! And I have to admit it kind of made me homesick, mostly of our uni days when Jess and me  used to have such  cheese moments together almost every evening. The only difference is that in England at the end of the movie we did not feel like it was to warm to be wrapped around a cover but rather wished it was warmer!

It was a big contrast in relation to our pretty hectic week, where even when we thought we would not have a plan  something came up and we would find ourselves in a bus full a children dressed in their hockey nursery team joggers (very orange by the way) and going to a museum dedicated to a very important Guru, sadly I have again forgotten his name and I am quite embarrassed about this continuous forgetting of Indian names. This happened on the day of Guru Nanak’s birthday (the day after we could not join the amazingly sounding parade in honour of this Guru).  And to top this day we ended up, on the way back to Bassi Pathana, in a community kitchen. I think I will have to describe you the sequence of this whole community Kitchen ritual. When we arrived with the bus everybody took his shoes off and left them on the bus. We were told that we should cover up our head when we would enter the community kitchen, you could see how everybody tried to cover up their head in every possible way, even just with a little handkerchief they probably had per chance in their pocket. When then finally entered the community kitchen and Jess and me felt like we probably were something like a walking zoo... People were trying to speak to us in English and introduce all their family to us. What I find fascinating is how, as much as we are foreigners, as much as we are a white English French Italian spot in the middle of the rest, you do not feel like you should not be there, on the contrary, people make you feel, as if it was a pleasure for them that you are here with them. We therefore entered the community kitchen where you could see rows of people sitting on the floor and drinking tea and eating some kind of fried bread. We washed out hands and then received a metal plate with different little sectors, we were then told to go inside and have a seat on the floor like the rest of the room was doing, so that we could finally be served by people going around and continuously serving dhal, chapatti bread and vegetables 24h  each day. I believe I never saw something of this sort, something this.... you would probably call it civilized. This was one of those strange moments where I feel like crying, in the same way as I feel like crying when I see the cars stopping on the side to let the ambulance pass by... Maybe it’s a feeling of amazement in relation to what we can be.

The rest of the working week stayed pretty normal within our routine as volunteers at the trust. A  combination of teaching English, trying to teach computer basic but ending in being taught Punjabi by our students, or being continuously visited by people from the trust in our room who are always very nicely asking us if we are happy or whether we need something. It is very strange how people here just come in in your room, sit down and tell you; “please have a seat” and try to start having a conversation with you. And I am afraid we might come across as being rude and not wanting to relate with them, but sometimes they just come in at the worst moments and you just don’t know how to tell them, or probably we are afraid to tell them, that this might not be the best moment to simply sit down on our couch and try to have a conversation. But I believe we will slowly get used to this entering of the private sphere and maybe even end up inviting them for nice Italian pasta or a cup cake and a cup of tea.

But on saturday night we where put on the trust mini bus so that we could go back to Chandigarh and stay a professor’s Mejie’s house  (the so called president of the trust), we hence had a week-end with his son who took care of us for the rest of the week-end by making us experiencing a whole different Indian reality. This started by having a nice south Indian dinner with some business colleagues, which we had met before on the same day at the trust, topped with a rum and coke for Jess and a gin tonic for, which was then prolonged with white wine and more old friend and business friends. For the next day the plan was to go to the “hills” for a certain show of the Mehar Baba hockey nursery in a school, there somewhere in the hills... What really happened was a three hours car drive, with Jess feeling sick in relation to the curvy road and arriving at a altitude of aprox 2400 meters (hence I have trouble calling them hills, even if it truly does not feel like being at that height). It was the annual celebration of the school, which as every school consists in incredible creepy but extremely amusing spectacles where you ask yourself how the kids can accept to be put in such costumes and doing those dances. What happened next was probably even more crazy, as when honour prizes were given, Jess and I got called on the stage to receive ourselves a “Guest of Honour” prize, as the head master of the school found it incredible that we were here doing volunteering and hence treated us as one of her best guest to the celebration of her newly created school. We both did not know how to take this, being unsure whether we should be honoured and whether this whole thing was simply ridiculous.

Our last evening in Chandigarh seemed like a pretty relaxed evening, everybody very tired even if the professor’s son invited us to join him to go to a friend’s house. As we always do since we are here we kind of say yes , even if we don’t really know in what the night will consist. And as always what happen never is what we expect to happen.  The night therefore end in a house dinner/cocktail party surrounded by a certain Chandigarh upper society which are drinking whiskey and smoking a narguilé, while talking about more business. Jess and I probably had to drink 5 classes of whiskey if not more by the motto of “sippy sippy sippy” and end up at bed at 2 in the morning, half drunk and not truly sure about what we experienced that evening, as well as knowing that we will have to get up at seven to go back to Bassi Pathana in the trust where we teach English and try to help developing this rural area of Bassi Pathana and the surrounding villages.

I am still not sure what to make about this contrasting experiences, but what I know is that I never thought I would experience within one week two completely opposing sides of India, I never thought that I would directly experience these two environments so closely. And the only thing I can say is that I think it’s amazing! My brain is simply being filled with new realities new encounters, new cultures and new languages and every time I realises or rather conceptualise that I am here and what I am seeing, feeling and experiencing I have this strange feeling of infinite happiness going through my mind. I would never have thought that within a week I would have the possibility to experience Punjab from so near.

The problem lies in the fact that our brain is so full of thoughts, feeling and even more little experiences, but as I am not a professional writer I find trouble in condensing thoughts, therefore if I would continue to write, this article would probably double its length or even be tripled. Hence I will stop here and wish you all the best and till the next time!

Good night from Bassi Pathana!

Dear Western World,

Sat shri akal!

How's cheese, tobacco and alcohol treating you?

Here I am, just as I expect the ideal-type blogger to be. Sitting at the dining room table, listening to Common' (not so ideally typically blogger maybe) while there is an extraordinary village festival going on for the first-ever Sikh guru's birthday outside (ok, so maybe not ideally typically blogger at all).

Ja. Alizé is on the couch doing her TEFL grammar module, while I sit here, looking out the window at the fireworks and millions of fairy lights draped around Bassi Pathana households. In tune, both of us regularly jump out of our seats at what genuinely sounds like we are stuck sitting outside in central-Blitz. For anyone who knows Alizé and I, we ought not to be here. We ought to be outside, partying it out Guru-Punjabi-style. Unfortunately, we're white, young, middle-class women, and while this entitles us to freedom and a quasi-perfect lifestyle in Europe, this confines us to the household in Punjab.

Indeed, as we were taught today by one of our intermediate-level English students who was forced into an arranged marriage by her family and beaten by her mad husband for 7 months, women are dependents here. Women stay at home. In the kichen or with the kids.They are not to walk out alone when the sun is down. They are not to get a job. And they are not to challenge the old ways. No, neigng, never.

And yet here she is. She left her husband and got disowned by her family. She attends the Mehar Baba Charitable Trust academy for an education, and truly, this chick is sharp. She has full understanding of the necessity of an education, but also of its limits in this part of town. She dreams of getting a job. But jobs don't pay enough here. It's called exploitation. It's called dependency. It's called sexism.
Damn right.

But the Mehar Baba Trust guarantee reasonably paid jobs to all those who make a real effort, who learn well and get good grades. She has a degree. She will hopefully get a job when her english and her sewing or embroidery skills gets better.

Let me explain.

We live in the charity's school. It has a classroom where students are taught English, and are now being taught Italian and French (hm. funny.), as well as a conference room, computer-skills classroom with approximately 15 old-school pcs, a hardware classroom, many offices, a kitchen and our apartment on the top floor. Most importantly however, is their women empowerment project which takes up most of the building. On the top floor under the dome-like roof sit the girls with their sewing and embroidery machines. Here, they are taught all different types of stitches, patterns, classic indian hand embroidery on wooden frames and machine embroidery (yes mother. promise). Under that is the design area, where clothes are patterned out, cut out and conceptualised. Below that again, is the boutique, where these trust-made clothes and rugs are sold, based on the fact that these are hand-made quality goods and have serious ethical value. Most of all, this place allows girls and boys to acquire certain necessary skills which may then allow them to get jobs or open their own boutique. Thereby escaping dependency. Thereby escaping oppressive traditions. Thereby making a small step in changing Punjabi  habits. This is the trust's main goal, and this is the hardest one: changing people's attitudes.

Don't get me wrong though, this is not a dreadful place where all men beat their women. This is only day 2, and I cannot speak for all of India, Punjab, or even all Bassi Pathana, but these people are so kind, so generous and so welcoming. We are treated like queens. We feel useless, but we are told that we can do many things. Get these kids used to accents, to different ways of learning, holding yourself. The simple fact that we were allowed to come to India on our own, that I cannot cook and that Alizé is a lefty (kaboo) is all extremely new to all of them, girls and boys alike. There is a clear bond forming, based on an exchange. We teach you English, (French, Italian) and basic computing skills (ha!), and you teach us punjabi, sewing, how to cook a good curry (for anyone interested, everything is still perfectly compact) and what your culture is about.

And we're doing pretty well for now. What was meant to be a computing class turned into a massive Punjabi drilling from our own students, who find our accents perfectly hilarious, our lack of memory pitiful and who at our age, get ridiculously giddy at the sight of a cartoon of a couple kissing.
If only they knew what we get up to. Let's hope they never ask...

Similarly, the boys are not particularly into english speaking, but are rather interested in what we think of Punjabi men, and are consistently told "no. you must ask sensible questions" as soon as a punjabi word leaves their lips. And yet, without this fascination for white western girls, who knows, we might never have managed to get here.

Oh yea, because while a very few amount of punjabi people say lefties are "lucky", we got especially lucky on the way here. We left sunday at 9.30am. We didn't sleep the night before... you know what with us not being able to drink alcohol, smoke (I'm gonna burst soon and ask Mr. Maan the english teacher if we can smuggle in a pag of fags), shag or wear low-neck shirts. We stayed up all sunday, (well I did. Alizé snored for a few hours). Had an 8h flight. Got into Delhi at 10am. Saw that for 2000 rupees (30e) we could get a nap + shower + massage for 3h in this spa at the airport. Figured, it's cool, we only have another 8h to wait before our next flight. We're young and exhausted. We'll be fine! 6h later, time for us to check in to our next flight to Chandigarh.

Oops. Um.. yea about that.. we over-booked it. If you like, we will pay for accommodation and you can (maybe) leave tomorrow night at 6pm. Orrr we will pay for you to take a 2h30-3h taxi ride to Chandigarh. Oh Ok. We will take the cab. Oh but wait we need to be able to call the trust and tell them we will be getting in late so they will come pick us up. So we call. But "No english""No English".  Oh, here comes the junior Punjab cricket club whose flight has also been cancelled. So happens, Alizé is cute, has a nice smile and a nice bum. "Excuse-me could you talk to the man on the phone in Punjab and explain the situation". Ha! After 4 phone calls. Sorted! Off to the cab. An Australian and an Englishman are waiting for us near the car, also on the way to Chandigarh. Our stuff is lifted in and above the vehicle, we get in, start rolling, oh btw, the ride is actually 5-6h. Ah. Awesome.

Not your usual highway ride either. Oh nooooo. Whole different code here my friend. We have established that if you can drive in India, you can drive anywhere. Here are the rules:

There are no rules. The white lines to delimit car space: optional. On the back of larger vehicles is written "Honk your Horn". Why? Because review mirrors are also optional, and seemingly unfashionable. So if you wish to overtake, if you can amongst the motorbikes, buggies, vespas and bicycles carrying side-saddling women and babies, you honk. So all the way to Chandi, the continuous symphony of honking horns (our driver had a particular honk-fetish) was music to our sleepy ears. Also, the nice australian and englishman? Yea, protestant Pentecostal pastors here to give a conference, check out an orphanage and vaguely attempt to preach to young volunteers. Again, Alizé's "kaboo" luck. Stopped off for our first (and last) left-hand-water-rinsed toilet break. I found it very wet. No drying equipment. Hm. Got there at midnight. Slept in Chandigarh. Left the next morning at 9am for Bassi Pathana. And here we are. Sitting in our lounge, with our shared bedroom and en-suite bathroom. Alizé and I will be sleeping together for 8 months. Might as well get married. Although here may not be the place....

All in all, I have hereby done my best to depict the beginning of our adventure together.

On a more personal-Jess note. I am finding it very hard being away from family, friends and special friend, all of which seem to be in times of hardship and sorrow. I don't think I can explain how much it deeply pains me not to be there to pay my respects, help, or simply feel like I'm helping. Admittedly, it has always been my biggest problem, not being able to say goodbye without falling appart. But right now, I'm finding it particularly hard.

Nonetheless, I adore this place. I am so privileged to volunteer in a place whose philosophy I entirely, sans-compromis, agree with (for now). Alizé and I are brought Indian food (which does not make us sick. Water sanitation is a big project for this trust) for lunch and dinner, as well as tea (tcha) while we give class. A woman sometimes comes in to do dishes and clean the kitchen-area (although we make a point of having it already done before she comes in, unless we have to rush to class). We are stocked up with westernised goods like detox-organic tea, oreos, toilet paper, chicken noodle soup and cornflakes (although the milk here.. ugh!). We have "the wifi". The admin-man, Mr. Gupta visits us in the evening for a small chat to make sure all is well and learn some French. We will be visiting Chandigarh this weekend. Genuinely, could not have been treated any better. Other than for the obvious house-arrest feeling whereby we are not to walk out the house without another "respectable" female presence, we are blessed (I mean that in the most lovely atheistic sort of way of course). And have been told friends and family who wish to visit are more than welcome. Have a look: www.mbtrust.org

So really, maanu passand hae, man!

Love to all,
Jess