true life planet

The Top Ten Things I love About This City….

(in no particular order whatsoever)..

1. The Indian “head nod”.

This is a slight nod, usually to the left. It means everything and anything, yes, no, maybe. It takes practice, but after being here for several months, I find I am doing it myself.

2. The Indian “head wobble”.

More famous than the Indian “head nod”, probably because Westerners cannot master it so easily. This head wobble literally makes the head of the person doing the wobbling look like it is only loosely attached to the neck. It usually means yes.

3. It’s a dog’s life, here in Calcutta.

Oh, the dogs! I spend hours photographing them, because they are everywhere and anywhere. Fat ones. Skinny ones, Little ones, Sick ones, Hairless ones, Black ones, Spotted ones. Packs of dogs. Single stray dogs.Dogs lying in the middle of sidewalk. Dogs curled up in the street, oblivious to the goings-on around them. Dogs on leashes, being walked by their owners in the early morning, sniffing for the best trash in ther steaming trash heaps. Dogs waiting outside of butchershops, never tearing their eyes away from the butchers hands, waiting for a morsel.

I have never seen so many dogs in one place in my life.

3. Shopping.

Oh, yes, this place is fantastic for buying things, but it’s even better for window-shoping. Except there are few windows.

You can find whatever you want, if you’re willing to go to bother of actually finding it. And although the buying part isn’t that fun, the looking part is really wonderful.

A whole cultural experience, that many people find intimidating as proper bartering here takes time. You need to sit, look, think, then have soda, then think some more..then maybe decide on something, then change your mind, then almost walk away…

4. The colors of the clothes.

Never before have I been around so many colors , just saturated colors, day in and day out. Western clothes seem so, well, boring.

The other day as an experiment, I wore Western clothes–a classic travel outfit, black pants and shirt. I felt so dull and depressed.

Hopefully some of this color will rub off on to me at home. Even black things here have patterns and texture, always something interesting. At home everyone looks the same. Here, everyone’s saying something , just by their headscarf, sari, bangles…all noisily creating one big concert of messy colors. I love it.

5. The kindness of the Bengali people.

In general, people here are the nicest of anyone I have ever met on my travels to third world places. If you are in trouble, say, in a disagreement about a taxi ride price or whathaveyou, you will soon be surrounded by a crowd who will either set you straight(but kindly) or the taxi driver.

6. The metro. It’s actually clean. It’s actually fast. It’s better than the metro in the USA.

Makes my life so much easier, and as long as I stand in the women’s compartment I can usually avoid the occasional groping hand on my bottom!

7. The view from my window.

I’m on the third floor, looking down into a busy alleyway, which always has something going on, even at 3 am. (I’m writng a long journal entry about the goings-on in the alleyway at the moment, hoping to post it on the blog at some point).

8. Kit kat choclate bars, which are vastly superior to the horrible ones we have at home.

They are actually real chocolate and taste non plastic-y, unlike the kitkats at home. I’m a convert. I’ll have to have those kitkats shipped from India to California, now.

9. My job at Daya Dan.

Although at first I felt like it was too much and was ill at ease (Me with autistic kids for 8 hours a day?) It’s turned out to be a good fit. I’d actually (if my home life was different) consider adopting one of these kids-or a child with a disability like autism-someday. I love what I’m doing and I can truly say that it has changed me for the better.

10. The time for reflection that being here has given me.

This may sound odd, buit in spite of being so insanely busy here I have probably thought more about my life and what I want from it and even what I think about things here than at any point so far on the trip.

Maybe it’s becasue you are so confronted with such extreme scenes of poverty and so on, and you soon learn that whatever you would normally do in a Western culture will not work here. It wil not solve things.

So you are just left alone with your thoughts, all of them, some of them terrible dark depressing thoughts and others are golden, rising up from this mess like steam.

I’m so used to keeping my thoughts to myself most of the time, and frankly just having to be with them, that I have found I am thinking more clearly and efficiently here.

I am able to see myself as separate and distinct from what I see around me.

This in turn has led me to define myself more and more in almost every other area of my life.

Being here I have a very strong sense of who I am and what I am willing to do for others and what I am not.

All, in all, a very good top ten list.

gigi

Tags: 1

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 4:45 am and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.