India on My Shoulder

Now that I’ve been back home for a couple of days, I am feeling the impact that my experience in India has made on me. It’s in my eyes – how I look at things.

Right away, I noticed how everyone on the plane to Maine was white, how thinly traveled the roads are in southern Maine, how flush and antiseptic the grocery stores are. I see my my own home as spacious and wonderfully functional and comfortable – without the help of servants. I love being able to drive my own car, cook in my own kitchen, sleep in my own bed, have my own routines.

I’m so glad to be home and yet home also feels so, well, narrow. I love the safety and security that come with being in my own “known” world and at the same time I am aware that it is so small in scope and possibilities. I do love the work I do here as a professor, but I am aware that it too is small and limited. Small is not a bad thing – actually it’s something I like about living in Maine. Life is simpler here, easier to manage. Portland, our biggest city is only 65,000 people, the air is clean and crisp, it is easy to get around. But there is a trade-off in terms of your experience with humanity. It is such a limited view.

I came back from India with some cultural goodies to enjoy and to remind us of the larger world. We now have Tibetan prayer flags flapping away on our porch adding color and spirit to our snowy landscape. We have a carved wooden Ganesh mask hanging in our dining room along with a Kashmir hand-painted bowl. Soon we’ll mount the carpet I got in Pakistan, the hooked rug mandala I got in a Tibetan refugee self-help center in Darjeeling, and a cloth wall hanging depicting a Bihar community in fine and fun detail. All of these will be beautiful reminders of the culture and people I just visited.

But dressing up our house is only an outward sign that my mind and heart have been moved by my experience in India. What is not so visible is that my sense of belonging to the wider world has grown. I have friends in India that I care about and who care about me – Hindus, Muslims, “others.” I better understand the important work and struggles that are going on there, and around the world, and would like to make a contribution if I can. I don’t know what that might be, but I am open to possibilities.

Being open to possibilities. That’s important to me, maybe more now that I’ve been through my experience in India where the possibilities seem to present themselves so fast and furiously, where people operate much more in the moment, where cell phones and texting are for managing daily operations, not just chatting. I may still be a fiend for planning, but I’m more willing to drop the plan and go with the existing situation.

In the very first entry I wrote in this blog, as I anticipated going to India, I asked the question of how one can prepare for the unknown. Now with my last blog entry, I am thinking that preparation is not as important as disposition. Really, we are always dealing with the unknown, whether we realize it or not. Keeping one’s balance through it all rests on keeping things in perspective, on having the temperament to adjust, adjust, and adjust some more.

I think the most lasting effect of my India experience will be related to disposition and perspective. Years ago, I read a kind of guru book that suggested keeping death on your shoulder as an “advisor” as you go through life. If we keep in mind that we could die at any time, then we can have a much better sense of how to live, of seeing what’s important and what’s not. It was an idea that has stuck with me all these years and sometimes I’m even able to approach life with this in mind.

It occurs to me that I might also keep India on my shoulder now as another advisor. Seeing my Western life through the lens of an Eastern perspective could help me realize what is important and what is not. It could help me navigate in the world of unknowns and unrelenting stimulation. It could also help me see what our world can look like if we continue down the path of unrestrained capitalism and social inequity. Paradoxically, I feel a greater sense of acceptance from my India experience as well as a greater commitment to social justice. Yes and yes.

Even More Signs

I think lovers should be allowed to rest there


Just let me hit it one time!


One god, many faces


Finally - a good test!


Good motto for the ride

Indias

Having just spent a week on a trip out of Delhi, I am struck even more by the incredible diversity of India. We were in the mountains of Darjeeling and amidst people of very different ethnicities, religions, languages, and lifestyles than you see in Delhi. A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Kerala, in the south of India. Again, very different cultures there. What is clear is that there is not just one India, but many Indias.

Or, maybe another way of putting it is that there is no India at all, except governmentally. We know that the current construct of India was created by the British, for reasons not based on culture or even natural boundaries. Even now, there are more separatist tendencies than just Jammu/Kashmir, including the Naxalite insurgencies. In Darjeeling, there is a strong and longstanding fight for a separate Gorkhaland, based on the Nepali language spoken across several existing Indian states and the country of Nepal. I’m sure there are other energies straining against the centralizing force of the modern nation.

Here in India, you can see starkly how media and government projected concepts of national identity are not the same as the more authentic local cultural identities. It is the latter that I find so precious and endlessly fascinating. And it is the former that threatens the latter, not only in India, but throughout the world. In the U.S., it is easy to see how indigenous and immigrant cultures have been undermined, homogenized, even trivialized, by the modern mass-media pop culture, educational systems, and various forms of official and unofficial privilege. The same is true in India, home of Bollywood, TV inanity that rivals that seen in the U.S., and a government/media that embraces the values of Brahminic Hinduism over all the other peoples and cultures in this diverse land.

My time in India has brought me a lot, not the least of which is a deep appreciation of the many types and conditions and expressions of humanity. Being around many kinds of people is enriching as well as humbling. How small we all are, in the larger scheme of things. And yet how amazing each of us is. It stuns me to realize while in the midst of dense Indian throngs that every single person in that crowd has his or her own rich life story, keen intelligence, and connected network of other people. Ungraspable reality, this thing we call humanity.

I was also thinking today, as I get ready to return to my home in Maine, how much I will miss being around all these Indian people. How odd it is going to feel, at least at first, to be back among all white people who speak the same language, are primarily Christian, and hold much the same values and lifestyles as I do. I figure I will have something of a reverse culture shock, coming back into my white middle-class life in the U.S.

I’ll have to do something about that. I want connections to people who are from different worlds than I am. I am looking forward to being back in my home, but my heart wants so much to also be connected to other homes, other peoples, those whose lives dwell outside of what I know.

I ponder about the idea of “the other.” Now, more than ever, I can feel how much our fear of “the other” prevents us from loving and appreciating our fellow humans on this planet and causes so much of the tragedy and heartache in the world today. I have learned during my stay in India, to see myself reflected in “others.” Over and over I wonder what I would do if I were in their circumstances, who I would be if I grew up as they have. I can see all kinds of characteristics in others that I can see as my own, both for good and not so good. And this sense of oneness feels like love.

Thank you, Indias.

A Good Start

For the past two days, I have tagged along with university faculty supervisors to see student teachers present a culminating exhibit for their semester. What they were required to do was to create a resource room for their host school and discuss the use and instructional value of the artifacts they produced. The resources were to be made of cheap and readily available materials, portable, and durable. They should have been used by the students during their student teaching.

What the students created was for the most part done with artistry and imagination. There was a lot of work here. But the rooms were heavy on displays and light on instructional materials that could actually be used by teachers in the building. More problematic was that the students we visited had trouble explaining either the learning theory or practicality behind the resources. More than once I felt sorry for the students who did not have very good answers to the very legitimate probing questions posed by the faculty. As I looked through my teacher educator eyes, I could not tell whether they were prepared to teach in schools or not.

These students are completing a 4-year undergraduate education degree program in elementary education, called the B. El. Ed. Program. Created in the early 90s in the Delhi University system, it continues to be a leap forward in terms of professionalizing elementary school teaching in India. The norm had been, and still is, that a one or two year program after high school is all that is required for teaching young children, not a four year degree program.

There are many good things built into this 4-year program, especially psychological and sociological perspectives and experiences that emphasize human development and communications. But it seems to suffer from the very same thing that four-year teacher education degree programs in the U.S. are criticized for – a lack of content strength and practical know-how.

What exists for secondary teachers in India is a one-year B. Ed. program, which is a second bachelor’s degree. The first bachelor’s must be in the discipline that will be taught in the schools. The subsequent teaching degree is not a master’s program because it is the initial degree in education. In the U.S., such one-year post-baccalaureate programs are common for both elementary and secondary certifications and are at the master’s level. We have one at my university that is nationally recognized for its excellence.

India recently enacted a Right to Education Act (RTE), which calls for educating all students up to grade 8 and including those with special needs into a mainstreamed classroom environment. In a country that has a long history of not educating all children, especially girls and those who are poor or of lower castes, this presents many challenges. Not the least of which is the urgent need to prepare a huge number of teachers in a hurry who can teach a diverse classroom at high levels. It is what we are dealing with in the U.S., but the newness of the mandate to educate all children, the abrupt increased demand for prepared teachers, and the new requirement to mainstream special education are much more intense, given the scale we are talking about. This is a country of 1.2 billion, well over 3 times the population of the U.S., representing about ¼ of the people on earth. Yikes!

It would be possible and desirable to scale up the B. El. Ed. program, hopefully tweaking it to put a greater emphasis on content knowledge and practical experience. I would vote for also creating elementary B. Ed programs (i.e., the second bachelors degree used for secondary teachers) that include both general education and special education. We have an online program like this at my university. It is designed to prepare elementary teachers to handle the learning needs of a very diverse classroom and is very well received by students and schools.

But knowing how funding in this neoliberal country is not being adequately provided for public education and other social services, I fear that what will happen in India will be a quick fix rather than an investment in preparing teachers well. This is certainly the trend in the U.S. and I expect it will be the same here in India.

The student teachers doing their exhibitions here may not have all the chops they need to be effective in the new educational environment of India, but at least they are able to envision education that is child-centered, interdisciplinary, and open to possibilities. This they clearly exhibited. It’s not enough for addressing the elementary education needs of India, but it’s a good start.

Tiramisu for Breakfast

Last night a friend and I went to an Italian restaurant. We celebrated (1) the birthday of her first daughter, now all grown up and living on her own; (2) her successful (we think) negotiation of the U.S. Embassy in getting a visa to come to the U.S.; and (3) the seeming recovery of her ex-husband (ex as of 20 years ago) from a spate of cancer and her consequent liberation from being the facilitator of his hospital care here in Delhi.

We went for Italian because we were both tired of Indian food and there was a big neon sign in the market beckoning us. It turned out that they had a special meal deal going on to celebrate their one-year anniversary in business. There were balloons and streamers and festive Italian music playing. My friend took this all as meant to be for her celebrations.

We may not have been paying close enough attention to the nature of the special meal deal because we both ordered it. When food and more food kept coming to our table we realized that the deal was probably meant as dinner for two. So what we had done is order dinner for four! We carried on and had lots of take-away. Among my other leftovers, I took my tiramisu home to have later, but I was so full I just put it in the frig.

This morning, I read just some brief excerpts from Baba Ram Dass’s new book, Be Love Now. He’s the same wonderful soul who led so many of us on a spiritual journey in the 60s and 70s with his book Remember, Be Here Now. Once again, he was talking about being in the present, recognizing that everything is changing, and that we should not hold on to the transitory forms of this life.

I was moved to a deeper place and it also occurred to me that the transitory tiramisu in my frig needed to be eaten soon or it would melt into its own soaked goodness. So I had it for breakfast and celebrated my own liberation from convention and my improvisational being here now, nevermind the decadence factor. I loved it in the now, despite my mother’s warning that we should not love our food, only like it (she was sadly mistaken, I'm afraid).

Now I’m feeling a little buzzed and having a bit of a queasy stomach. These are the wages of sin, of course. I guess we still need to attend to healthy living on this plane of existence, even if it is transitory. I think I’ll do some walking today to pay for my wild living. But then again, maybe something else will come up in the now and I will love it instead.

A Bigger Person

A friend of mine just asked me how my time in India has changed me. I had to think about it and will still have to think about it some more. I think I will need to be back in the U.S. before I can really understand how I have been affected.

Here’s what I can see so far:

• I know a little better what it feels like to be a minority, albeit a privileged minority;

• I am (a little) more comfortable with chaos and crowds;

• I am much more conscious of the oppression and repression of women around the world;

• I appreciate better the importance of looking out for others;

• I am more tuned into nonverbal signals (helpful when you don’t speak the language or know the societal norms);

• I thought I knew what human diversity meant – I had no idea;

• I thought I knew what a stratified society was like – I had no idea;

• I’m more in the immediate present;

• I’ve honed my ability to be flexible and to not sweat the small things;

• I have a deeper understanding of how globalization works for the rich only.

Most of all, as I told someone today, I will always have India - and Pakistan - in me now. I have friends I care about here whom I will miss when I leave – Muslims, Hindus, people of color, people who cannot speak English well, young, old. I have sights and sounds and smells in my head. There are Indian beauties that I love, injustices I am outraged about, contradictions that I am confounded by.

My friend said she thought I had been broadened. I’m thinking I’ve also been deepened in some ways. Am I a bigger person because of India? How could it not be so?

Arundhati Roy's speech

Here is Arundhati Roy's speech that led to her being threatened with a sedition charge. If you want to understand Indian politics and militarism, you must read her. To me, she is the Noam Chomsky of India - informed, committed, outspoken, and fearless.