It has been a rough few days for me. I am sort of exhausted with my living situation and with the stagnant quality that India has acquired right now. Everything sort of came to a head last night, and I’ll admit that I had my first real problem since I have been here. I just sort of lost it for a few hours, got no sleep, and then had an emotional outburst in class because I hit my breaking point when I forgot to turn off the fan in my room.
Things are progressively getting better though. This afternoon Sucheta took us to the Bandarkar Oriental Research Institute—walking distance from ACM, where we got to see 2600 year old manuscripts and other relics of civilizations that have since dissolved. Sucheta works at ACM as the Academic Director and also our Marathi teacher, but she is really an expert in Sanskrit. She has a PhD is Sanskrit Literature—or something similar—and she is basically just brilliant. These manuscripts were so carefully created and are, or course, all written by hand. There is a special process to create them where first you get the paper wet, then you lay this board of strings across it to create lines. That is how the writing is so straight. After several years the lines disappear, and that is what we see. Who knew? Some of the manuscripts are written in real gold. Others are faded so badly that they have to be immersed in water before they can be read.
There is an amazing library there full of ancient and beautiful books that must be carefully preserved, but not in the ways that we Americans think of preservation. These manuscripts are not bound, they never were, and so they are sandwiched between two pieces of what appears to be a pressed boars, then they are wrapped in a cloth and tied with string. They are placed in mostly wooden cabinets, and that is all there is to it. No special boxes, not UV protective coverings, just cloth and cardboard basically. And the thing is, it seems to have held up for a pretty decent length of time. Maybe we are overdoing it with our chemicals and gloves and stuff. Luckily Pune is a temperate place. A lot of humidity, but no crazy extreme temperatures or anything.
Fun fact (not actually fun, just interesting) There was no paper in India during WWI because the British had their hands full in other areas.
Less fun fact: There are no original Buddhists texts left in India, even though it is the birthplace of the religion. The Mughal rulers destroyed all of it. Now one must go to Tibet, Nepal or China to find original Buddhist texts.
We went to lunch at one of our new favorite spots, the Baba Food Court, just a few short blocks from ACM. They have a great 28 Rs. Thali, which is delicious, relatively nutritious, and freakin’ cheap. 28 Rs. Is approximately 65 cents. Score! After that, I decided to try and get my life back on track, starting with putting more minutes on my cell phone. I went to two places, one of which could not do it and the other which could not do it because they were closed for lunch. I finally sucked it up and went to the Idea Mobile office which is really close to my house, and damn, that place runs like clock-work! I went over to this screen, took a number, gave them my cell phone number and told them why I was there, and within fifteen minutes I was sitting across from a real Idea employee asking her which amount was the most economical. It was fantastic! Addy had told me that India would be the most functional country on earth if the Idea people ran everything, and indeed she was right. While I was there I witnessed a blind man being set up with a cell phone, A kid delivering Thali plates to the employees, and a seamless shift change. It was amazing! Granted, it did take longer than it does at other locations because they do more than just recharge cell phones, but I think it was worth the experience.
Tonight we went far-far-far out into the boonies to this lovely home to perform our dances for some of our teacher’s other students. It was really nice to get out for a while and to meet some new people. They also fed us some idli, really good tea, and some fried onion-potato things. It was fantastic! There were four really little girls there—some of whom I think take Baratnatium from our teacher, and they were too cute. None of them would talk to us though, which is too bad, but also sort of understandable.
