Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Radhika now lives in England. Like a fair number of young Indian women, she moved abroad shortly after her wedding.
Her weblog is beautifully written and captivating. Go and spend an hour digging in her past posts, you won’t regret it.
Moz users: if the page appears incomplete as it does to me, just click on the first link in the archives.
I have been asked for permission to reprint a few paragraphs excerpted from Adventures in India. I have also been asked for an interview by the local state radio – they are doing a show on weblogs.
PS: just got home from a few days in England. Keeping my offline life busy. Not much to blog about – and as I always say, “better not to blog than to blog just to blog.”
Seems Anita’s husband got whacked on the head and taken to the police station for… doing nothing.
The conversation she cites remindes me of this one.
The first book of the Harry Potter series has been translated into Marathi.
I’m really keeping an eye open for a Hindi translation. I promise I’ll buy it and try to read it if it is published in Hindi. Reading a book you know and like in a foreign language you are learning is a great way to improve your skills: it makes you read a lot, and it’s not as discouraging as reading an unknown text: you know the story already, so you’re not reaching for the dictionary at every line.
[via The Leaky Cauldron]
A few months back I read this post of Anil’s, in which he suggests reunification as a solution to the India-Pakistan situation. I must say I personally quite like this solution, although I’m not sure it’s really viable (see my ideas on critical mass and big communities). I won’t comment further on the problem and its possible solutions, though, as I totally lack the political and economical insight to do so.
One argument in Anil’s post shocked me, however, and this is what I want to talk about today:
I also feel like the division of 50 years, or one hundred years, or however long it lasts, pales in comparison to the thousands of years of shared history.
[…]
It should only take a strong leader to remind Indians, Pakistanis, and Kashmiris of their thousands of years of shared history.
Anil Dash, Jan. 2002
The thousands of years of shared history
is unfortunately a reinterpretation of history. The indian subcontinent was more or less unified under the Raj, and also at some point under the Moghul domination, but apart from that its history is definitely not one of unification.
I’m currently in the process of digging out enough indian history to demonstrate this (as I like giving evidence for what I state – sometimes). The “united subcontinent” is another of these “myths” whose origin can certainly be traced to relatively recent times (19th or 20th century, probaly). If anybody is interested, I’ll do a bit of research about it.
Now, let it be clear that I don’t blame Anil a bit for making that statement. We all—me included—repeat things that are “common knowledge” every day, and (unfortunately?) a fair amount of such things “heard and repeated” are false (heard about urban legends?)
The reason I’m telling you about this is because when I read the post, I thought “OK, that’s definitely not correct… but where on earth do I start to explain that it’s wrong? Do I have to go through the entire history of the indian subcontinent?” Actually, it’s possible to give a concise explanation—which I will try to do in a future post. The problem, I have now realized, is that my knowledge of indian history isn’t thorough enough that I am able to do so off the top of my head, even though I remember having seen evidence proving the point. So I’ll sweat a bit for the education of my readers and hunt it down đ
I run in to this “where do I start?” problem pretty often, especially when the subject matter happens to be in my field of expertise. For example, I have joined buddha-l for my dissertation research. One of the reasons I haven’t participated to discussions there is that a lot of what is said is so far “off the mark” that I just can’t answer to it with my (limited, albeit specialized) student’s knowledge. If I’m pointing at Anil’s post today, it’s simply this afternoon’s indian culture lecture happened to mention Independence and Partition…
Do you remember that I met a journalist while I was in Pune? If you’re on the notify list you will probably have seen the online article already, but might be curious to see exactly what it looked like in the paper…
I was lucky enough to make it into a movie theatre once during my six weeks in India. I went to see Dil Chahta Hai, and I’ve been listening to the music for the last two or three days. My favorites:
The others are good too, of course. But one has to start somewhere… Happy listening!
Somebody told me you were waiting for photographs of India. Well, I’ve heard you. The first batch is up, with a new layout too: welcome to Markal.
I’ve implemented the new layout for Lausanne too. The gallery index is not complete though, and might land in empty directories (depending on where you try to go!).
One of the things I missed the most when I arrived in India was the long evenings. Today, at something past 10 pm, the sky has only just become black.
The first day I arrived in Pune, we went out to eat around 7 pm. My plane had landed at 5 o’clock, I had had time to dump my stuff in my room, have a bath, and get changed. We stepped outside and it was pitch black. All of a sudden,
it felt as though my internal clock had broken down: it couldn’t be dark already!
I learnt to live with it. Being closer to the equator, India sees less difference in night length throughout the year than a country like Switzerland. It’s logical, it makes perfect sense, but I never would have thought about it. Not before it hit me straight in the eyes. I guess
Switzerland sounds to Indians like Scandinavia sounds to us.
One thing Indians tend to find really weird is the fact that we don’t have a rainy season. “You mean it rains all year long?” Well, of course it doesn’t rain every single day here. But it can rain at any given date. Simply enough, the idea of living in a place where there is no monsoon must sound quite incredible to the indian mind – just as we have trouble
imagining what the monsoon can be like before we have lived (swam) through it.
Today was the last lesson of my class on “Visual Hinduism”. We explored architecture, iconography, miniatures, but also rituals (hence my presentation on indian weddings) and finally even cinema. The teacher, who was doing this kind of “visual” class for the first time, was curious about our feedback.
Actually, I thought it was a great idea. Academic teaching often neglects the realm of the eye – unless you are studying history of art. And the visual world is very important for grasping indian culture.
I remember the first time I saw real pictures of India. My interest for India came late, as I was studying, so I had never spent much time looking at books, documentaries or other hippy friends’ photographs. All I had seen were photographs by BenoĂźt Lange (or similar artists), which are
beautiful pictures but hardly prepare you for what you are actually going to see in indian streets.
So the first “real” indian photographs I saw were pictures of a pilgrimage that my teacher was giving a conference about. I had already started planning my trip to India, although it was still a long way off, and I can remember the surprise of seeing the stretch of brown earth, the
rickety stalls next to the road, and people scattered everywhere. “Gosh, it looks like that over there!?”
During my first days in India, my most intense culture shock was visual. I wasn’t prepared for it at all – I couldn’t have prepared myself, had I even wanted to. Everything I laid my eyes on was new and
unknown. Nothing made sense. All I could see was a mass of colours and shacks and rubbish and puddles and dogs and people. I just stayed there for hours on end, stunned, perched on my small terrasse above the street, looking at the strange world outside and trying to get over the
indigestion.
SpĂ©cialement pour vous, amis frĂ©missant devant la langue anglaise, un portail francophone pour ce site. Le lien “français” dans la navigation vous y emmĂšnera joyeusement, oĂč que vous vous trouviez.
J’en ai profitĂ© pour mettre en ligne un petit texte Ă©crit sur le choc culturel et ses bienfaits.
Un avertissement toutefois: ces pages utilisent la “nouvelle version” de mon site, qui est encore en phase de fignolage. Plus de tableaux, mais quelques problĂšmes encore pour IE5 Mac (et aussi IE4.5). Je vous conseille de dĂ©sactiver les feuilles de style si vous voulez lire en toute tranquilitĂ©. J’espĂšre trouver bientĂŽt une solution!
