Native? [en]

IUCAA, 18 August 01, 4:30 pm

Life and thoughts are rushing by so fast that I can’t keep up. That isn’t new, is it?

Talking with Chris yesterday was nice, because I feel I am quickly “turning native” again. Chris has been living here for the last few months; her questions about life here and indian culture were stimulating for me. Lots of them are questions that I used to ask myself, but which have now simply faded away because I have “blended in” here quite a bit: I tend to find things “normal”, when they used to astonish me.

Journaliste [en]

IUCAA, 17 Août 01, 23h00

Il est certain que je ne suis pas en train de suivre le sage précepte qui recommande de faire une seule chose par jour en Inde. J’en fais quatre ou cinq, je passe mes journées à  courir, et je m’épuise. Je ne peux pas continuer comme ça, je vais finir par tomber à  plat ventre au milieu de la route.

J’ai aussi des piles de choses à  écrire. L’Inde semble me faire cet effet – ou alors c’est simplement la rupture de la routine. Toujours est-il que j’ai mille choses à  dire, je pourrais presque en faire un livre. Mais le soir, je suis tellement fatiguée et j’ai la tête tellement pleine que les mots ne viennent plus et qu’il me tarde de dormir.

J’ai rencontré aujourd’hui un journaliste du “Times of India”, qui voudrait peut-être m’interviewer. J’ai donné mon accord de principe, j’ai pris sa carte, et je lui ai dit où il pouvait me trouver.

Après lui avoir dit au revoir, je me suis retrouvée dans ses souliers, imaginant ses motivations possibles. Quand quelqu’un fait un pas vers moi en Inde, je me demande toujours si il n’y a pas quelque part des motivations cachées moins honorables chez l’autre – argent, prestige qu’apporte avec lui l’étranger, sexe facile. Tout le monde n’est pas comme ça, c’est clair, mais ce genre “d’approche” arrive assez souvent pour qu’on apprenne vite à  se méfier un peu de tout le monde a priori.

Je suis bien moins méfiante qu’au début de mes expériences indiennes, mais bon, ce n’est pas tous les jours qu’un inconnu s’arrête vers moi alors que je marche le long de la route, propose de me prendre en stop sur son scooter jusqu’au stand des rickshaws, et désire ensuite me voir pour un éventuel interview.

Nous avions parlé ensemble deux minutes; tout ce qu’il savait de moi était que je me promenais à  l’université en sari, que j’étudiais les lettres, que j’avais habité ici et que j’apprenais le hindi.

Videshi Lunch [en]

IUCAA, 17 August 01, 5:30 pm

I’ve just had lunch with five women (four american, one irish) whose husbands work in Pune or somewhere in the area. They have been living here for a few years or a couple of weeks. Talking to them was nice, and I realised that I know a lot of places in Pune that not “everybody” knows about – and it is always strange for me to be faced with this fact. I guess I’ll really have to write down my “Pune Recommendations” someday.

Lost Life [en]

IUCAA, 18 August 01, 0:30 pm

For the first time in my life, I find myself missing the life I had at some point. I have often felt unsatisfied by the present, but as far as I can remember I have always coped by looking ahead into the unforseeable future: “things will be better when…”

I really miss the life I had with Somak and Aleika in IUCAA. I miss it in the sense that I would really like to be able to go back to that time. I don’t have the feeling that I’m particularly unsatisfied with my present, though – I just wish I could still be living in the cosy little family we had.

Visiting them in Birmingham is a way of finding a bit of this life again, but much too briefly. Coming here is a way of looking straight into what hurts – a chance to realise where exactly the hurt is, maybe, and hopefully to help heal it.

Déchirure [en]

IUCAA, 17 Août 01, 0h30

Durant les deux derniers jours, j’ai croisé nombre de personnes qui faisaient partie de mon petit monde à  Pune. J’ai fait du shopping, j’ai exercé mes talents diplomatiques indiens avec les vendeurs de divers magasins, j’ai mangé dehors avec Madhav et revu ses copains étudiants, et parlé hindi avec Nisha.

J’avais bien des choses à  écrire, mais elles sont un peu dans l’arrière-plan, maintenant. Après un téléphone à  Aleika, me revoilà  toute nostalgique de l’époque ou nous vivions ici ensemble. La vie que nous avions me manque – et elle aussi, elle me manque. Je crois bien qu’il reste une déchirure qui n’a pas guéri. Quitter un lieu ou une personne trop vite et un peu en catastrophe, ça n’aide pas à  passer à  la phase suivante dans de bonnes conditions.

Et d’un coup, je me demande si d’une certaine façon, je n’ai pas passé une bonne partie de l’année passée à  payer mon départ brutal de Pune. Je crois que je n’étais pas prête à  rentrer – peut-être bien parce que mon départ initial de suisse ne s’était pas passé non plus le mieux qu’il aurait pu.

Il me reste un peu moins de dix jours pour parvenir à  quitter IUCAA en paix.

Pensée [en]

Mieux vaut faire face à  ce qui fait mal. Enterrer la souffrance sous le silence n’est qu’un pis-aller.

Daily Snippets [en]

IUCAA, 16 August 01

Time is starting to fly by. I found a nice Internet Café near Ambedkar Chowk, arranged travel to Delhi and planned a day or two in Bombay with Nisha and Shinde during the Ganesh festival.

I went on a shopping trip to MG Road with Madhav this afternoon. As my eyes are still full of Europe, the goods in Indian stores are all the more tempting.. Maybe I’ll have to start some import-export business so I can walk around buying everything that catches my eye without any guilt.

During the last couple of days I have bumped into a fair number of people I am aquainted to. Most of the security guards and IUCAA staff recognise me, and I saw Shobha, Varun, Tarun, Rita and a couple of people from the servant quarters. I went to visit “my” jeweller, and stopped by at the choli-maker’s.

She has been ill for the last couple of weeks – the flu, they say. Her two daughters are ill too. Her husband showed me upstairs into their small flat so that I could say hello to her. She looked really thin and unwell, something like half her normal self. It really hurt me to see her like that. I hope she gets better.

During a year here, I have acquired quite efficient indian interpersonal skills. If I compare my achievements over the last few days, dealing with shop-keepers and other people, to the way I got around (or rather, didn’t get around) when I first set foot in this country, it is rather satisfying.

Keyboard Stories [en]

To make things worse (as it always happens in this country…) they all seem to have standardized on a 101 key keyboard. Sounds like a lot of keys to hit, doesn’t it? Actually, it is short of one to keep me happy, especially when I mark up as I type. But now, before I let you know which is this magic missing key, I have to provide you with a little digression.

If you don’t know how to touchtype (or perform anything near it) and have never marked up HTML by hand, you might not understand all of what is coming. Don’t worry – it’s pretty futile stuff, though it might hopefully be funny for those who have shared similar experiences.

Have any of you touchtypers out there ever experienced the joy of finding yourself in a country which uses a keyboard layout different from yours? It’s absolutely maddening. It is back to square one, or worse. You just can’t type. Chances are that you will quickly figure out how to install your native keyboard – that is, providing you didn’t already know how to do it.

With a year spent in India, regular trips to the UK, and enough excursions into “raw DOS” (understand: with the factory default keyboard settings) on broken or misbehaving computers, I have gained a fair knowledge of the English (US and British) keyboard. The mapping isn’t that different from the French (swiss) one (which is, while I’m at it, radically different from the standard French AZERTY keyboard, which requires a “shift” key to access the numerals), although most of the punctuation keys are scattered about in wierd places.

The main problem with these English keyboards is that they don’t give access to all the pretty accented characters one uses in French. And having to type ´ and à all the time simply makes me want to scream (especially on a keyboard where I fumble a bit when it comes to “non-letters”). All this to say that if I need to type in French (other than chat and email, which can survive without the accents), the first thing I do when I sit at my “workplace” is install my beloved French (swiss) keyboard.

And now, as you have had the patience to follow me through this geek-talk, I will tell you which key disappears in the void when you install a 102 key French (swiss) keyboard on a machine which depends on 101 little plastic caps for your input. I warn you, however, that non-geeks may not fully appreciate the revelation. So be it.

The missing key is the one which enables to type “<” and “>”. (Note for non-geeks: these two characters are indispensable for writing any HTML tag – locate the “view source” command in your browser to see it with your own eyes.)

With this information in hand, you can imagine how much I miss my Cyberia, and how much I hope that I will find an adequate workplace in Rishikesh. All the more as my typing has trouble keeping up with my writing, which in turn has trouble keeping up with my life and thoughts. None of which really matters as my site is still unavailable.

Internet Cafés [en]

IUCAA, 15 August 01

Before going shopping today (a torture for a shopaholic like me who has a credit card but enough saris and indian stuff to last her a long time), I went down to FC Road to find an Internet Café where I could type down these notes in peace and communicate with the rest of the world.

Cyberia, the Internet Café in which I spent a great many hours during the initial phase of my first stay here, is no more. I recall that they were about to move when I left town. After a lot of hunting around, I tracked down the present office. The closed door which greeted me gave no indication that an Internet Café was still part of their business plan (if anything was left of it at all).

Having tested two Internet Cafés during the afternoon, I daresay that Cyberia is no small loss to me. The people were friendly, technically competent, and above all, each computer booth came with plenty of keyboard and elbow room. All the places I saw this afternoon – and I saw many which I did not enter – seem to have adopted the cramped-cubicle-with-keyboard-in-drawer system. For somebody like me who enjoys resting elbows on table for a comfortable typing position, it is a complete disaster. Add to that my persistent tendinitis, which pokes a sore head out whenever I am sloppy in handling the mouse or attacking the keyboard, and you’ll get an idea how uncomfortable I was.

Humanité [en]

IUCAA, 15 août 01, 22h30

Passant à  travers un groupe de mendiants dans mon rickshaw, j’ai compris en un éclair le sens qu’a ma lecture de Si c’est un homme alors que je suis en Inde. En apercevant une de ces jeunes femmes vêtues de haillons, un bébé au regard vide, s’il a un, jeté négligement sur l’épaule, j’ai réalisé que ce constat fait par Primo Levi sur la perte d’humanité dans les camps, j’avais eu l’occasion de le faire par moi-même, quoique d’une position bien extérieure, lors de mon séjour en Inde.

Il vient un moment où le sort des mendiants ne touche plus – surtout celui des enfants, et de ceux qui ne vendent rien – parce que leur lot les met tellement en marge de l’humanité qu’il n’est plus possible de s’identifier à  eux. Il vient aussi un moment où l’on accepte qu’en Inde un animal n’est qu’un animal, alors que dans notre occident privilégié ils jouissent d’un statut plus élevé que nombre d’hommes sur la planête – et cela même si la loi peine à  les voir autrement que comme des objets.

“Est-ce bien?”, “est-ce mal?” et “que vaut-il mieux?” sont les questions que je ne puis plus me poser pour l’instant.