Progress report

           With the mid-February mark on the horizon, it seems a fitting moment to take a moment to reflect on my life in Bangalore.  Three more weeks remain before I hit the road again.  I’ll be traveling through India for most of March and then will head north in April to do some trekking in Nepal.  The next few months promise to be amazing, and afterwards, who knows where I’ll end up.  I’m sure I’ll end up somewhere so I’m not too worried.  A big advantage of deferring admission to graduate school for a year is that it gives me the freedom to explore without worrying too much that I will get lost along the way and lapse into some sort of peripatetic, aimless lifestyle because I know I have to be in New York City come August. 

Still, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in India is about how to let go, how to be comfortable with situations that make you feel uncomfortable or are out of your control entirely.  I put in my fair share of effort to control areas of my life than I can, like my immediate travel plans or my room for instance, but once I leave the confines of my room, I slip into a much more relaxed attitude.  India, as rumor has it, is a rather chaotic place on the surface (below the surface, it is actually quite orderly), and you just go with the flow.  Today, I was on a bus that was so full that when the driver tried to close the door, he nearly trash-compacted the five people who had managed to squeeze only half of their bodies inside.  I wasn’t particularly perturbed by the close contact with many stinky, sweaty men that this ride entailed because my concept of personal space has also evolved.  Earlier, I was in a rickshaw stopped at a light when a beggar holding a baby approached and, in her entreaties, began stroking (not in a romantic way) my arm and touching my face for at least a minute.  I guess I’ve just become thick-skinned, but I ignored her.  That said, I haven’t yet made a habit of holding other men’s hands though I still am subjected to that pleasure every now and then.

But I digress.  In sum then, I’ve been in Bangalore since November 15^th, I’ve been working since November 18^th, I’ve been living at my current residence since December 1^st, and I’ve been a member of the local gym since December 6^th.   I’ve made a few good friends who I’m going to miss when I leave or when they leave, and I’ve made many peripheral friends.  This category ranges from the people with whom I have five minute conversations on the street corner followed by the ritual exchange of phone numbers to the more meaningful peripheral friends like the trainer at my gym.

Lab continues to be a reliable source of boredom and amusement.  I’ve started learning to read and write Hindi – my attempts to learn how to speak have been suspended for the last few months – when nothing else is going on.  This decision has been a good one because the whole lab has gotten behind the effort, and everyone chips in to help me out.  It’s an interesting dynamic because most of my labmates are South Indian and, therefore, speak limited Hindi if they speak any at all, but almost all of them studied it in school and can write. Their patience with me has paid off and now I have a loose grasp of all of the consonants used in Devanagari, the script used for Hindi.  Now, I just have to figure out the vowels, and the compound consonants, and what the things I’m writing mean…  In any case, they say it takes a village to raise a child.

I also have started coming up with more outlandish ways of describing my lab experience.  I now think of the guy who runs the chemical stockroom as the Soup Nazi (“No flask for you!” or “No sodium borohydride for you!”), and have re-imagined the lab as a battleground. Competition for space and materials between opposing research teams is fierce.  While black-ops groups employ underhanded tactics to sabotage opponents’ projects, diplomats patch over the strained relationships to maintain a civil working climate.  The pace of work, like the pace of war, is slow and steady, but every now and then it is punctuated by moments of sheer terror and panic.  Tragedy can strike without warning, and victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat.  Let me assure you, however, that the camaraderie of the battlefield and the ups and downs of combat beats the pants off of sitting at a desk reading documents like I had been doing while my foot was still in a cast.

There are many topics I would still like to write about, but time is running thin, and life has gotten a bit hectic.  This weekend I’m going to Goa, which is one of the few places in South India that I haven’t checked off my list of must-sees, and in just a moment, I’ll be hopping into a rickshaw to meet up with my ex-pat friends.  My French buddy who had been working at my company finished his last day yesterday, and we are going out for a few drinks to celebrate/say goodbye.  We became close mostly because he is a good guy, but partially because he was the only other white person working on our campus that I am aware of (excepting the Managing Director’s Irish husband who doesn’t count).  And then there was one…