My Indian Adventure

[bejapuskas]

Hello readers,

 

I decided to write a journal about my experience with living and studying in India as a European teenager. I will post some stories and insights here, it has been a wild ride so far.

 

Enjoy!

[Michael569]

Looking forward to reading about it ?

[Harikrishnan]

where in India are you studying now?

[bejapuskas]

@Harikrishnan  In Maharashtra  

[Harikrishnan]

@Rahul yadav @fi1ghtclub @Niranjan Kuna @assx95 @Hardik

[fi1ghtclub]

Hey yo! You can DM me if you're ever in and around Mumbai or need any help while you're here. It would be nice to have an opportunity to interact with you.

[bejapuskas]

Wow, so many Maharashtrians! I didn't know we have such a big community on this forum. I would love to see Mumbai. Hopefully we will be allowed to travel this year. 

[bejapuskas]

One day my mum came home from her job and told me that her co-worker's daughter graduated high school in UWC Costa Rica. She said that in a few months, there will be another selection process and that I could apply and get a scholarship to also study abroad. I have never imagined that something similar could come to me, but I was the kind of person who would accept that challenge and grab that opportunity by its horns.

 

The day after she helped me to miss a day of school and instead attend a seminar about this scholarship. The girl who organized it was 18. She described her amazing journey in Armenia, how she learnt Russian and met so many amazing people. I was lucky to be the only person to contact her after that seminar, so I received her fully attention and she helped me with the essays and interviews for the selection process. 

 

Finishing high school in India was not the only option and I have had some doubts in the past about whether it was the right choice. My family and some friends were questioning my decision of going to India instead of for example Italy or Singapore, which are much more developed and safer countries. I relied on my experience with interacting with my Indian friends who work in restaurants in my home town in the Czech Republic. Since I have began the online studies and later arrived to India, I have never regretted this decision. 

 

The school year started in a rather unpleasant way. Many people were not convinced that they are going to get their visas, some of them are still imprisoned in their homes, specifically those who live in poor countries in Africa and those in China, because of the conflict near the borders with India. Our school has lost many beautiful faces who tranferred to other international schools. However, the online studying has been very enjoyable so far. It is definitely because of the dedication and passion of the teachers (I have discussed psychedelics with some of the faculty even) and the diversity of the student body, who come from 81 different countries, many of which have mixed nationalities, are queer, have experienced war, poverty, etc...

 

My opinion on education has really changed. Teachers and students are friends here, we do not have to play any social games or be polite at all. We laugh, struggle together, learn, grow, make inappropriate jokes... My favorite class so far has been the English Literature class. Our teacher only has a bachelor's degree, but he has travelled around the world, speaks many languages and is very knowledgable. These qualities and experiences make him a much better teacher than the other literature teachers I have had, because of his life experiences and wisdom. The most amazing thing about the class is that when we read a text, everybody understands it differently. I have for example never thought that patriarchy, gender discrimination and colonialism have been a serious problem, because I have not experienced them in Europe to a great degree. This was mainly because of how western-centric and biased the education system is in most schools. How can people overlook the fact that most of what we read is from white, heterosexual male authors? Reading texts from India and Africa has blown my mind and pushed me up the spiral, most education indeed is brainwashing. There is so much beauty in diversity. However, I still oftentimes seek out my dear friends who share my sense of humor and with whom I can be sarcastically insensitive.

 

Some few days ago I have finally packed up my bags and prepared myself for a long flight. I slept over at my friend in Prague and the next day we were in India. It was a big shock, there was smog inside of the Delhi airport building and stray dogs were barking at us in between the terminals. The airport staff were shaking their heads from side to side when we handed in our documents and we were the only white people to be seen. The flight from from Delhi to Pune exceeded our expectations, everybody back home was telling us that it would be a shitty airplane with a war veteran injured pilot who has suffered brain damage. But that obviously was not true! Music that resembled some sort lullaby before the plane took off was an invention we have never seen in Europe and it made us rate the flight with 1 extra star in our minds. In Pune, we got out of the airport building and immediately all the taxi drivers started speaking at us in Hindi and Marathi, I so hope they thought I am bhaaratiya, because that would make me very pleased. 

 

The next person we saw was our actual driver. The first mistake I made was trying to enter the front seat from the right side, how dumb of me. We left the airport and even though I was quite tired, I could not sleep, because what I saw was so incredibly diverse, interesting and beautiful. The roads are probably my most favorite thing in India. Nobody adheres to the rules, cows and dogs everywhere around, so many rikshas, tricycles and motorbikes, slum children walking without shoes, hijras (transgender beggars) knocking on our windows... I have never seen anything similar. 

 

After that we arrived at the hotel where I have seen for the first time some of my online classmates and teachers. The mandatory quarantine in a hotel was very very boring, I fainted once because of the shock my body was undergoing with all the different food, climate, air etc... The funniest thing that happened was when my Ethiopian roommate asked me whether I want to wear a jacket in 29 degrees celcius, which was too cold for him. (in my home country there is snow right now, Maharashtrian weather is basically a permanent summer for me) 

 

The teachers finally let us go for a walk around the hotel and its backyard where there were some dumpsters and very poor looking houses. I asked my friend from Delhi whether it is actually a slum and she said yes. I hugged the fence and observed the life there. It was very tragic for me to see, because I was spending time in a very luxurious hotel and from my window I saw these people living in extreme conditions. Right next to the slum were modern skyscrapers and a highway. It made me realize how stupidly rich I am, even though I come from a middle class Czech family, which is by no means considered wild rich in the West. The night before we headed to campus I spoke with my Ethiopian roommate about happiness in Africa.

[lostmedstudent]

You should make youtube videos about it!  If you like filming, it would beinteresting

[lostmedstudent]

Also how long have you been in india now ? 

This is so cool are you there without your parents ? Supervised by school officials ? 

[bejapuskas]

@lostmedstudent I was thinking about starting a youtube channel yeh  I have been here for a month now. My parents are back in Europe, fortunately  Yes, there are teachers, guards, nurses, doctors etc. who take care of us.

[lostmedstudent]

very cool@bejapuskas

if you do lmk

[bejapuskas]

14th day of quarantine, 24th December 2020 - Everybody is celebrating, but not because of Christmas - those were celebrated only by me, my Czech co-year and some few other people that day, most of our students celebrate Christmas the day after. I saw a bus from the window of my hotel room and I knew that it was the bus that was supposed to take us to the school's campus. Nobody was certain about whether the campus actually exists, we have been waiting since August to see it. 

 

After two hours of yet another very interesting ride, we took our bags and headed to our new homes. We were told that we are not supposed to hug, but when I knocked on the door of our house, my neighbour from Afghanistan hugged me so tightly that my feet left the ground and he picked me up in the air. The same was done to me by my other housemates from Chile, Brazil, Nepal, India and Bangladesh. I later realized that everybody is very very touchy even with people of the same sex, nobody ever laughs at anyone's sexuality here and there is almost zero repression of expresiveness. On the same day, we sat down in the lanyard of our house and talked about the very much needed house rules - in a multicultural community like ours, nobody can ever know what to expect from their housemates and roommates. The most important rule is that we are not snitches - we really do not want any of our friends to lose their scholarship for "experimenting" and "exploring" as we call it. But of course we behave very nicely. (thanks for teaching me about all the different types of sex you can have Leo, it is very much appreciated)

 

The day after, there unexpectedly wasn't any snow and my body was very confused about that fact. I wanted to look fancy that day so I asked my roommate from India to borrow me his kurta. (traditional Indian clothing) It was a very good way to raise my social status in the eyes of my South Asian friends. I seriously need to buy one for myself. (the girl in the picture is my Czech co-year)

[bejapuskas]

For a certain time period I had a personal crisis, which stemmed in me asking why am I so lucky to be white and European from a nice middle class family. After meeting so many people who have experienced war, racial discrimination, sexist violence etc. I just started thinking how the world is fair. Back at home I could easily dettach from such issues, but they just became a lot more personal to me at this school. 

I asked my English literature teacher whether he could talk about this with me and he took me to a hike to a nearby hill in the Western Ghats. We ended up talking about how in the last academic year, some students visited Karnataka's red light district, which is the second biggest in India, as a part of a project experiential learning week. At one point, one of the sex workers asked him whether she can dance for the students and the faculty, he had to hesitate, but then he thought it is probably something she does and is proud of, so he gave her the permission. It ended up not being erotic.

[bejapuskas]

This week, 18th to 24th January 2021, we had an American regional week. We had a special American dinner without beef, snack making (we made empanadas) in faculty's houses, futbol tournament, movie night and also our own Burning Man, which turned political. (our school does not have the policy which discourages its students and faculty to openly express their political opinions, so burning Trump and Bolsonaro was not against anything)

[Elisabeth]

@bejapuskas  What's new?  

[bejapuskas]

Last week, my classmates Omar from Morocco and Ibrahim from Syria organized a speech and a discussion block about Syria. Many Syrians are hopelessly trying to get a better life in Europe. One of those people was a 3 years old Alan Kurdi, whose body was found on a beach in Turkey.

"After Alan's death, absolutely nothing changed" says Ibrahim. "My father used to travel regularly from Damask to Duma to his workplace. He used to see his colleagues as they were lying down on the concrete with bullets run through them. In the end, he had to leave this job. When there was a storm before this discussion block, me and Omar were joking about the thunders being exploding bombs. Many people who I've known have died in war. Obviously my family died, obviously many of my friends died, my uncle... The situation is really hopeless, because Russia and China are preventing the EU from intervening and the American army also cannot do anything, because they do not have any allies in Syria. The main three military groups functioning in Syria are the Islamic State, the corrupted totalitarian government's army and the radical opposition."

Every time somebody from the Middle East opens their mouth I feel like I shouldn't complain about absolutely anything. My life is just too good to be true, to the extent that I do not even want to believe that what Ibrahim and Omar were saying was true. 

This points at a larger issue in our society where there is so little diversity and unbiased information. For example, there is no way that a Syrian could travel to the US, so US citizens are probably not gonna encounter a Syrian person in a classroom and hear their story in a politics or history class for example. All the information shared in these classes and also in media and therefore basically most major information sources is so extremely biased that it is ugly. 

This week we also had a discussion about how ignoring art subjects, especially theatre and film, in education leads to enhancing this single perspective bias. Many people in our school have had a chance to perform in a theatre play and act a character that was oppressed in the play, which might have drastically changed their perspective. Imagine politicians could perform in such plays as a part of education. 

[bejapuskas]

Day after my birthday, on the 15th of April, I was sitting at a laptop and listening to a speech of our head of college - she was announcing that we will all have to return to our home countries a month earlier, because of exams being cancelled and the increasingly worse pandemic situation in India. It was a very sad moment, since I thought there was still so much more left for me to explore and discover on campus and in India, yet the opportunity was not there for me anymore. (only next academic year) I am now sitting back inside my house in Czechia and I feel the need to self-reflect on what happened, since there were many big moments of growth and value awakenings for me.

The school got me to reconnect with my creativity and imagination. Since the faculty and students at the school were not as hierarchically different at our school and we were not meant to be polite, there was more confidence in people overall and less fear of judgement. In my opinion, that's a great environment for creativity to develop. Also, my theater teacher was so amazing and he showed us a theater company called Complicité, (which means completely in sync in French) which happened to be very spiritual and made me have psychedelic state vibes in classes. All of this inteconnected my mind so much, made me more connected to others, better at collaboration and much other fancy stuff.

I also started valuing art much more. My literature teacher showed me how well art can be used for education and spiral development if one reads fiction books that present very different perspectives. (for me this was non-western books from the Middle East, Africa, Japan and India) Being the only white person in class with all these people constantly calling me out on subtle and less subtle racial and other biases got me to go very deeply into exploring green and basically social justice in general. By being in this class and also by seeing the amount of poverty I saw in Mumbai, Delhi and Pune, I realized my privilege as a white person and more deeply realized how much devilry there is in the people who are world leaders, as well as how important it is to educate the future generations about this, because they might become the next world leader. And art can be a great tool for doing that. 

My view on feminism also changed drastically. Before, I saw feminists as privileged white women who complain about petty things. Now, I realize how serious gender issues are in the world for both men and women and how everybody is in one way or the other a victim of patriarchical society and its expectations and values. I started reading an Indian feminist book, which I would never consider doing before, I would probably say to myself that it is useless. I am also making many notes on it, which really helps me to cure my insecurities about girls calling me out. Being in my first healthy relationship (with a girl of colour) who always explained some social justice stuff to me when I was triggered or angry or misunderstanding also helped a lot and I think that working on my insecurities in this way made me happier, more developed in life and also able to have a healthy relationship with a girl finally after all these years. Key statement: a feminist is by definition also a humanist.

Realizing my own privilege is also connected to what I realized in philosophy class, where we talked a lot about consciousness, life and what it means to be human. I realized how much every single life matters, not just black lives of white lives or animal lives, but literally all lives. I stopped believing things such as that my family is more important than other people or other biases. I feel more responsibility to be politically and environmentally conscious and to align my life purpose with helping and educating others about the value of life.

[bejapuskas]

More new content incoming soon. I am currently in Guwahati, which is a rather unexplored territory of India to most tourists, quite a unique experience. I am living with a Hindu family of my girlfriend, travelling everyday, taking motorcycle rides... I am currently quite busy, but once I have some free time, I will start posting a lot here. If anyone has any advice on how to write a blog, please DM me.