Reading is finally set

I met with Dr. Eastley today to make sure I have all the texts I will need to read. I think I will change one of my tabs into a reading list tab thing/center to record/report/respond to what I am reading or something. I will see what ends up being practical in the field, I suppose. Essentially I have everything. There are two books I do not currently own, but Dr. Eastley is getting me PDFs of them. I think I will probably end up purchasing them eventually, but for now I will go on this. Does planning on buying them in the future counteract any potential copyright issues? I think so. Actually the only reason I did not end up buying them is because I can't find them right now. I think that basically covers my bases, don't you think? If anyone questions me I will just clarify my stance on the restrictive and backwards state of academic literature currently.

I think books are going to take up a significant portion of my luggage to India. I can't bring myself to change over to e-books. The idea just sounds awful. Also, it is way way way too politicized right now. I can't support Amazon with their kind of brutal business practices. I am not ready to marry Apple. I have no idea if Barnes and Noble will be around much longer. I think I am just going to wait until physical books are no longer a possibility. Maybe by then e-books will be like MP3 files that you can play on anything that can play MP3s. Because it isn't like I need to sit in an Amazon branded chair or in a specific Penguin zone to read the books I have now. Why would I want to shift to a standard where I have some big corporation reading over my shoulder at all times? The other issue is that a lot of the academic texts I need are not available on any e-readers currently that I know of, so I am going to have to take some books either way.

I will update my tabs, I think, with my reading list. Also, I will publish my proposal soon, I just want to rewrite the background/significance/lit review part because it is so bad. I just did not have the energy with the disaster last semester was to make it what I want it to be. So more improvements pending. Perhaps I will have this blog where I want it to be by October.

Visa Vie

See what I did there?

My visa is finally here. I feel like I have suddenly accomplished so much even though I did not really do anything except throw money at a middle man to process documents for me. It took the visa processing company about two weeks to work with my paperwork. The Indian Consulate took less than six hours to get their stuff done. Oh well. A few polite phone calls and now all is well.

My flight is officially scheduled for May ninth at 10:35 AM.

I still do not have housing, but I am sure that will figure itself out eventually. I have sent out another round of contacts. Did I already say that in my last entry? I cannot remember. Anyhow, new round of pleas is out and we shall see. If worse comes to worse I will just be in a hostel for a while. I am concerned about my ability to approach people to see if I can stay with them, because that is incredibly far outside my comfort zone. But getting out of my comfort zone is the whole point of this endeavor, now isn't it? If I wanted to be comfortable I would have just stayed home, worked, and saved money rather than going out on this madcap adventure to India on money I don't really have to do something I am not exactly sure I even know how to do.

I am meeting with Dr. Eastley tomorrow to confirm I have all the reading material I will need. There is no required reading for IAS 397R or ENGL 490? 493? (I can't remember which one is the mentored research one). For ENGL 358, my Southeast Asian literature class I already have the required texts. It is just my ENGL 480?, the directed readings course, I think I have about half of the books I will be reading from, I just need to confirm if I am missing any, and then get the specific chapters I am supposed to read from Dr. Eastley.

Okay, you know what, I am just going to confirm everything for future reference so everything is clear when I talk about my classes. These are the classes I am taking:

IAS 397R Field Studies Field Course
ENGL 358R Southeast Asian Literature
ENGL 480R Directed Research in English
ENGL 490R Individual Readings in English

There we go. I had it backwards. Anyhow, I have all the readings except for I don't think I have them all for 490R, at least not the specifics. I am super excited for the news reading assignment for IAS 397R. I will probably just get either The Times of India or The Week (an Indian news magazine thing) or something like it. We will see how I am feeling. I think the only part about the FSFC that concerns me is the writing two or three pages everyday. I have had bad experiences with journaling. Maybe it will come easily. I hope so. Maybe if I do it on my compy it will be easier.

Other than that, everything should go smoothly. Before I leave I am definitely going to have to set up a reading schedule for my two reading courses because they are fairly rigorous. Well, exceptionally rigorous, but I wouldn't have it any other way. It is so exciting to finally have a semester in college that is specifically, completely geared entirely towards exactly what I want to study. I am curious how I will feel coming out of it. Will I discover things about it I don't actually like? Will I like it more? Will I like it less? It is so exciting and new. I wish all of college could be like this.

For now I am kind of in this limbo space. In less than a week I will have so much to do it will be crazy, but for now things are basically set. I just need to do a little preliminary planning and pack. Well, besides locate housing, but there is not much I can do about that except e-mail and/or call people and hope for the best. So for now I just work and then come home and read. Right now I am in the middle of Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar. I actually started it a few months ago, but lost interest in it, yet suddenly it has become a page turner for me. It is so strange how that happens. One day I would like to know the psychology behind that. I mean, I know sometimes the story just gets better, but in this case I read the first ten pages and could not find the energy to keep going and then I started again the other day and I could not put it down. Maybe it is all in perspective or something or psychological state.

Horses

Okay, okay, so I sort of fell off of the getting back on the horse horse. But I am back for reals this time. It feels right. Despite my miserable failure to post regularly during the prep course, in the end I somehow ended up with exactly fifty posts on this blog. That seems signish enough for me. That portion of the blog is over and now this one will begin.

Everything is mostly in place. I think. I have my courses set, generally. I just need to reconfirm that I have all the books I need. Never mind how I will actually get the books to India, but that is a problem for another day. Like tomorrow. My proposal was done a while ago and I received my IRB approval today itself. My visa has been approved. It is supposed to be in the mail. Assuming that Travisa came through for me. I have had to sort of gently nudge them through the process, but at least I officially have the visa now. I don't quite have a place to live yet. And by not quite I mean not at all. I am sure that will figure itself out though. I have a friend who has given me some fresh contacts, so hopefully they will lead to something. I may be in a hostel or something for the first few days, but that isn't the end of the world.

I should probably look into packing. I don't know that I will need all that much this time. The biggest part of my luggage will be all my books. So many books.

Anyhow, today I am writing hopefully not too desperate sounding e-mails to some more people to see if I can figure out somewhere to stay, make sure I have all my paperwork in order, and begin the process of packing.

Also, I need to decide if I should push my flight back a week or not. Right now I am scheduled to leave Thursday, but I don't quite feel ready, to be honest. A few more days to put things in order might be nice, if slightly expensive.

I think I am going to rearrange this blog a bit, now that it isn't under any official strictures of the prep course. Oh, and I should probably go over the IAS course contract to make sure I know what I am doing so I can get started on it.

I am slightly nervous I am not going to be able to operate in the heat. Hyderabad wasn't that bad last summer, but this is Delhi. I don't know if I can handle 120/50 degrees again. It was pretty bad in Rajamundry.

Visiting Cards

As we have been talking about ethics and stuff in class, I have been thinking about the ethics involved in my project. I feel like as long as I remain super sensitive to people around me and always ask questions if I am doing anything wrong when appropriate, I feel like I can mitigate most of the potential problems of my topic and methods. I mean, I still want to sit down with a few people and brainstorm with them to come up with ways in which my project might cause problems. The big part semi-ethical hurdle in my project is getting my research, results, my project back to the people that have helped and will help me accomplish it. I am still pondering this idea, but one thing I already planned to do that now will take on a new purpose is getting my own visiting cards. I am super excited.

This is a visiting card:

It may look like a simple business card, but in Indian culture this takes on a completely new meaning. Everyone has visiting cards. You give them out to people you meet who you want to do business with or stay in contact with. It is a way to either make business contacts or to give to someone who can see that you are important, that you are successful. It kind of is like a mini profile in many cases. Like this one. I got it from this blog. They do graphic design, so they are technically showing off their talent, but this sample is a good one for visiting cards, in addition to their graphic design capabilities. You notice that in this example it has the name of the person, M. Ali Bhatti, their position, proprietor, the name of their company, Bhatti + Bhatti, and what they do. It also has their address. When the fictional Mr. Bhatti meets someone, he will give them this card.

As soon as I get to India, one of the first things I hope to do is locate a printer and have five hundred or a thousand visiting cards made up. Mine will probably be a lot simpler than Mr. Bhatti's, but they will serve the same purpose. Basically I plan to just have my name, my e-mail address, my blog address, and maybe my facebook or google+ page (depending on if I can bring myself to support those) listed on the card. That way I can give it to anyone who works with me, who I meet who I hope to work with, or who I just want to stay in contact with. For giving back my finished research project, I still will try to collect people's information and notify them when it is finished/let them know the progress. Visiting cards will give me a double layer of protection. Rather than going through the awkward motions of having to find pens and paper scraps that will get lost, the visiting card is official, clean, and easy to read and provide a way for everyone I meet to at least have the chance of following along with my project. Internet access is still going to be a problem, which I as a lone undergraduate student cannot overcome, but there are internet cafe's and things like that. At least this will be some way to make sure that I do not come off as some invading American taking advantage of India for my undergraduate gain. It is so unbelievably important to me that my project in every way possible give back to India. I hope to gain a lot from this, but a major goal of my topic is to in some way to contribute to the understanding and culture of reading in India in ways that will benefit India continuing to establish a solid place in the global world.

Beginning

Through the methodology assignments, I have realized that really, there is no reason I cannot begin my project now, sort of. I am not exactly sure if there are rules to this, but I am going for it. I am developing some light, easy-going interviews/surveys for a few people I know to sort of get my bearing on reading in India. I know a few Indians here, hopefully they can point me to a few more, and I have randomly run into a few people online that I know from India whom I hope to e-mail or chat with online to get a generally idea for the feel of this area.

Any information I got from this would of course be colored by the fact that most people I know are very well educated, in America, or going to be in America in the near future. Thus I am not quite sure how much their reading experience differs from the general Indian reading experience.

Thinking about this, as I work on finalizing my project into a proposal, I am probably going to limit it in some way to something like just North India, or people who's first language is Hindi or English, as will be the case in Delhi. Granted, there are a lot of different states represented in Delhi since it is the capital I am just not confident that I will be able to get a representative sample large enough to confidently label it as reading in India rather than just a subset. India shares a lot of culture, but there is also a lot of difference between each of the states.

I dislike how scientific that sounds. I really am not happy with how scientific this sounds sometimes. It isn't that I do not want to be scientific, because that kind of is the way to conclude things, I suppose. I guess the bigger issue is that I do not believe that I know enough or that I can know enough about the people I am working with enough to even label them as something. I also know that I am not going to be able to interview or survey or interact with enough people in time to really get "scientific" data. Plus that just sounds so mercenary to me. My goal this summer is not to draw broad conclusions. I don't expect that I will be able to declare with confidence the state of reading in India. What I am going for is more like context, experiences, ideas, guidance. I wonder sometimes if that perspective will end up cutting me short in the end.

I think what it comes down to is part of the reason I ultimately chose to pursue English. I am more interested in the inquiry. I am much more comfortable with observing things and then making observations, trying to see how things ultimately connect.

I think it will probably just end up being a scientific ethnography, or at least the attempt at it, but I like to think how I think about it makes a difference. Maybe I just need to come to terms with the post modern and identify the role it will play in my project.

Hate

So I am in the middle of the days reading, and one thing that occurred to me that I have kind of thought about, but haven't seriously considered and that I am not realizing I should probably very seriously consider is preparing myself for hate. That is a strong word, but I think in my excitement to get back to India, I am not preparing myself mentally for the very real and very likely possibility that this summer will not be all sunshine and roses. I know it won't. Last summer in India I was living with seven to sixteen other Americans (they came and went) and so was somewhat insulated away from Indian culture. I mean, I love love love Indian culture. I love the food, I love the people, I love the religions, I love the heat and the humidity, I love the languages, I love so many things about freaking awesome India! But as I was reading about field notes and diaries, I realize that I really do need to take serious consideration to preparing myself for when I am reacquainted with or discover new things about India that drive me crazy. I guess I am not exactly sure how to prepare myself to hate India (again, strong words, not as strong as I mean, but I hope you understand what I am talking about) other than perhaps just allow myself to be open to the idea. I don't mean that I plan to be apprehensive or distant, but just that I am aware that this can and probably will happen to some degree so that when it happens I am prepared to react appropriately.

Okay, I really have apprehensions about admitting that I have read this book and even more apprehensions in admitting that in some ways it has influenced my life, since in general I think it is honestly kind of a stupid book, but Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love actually had what I thought was one good point. Overall I think it is full of exactly the kinds of things that stupid Americans do and perpetuates the idea that all the rest of the world exists as a playground for Americans and that we bless them by gracing them with our divine American presences. Anyhow, end rant. In the middle of the book in the India section she is at the Ashram misinterpreting Hinduism, but there is one moment that I really, really liked. It is the part where she practices...I don't know if it has a name, I will call it mosquito meditation. The book builds up to this moment, so she is working on these ideas beforehand, but it comes to ahead here. Basically what she is doing is meditating with all these distractions and pain. When she does this she kind of goes through this mental exercise where she acknowledges the annoyance or distraction, confesses she cannot do anything about it, and then sets it aside. In her mind she describes it something like "Cramped knees, I know you are hurting, but I cannot do anything about that right now, I have to keep meditating, it will be okay. I acknowledge you, but there is nothing I can do" and then sets it aside. This idea of acknowledging and embracing pain and difficulty has actually been very helpful in my life and it is what I hope to use to help me deal with any difficulties I encounter in India. India is always an exercise in patience, at least for Westerners. I hope I can just accept and embrace the terrible traffic caused by unwise decisions by Delhi's drivers, admit that it drives me crazy, and then set it aside and just move forward. A lot of dealing with difficult people or misunderstandings or differing world views will probably just come down to whether or not I can accept them with patience. I don't know how long I will be able to maintain this zen thing, but it is on my list of things I hope to be able to do while I am there. India is a lot more about existing than in America. Sometimes you just need to stop and accept/enjoy the moment even though it is hot or you have a headache or you just want to be home or you are late. There isn't anything you can do about it anyways, so let it be and see, perhaps for the first time, what is around you.