Crooked just the same

Crooked just the same

My Hindi is still the most rotten, but it is slowly improving. Mussorie is proving to be a much better place to study in July/August than it was in February. M and I are ensconced in the christian guest house at the top of the big hill and few hundred meters down from the language school. I've actually been making all of the scheduled classes. I don't miss the 30 minute walk uphill through the cold rain and snow.

It has been raining quite a bit, although we had a respite over the weekend. The mountains here are incredible. We had dinner a few nights back with a fellow student who lives in the Fruitvale area in Oakland. We sat on his back patio and ate local cheese and stared googley eyed at the snowcapped peaks of the Yamunotri and the Gangotri Glacier until the clouds snuck up underneath us and the sun set.

We are sparingly using the digital camera. There are just too many vistas to capture. It does have a nice video record feature that I've been using to torture M. I wait till she is napping, then I attack her with recording camera in hand (not that sort of attacking). Although I get a big kick out of it, M may be counting the days until I leave her to nap in peace.

The rain makes it easy to study or sleep. There is a small posse of likeminded students staying at our guest house, so we sit around reading Hindi books and making fun of missionaries and each other. We stayed up late last night drinking rum and whiskey and a local rice-based alcohol that did not (as some were worried of) cause us to go blind. There were rumors that the rocket-fuel-esque drink would make us all sterile, but we've not verified this theory so far. From what I can tell, consumption of said hooch has not effected the local population growth.

We've been talking a lot about disability and identity development in India. It turns out the too many of the language school students and guest house residents happen to study Anthropology / Sociology. I turn back to reading my Hindi books and practicing writing the script whenever the topic turns to focaultian analysis.

I have had great conversations about young indian call-center employees and the unsustainable trajectory that the industry is following. It turns our that call center jobs that are supposed to level the global playing field are really opportunities to turn young educated indians into wage slaves and office drones. Economic opportunity is helpful to some degree, but there are no avenues for advancement and people get trapped by extravagent lifestyles and debt. We speculated on what the indian call center employees will do when their jobs are outsourced to China.

Will there will be an exodus of millions of over-educated, under-employed, american accented, english speaking indians back to the simple life of the rural villages?

Probably not. But I do see increased trends in repetitive stress injuries and depression in this new generation of worker bees. What a wonderful time for the pharmacuetical companies to save the day. Prozac futures in the subcontinent are high!