Being an Alien

Most of my friends here in the US say that they were / are immediately subsumed by the Indian crowd as soon as they arrive here. The Indians take them to places, introduce them to culture, help them place gradually in this new time-space. This makes the transition a lot more comfortable - smooth.

On the other hand, they say that Yale has a very low international admittance. Statistics say it's only 8%. There is no 'Indian community' here at Yale, except the Hindu Society and the South Asian Students Association. The latter is more heavy with Koreans and Chinese. One hardly finds Indians for traditional gatherings.

But what after all is the need to meet, know and be around Indians here? At the American Alumni Association award ceremony, the Director said "try not to be around Indians, make friends from other countries - you are going there for exposure."

Having spent about two-and-a-half months here, I constantly get pulled by the two thoughts above. Where on one hand, I have the opportunity of being away from Indians and Indian culture (and being within a foreign crowd), I feel a strong pull gravitating me towards my community. I shall go towards describing what this whole phenomena is!

There are several issues that operate under above attitudes that various people promote back in India. And through my discussion with various friends here, and who have been here, I have come to realize several aspects. I shall try and enlist them one by one.

The first, which my friend Prashant (Prabhu) told me was that it makes a difference at what age you go to the US. Generally people visiting the US at the age of 22-23 do not find it so hard to mingle up and adopt to change. Those are still the years in which you are moulding your personality and have not seen the world outside the cushioned space of academics. Secondly, it makes a difference if you have been a visitor to the US before actually spending a longer time there. You have a brief exposure of the bests that can happen to you / you can experience in your formal US life.

Coming to what the life in US is: US is a land of young people. The country attracts a lot of youth and likes to invest in youth. The average age of people who drive this country would be around 25-40. This age-group, absolutely free, independent, with very little family connections, away from parents, with hardly any culture of savings, sometimes spendthrift - generate a different kind of socio-economic dynamic. Either you need to attune yourself to it at the right moment or you distinguish yourself from them if it's late!

In universities like Yale, as I said before, since most of the population is American, they get along well within themselves. They have their own circles, own things to do. For them, it does not matter whether or not they indulge in new friends from other places. They know their system, they have their priorities and they hardly have time to indulge with you. In a program like mine - an independent research program, our interactions become further rarefied. Our ages are disparate and we are only 4 of us in this program. It is hard to initiate or enter into the space of Americans. Or rather, I still do not know how. They are not as sociable as us (Indians) and I have yet not seen any American who approaches an outsider for friendship. One wonders why it has to be only us to take the first step, and constantly keep on trying hard to maintain it?

The answer is simple: We came here. We decided to leave our country and study in another. And the above process is what is called the condition of alienation. With no cultural ties to this place, a completely new social dynamic and constraints of geography and time-space, the sense of alienation is completely encompassing.

You realize that when you want to talk back home or a friend, the time zones clash. The facilities of communication clash. And since you can not afford luxury, everything becomes confined. Thus there are two forces acting towards a single condition - an externalized social space that does not absorb you and an internal constraint that restricts you and makes you realize of your limitations - both making you more and more inward.

And well, this inward reflection makes one aware of oneself. In this condition, you are your best friend and you are your worst enemy. All decisions affect you and you are under your full control. All thoughts are self generated, all moods are self controlled. It's futile to expect anything from any one. History and geography play a game.

And this is just something I wanted to write since a long time. This shall pass too.

History of Madness

If madness drags everyone into a blindness where all bearings are lost, then the madman by contrast brings everyone back to their own truth: in comedy, where everyone deceives someone else and lies to themselves, he is a comedy of the second degree, a deception that is itself deceptive.

The Ship of Fools, Hieronymous Bosch

The Cure of Folly (the Cure of Madness), Hieronymous Bosch

Mad Meg, Brueghel


The rise of madness on the Renaissance horizon is first noticeable in this decay of Gothic symbolism, as though a network of tightly ordered spiritual significations was beginning to become undone, revealing figures with meanings only perceptible as insane. Gothic forms lived on, but little by little they fell silent, ceasing to speak, to recall or instruct. The forms remained familiar, but all understanding was lost, leaving nothing but a fantastical presence; and freed from the wisdom and morality it was intended to transmit, the image began to gravitate around its own insanity.

All from Michael Foucault.

Techno-cultural Revelations & Adjustments

Technology makes so much sense here in USA. I think it is ideal for this world. I don't think USA will survive without it!

I had to adapt to a lot of technology as I came here and I am still in the process of updating myself with all the stuff that they use. In the first month, I found it extremely difficult to maintain my schedule. Since the university is a campus and classes happen all over, I was almost fed up using maps and codes for building names. Every bit of document seemed like an index. It seemed as if I was wasting more time in remembering than traveling! I was forgetting so many smaller things that needed to be taken care of and there were pockets of time which had gotten created because of the flexible nature of choice.

(This is one thing I realize as I write: In Indian system of education, you are packed with classes one after the other, and it's all structured for you. Neither do you have to think of space, nor time. You are seated in one place most of the time and the faculty is circulating. Here, every one is circulating all the time. In the system back home, I always knew that I would be engaged for half my day. So I had a fixed empty half - which I could mindlessly think of utilizing anyway. Here, since I have different pockets of time on different days, conventional time table techniques constantly failed)

I finally had to ask my colleague how she maintained her time table. One of them said that she would make a 'To Do' list every morning and follow that. Another one, was much ahead. She would use Google Calender. I have become so used to google calender now that I absolutely need to see it to know which pockets I have free. It makes sense to use them since there is internet every where, there is a computer everywhere and it just syncs with the smart phones. Thus, smart phones are used to their maximum potential. The timetable is always with me since any change is updated through wifi on campus.

Bus systems are on GPS and so I only move out when I see the bus approaching on my phone app. When you call a security shuttle, it gives you a time and arrives then. Before arriving, it gives you an automated call to be prepared out of the house near the place you specified to be picked up. Announcements about weather, storms, robberies and system crash are immediately e mailed. Basically - everything is tied up to the  internet and a strong network system.

The google calender has helped me to slot in chosen lectures, symposia, music events or any other events into my schedule. I plan my time through the google calender. It pops up a message in advance to remind you if you are forgetting any thing! It just makes you forget your distress of following up things.

But in terms of exploiting technology, I am far behind. I will have to make extra effort in order to really be up to date! Needless to say there is another side to this story. But that's not for this post! 

The Past 2 Weeks in New Haven

If those who read this blog have been wondering why has there been no writing for the past month, I am going to spell out the fall of events for my last month in US! If there would be any period comparable to this one in my life before, it has to be the Delhi study tour during 2011! But I am not able to make up my mind which one is graver. After a lot of thought about the context, I feel this one was more emotionally draining.

It all begins during the end of last month - September 2012 end. I was to change my house and shift to the new one. The flowchart below will give a better idea of the fall of events:

And thus, is my life shuttling between settling and studying. There are layers of things between the flowchart and I think it would be best forgotten. They shall remain burried deep into my invisible learnings.

Meanwhile, I just learnt about the above flowchart software - a new thing learnt in constructing this post, and have accumulated a lot of other things to write about. Have to find time and the right frame of mind to put them all down...

The Simile of the Cave

'But anyone with any sense,' I said, 'will remember that the eyes may be unsighted in two ways, by a transition wither from light to darkness or from darkness to light, and thatt he same distinction applies to the mind. So when he sees a mind confused and unable to see clearly hewill not laugh without thinking, but will ask himself whether it has come from a clearer world and is confused by the unaccustomed darkness, or whether it is dazzled by the stronger light of the clearer world to which it has escaped from its previous ignorance. The first state is a reason for congratulation, the second for sympathy, though if one wants to laugh at it one can do wo with less absurdity than at the mind that has descended from the daylight of the upper world.'

-The Simile of the Cave, Plato

Ma vie en rose

Ma vie en rose (French)
My Life in Pink (Translated in English)
1997 Belgian film
directed by Alain Berliner

Apart from the fact that the above film in French uses 'Pink' as a referrent to an ambiguous identity of an individual, (pulling from what associations the society has hooked on to the colour) it also makes these associations blurred. The protagonist of the film, the little boy Ludovic who is in his liminal stages of life where he begins to open up to the idea of sexuality, finds himself to relate to what generally the society understands as feminine traits. He likes to dress up in frocks, likes to make himself up and almost wants to feel like women until he is made to realize that it is not perfectly fine to do so.

We were made to watch the above film as a part of our French Theory class, where we were discussing Simon de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' and ideas of feminism. In the literature, SdB brings out the the construct of the 'woman', saying that a woman is made, a woman is a social construct. She goes on to analyse how the woman has been historically placed after the man, and gives a number of examples from historical references that have continued to affect the perception of the woman as the second sex. She uses psychoanalytic theories and goes on to open up cognition systems in children to question when a body realizes and becomes conscious of its biological exclusiveness.

I will put up some of our discussion in the class here, but to get back to the film, 'My Life in Pink' portrays a family struggling between allowing freedom for a body (biologically produced by it) to be like it wants to be versus what the society expects it to be. Ludovic's mother initially supports the boy's different behaviour. She feels it's a passing transient feeling for her child. Ludovic continues to engage with his feelings and goes on to develop a liking for his Father's boss's son who studies in his class. He openly expresses in his innocence, to his parents, that he would eventually get married to this boy.

In a society where roles of males and females are so strictly defined, the family gradually gets in to complications. Ludovic's father loses his job to his boss (who holds his own social position), who doesnot want to either accept his son's eccentric likings too. A blow on thier stomach, the mother realizes that her son's odd social behaviour is affecting far beyond what is just thought to be the issue of an individual body, and she expects it to be rectified. Thus, the psychologist is also involved to correct Ludovic's orientation issues.

There are several layers in the film and the prime one is that which raises questions that SdB raises of gender v/s sex. Ludovic, in the film has mixed up his biological identity with his social one. He is in those stages of life where he is just beginning to gain consciousness about his body and its realtionship to the world outside it. What initially seems to be an effortless assumption of his body turns out to be quite a complex reality for him. This reality pushes him to quietitude, seclusion and makes him introvert.

The film sensitively deals with the difficulties a body encounters while it constructs its identity. This identity for most of us is often socially and politically masked. The film questions this mask through innocent ignorance. It raises questions of whether we can really be free - to make choices for ourselves, since much of our self is already constructed before we gain consciousness.

 

Times Square

Times Square, New York, where everything is moving. Facades of buildings merge in the sky and the ground seems to be unstable. People gaze around and sometimes find themselves embedded onto the screens. LEDs creep over tall buildings till they cover them up completely. You feel exploded into images, until you completely immerse into them, and become one of it...An absolutely ultimate space.

Animal Behaviours

An amazing squirrel crossing the road on the overhead electric cable. 

I see it many times.

The 8 week cat, my neighbour's pet. Absolutely adorable and cartoon-like.

Revisiting Student-hood

To become a student again after four years of graduating is a strange feeling. It's like a constant battle between the freedom one can take and the forces of institution that tie you down. This time, the feeling of being a student is a different one - something between the states of being confident and the underconfidence that you wish to fill up through your further study. As against the undergraduate study course where all is welcome and acceptable as a part of your learning, graduate studies are about foucsing, chanelling, tuning, fine tuning and sharpening your skills into one area for specialization. This process calls for a lot of discarding of what may be apparently interesting for you to know, but not necessary for you to learn. Thus, the probability of things you should be doing reduces.

On the other hand, being an 'alien' student in a distant country, I can now relate to experiences that students going to cities from small places for education undergo. I am sure that my present difficulty would help me appreicate and empathize with what outstation students undergo when they come to a new place, especially a city. The exprience of a city is overwhelming, since it gets you landed in an extremely complex web of rules, regulations and unfamiliarity at once. Inspite of the fact that I am not in a big city in US - infact I am in a very small town (not even a city) - I can feel the friction of unfamiliarity.

Unfamiliarity with history, culture and people; with systems, regulations and ethics of the place makes me quiet and feel secluded. Being a town, one doesnot see much activity here. And soon, when it becomes cold, streets will be laden with snow and there will be nothing to look out through my large window! The disconnect with a place due to your cultural roots being somewhere else can be distracting. My mind is preoccupied by thought of what can be done of this distance that I feel with this new culture. I generally try to fill this distance through writing and recording. In the recent days, I have found myself too distracted to record too...

And I absolutely dislike the fact that my experiences are following the trajectory of 'culture shock theory'. Where on one hand it comforts me, it also makes me feel quintessential...

But I am managing. Quiteness helps looking inwards. And perhaps it is one big aspect of learning.

Waste around New Haven

Around New Haven, I always find people carrying packaging boxes that they may have just emptied off a new item. The dustbins of the city are full of these brown card board boxes. Even inside the buildings, the dustbins always have a lot of cardboard.

Packaging material here can be perpetually found lying on the streets. Such stuff tells differnt stories of the place. That people are constantly engaging in newer products. That perhaps people are constantly changing, and hence constantly buying new products. That the University is buying a lot of new product all the time. That packaging in the US is intensive...so on and so forth.

However, all this material never goes to any further use. The nature of garbage in New Haven is much different than what I would find in Indian cities. There are many times when people may walk up to a dustbin and pick up thigs from it. It's absolutely a normal practice to so it in the US. But what is also tells about this society is that it's limits of seeing the potential of 'material'. The inventive minds of India would try and use up much of all the material before it actually finds place in the garbage can.

For example, we save most of our packaging, often turning it into containers, cutting it for smaller things, selling it to the nearby raddi wala for some money -- in the process of which we mobilize a lot of things and ideas. It gives rise to a certain kind of culture and chain of entrepreneurs. There is no such dimension here. Social space is very flat, and further reduced by the ingress of computer and technology. Technology has made this place, to a large extent, physically immobile. And on the other hand, they crave for more and more speed. Thus landscapes are flat, and textures are plainer...