This past weekend, packed into a van much to small for all of us, not an uncommon experience in India thus far, we set off down the coast for a day visit to Murudeshwar and Gokarna. Murudeshwar, known for the second largest statue of Lord Shiva in the world, is a holy place full of natural beauty. The statue is perfectly situated on a hill with its back facing the Arabian ocean. Colorfully painted fishing skiffs lined the waters edge along the beach below and visitors shrieked and shouted as they splashed in the water, fully clothed, colorful scarves and sari fabric floating in the waves. A neighboring temple tower (one of the largest of its kind), rising 249 feet from the lapping ocean waves, provided the most magnificent view of the statue, boats, and visitors below. We spent time visiting the statue and the caves beneath it that were carved with dioramas detailing the legend of the Shiva statue and took a quick boat ride around the peninsula, holding on for dear life at points when the driver rocked the boat precariously to keep things exciting. We spent the hours perpetually dodging the tourists with their cameras pointed at us and little boys selling postcards. Katie Jo came prepared, though, and we gave the boys balloons instead, which made their faces light up with joy and amusement. Later, we continued down the coast to Gokarna, a beach town popular among hippie tourists. This was the perfect place to spend the hot afternoon swimming in the warm ocean waves along Om beach (its shaped like an Om!) actually wearing bathing suits, a rare opportunity. The ride back was hours longer than expected and by the time we finally reached Manipal my legs were numb from squeezing into a row with too many people but despite the unfortunate journey it was a great day!
For the past few months I have been taking art classes at a local art gallery between Manipal and Udupi. The gallery is owned by a family of artists whose talents span from photography to painting to metal embossing to dancing and singing. Along with some other girls in my program, I took weekly classes at the gallery, slowly working toward completing one final painting. The classes were arguably the best part of my week. It was a great chance to get out of our normal routine, relax, learn something new, and interact with other local woman in our class and with our wonderful instructor, Pravina. She helped us through each step of our paintings, making us look like the wonderful artists we were not. But after months of weekly meetings, I think she was able to impart some of her incredible talent and vision upon us - the end product is something I never thought I would be capable of and I'm so happy with how it turned out! While I am proud of what I've done, I'm going to miss this part of my week. I'll miss Pravina’s jokes and bright smiles, escaping into another world, and enjoying the simple pleasures (and frustrations) of painting. Although I hope to take it up more back home, that is, if I can keep an ounce of the skill I learned this semester and manage without Pravina's close guidance and encouragement.
With less than a month remaining in Manipal assignments are starting to pile up and time seems to be going faster than ever. With only a few more adventures to go I thought I should write an update on how the study part of study abroad is going.
Contemporary India Contemporary India is a core class that all study abroad students are required to take at Manipal. This course is taught just for our cohort so it is a small class. This initially seemed great, as it would allow us to delve much deeper into complex issues and have intelligent, focused discussions. As such it was one that I was most looking forward to. However as time has worn on, it has become more and more excruciating. India is so clearly a complex society, full of contradictions, and filled with such rich culture and traditions, but our professor manages to take all the complexity out of the system and describe Indian society like he is reading from an encyclopedia (I think he actually is sometimes. One of the three readings he assigned to us was an encyclopedia article on religions of India). While I feel like I have a good grasp on history, since his poor time management and planning led us to study history for more than half the semester despite only allocating two weeks for it in the original syllabus, there are still so many questions still left unanswered. I can recite important dates and names but I am still not sure how everything connects. The lack of readings for the class makes it even more one-dimensional. He also talks so slowly I’m able write down every single word he says while also having time to do some great doodles in the margins of my notebook. Now that we are finally getting into more interesting and complex issues related to contemporary culture, the class has gotten slightly more interesting, but only slightly. Our class on caste failed to address any contemporary issues surrounding caste, merely just describing that there were castes, what some of them were, and where they might have come from. Our class on gender was read straight from a reading we were already assigned and failed to delve further into the issues. I had to call my professor out at one point about completely misrepresenting the author’s argument. While he almost allowed us to have a discussion on this topic, he always cut it off before we could really get further into the issues. Anyway, while this class had great potential it has really fallen short of any expectations I had and I only feel slightly more well versed about contemporary India than I could have been after spending a few days of reading about it. Epidemiology Epidemiology is another one of my core classes here, though it is not required for all study abroad students. It is a part of the MPH program and is taught in a lecture hall with the public health masters students. This is the second semester continuation of epidemiology that they started in the fall so we’ve missed out on key information necessary to understand epi as a whole, but it has not been hard to pick up the concepts we are taught in the class. This semester we have mostly talked about measures of occurrence and study designs. Mid-way through the semester our professors changed and while I loved the original professor, I am less than a fan of the new one. She has only just graduated the MPH program herself and therefore only has slightly more knowledge on the topics than the students in the class. She uses slides the other professor has prepared and as a result, is unable to go beyond the immediate concepts and answer basic questions without going and researching it first. Since she is also only a few years senior to most of the students there also is a relative lack of respect for her in the classroom (respect is really important in Indian classrooms) and her authority is frequently undermined. Not to mention, she is very dull and uses “isn’t it?” at the end of every sentence. Needless to say, this class has taken a turn for the worse and if I ever intend on using epidemiology, which is likely as it is the most basic part of public health, I might have to do some revision on my own or with the public health department back at AU. Surveillance of Infectious Diseases Surveillance is one of my public health electives and is also taught in lecture-style with MPH students. The professor is absolutely great: he is always very well prepared and engaging, has years of practical field experience he brings to the classroom, and is very entertaining (though many of his jokes are pretty politically incorrect). This class focuses on different types of surveillance systems, how they work in theory versus practice, and uses specific diseases as examples (we have learned a LOT about polio eradication!). I have learned SO much not only about the Indian healthcare and surveillance systems in this class, which is great because most of my public health classes are very globally and generally focused. Studying for this class is always a challenge though because he expects direct regurgitation of the PowerPoint’s, which are hundreds of slides long and are densely filled with text. But I have learned a lot as a result! Maternal and Child Health Maternal and Child health is a small class with only a few of the public health students. Our professor takes advantage of this and makes sure everyone participates in his class, which is great because it keeps us engaged and forces us to think critically about the material. We also focus a lot on developing countries, which I appreciate, and each topic is covered extensively and with great depth. Topics we have covered so far include antenatal care, diarrhea, childhood immunizations, anemia in pregnancy, nutrition and public health interventions, and low birth weight. While it got off to a slow start, this class is easily one of my favorites now. It also doesn’t hurt that the midterm (and maybe final??) was self-graded. Ayurveda Ayurveda is an ancient system of medicine that was developed over 5,000 years ago in the Indus Valley Civilization but still plays an important role in Indian medicine today. This class is taught just for study abroad students and is extremely well organized and planned out. There are five modules, each on different topics that are taught by different faculty members in the department. Some of the topics have been on basics of Ayurveda, Ayurvedic treatments, pharmacology, etc. In addition to the lectures, we also have practical classes each week where we either get to experience different procedures or watch them being done on our classmates. Some of these procedures have included oil baths, massages, and heat therapies. I participated in a treatment where hot oil pads were tied around my head after a head massage and another where a lemon/ turmeric mixture were placed in fabric sacs, heated on a stove, and rubbed around my neck and shoulders. Ayurveda is another of my favorite classes because it exposes us to such different ways of knowing and thinking than we get at home. It is also great to get to hear about so many different branches of Ayurveda from many different points of view and then get to see/experience some of it in action. Overall, classes have been relatively easy this semester and the only work we’ve really had has been right around midterms and finals, though we now also have a bunch of papers and presentations coming up. This has been good and bad. Good in that it has really given us time to explore this country and get to know Manipal, but bad in that I think we could have learned a lot more and been more challenged/engaged throughout the process. That being said, I still learned so much just from being here, sitting in classes with Indian students, and participating in a system so different from back home. The Friday field visits to different health facilities have also been a great addition and have really helped paint of picture of healthcare in India. As I am wrapping up my Ayurveda research paper, I have had some time to reflect on a concept that was introduced to me in my gender and development class last semester in Kenya - colonization of the mind and how it relates to my experience with Ayurveda and my time abroad in general. While the concept is incredibly complex and difficult to articulate, this notion describes how our minds can be molded subconsciously to accept specific values and social norms. It traditionally focused on those who were members of societies that were colonized in the conventional sense of the word. In this sense, colonization of the mind was the emotional and cognitive acceptance of the colonizer as superior in every sense. In this way people accepted the values, lifestyle, and standard of living of the colonizer as the good life and invariably one’s own culture, lifestyle, social institutions, and philosophy of life was devalued. While initially enforced by the colonizer this devaluation was eventually accepted and internalized by the colonized as the ‘natural’ state of affairs. From there it becomes almost impossible to develop an individual identity, even after the process of formal decolonization. These new values and modes of living have become so engrained that people don’t even know they exist. In order to fully overthrow the oppressor the individual must question their entire identity, what they are and what they do.
Colonization of the mind exists, not in the same sense, but exists nonetheless among all members of any society. Though never colonized by some external force working to devalue our modes of existence, we must understand that our entire mode of being and existence has also shaped by factors external to ourselves, by the very nature of living and existing within the predefined fabric of society. In a sense we have all been colonized to believe our beliefs, value systems, customs, societal interactions, and most importantly modes of knowing and understanding are ‘natural’ or are merely a result of human biology. Instead, sociocultural human forces have been the shapers of our entire modes of thinking and understanding over time. Social construction and hegemonic discourses have shaped our way of knowing. This is such an implicit element of life it is almost impossible to recognize it on a surface level. However, when directly juxtaposed with other systems it can surface and even sometimes can become blatantly apparent. The simplest example of a blatantly apparent difference in the modes of understanding is my experience in learning about Ayurveda, the ancient tradition of Indian medicine. Developed over 5,000 years ago this system of knowing is incredibly distinct from the ones we have grown up with. In reality many Ayurvedic concepts and many “Western” concepts overlap and describe the same phenomena but are rationalized and understood in vastly different ways. For example, Ayurveda believes the body is a microcosm of the universe made up entirely of the five elements: ether, air, water, fire, and earth. These elements combine to form the various elements of the human body and govern their interactions ( obviously its also a lot more complex than this). To an outsider looking in this may sound crazy. But is it? Isn’t it in reality just a different way of understanding and describing phenomena that exists in the natural world? At first when we learned about these concepts our class was quick to disregard them, to show they were wrong. Why? because they didn't fit within our preconceived notions of what makes up the body. Western medicine has started testing age-old Ayurvedic techniques for any semblance of scientific validity and the results they are finding are incredible – in some ways Ayurveda may be much more advanced than “modern” medicine especially in their holistic notion of healthcare and some of the natural drugs that cure the same illnesses without the horrible side effects. Even more surprising, ancient Ayurveda texts described phenomena that are only “just being discovered” by quantum physicists. We are so quick to brush off these different concepts as primitive or as "ancient medicine" but nothing beyond that. They are seen as so far outside the realm of the knowledge we "know" to be true we don’t even question our assumptions as to why we think our way of knowing and being is correct? Is there really a correct? Being abroad I am lucky in that I am consistently thrown into situations where I have to ask myself these questions. I am glad to be challenging my assumptions, that is why I came abroad - to learn about new value systems and ways of life, to learn about other ways of being, to understand what makes up cultures, etc. While Ayurveda is an “easy” example, there are, as I mentioned previously, so many implicit differences that are not readily apparent even when directly juxtaposed. It is up to us to constantly be questioning our thoughts, beliefs, modes of knowing, and really everything we take for granted as "truth." We need to begin to deconstruct all of these elements to begin to truly decolonize our minds. By no means is this an easy task. Nor will it probably be completely possible. But even recognition of the existence of mental colonization is a step in the right direction, a way to understand the world in a fuller and more complex light, to understand the implicit differences in culture and what makes up societies, and to understand what makes us universally human and what is only a social construction. Another interesting example can be found in language. Some languages have words for concepts that don't even exist in other languages, many of them describing emotions, feelings, actions, or the physical world. If there is no way to articulate these concepts our minds subconsciously become closed off to them, they escape our realm of knowledge. And through the simple mechanism of language our ways of knowing and being are shaped. We have no way of fathoming without deconstructing the inherent constructs and mechanisms of language, that so much more to the world exists beyond our vocabulary and mode of thinking. In being abroad and putting myself in positions where I am constantly learning and experiencing new things, I am working to challenge or at least acknowledge as many of my assumptions as I can to break down some of the invisible barriers our minds have built up and to attempt to truly gain greater understanding of the world we live in. Every Thursday we have a different lesson in some aspect of Indian culture. Past weeks we have learned how to do rangoli, intricate art done on the floor using different colored powders, mehindi (henna), or learned about different religious festivals and traditions, etc. This week we had a lesson in Indian cooking. The school of hospitality and hotel management at Manipal hosted a workshop for us, pairing us each with a culinary student to create seven classical Indian dishes. Over hot stoves, chefs shouting orders, and lots of pouring and stirring, we bonded with our student hosts and learned some of the basics of Indian cooking. We made a potato/pomegranate salad, a tomato based soup, paneer tikka masala, a chicken dish, dal palak (lentils and spinach), carrot halwa (a dessert), and biryani rice. What was supposed to take two hours ended up taking maybe four but it was totally worth it! The students were so nice (even when I was so clearly doing something wrong) and it was so fun to learn about and make our own Indian food. Indian food is so complex and one dish might vary completely every half-kilometer you go. It was easy to see how this was possible, as the chefs would add random extra ingredients to our dishes as they saw fit, deviating from the set recipes, making it impossible for us to replicate the dishes later. But this also demonstrated incredible skill and creativity. In the end the dishes were served on fancy plates and we were able to eat all the incredible food, laughing with our student hosts. Plus we were treated to amazing cakes left over from the students’ baking practical earlier in the day. This was easily the best lesson yet. It has been almost exactly four years now since I first came to India to live and work with Tibetan refugees in settlements in the north of the country. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, the people were some of the kindest I had ever met, and my eyes were opened to one of the greatest, but largely silent, political/identity struggles of our time. I heard harrowing stories of refugees escaping over the Himalayas, of torture in the TAR (Tibetan Autonomous Region), and the systematic destruction of one of the most beautiful, loving cultures. I saw some of the purest devotion to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan culture and some of the strongest commitment to protecting what they could, but also signs of resignation buried deep behind the smiling eyes. I was faced with difficult questions as to why the US would not take action and I had to try to explain something that was far too complex for a sixteen year old to ever understand. Something about Tibet and its people captivated me and has continued to enthrall me long after my visit ended. I continued to learn as much as I could about Tibet, coming to greater understandings of the current situation through in depth analyses of the conflict and through the attempt to develop a peace proposal for a peace and conflict class I took at AU. And then, four years later I finally had the chance to visit another Tibetan settlement in India through one of our weekend trips planned by our program. In this visit to Bylakuppe, the first Tibetan settlement in India, about a six-hour journey from Manipal, community members warmly greeted us with traditional white silk scarves. We were treated to tea and biscuits as we met with the Tibetan Women’s Association and the leader of the Tibetan Youth Council learning about the work they do in Bylakuppe and for Tibetan refugees across India and around the world. They accompanied us to a traditional Tibetan medical center where we learned about ancient systems of Tibetan medicine and its practice today. We ate a delicious lunch of momo’s (Tibetan dumplings) and other wonderful food with a group of the sweetest women from the women’s association, and accompanied one of them to the Golden Temple, learning tid-bits about the settlement and Buddhism along the way. As we wandered, we passed monks and nuns in their maroon robes and colorful prayer flags high above our heads rippled lightly in the breeze. We came upon a local fishpond where we fed the enormous fish writhing below us and learned about how new fish are added to the pond each year on the Dalai Lama’s birthday and about the general Tibetan commitment to serving all living things and to respecting nature. Our visit seemed to short, but the time we did have was incredible. It revived so many memories of my previous experiences and of all the wonderful people I had come across. It was such a pure reminder of human kindness and resilience but also of deep-seeded struggle. Though short-lived, it is a visit I will always keep close to my heart. |
AuthorAmerican University Student studying abroad in Kenya and India and wandering the world Archives
May 2015
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