I desperately wish I were joking, but I'm not. Our teachers thought it would be cute to display the tangible products of their labor in the form of a Vaudeville like "Hindi Camp" this past weekend in Pushkar.
Most of you know that I am really not a performer, actually quite the opposite. Much of the time, I would much rather burrow into the banks of the Yamuna than do anything on stage. I can appreciate these things when performed by others, but I really prefer a nice seat in the audience. Luckily, I haven't been asked to "perform" anything since seventh grade, but I also haven't been living in India. For some reason, the idea of "stage fright" here is about as foreign as "traffic laws."
In a place where everyone clambers to have their picture taken and where most people in their heart of hearts want to be Bollywood stars, the words, " No, I don't want to sing Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Jana Sanam in front of lots of people that I don't know," doesn't make any sense.
So because of some sort of cultural/language barrier I was locked into singing this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
Further, my teacher told me that I had to learn a Kathak dance. Now mind you, Kathak is a very serious, complicated and nuanced art form. Most people start training for it when they are about 4 or 5 and really hit their prime when they are in their early 30s. Therefore, the prospect of me putting together anything resembling something like a Kathak dance in 6 days looked fairly bleak, but I asked my friend to help me and she taught me how to count and move my wrists and kind of how to spin on my heel and then she left for Orissa for a Kathak competition.
So we scratched Kathak off the schedule.
This left my teacher, Sayeed, a little panicky (alright, he's always a little panicky- this left him a lot panicky) and so we had to quickly brainstorm a Kathak replacement. I jokingly said that we could have our own version of this Shah Rukh Khan show where children compete against adults about various trivia questions. My teacher loved the idea. He made up a list of questions that he would ask us about Indian history and culture and was all ready to make Gautum the host. "Ummm where are you going to find a kid?" "Don't worry, don't worry, we'll find one in Pushkar." When we got there, Sayeed went on a mad dash trying to find a willing child somewhere within the city limits....
So we replaced Kathak with chai.
The only promising portion of the whole thing was the little comic skit that Gautum and I concocted. The skit was about a reverse call center. Now in India, most people refer to call centers by the acronym for Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO), so ours was called Odhiyogik (Industrial) Prityam (Processing) Bahar Se Lo (Outside) (OPB). I played a disheveled out of work college student (quite a stretch, but I think I did alright), looking through the classified ads. I find a way to make easy fast money at night and it turns out that its this information hotline for the Indian Government that has been outsourced to the U.S. I am forced to learn Hindi and take on a new name. We embedded all kinds of cultural jokes about Americans in India and what not. For instance, we videotaped a pharmacist asking why there were so many sick people and I answered by saying it was because of the change in the weather (a very common answer for everything). In the play, I became so well loved as an information hotline engineer that I became the first outsourced Prime Minister of India and culminated with me singing Jan Gan Man (the national anthem) over my headset from Wisconsin.
But no one laughed. The place was totally deadpan. No one even sang along with the national anthem. Go figure.
In other news, my roomate just got a job as a flight attendant which quite a prestigious job for a girl my age. However, she's going through training right now and because English is not her native (most native?) language the manuals are very difficult for her to understand. Because of this she'll do things like wake up at 3 in the morning to copy the entire manual by hand and lean over and ask me questions like "what does sterile mean?" "what does surround mean?" recite it and then do a puja and then come back and recite it again. This leaves me a little exhausted and disoriented in the morning, so hopefully her exams will end soon.
Hostel life continues to be enjoyable with 20 girls consistently sharing their contradictory opinions with me. For instance one girl informed me that I had lost weight and that I should "stop going to the gym." 15 minutes later another girl came up to me shook her head and patted my hip, saying "Becky tum itne moti hui," (Becky you have become so fat). So like most things, I take a lot of their advice/editorial comments with a grain of salt (er amchu?)
On a last note, I just found an honest to do list that I made a couple days ago on my way to school. I thought that it summed up my life pretty well.
1. Find contact info for Parliamentarians on Population Policy
2. Practice drinking water without putting lips on bottle
3. Fix camera
4. Figure out how to dial exclamation point on SMS
I love and miss you all and cannot wait for life updates.
No comments:
Post a Comment