From the ground up

Pardon the lack of updates - we moved into our new hostel where there's no internet yet and I've been too busy with orientation and the like to make it over to the library. Expect some lengthy posts to come, concerning my first time in the city outskirts, the Indian fusion concert, getting new duds at Fab India, New Year's Eve, and our jam-packed day of Hyderabad exploration, including a palace, mosque, series of tombs and ancient fort. Also, I saw my first Indian movie yesterday, Ganjini (a Bollywood take on Memento), at a local theater.

Everything is going spectacularly well. There are lots of adjustments, some superficial and some less so. The poverty is very hard to understand, let alone accept as another fact of life. I don't think I'll ever get used to the pleading eyes of a malnourished, hobbling child tugging at my pantleg - I don't think I'd like to.

This world challenges the boundaries of life and humanity as I've known it so far; I've seen more intense joy and sorrow than I recall having ever seen before. It's constantly said that India is a place of extremes, but what they don't tell you, is that it is a place of constant, simultaneous, seemingly irreconcilable extremes. Towering new office buildings grow out of roughshod huts, made of tarps and bamboo, until the work is done and another sprouts up by the same workers' hands. Women smiling brilliantly in shining saris pass the starving people, in their ragged nests. Chaos rules the streets through insistent merchants and motions, waves of people from all sides in all directions, while ten feet away, pigeons congregate outside a tranquil mosque.

That such extremes could exist comes as no surprise; that they could do so tangled up with one another, distinct and apart yet wholly integrated (each essential to the other), stuns and humbles me. It is overwhelming to feel my mental framework reworking itself anew to try and account for these paradoxical inconsistencies, like a toddler making sense of a language's ins and outs, learning an incredible lot in a very, very short time.

I came to India for a challenge, for a fresh start and to redefine my world, my life and in turn, myself. I didn't realize this wasn't about expansion - it's about reconstruction.