I apologize for not updating this little one-sided conversation of ours earlier, but frankly I'm busy and you give me little to work with. That said, let's talk about India this week...
I shall begin last Saturday, with a particularly interesting conversation I had with Kalyan and his pal Varghese-my-neezy-keep-my-knees-so-breezy (although he said his first name to me about 10 times I never remembered it, so to avoid embarrassment I made more and more baroque versions of his last name, like that one, to the amusement of us all.) We were discussing Kalyan's obsession with Pink Floyd, an obsession that won him a free cell phone at a trivia contest two weeks ago, and how utterly crap classic rock is (my opinion, not his.) He wished to know what music I consider worth listening to... to this query I made an unforgivable blunder. I played MIA. Now for all of you unfamiliar with her work, MIA is a brittish pop/rap star whose father was the founder of the particularly militant student branch of the Sri Lankan rebels, the Tamil Tigers, who has been living in exile in England for all of MIA's life. I live in Tamil Nadu. So immediately Kalyan and Varghese-why-is-my-green-soup-so-split-peas-y have a problem with the fact that by purchasing her album I was indirectly supporting a terrorist organization. Once assuring them that I would never purchase her, nor anyone else's, album we got down to listening. Oh crap. So apparently MIA's new album KALA, has borrowed all of its samples from last year's Tamil hits. To a couple of non-Tamil boys like Kalyan and Varghese-the-magic-word-is-please-y Tamil-anything is the hallmark of low culture. To add to their disbelief that Westerners would appreciate any aspect of Tamil culture, I told them how pretentious high-school types in the US (not like me, but in a similar vein) smoke beedi cigarettes (made and consumed by rural villages in Tamil Nadu for about 10 rupees [$0.25] per 100.) To this they added a list of other shitty Tamil things I can take back with me and introduce to American Culture:
1.) The Lungi
2.) The Urban Cow
3.)The Autorickshaw
4.) Forget plates... let's use leaves!
Saturday night I went to the house of my research advisor, Dr. Kang, for dinner. What surprised me was not the fact that she had a dascheund, but was the fact that upon arriving I was offered hard liquor. In terms that you would all understand, that's about as socially acceptable in India as being offered a line of coke upon visiting a professor's house... especially since drinking is forbidden in all CMC staff housing. Having experienced the ravages of Nepali whiskey and the days of recovery after drinking Nepali gin (I was put up in a posh hotel by Peace Corps medical and given what I think was a banana bag by a nurse after a particularly bad encounter) I settled on the local brew, a Kingfisher.
Dinner went well. I spent most of the time talking with Dr. Kang's husband about American football and how living in Houston is still worse than living in Vellore. A bold, though true, statement.
I wasted Sunday cleaning up the house, doing laundry, skyping with various individuals.
Monday was my first day at the hospital. It felt a lot like third year. We began with a bible reading, a group prayer and a discussion with the chaplain about personal responsibility in bad medical outcomes. Then we had journal club and a bit of breakfast. After that we went on rounds.... yeah, did you notice the bible business and the prayer too? Based on the scouting report from Mark, my predecessor, this is business as usual... and next time I'll be asked to lead... *gulp* I really hope that my impromptu prayer does not read like my rough drafts of these blog entries, full of colorful anthropomorphic expletives, vague sports cliches, obscure literary/film references and long winded stories that everyone has heard before. If I hit a mental traffic pylon, I'll just recite the Jesus prayer from Franny and Zooey.
That was a joke.
Monday night shall be known as White Kid Party #1.
After getting a text around dinner time from local Canadian idealist P-Daley, I set out for the med school campus for August's edition of the monthly foreign student program and mixer. I was shocked to see that so many foreigners were around, about 20 in all, varying from a high school student from Northern California to a Cardiology fellow from Tanzania. For our entertainment they (the gypsys, not the foreign types) put on a show of traditional gypsy dance. This topic would be otherwise unremarkable if it weren't for the 25 minute introduction given by the organizer of the program about how God told her to save these people from their lacksadaisical ways and help them get jobs, go to church, save money, wear underpants, and other such important things. After speaking of her aforementioned successes, she also spoke of the fact that gypsy children cannot stand to go to school, gypsy men are only qualified to make slingshots to sell to tourists, and gypsy women suited only for beading. She said all of this in the same matter of fact way you might say that I have magazine advertisement related OCD, or Farshid cooks stinky rice.... i.e. like facts. All of us foreigners looked uncomfortably at one another during the duration of this lecture before retiring to tea, nescafe, and biscuits.
I met various foreigners which I shall tally here:
Americans - 3.5 (two of them are identical twins... I wasn't sure how to count that)
Australians - 4
Brits - 4
Canadians - 1
Danes/Dames - 1
Germans - 5
Omanians - 5
Malaysians - 1
Swedes - 1
Tanzanians - 1
After hearing the phrase "what is med school like in your country?" repeated at least 381 times in different manners of broken english, we dispersed... agreeing to meet again on Wednesday for dinner at Vellore's only proper wait-staffed restaurant, Hotel Darling.
I will, of course continue this post at a future date... but for now I must retire.
2.) The Urban Cow
3.)The Autorickshaw
4.) Forget plates... let's use leaves!
Saturday night I went to the house of my research advisor, Dr. Kang, for dinner. What surprised me was not the fact that she had a dascheund, but was the fact that upon arriving I was offered hard liquor. In terms that you would all understand, that's about as socially acceptable in India as being offered a line of coke upon visiting a professor's house... especially since drinking is forbidden in all CMC staff housing. Having experienced the ravages of Nepali whiskey and the days of recovery after drinking Nepali gin (I was put up in a posh hotel by Peace Corps medical and given what I think was a banana bag by a nurse after a particularly bad encounter) I settled on the local brew, a Kingfisher.
Dinner went well. I spent most of the time talking with Dr. Kang's husband about American football and how living in Houston is still worse than living in Vellore. A bold, though true, statement.
I wasted Sunday cleaning up the house, doing laundry, skyping with various individuals.
Monday was my first day at the hospital. It felt a lot like third year. We began with a bible reading, a group prayer and a discussion with the chaplain about personal responsibility in bad medical outcomes. Then we had journal club and a bit of breakfast. After that we went on rounds.... yeah, did you notice the bible business and the prayer too? Based on the scouting report from Mark, my predecessor, this is business as usual... and next time I'll be asked to lead... *gulp* I really hope that my impromptu prayer does not read like my rough drafts of these blog entries, full of colorful anthropomorphic expletives, vague sports cliches, obscure literary/film references and long winded stories that everyone has heard before. If I hit a mental traffic pylon, I'll just recite the Jesus prayer from Franny and Zooey.
That was a joke.
Monday night shall be known as White Kid Party #1.
After getting a text around dinner time from local Canadian idealist P-Daley, I set out for the med school campus for August's edition of the monthly foreign student program and mixer. I was shocked to see that so many foreigners were around, about 20 in all, varying from a high school student from Northern California to a Cardiology fellow from Tanzania. For our entertainment they (the gypsys, not the foreign types) put on a show of traditional gypsy dance. This topic would be otherwise unremarkable if it weren't for the 25 minute introduction given by the organizer of the program about how God told her to save these people from their lacksadaisical ways and help them get jobs, go to church, save money, wear underpants, and other such important things. After speaking of her aforementioned successes, she also spoke of the fact that gypsy children cannot stand to go to school, gypsy men are only qualified to make slingshots to sell to tourists, and gypsy women suited only for beading. She said all of this in the same matter of fact way you might say that I have magazine advertisement related OCD, or Farshid cooks stinky rice.... i.e. like facts. All of us foreigners looked uncomfortably at one another during the duration of this lecture before retiring to tea, nescafe, and biscuits.
I met various foreigners which I shall tally here:
Americans - 3.5 (two of them are identical twins... I wasn't sure how to count that)
Australians - 4
Brits - 4
Canadians - 1
Danes/Dames - 1
Germans - 5
Omanians - 5
Malaysians - 1
Swedes - 1
Tanzanians - 1
After hearing the phrase "what is med school like in your country?" repeated at least 381 times in different manners of broken english, we dispersed... agreeing to meet again on Wednesday for dinner at Vellore's only proper wait-staffed restaurant, Hotel Darling.
I will, of course continue this post at a future date... but for now I must retire.
1 comment:
Just to be a huge dick, none of those things are strictly Tamil. I've been pimping the urban cow for years now. Hasn't caught on... but it will... it will...
Post a Comment