Welcome to my blog!

I am off to India this July 20th (and luckily will be able to see the last Harry Potter before I leave) to spend a year at Lady Shri Ram College for Women in New Delhi, India!

I have set up this blog to chronicle my greater and lesser adventures whilst abroad, and to counter a problem I predict would arise: the slow turn around time one may expect when attempting to communicate with me. With this fancy blog, I can share my stories, thoughts, etc., with lots of people at once! This way, perhaps my communications will be timelier and less superficial.

I hope to, in the time before I leave and have nothing much to write about, satisfy the basic questions that are asked when I say that I’m going to India for a year.

Why are you going to India?

I attribute the desire and decision to spend a year about as far away form home as possible to a strange pattern that seems to guide my life choices. Perhaps its less of a pattern, but more of a strange way in which things tend to work to lead me to new places, which, looking from the end point, seems all to make perfect sense. So when I come up with an idea, “I want to go to India,” I’ve realized the best thing to do is just throw it out to the universe and see what happens. At the point that something happens, it is easiest just to go with the flow.

Boarding school may be the best example of this. It was a decisions not long premeditated, followed by careful searching guided by a goal of getting into a good college or anything like that. My aunt, Jeanne, mentioned a small boarding school in New Hampshire one day. I inquired online. I applied. I was accepted. It was at this point that I realized this whole idea may not be a fantasy, and that I may have to make a decision. After visiting the school, my mother and I were sitting in my aunt and uncle’s house, when she said, “You have to do this.” Though uncharacteristic of my mother to say, we both felt that this was right, and I was happy, because it looked like a lot more fun than public school.

Looking back, the White Mountain School was very important in developing both my character and interests. Who, without backpacking Mahoosuc Notch in Maine, swimming in New Hampshire’s lakes and rivers, and carrying buckets of compost through the snow, could bear the disheartening learning of political and economic environmental issues with optimism?

And so this trip to India began in the same vein. For some reason, the idea of India stuck in my mind. Seeing events fall into place, I decided it was best just to go with it, happy the universe is conspiring something that sounded like fun. I am drawn to India for its rich spiritual history, its growing economy and environmental issues, but we’ll see in the end why the idea got into my head.