The Sunday Night Blahs

Today, for the first time in a while, I was struck by what my mother affectionately refers to as “the Sunday night blahs.” The Sunday night blahs are those feelings associated with the semi-dread of going back to school or work on Monday morning. They come in varying styles, “the weekend wasn’t long enough,” “I’m not having fun at school,” and “I don't like work,” as well as varying intensities, ranging from being slightly down to tearful despair.

Though it was Monday, I was struck for a while this afternoon and evening with a feeling of the Sunday night blahs. I leave on Wednesday for India, and suddenly, this seems very immanent.

Not only was I suddenly struck by the abruptness of my departure, but also I have a tendency to put on myself responsibility for the feelings of others, somehow considering it my responsibility to keep all those around me whole and happy. This, I continue to find, is near impossible to do, but despite this, something in me continues to put this upon myself. Today though, I was reminded that the opposite is true.

I was in the family room with my mom and step-dad watching house hunters international. During a commercial break, I had told my mom that I had the Sunday night blahs, which had festered today as I was looking at my adorable puppies. I then asked, “You’re not gonna be too sad when I leave?”

My mom, who is both excited to live vicariously through me and also sad to see me go, responded, “I will be happy so long as you are happy. If you’re not happy, then I won’t be happy.”

To which my step-dad added humorously, “and if Mom is happy, then I’m happy. If Mom isn’t happy, then I’m not happy.”

“So,” I said, “I just have to be happy, and then everyone is happy.”

While I think we still have to work on not depending on other people for our happiness, in this situation, we seem to have moved my responsibility for happiness back to only myself (where it belongs), as well as exemplified motherhood and marriage, all in one. 

Having mentioned my puppies, here is the perfect opportunity to include pictures, as no blog of mine would be complete without them. 

Maxwell

Dizzy

Puppies napping on the bed

Four Days Out

There are now four days until the day I leave for India. I have done everything on my lists; I have gotten my visa, bought pepto bismal tabs, ordered rupees, and organized admissions materials. Now I am sitting around, though today, I think, I have some reason. I have been effectively doing nothing for some days now. This is not to say that I haven’t kept myself busy or I haven’t had things to do. I’ve run errands, made muffins, and participated in various family engagements, but these activities, while time consuming, bear no gravity in relation to things like packing to leave for India. Or actually going to India, for that matter.

            But today, I am sitting on the couch. I have the beginnings of a sore throat, the kind that under normal circumstances I would ignore and go about doing everything I wanted to do, perhaps being a little tired at the end of the day. But being four days away from a twenty-four hour plane ride across the world to land in a foreign country to which I have never been, I have considered the immanent physical and emotional turbulence as reason to act more sick than I feel.

            As I don’t actually have to do anything outside of the house, since (weeks ago) I have done everything on my lists, this is relatively easy to do: draw, bother mom, read, bother mom, make neater copies of existing lists, bother mom, drink orange juice.

            I really don’t have anything more to say. Maybe I’ll get back to people who I’ve been meaning to get back to for a while. Or bother mom. 

Terrorist Attacks in Mumbai, July 13

This morning when I finally emerged from my bed, my mother told me that there had been a terrorist attack in Mumbai. Three improvised explosive devices went off in crowded areas of the city as people were coming home from work, around 6:50-7:00pm Indian time. So far 21 people have been confirmed dead and 141 wounded, and with no organization taking credit as of yet. I will continue to update this blog entry as there is more information, but there is a good article on the Times of India.  

From what I've heard on CNN and the Times of India, the police and other law enforcement have done a relatively good job of managing the situation (in 2008 they had apparently faced criticism), though I heard the phone lines and cell phones have been jammed, which I'm sure is scary for many whose family members have been asked to stay in their office buildings. I'm guessing this is a measure taken after learning from 2008 in which the terrorists used their smart phones to evade law enforcement. 

As for how this may effect me, I still plan on leaving for India in a week. New Delhi has been placed on high alert, as have many other cities, but I don't think my travel plans will be effected unless there are more widespread attacks, they target westerners (as in the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008 and as far as I can tell these ones haven't explicitly, though they were set off in commercial and financial centers), or India goes on the US State Department's travel advisory list. For now, I'm just trying to send good vibes and love to India and Mumbai especially in the ways that I can. 

Lady Shri Ram College - Bragging Rights

Lady Shri Ram College was recently ranked the top Arts College in India by India Today (which seems oddly akin to USA Today)!

The magazine made some videos of the students and the principal, and they have really made me so impatient to get to India and become part of the LSR community!

I have yet to figure out how to get non-youtube videos to come in so nicely as they did on my last posting, but here are the links so you can see where I'm going to be spending my time next year! I am so psyched!

LSR-Principal Reflects

LSR-Students Speak

From the India Today article online:

What makes LSR a consistent leader? "LSR takes pride in the values it infuses in its students. We teach them that there are more possibilities than limits. This ideology reflects in the number of distinguished alumni we have," says Meenakshi Gopinath, Principal, LSR for the past 23 years. The college has 21 societies and several student exchange programmes that are aimed at creating future women leaders in all spheres. "The curriculum is simply a basic minimum requirement. The more important idea is to push students to excel in all extra-curricular activities and to develop critical thinkers and concerned citizens. Overall personality development is the most important part of education at LSR," says Gopinath. The college is widely recognised for its outreach initiatives and civic engagement. 

Hindu Gods and Happy Holi (What I'm looking forward to)

My mother and I were sitting in our family room before dinner, when I opened my Lonely Planet guide to India for reference.

The situation was this:

A week or so earlier, we had been at the Soul of Yoga's yoga church and had sung a chant naming Ganesh, the Hindu deity of good fortune and the remover of obstacles (who has an elephant head). A pretty cool deity if you ask me. A few days after that, we had watched the movie Outsourced, recommended to me by Aunt Sharon, which is a hilarious movie about a man who goes to India to train his replacement at a call center. In the movie, the American is freaked out by the god Kali, depicted with a smile as she hacks off a head to presumably add to the ones stringed around her neck. His Indian friend explains that Kali is the destroyer, but sometimes destruction can be a good thing; one cycle has to end for another to begin.

“Is Hinduism a polytheistic religion?” my mom asked. I told her I didn’t think so, but we needed to consult the guidebook.

All Hindu deities are regarded as manifestations of Brahman (God). There are three main representations, Brahma (the creator, who is in meditation unless he’s creating the universe), Vishnu (the sustainer), and Shiva (the destroyer, without which creation couldn’t occur. Kali is somehow a combination of Shiva and the divine mother, I’m still unclear on that one).

(Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva)

(Kali)

My favorite is the story of Ganesh (remover of obstacles, bringer of good fortune). Ganesh is the child of another deity Parvati and Shiva the destroyer, but Ganesh didn’t know that Shiva was his father, being born while he was away. When Shiva showed up to see Parvati, Ganesh wouldn’t let him, because his mother was bathing. Shiva lopped off Ganesh’s head, only to find out later that he had lopped off the head of his own son. Feeling rather remorseful, he vowed to replace his son’s head with that of the next animal he came across…which happened to be an elephant. Thus, Ganesh has an elephant head.

(Ganesh, Remover of obstacles)

Further exploration in the guidebook led me to the section on Indian holidays, and to the holiday that I am looking forward to the most: Holi. During Holi, the coming of spring is celebrated with color. By color, we mean everything from smearing a bit of colored powder on someone’s cheek to drenching people buckets of color-dyed water. Here, let me explain:

This is a clip from the movie Outsourced, which I would recommend to anyone. This is what I'm looking forward to. 

And for some facts...

I have decided that it is necessary to create a rather boring post with a few facts I collected off of Wikipedia about India. 

Name: Republic of India

Motto: “Satyameva Jayate” (Truth Alone Triumphs)

Capital: New Delhi

Largest City: Mumbai

Languages: Hindi, English, with over 20 officially recognized regionally, and thousands of other mutually unintelligible languages

Area: 1,269,219 square miles (almost five times the size of Texas, for those who were wondering)

Population: Second in the world (guess who is first…)

Drives on the left (silly English)

Instead of giving you an accurate and boring map, I decided to draw my own, with all the relevant geographical information.  

I think that covers all the bases. 

Plug Converters

I leave for India on July 20^th, a little over two weeks from today. Unable to contain myself any longer, I have set to begin accumulating those things on my shopping lists, which are organized by store and subdivided by section of the specified store, having been written at least two weeks ago. In addition to small containers for shampoo and conditioner, pocket packs of Kleenex and tampons, I also needed plug converters.

Looking at the aisle of plug adapters in the electronics store stirred a part of me generally awoken by discussions on the viability of the “European identity” in the current economic situation, or the various MAD and NUTs positions on the utility of nuclear weapons.

Regarding systems of measurement, the world has come to general consensus, disregarding non-scientific Americans, on the metric system. Electrical systems on the other hand, seem to resemble more of a colonized world achieved not by history, but by a long game of Risk.

I find it best to explain with diagrams. The following is a map explaining where different plug systems can be used, based on the information found on the packaging of my own converter (which is good for India, Hong Kong, and only parts of South Africa).

For comparison:

My search for similarities with the colonized world of 1895 was met with confusion. At least according to this map I got from a nonacademic source on Google image search, The Dutch, who controlled South Africa and the western coast of India, had no claim to Hong Kong.  The Spanish too, seem to have given up on electrically influencing any of their colonies.

I was forced to create a more plausible story to explain why China has two possible plug options, Hong Kong has another two, some shared with England, some with Australia, and some with South Africa, who each do not share with each other.

Here is the story I have come up with: 
Early electrical engineers looked for a way to compare their newly designed electrical systems. Being competitive, they created real-life electrical Risk. 

The green team holed up in Australia and the surrounding islands, building their forces. The yellow player, who was not too good at Risk started in Africa, managing to scatter his pieces around the area but often unable to hold onto any country for a substantial period of time. He was saved though, by the powerful forces of the blue team of the Americas and the silent but strong green team in Australia fighting over Chinese territory and duking it out there rather than trying to cross the Himalayas. The dark blue player managed to hold onto Europe, but had to constantly defend itself against its open borders, and did not travel far. The red team was a miserable player with bad luck.

While my imagination has now rendered the electrical situation of the world perfectly plausible, you might realize that Italy and Israel remain left out of my story. This information is neatly filled in by a cultural study, the likes of which are regularly undertaken by international relations students to understand deep seated or longstanding conflicts. Italy and Israel have their own systems because they like to be special, and to make of a bit of a mess of things.