(Note 1: Warning! Long post.
Note 2: writings from my short stay in Norway will be announced when posted. )
I dag er det fjerde dagen min i India – et land jeg endelig har kommet meg til! Dette høres vel ut som jeg har slitt med å få til å komme hit, men slik er det altså ikke.
I’d better write in English I realize… After a year in Japan speaking English almost everyday I thought I would automatically start again in English here in India, but that is not the case. I don’t have the exact numbers, but we’re about 80% Norwegians, a handful of Swedes, a Dane, a German, an Indian and a Sri Lanka. (And I think about 90% of the students are female…) Among the staff there are many Indians, a Swede, and a Briton. …So, I guess my point is that since we’re sooooooooo incredibly many Norwegians together, it’s almost impossible not to speak or think Norwegian. (We’re getting better at speaking English together whenever any non-Scandinavian is present, but I’m embarrassed that we actually had to *think* about it the first two days…)
I can’t tell you much about India, and probably never will; “We Indians are still trying to figure out India” my first guest lecturer tells us in our first class. Our guest lecturer for these introduction lectures is Dr. Sudha (Ph.D), a very nice and highly intelligent woman from Bangalore. We’re having introductory lectures about India this first week here in Pondicherry, preparing us for our next 2 months here.
There has been some culture shocks already, but none too big as of yet, seeing as we all expected them from the beginning since everything seems slightly alien or dreamlike to us. I’m guessing that the culture shocks are smaller (read: less severe) here than in Japan, because in Japan everything was more similar to home and culture shocks thus became less anticipated.
Our first major culture shock came as soon as we left the airport in Chennai. There were people everywhere, even at 4am, and the traffic…. The traffic. The traffic is a chapter in itself, and due some deeper analysis in its own right at some later point. But I conclude from the traffic – the amount of it, the traffic behaviour, etc. – that Indians are brave people, just by daring to cross the road.
Due to its extreme complexity of cultural/social/ethnic systems within democracy Dr. Sudha described India as a “functioning anarchy”, and today we concluded this applies to India’s traffic as well.
Incidentally, today I took my first ride in a rickshaw. Originally the rickshaw was a bicycle with a comfortable (?) passenger seat, now most of Pondi’s rickshaws are small, yellow-painted, built-in mopeds with space for 3 people (or an Indian family of 5*).There are small margins in the Indian traffic, the rickshaws constantly, narrowly avoids pedestrians, cars, bikes of all kinds, other rickshaws, cows, etc. I read in a book before going to India that you need to be confident, and I believe that is 100% true –especially in the traffic. You have to be confident, or project (prosjektere?) confidence to be able to cross streets.
(* I would have loved to say “Indian family of 8” but I decided the exaggeration of the rickshaw’s size, and/or an Indian family’s ability to invent space, would be too big…)
(*EDIT: apparently the limit is 7 Norwegian girls + the driver....)
You also need confidence in bargaining with the locals when shopping. In some stores there are set prices and that is no problem, but in the street shops and market places the traders and peddlers and salespeople raise their prices tenfold whenever they see a foreign (usually Western and/or white) face. The most extreme case of bargaining I’ve heard of from my group so far (i.e. after just 4 days) was a girl that was shopping for necklaces and bargained down the price 70% (from 1000Rps to 300Rps) and still the saleswoman was happy when she left.
300 Rps is not much by Norwegian standards nowadays; it is 8 Rps to 1nok I’ve been told, and by comparison a pair of trousers (loose, baggy trousers fitting for the local climate) cost me 220 Rps (tourist price, of course), while they would have been cheap in Norway for 200 NOK. Here, a 1 litre bottle of water costs 15 Rps, and ½ litre bottle of water in Norway costs 16 NOK (Imsdal, last time I checked at least). Dinner at a nice restaurant, 100-200 Rps here in Pondi, a cheap meal at a restaurant in Norway would be 180-250 NOK. It’s not a problem for us to pay without bargaining, but it is proportionally ridiculous compared to other local prices and the products’ actual price etc. We have to bargain down, and since they’re much better at bargaining they’ll still get a good profit compared to the local price levels. I’m just fine with not being good at bargaining just yet, but I’m going to practice with clear conscience knowing that I won’t have out-bargained anyone until the day a salesman does not smile as he shows me the door.
I’ve been writing about an hour now, I think it’s about time to sleep. I’m one hour late according to my new day-rhythm the last couple of days, but that’s another description for another time.
Good night!
