First Week of Hindi Classes

Dear friends and family,

I hope things are going well at home. I have been enjoying your update emails!

I completed my first week of Hindi classes on Friday. My day looks like this: I wake up in the morning to do yoga or run while the water heats up for my shower. Then, I shower and eat breakfast.  After that, I catch up on emails, other internet related items, and study Hindi. Next, I walk to Char Dukan to eat lunch with my fellow Fulbrighters and friends from the language school. In the afternoon, I have four hours of Hindi classes back-to-back. At first I thought this would be too much, but I actually like having them blocked together. I am often exhausted by class four, but this would be the case whether there were breaks or not. After that, I may go for a walk, head back to my house, go to the bazaar, etc. I eat dinner around 7:00 or 7:30 usually, study/catch up on things, and go to bed.

There are few things from this week that I want to tell you about in particular.

On Wednesday night, I went to an Indian Christian bible study. Even though India is predominantly Hindu, there are a number of Muslims and Christians. Especially in Mussoorie, there are a lot of Christian churches. It was very interesting and the community was very welcoming. The bible study was almost solely in Hindi although they would give me 30 second updates on what was happening every once in a while. I understood very little of what everyone was saying, but I think it will get easier. It’s amazing to me that I have only studied Hindi for seven weeks formally, but I can understand so much more now! I can even express myself, what I want, and ask questions. My grammar is not always correct, but it’s getting much better. To me, it feels like a puzzle. I have to get the words in the right order with the right gender and then try to decode the message back to me.

On Thursday night, I went to a soiree hosted by four other students at the language school. This was really incredible! We ate pizza (which was thin crust and tasted a lot like home, except spicier and one had paneer on it). Then, four of the students gave talks about travels to strange places. The first talk was by Max who spent three years living in Myanmar including during the change of power in 2008. The second was by Karin, a Swiss radio reporter, based in Delhi reporting on the latest news from Afghanistan. She explained how difficult it is to validate the truth of what people tell her. She showed us pictures of her travels to Afghanistan including some of the locals she met. She also let us listen to sound bites from American soldiers who are stationed there. She prefers to speak with soldiers at lower ranks because she can get a more accurate story from them. Adam, an English professor, gave another talk outlining his prediction on the next economic superpower. Instead of having such a dominant country like the U.S., he thinks that the power will be more dispersed. In addition, he explained that China is less likely to be a successful economic power because of its aversion to diversity. The last talk (which began around 11:00pm) was by Daniel Simpson who recently finished his book The Rough Guide to the Dark Side (he is starting his U.S. book tour in the next month). Although I was exhausted by this point, he was very engaging and his story was also fascinating. He talked mostly about his disillusionment with the free press especially after working for the NY Times after 9/11. I am excited to read his book after hearing his brief talk. He has a website: www.roughguidedarkside.com/.

After such a successful soiree on Thursday, we are going to try to continue this weekly. We had such diversity in the room and hearing everyone’s perspectives and thoughtful questions was such a wonderful experience. To give you a taste of who was there, in addition to the four mentioned above, we had two Ph.D. students from London (one writing her dissertation on something to do with the BBC and the other writing about mobile phones in India), an Indian/British couple who live in Mussoorie, a woman from California who has traveled all over the world, a young man from the U.S. in the National Guard, a woman from Mussoorie whose father owns an antique shop, a university student from Germany, and a man who teaches at the language school.

That’s about it for now. I attached some pictures of the beautiful mountains in Mussoorie below. The other night, I was able to see about 70-80 miles from here to a power station in the horizon. This is the right place to be. =)

Margaret