27 August

Over a week has passed since my last post and I have so much to write about. I shall start off with the sad news, concerning my family, here. My host-grandfather died on Thursday. My respects to you, Ajaid and may you find peace. I didn’t go to school on Thursday because of this. The whole day was really exhausting. I must say that Indians put a lot of energy and time into their mourning. Our house was filled with people, with women crying loudly over Ajaid’s body and men quietly speaking. This crying and gathering lasted until about mid-day, when the body was washed and after that cremated. The cremation was done the “old way” which means, the body was placed on dry logs and covered in grease and cloth and layers of wood.After the pile was set on fire, we went on for prayers in the cremation place. These prayers were, of course not enough, so we went on to Gurdwara. After all those things, we had langar in our house. By the end of langar, it was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the ceremony had lasted for 8 hours and everybody was exhausted. Still, our house remained full of people till the evening. And the closest relatives even stayed the night.

I went to school on the next day and therefore didn’t see the gathering of ashes from the cremation place and dropping them into a holy river. However, Sukhbir’s sister told me that they held one place empty the whole time, while driving there (about 3 hours drive) just as he had been there with them. When they had dropped the ashes in to the river, they said to the ghost of Ajaid that this is his final resting place and he will not come back with them anymore.

The next following days were the time when the majority of friends, relatives (and the friends of relatives relatives) came to share our family’s grief. On Sunday, about the entire family went for a lunch at Sukhbir’s grandmother’s relatives place. For now, the major rush of guests is over (although we still get some 3-4 visits a-day) and only Harleen’s mother and Sukhbir’s elder sister have stayed with us.This is about to change quickly because from Thursday to Sunday, we will have a priest with a Guru Grand Sahib in our house. He will be reading (or actually singing) it loudly continuously till Sunday (if I have not misunderstood, 24 hours a-day). One of the family members will always have to sit there and listen

As always, there are positive sides of every event, even an event of such tragedy. I have met n number of very interesting people. I met Harleen’s brother Ajit (Bobby) and his wife for instance. Both of whom are very nice and intelligent people. I became very friendly with Bobby almost instantly.

Another person I met is Sukhbir’s elder sister Raj who flew over from US, I really like her and we have had several very interesting conversations.And last but not least, today I met Sukhbir’s “uncle” who is actually the father of one of his best friends. We had a nice conversation and he promised to take me to his golf club. I shall look forward to that. Today I had my physics practical. It was kind of fuddhu. I think I made some mistakes in calculations (we are not allowed to use calculator here) and therefore, the written part of my exam was not so good. On the other hand, my oral examination went perfectly. And one more thing: there will be a dance workshop in our school, in which the best choreographers will be teaching us. Our dancing will be a mixture of classical dances and traditional dances and pop-dances. I’m sure, we will have fun and I’m eagerly waiting 13 September, when the classes start.

I cant think of anything else to say, so I’m going to say good bye!

August 19

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, that I can’t trust our made anymore, because she pulled a rather unpleasant trick on me. This Saturday we had school (only 3 periods). The thing is that on Saturdays our school-busses don’t use their normal routes and I was not aware of that, because I had not bothered to ask anyone as I was supposed to go to Chandigarh on Saturday. Of course I was an idiot and forgot again that I’m in India and things rarely go as they are supposed to. This means that our trip to Chandigarh was cancelled on Friday evening. To get back to the point, I waited for my usual bus in the morning and after a half an hour, I returned to have Sukhbir drop me off. On our way to school, we saw a DPS school-bus on the side of the road, so we pulled over and I got on to the bus (in case of emergency, we are allowed to use any route we want to). It appeared that this was actually the bus which I was supposed to catch and my regular number didn’t go on special occasions. Anyway, I got to school without any further problems. Our school-day was pointless in terms of education, but it was fun, because both the English teacher and Physics teacher allowed us to do what ever we wanted to. So we played “truth and dear” the whole time. Our day ended at 11.00 and the buses were supposed to leave at 12. 00. So, taking concern of the fact that I had no idea, where my bus was going to drop me (because of the irregular routes) and the fact that I would have had to wait some 1,5 hours for my bus, I decided to call Sukhbir (as we had previously agreed) but found out that my credit was 0. At first I couldn’t figure it out because I knew, my balance was about 300 Rs. Now, the first thing that came to my mind was to use the school pay-phone but that was broken. The school administrator’s phone didn’t work either. Therefore, I had to wait for 2 hours for our bus to leave (it was supposed to leave at 12. 00 but left about 13.00). The bus dropped me at the place where it had picked me up and, using all of my energy to remember the road, I caught a riksha and told him that I’ll show him the way (because he didn’t know, where New Garden Colony was). Knowing only the direction, but being able to guess, I managed to guide the riksha driver to our house and got home without further problems. However, a question remained about my credit. I started checking my outgoing calls and saw that 95% of them were made to unknown numbers. I also looked at the times when they were taken and saw that most of them were taken on Friday (something like 15 calls) at the time when I know, I was already in school, Harleen and Sukhbir at work and therefore, there was no-one at the house except the maid and Ajaid (Sukhbir’s father). I must mention that I don’t carry my cell-phone to school (except on this Saturday) and I knew there was only one person who could have used it, the maid. Unfortunately I can not put a PIN-code on my card and therefore, my phone was free to be used by our maid. As soon as Sukhbir came home, I told him about this and, keeping everything between the two of us, we are planning to nail that bastard. I mean, 300 Rs. Is not a VERY big money but the fact that she left me in a very bad situation (which might have been even worse) created anger in me. I think I’m going to have this money taken off her wage.

That was the bad news. The good news is that I’m getting along with my classmates very well and am feeling more and more comfortable every day. I won’t be able to go out with them this weekend due to lack of credit on my phone-card but that really doesn’t matter. At some point of time I’m going to see my classmate’s house and meet her parents, because I might be able to convince them to let her go on an exchange year. Also, I had a chemistry test last week (as well as English) and I’m hoping for positive results (in chemistry somewhere around 20 points out of 25 ) and in English, maximum.English seems to be the subject in which I’m the best at the moment and my teacher said on Thursday that I am the only good student in our class (she was exaggerating of course). I also got back my Math test with a score of 1, which is not exactly good, but is progress, comparing to the previous 0. Also, I understand the chapter which we are dealing at the moment rather well and I’m hoping for positive (or at least better) results on the next test.

The next news is that I’m going to have to give a speech on 5th September (the teachers’ day). The only thing is, that I’m supposed to say positive things about Indian educational system and the teachers, but all I can think is criticism.
That’s it for this week,
Bye.

Independence Day

Happy Independence Day, India!! Today is the 60th birthday of what is frequently called “the largest democracy in the world”. Each and every newspaper is filled with Independence Day crap. It is hard to find any proper news. Although it is understandable that on such days, the news turn much attention to the past and so on, but to read from every piece of paper, how incredibly good and wonderful (if not to say flawless) it is in India is irritating. What happened to all of the poverty, where are the underprivileged people? How about corruption? No, they have not disappeared just like that. Of course we all know that India is a developing country (as is Estonia) with the problems, so typical to developing countries and is trying to overcome them, but I think it is immoral to only talk about the good things, while closing your eyes to everything else. Leaving aside the newspapers, the day is great. Since it is a holiday, the whole city is extremely quiet and peaceful. Yesterday I gave an interview to the school’s newspaper. It was pleasant and I met whole bunch of nice people again. Also, it is now certain that I will have some foreign company here in Jalandhar, as a new student from USA is coming here (they just found him a host-family). The guy is going to come to my school and possibly to my class. I’ll be looking forward to that.

Aug 12

Another week has passed and the surroundings seem to get more and more normal to me, I actually need to remind myself frequently that I’m in India. Not that I don’t know that, but it doesn’t seem so strange or foreign anymore. I guess it is a sign of me, starting to fit in. The previous week witnessed the ending of local district elections. Wednesday was the last day of elections and therefore, a holiday (this means- no more waking up at 5.30).The elections were a bit annoying but at the same time, more interesting than the ones in Estonia. Could you imagine Edgar Savisaar, walking in front of a parade (consisting of people whom he had paid some money- therefore in our case- the pensioners) and singing songs, stopping traffic and using any kind of drums to make noise? Besides the parades there were auto-rikshas with loud speakers on them and which drove around and shouted out election promises. Anyway it was once again an entirely new experience for me and I’m glad to have seen the event.On Saturday I went roaming with a guy from commerce section, Sarab J. It was really pleasant, although I’m not much of a biker person (usually they roam in cars but at that moment everybody were in tuitions and the cars were not available). We met a lot of people and I had a nice time, so I’ll be looking forward to next free days.

4 Aug

Golden Temple & Amritsar
My host-mother woke me up today, asking me if I wanted to go to Amritsar. Well, you can try to guess what my answer was. In any case, I got to see the famous Golden Temple. The temple itself is rather small I must say (I mean the main part which is surrounded by amrit (the holy water) and didn’t look very impressive, but the whole complex is very beautiful. We spent there about 2 hours, I think. At first I thought, I would take a bath in the holy water, but afterwards re-decided because I really don’t believe in these things and thought it would be a bit impropriate. Anyway, we waited in a queue for quite a while to get in to the main part and afterwards visited different parts of the complex. This included the place where people go and sit on the ground and eat the food, given by the temple. These meals are actually good to the society because eating there doesn’t cost anything, so the poor people can have their meal over there. You can actually get as much food as you want to. Because of the free food, there are a people from very different layers of society and it is interesting to all of them sitting on the ground and eating side-by-side. After visiting the temple, I saw the Sikh museum (which is actually a part of the temple). There were a lot of bloody paintings of ancient battles (between the Sikh and the Moghuls) and the Sikh martyrs and, to my surprise, the paintings of the so called “freedom fighters” who were responsible for the terrorist acts in the 1984. It only then occurred to me, exactly how violent the Sikh history is. After seeing that, we went to a beautiful garden near the temple, where a massacre had taken place (sorry, but I don’t know the datum). Nowadays there are monuments and truly very-very beautiful gardens.

In addition, I couldn’t miss a chance to see how Siim is living, so we went to the spa in which he lives. Siim gave me a tour around the property. That’s one hell of a building, I must say. Anyway, it was nice to speak Estonian again (although we had to concentrate in order to do so, because we are already so used to English).

About schoolmates

I’ve just read Siim’s post in wich he describes the behavior of his classmates and realized that I had completely forgotten to do that.I must say that I agree with Siim on the childishness: their behavior would definitely seem childish in Estonia, but as we are in India and I am trying my best to be culturally sensitive, I look past that. Just as Siim’s classmates, some of mine are into porn. They don’t watch it in school as the ones in Amritsar, but they sure do it at home. I know this because a guy offered to lend me a movie and after my investigation it came out that it was a so called “bad movie”. But these screwballs are exeptions (whom I’m trying to keep away from) and in general, the guys are great. Of course everybody asks a lot of questions. Surprisingly, one of the most frequent questions is: “do you have a girlfriend” and it seems to be almost impossible to explain them, why I don’t have a girlfriend, because, as one of my friends explained, Indians think that every western guy has several girlfriends ( a rather odd misconception, I must say). Then there is the uncomfortable question about, how do I like Indian girls. You may ask why is this uncomfortable? Well, you see, I’m a nice guy and I don’t want to insult anybody, but I don’t see any beautiful girls around me (don’t get me wrong, they are nice and friendly, just not beautiful), therefore, I must sneak around this question. I have also read from Siim’s blog that it is compulsory for every school to have morning prayers. Well in my school there are no such things as prayers, so I must disagree with Siim on this. Although, this is probably not Siim’s mistake, but someone who has explained it to him.

3 August

I haven’t posted for a while due to network problems (I’ll try to write more regularly hence forward. Anyhow, the school’s great. I got a birthday invitation for next Sunday, I’m kind of excited about this. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of parties do Indian teenagers have. From what I know, there will be no alcohol (It is actually considered to be a sin to drink alcohol). My schedule is now filled with extra classes in Physics, Chemistry, Math and Hindi. Hindi doesn’t seem to bee very difficult to learn, but this only applies for the oral part of it. The letters and vocals are a bit complicated. I gave my first test in this school (Math) and got 0 points, but I’m not very sad about that because about 75% of our class failed and there were about 3 tests with score 0. On Wednesday, we had our weekly test in English (literature) and I’m feeling rather confident about the results. Yesterday I played basketball with my friends and instantly felt really well, because they were no mach to me J . It seems that Indians are just not meant for basketball. I think it would be the other way around, if we had played cricket, though.
One of the purposes of exchange year is to start respecting your own country and culture more. The weird thing is, I already respect our e-country and our gorgeous girls a lot more than I used to (you don’t know what you got until you lose it).

Mihkel in Incredible India