It’s illegal to kill peacocks and cows in India…
So India… Where do I start, it’s been whirlwind. Melbourne is a life time away.
Excitement so far, Adam said I should drink water from the clouds while I was travelling through the sky……. Hmmmmmm beautiful fluffy water. On the leg between Melbourne and Sydney we were given bottled water with a picture of a cloud on it, perhaps it came straight form the clouds, sucked into the plane and bottled for our enjoyment:-
Happy passengers = Happy crew = Happy flight
NID is a bubble land- a safe haven walled in, lush, green, a controlled environment sealed off from the outside world. Students and acidemics wandering around occupying themselves with thoughts of design forgetting the rest of the world;- live, breath, sleep, make, talk design. Connected to all the outside walls are slums.
Nanna’s on Campus…
School runs from 9am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday and then it is very typical for the students to stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning working n their assignments. We haven’t gotten into this sleepless culture, early to bed for this pair of western nanna’s. The staying up late is almost a competition who is the most hardcore- sleep depravation is cool for the kids in the hood.
Drinking Chai has replaced my coffee addiction!! Kath sits with some of our new friends at BMW cafe (behind metal workshop).
I have been watching the students perform ‘ragging’. Which has been technically banned by the high court of India and thus now is termed ‘Social Interaction’. It’s ritual which the first years/freshers are subjected too. The action took place on the basketball courts from 9pm till about midnight. I was videoing the going ons, but was in trouble by the guards- technically it’s not taking place, so therefore there should be no record of it. It seemed to me to be a whole lot of yelling… Seniors yelling at the juniors. Sit down, no laughing, are you laughing, do you think it’s funny, heads down…. and so on- but they were screaming at the kids, so much so that it was hard to make out what they were saying; loud , intense, confusing. For three nights we went to see what was going on, it appeared to be some crazy form of bullying- really mean. It was suggested we should get involved- NO WAY! We were joking and thought we’d create a major stir by striping off and running around the court through the crowd. It would be one ragging not forgotten. What we missed last night was a staged fight that went wrong and about twenty people got involved, in the confusion a third year student trod on a nail, so there was blood everywhere. The ringleader of the ‘Social Interaction’ was ejected from the hostel in the middle of the night. We tried to leave the hostel to go for a walk, at first the guards weren’t going to let us, and then we had to sign out and in.There was talk of protests. Tonight it was the same again, though at the end all the freshers were drenched in water, then welcomed, hugged, given ice cream and then the dancing begun (up until this point in time they were being snubbed by the seniors). Every one seemed to know a dance which they all started to perform- they all went kind of crazy. It was very surreal watching them. To me it’s just justified bullying. These are adults; undergraduates and post grads; to me it seems the type of behaviour which could happen in school, it’s stupid. A friend of mine (who is 25) went to get water at 4am and bumped into some second year boys (they’d be 18) who were drunk. They made him dance and sing a song for them. He is 7 years their senior, but because he is a first year post grad student he has to respect their stupid demands, it’s so demeaning. It’s all a bit beyond me. The students here think I am strange because I am so horrified/ disgusted by this stupid tradition.
