I arrived a week ago yesterday in Chennai and it's been a bit of a whirlwind ever since. One of the reasons I chose to start my India adventure in Goa is that it's "India lite", very Westernized and not so extreme in the ways that India can be extreme, such as congestion, pollution, heat and traffic. Chennai, however, while not the most extreme of Indian cities, is definitely not India lite. The traffic is the worst I've ever seen, with the possible exception of the day-and-a-half I spent in Bangalore a couple of years ago. Utter chaos, constant honking, every inch of street crammed with cars and scooters and taxis and rikshaws during rushhour.
I arrived on a Saturday night and the normally twenty minute trip to my apartment took well over an hour. I don't take out my iPod in public-- it attracts the wrong kind of attention-- but it got dark and I couldn't read in the cab and traffic was 100% deadlocked so I capitulated and cranked up some Rosetta, screamingly heavy epic rock-metal, and halfway through the ten minute song the traffic still hadn't budged an inch. Bent over the digital iPod display and mesmerized by the heavy tunes, I made the mistake of looking up and briefly meeting the gaze of a ragged woman beggar who was making her way between the deadlocked vehicles. Immediately she moved directly in front of my passenger side window and started banging on the door and holding her hand out for money. I remembered the old "woman with baby" begging trick from Goa and to my semi-horror she very dramatically raised up a tiny child she had in her arms to feed it some milk and the baby obligingly started crying. I wish I could say that the image moved me in some way, but instead I wanted to lock the door and roll up a non-existent shade so I could block the whole thing out of my mind. You get numb to this sort of poverty and need after a while or you go a bit mental.
Sunday I met up with a friend-of-a-friend who's also in the program, "A", who is in India for the first time and was well into the throes of culture shock, an inevitable process for a Westerner. We went to orientation Sunday night and met the people in the program. It's mostly an older crowd, predominantly women, with a bunch of Americans but also people from Italy, the U.K., Ireland, Singapore, Brazil, Australia and even... India! (Which is odd, since it's a program for international students, but maybe he counts as a foreigner because he lives in Austin, Texas.) Monday morning began with a brief asana practice, which for me proved to be less than satisfying, as the program is geared towards yoga therapy and it's a far cry from the vigourous asana practice to which I am accustomed. Also, the program is way more theoretical than I realized, but my English major theory nerd side has taken over and I'm digging the classes. Surprisingly, I love the Vedic Chanting class, there's something very soothing and hypnotic about chanting Sanskrit. Another notch in my hippie belt.
As usual, the food is a problem and I will occasionally just throw up my hands and get full-on pissed off about the fact that the South Indian diet is so heavy on vegetables and carbs and is way on the other side of the spectrum from my usual protein heavy diet. But I've hunted down some more Western style places and I'm pleased to report that this morning I had a cheese omelette AND a chicken sandwich and like 3 cups of coffee and everything is right with the world!
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