Every time I've tried to write anything in a coherent structure about the actual experience of being here (on a gap year/abroad/in India/in the Himalayas/in Deer Park) I find myself driven to the point of needing to pencil in some silly moralistic statement about the benefits of a new country or volunteering or returning to an ancestral country or being around nature or something else that definitely doesn't need endorsement or explication, particularly not from some half-blown eighteen year old, just for a neat and superficial abstraction to tie together each striking detail, despite the fact that I'm surrounded by beautiful, complicated, cultural, ideological abstractions, none of which I can write about because each of them stubbornly refuses to be unraveled in any meaningful way except in momentary, incommunicable glimpses. At least for someone who writes as well as I do, or rather, someone who also doesn't write well enough to capture them.
So, rather than give in and say "Wow, how much I've learned about my place in the world!" I'll give you a list in no particular order of some of the thoughts I've had at here. Enjoy.
So, rather than give in and say "Wow, how much I've learned about my place in the world!" I'll give you a list in no particular order of some of the thoughts I've had at here. Enjoy.
- India is fantastic. It is ridiculous. It is a crazy country. Somehow it all works. People say it's a country to make you believe in God. My dad always answers its also one to make you disbelieve in one.
- Income inequality here is ridiculously evident, more so than in the US. In Gurgaon (outside of Delhi), $5 million apartments lie directly across sheet metal huts migrant laborers from Bihar live in.
- It is HEAVEN in Himachal, especially in Bir, where Deer Park is. Looking out at the Dhouladur Range every day is incredibly nurturing.
- Deer Park is a center for the study of classical Indian wisdom, led by Khyentse Rinpoche (a big deal in the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy) but it's managed by some great people and I mainly work on their community projects (so far I teach secular ethics at a local school for Tibetan refugees, am going to start teaching basic modal logic to a Science and Math critical-thinking camp for Dalit (untouchable) girls from Bihar (more on this later) and am helping Deer Park build a library for kids in the community. As such, I get an infusion of little kids scrambling all over my workspace and climbing everywhere and having lightsaber duels with me everyday at around four and I'll be damned if it's not the best workplace tradition, tied only with the two thirty minute tea breaks where everyone just drinks hot milk chai and sits together here and talks.
- I can't tell you how often that this is something I'm doing, that this is the place I am.
- The people I've met here at Deer Park are amazing. For example, my closest friend here is named Vid, a Latvian refugee when it was annexed by the USSR who then went to McGill, went to Woodstock, backpacked through Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Israel (where he met his wife, a Swiss woman who now has two MAs, on a kibbutz), worked as a cardiologist in Emergency medicine in inner-cities during the crack and heroin epidemics, and has now visited 80 countries and completed 32 Himalayan treks. Another couple here spends 14 hours a day meditating and the rest of their time going to local villages and providing medical care to the injured animals.
- Working at a school for Tibetan refugees has been incredibly interesting and fun. Aavishkaar, which runs science and math based critical thinking workshops for the purpose of creating educators for the Dalit community (where, in Bihar, among rat catchers, less than 1% of women are literate), does such such such AMAZING work. It's incredibly impressive how much such a small thing like a month long camp means to these children, both in the present and future.
- I scraped my leg playing basketball and it eventually got infected. Vid's taking great care of it!
- Every morning I watch the sun slant its way up the mountains. Every morning is something special.