Time fastly whittling down...

Well, here goes my little online quasi-public travel journal. I'll try to refrain from misguidedly essentializing claims about Indian life and India as a people and place, and do what I can to avoid the problems of a typical travel narrative. I hope you readers all enjoy, that this can be both entertaining and informative, and that I don't distort the way of things in the immense, complicated, and challenging land that will host me for the next few months. And also, prepare, for I'm sure this will be pretty self-absorbed, given the format. You've been notified.

Somehow, I'm left with only 3 days before the time arrives to head across the world. 3 days! Looking back, I've been in a strange limbo for the last month, a time that has been neither winter break nor Christmas season as usual, but rather The-Time-Before-I-Leave-For-India. I'm extremely excited to actually begin the journey, predictably, but its completely new for me to have no idea what any of the aspects of my life will be like in less than one week. So, a little anxiety has settled in as well. Of course, I'm feeling pretty strapped for time. The little practicalities of preparation always take much longer than you'd expect. So I haven't read as much as I had hoped, nor have I learned much Hindi, as I had planned. I've dabbled a little--trying to learn the alphabet and pronunciation. Otherwise, I've been studying the preparatory program readings about development and globalization, which were very interesting and explained a bit about the problems of neo-liberal economic policy and imperialism, reading some of the presumably prerequisite works (Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children), and learning whatever I can about Indian history, culture, and religion. I'll probably watch some Bollywood films in the next few days to garner a bit of pop culture currency to barter in conversation. I certainly don't want to come off completely ignorant of popular small talk topics. I'm sure some of that's inevitable. Oh well--just dive in, I suppose the advice would go.

I'm sure I'll be waiting at the airport before I know it. I doubt I'll say much more before I'm writing from Delhi. Until then, take care any and everybody.