Life outside the campus

On this cloudy Sunday we made the brave step to leave our comfortable, save yet rather boring campus to explore life in the outside world. The university is full of people who are rather well off and just outside the gates people live on the street. Today we left so early from our campus that we saw people waking up on street medians, lying under covers next to the street or still sleeping on a bed outside. This harsh reality is new to us and the contrast hard to understand. The concept of a home for instance, gets many new dimensions seeing all this. A mother with her son were eating breakfast on one street median while cars were driving past - would the son call that spot on the street his home? Throughout the day we saw also a very dirty city. The waste was mostly small pieces of plastic as all the valuable parts are collected already. The plastic bags and packaging makes the environment colorful, but I think everyone would agree that it is better to see it without any of these colors!

During the day we visited many temples and mosques, gates and fortes, and again Gandhi-ji's house. For each religious place we had to take off our shoes, but the exhibition about Gandhi we could enter with our shoes on. The highlight for me was the morning when we walked through the old part of Ahmedabad. There we saw the Sunday morning routines of normal people, cows walking around on the street the trash spread all over. The architecture reminded me of Zanzibar with its narrow streets and relatively high buildings. Other highlight was when in the house of Gandhi a lady explained Gandhi's philosophy. Themes such as equality, empowerment of women, food and love are nearly 70 years after his death still relevant. Indians are very proud of their peaceful independence and it is greatly thanks to Gandhi and his Satyagraha philosophy of Truth and Non-violence. Today was also the first time I entered a mosque and witnessed Muslims pray.

A group of some sixty Europeans disturbed all the normal routines of everyone. People kept on staring at us, asking for pictures with themselve or their children and giggling around. In Tanzania the children shout "What's my name?" and the older people "Karibu!" (welcome) to foreigners but here there is very little interaction in neither English nor Hindi. This is sad because it is much harder to pick up the language when there is no one who talks to you in the new language. Besides the school work I should maybe practice some Hindi and become more proactive!