January 22, 2024
No Particular Night or Morning
The past three weeks have been a blur of Bangalore, Srirangapatna, Mysore and many crammed bus rides. Learning the good, bad, and ugly about each other and India. I catch myself often feeling like these are still our first few days here rather than the end of three weeks. This weekend marked the beginning of more unstructured weeks to work with our organizations and time to explore.
Thursday night I found one of my friend’s favorite books, The Illustrated Man, at a used book store on Church street and decided to spend the weekend reading in Cubbon park. The book follows the stories of a man’s tattoos which come to life on his body. The stories are sweet, creepy, and a little too spot-on for science fiction written fifty years ago. One chapter particularly felt like a warning for the next seven weeks in Bangalore. “No Particular Night or Morning” follows an astronaut, Hitchcock, sharing his philosophy on being so far from the familiar. He fights with his crew that memories of Earth are futile and life outside the ship has become a blur. Hitchcock says at one point, “Why should I hold onto things I can’t use? I’m practical. If Earth isn’t here for me to walk on, you want me to walk on memories? To hell with them! Stay away from them. They make you unhappy. They ruin your work. They make you cry.” Hitchcock’s sentiments remind me of how Julian is always reminding us to experience India without constant comparisons to the United States. It’s sometimes a challenge to understand what is happening around us without relying on what we know so well in Seattle. But I think Hitchcock’s words have a small bit of truth to them. We are experiencing such a drastically different place; we have to view it as its own world with skills and sentiments we can learn from. Leaving our own biases and experiences and learning from the community. But Hitchcock also feels detached in space as if the experience is one big blur. One of his crew members countered with, “Everyone has a little touch of space the first time out… You get wildly philosophical, then frightened. You break into a sweat , then you doubt your parentage, you don’t believe in Earth, you get drunk, wake up with a hangover, and that’s it.” GCIL has begun to feel like a blur of excitement and intensity and the story seems to scream the importance of anchoring yourself. While we are learning so much from these new experiences, I have to remind myself to reflect at the end of the day and somehow record how I’m feeling or what I’m thinking. Constantly telling myself that our time in Bangalore is limited and to experience as much as possible. At the end of the story, Hitchcock jumps ship into an unknown fate in space. I am unsure if we should make this leap or stay on the ship dreaming every night of Earth. But I do know that our time in Bangalore is changing us all for the better, and I am excited to see what we all learn from our organizations.
By Nantahala
