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[bethlakshmi]

I have so many more parts of the trip to capture...

But I'm home now, and I think I need to write to clean out my head.

Status:
- I'm home
- My luggage is home
- My distressingly large shipment is home
- Vishnu from Belur is in Mysore (hopefully coming home w. my teacher)
- 3 saris and some tailoring is in Delhi being shipped to me as a great pain in the ass by my friend (I feel so bad about this...) having arrived from Hyderabad 12 hours too late.

... my cold is another souvenir. On the good side - it didn't slow me down. There was hardly any time when I failed to enjoy myself because I was sick - maybe 2 hours in Hyderabad while Vidya and I shared our misery, and 3 hours in Mysore when I coughed my way through the night... I've been phlegmy and coughy but generally in amazing spirits. Delhi is cold and clammy - though - and the healing that Trivandrum was doing was definitely off set there. And then the airplane was no help. It also dried me like a dessicated mummy. And now there is the righteous New England cold - which has mercifully NOT hit full throttle...

At least with the New England cold, there is also the super-heated New England buildings. :) It's like Delhi outside and Trivandrum inside!

Thankfullness

Anyhow, I think the best way to sum up is a quick look at what I'm thankful for as I step between the worlds:

India	United States
Weather - damn near idyllic. Delhi can be cold, but all the weather lacked the brutality of a Boston winter Willingness to help - the functional chaos of the country means that people are always willing to help. It teaches me that it's OK to ask for help, and that people can and do give each other (even strangers) the benefit of the doubt. When I think of all the people who helped me on my journeys, I'm just so thankful and amazed.  My best example of this trust is when fabric sellers sent us WITH our packages to go to an ATM to get cash when the credit card machine wouldn't take my card... because they felt that having the package would make me more likely to come back and pay.  It worked... Full of Mystery - not just because I'm a foreigner.  Sure, that's some of it.  But what i see is that India is always changing, and always diverse.  Even Indians don't really know what's around the corner or what will happen next.  Magic feels a bit closer here - you can find a forgotten god in a temple, a shop keeper may dig you out a treasure from a lost corner of a shelf that even they had forgotten, a monkey may visit you for your morning coffee or a parrot perch on a forgotten tomb for a photo shoot. Milk - Dairy in India is just a whole other thing.  There isn't so much cheese (at least where I was) but every form of milk is just so much better.  And yet the older folks talk about the days before the government milk program - when you got milk even more directly from the cow (ahem, buffalo, thanks Vidya) - and it was even more amazing.  This hits everything - the milk in your coffee is better than cream, the curds are a food I can't describe, even ice cream that came cheap and mass produced is better than some Hagen Das, and the sweet yogurts from West Bengal and Punjab make FroYo unnecessary. Coffee - I know I just said Milk - but coffee is a whole other thing.  It's sweet, it's cinnamon, cardamom and I don't know what all, but it's magic.  They serve it in tiny expresso cups because otherwise you would die of joy. Tender coconut - 30-50 RP unless someone is screwing you over - drink the water from a straw, cut it, and scrape out the tender fruit - and the only non-biodegradable thing is the straw.  It's just waiting for you on the side of every road. Textiles - I'll never be sick of the beauty and variety of Indian textiles.  The variety, the beauty, and the price - these days handwork is expensive no matter how you cut it.  But the demands of the market mean that even the mass produced factory stuff is vibrant in its cost friendly form.  And the idea that you must have a LBD to be in formal society is unheard of.  Spas - they are basically a 1/3 the price for most of the value.  There are some points that aren't great - they don't know quite how to deal with certain white people issues like straight dyed hair, and nail polish drying just doesn't work out so great here.  But overall you get a whole lot more luxury for a great price. Alternatives to driving - a nicer point of India's complexity is the travel alternatives (but not the traffic!) - you have autos (auto-rickshaws), Metros (in big cities), scooters, micro-cars, cars, buses, trains... and you can hire a driver for your car, or drive yourself, or get an Uber, or get a driver with a car .... it's not perfect (will it ever be?) but I like the alternatives.  I may be a little jaded, as the economic advantage from being an American means that a 4 hour car drive with a driver between cities is on par with an Uber ride across Boston, and you can hire a car AND driver for a 2 day adventure for the cost of a bus to NYC from Boston. Nature - for better or worse nature is living with you every day in India in a way it isn't in the US.  Some of it is our US hermetically sealed buildings.  But also our insecticides, other pest control, farming practices, etc, etc.  We not only tamed nature, we crushed it.  There are cities in India where it's sad to see the retreat of nature in any but it's meaner forms (Bangalore can't really defend it's title as the "Garden City"... and I'm still pondering which city wins for "Mosquito City" - Trivandrum wins for largest individual bites, but I think Bangalore wins for persistence) - but in most cases, nature is there WITH you - dogs, cows, cats on the street, trees & bushes anywhere/everywhere - and people using seeds, leaves, fruits, flowers, etc. from their backyards for food and healing.  Yeah - I also hang out with Ayurvedically inclined folks, who appreciate that connection to nature... but I can honestly say, there's a connection here that I think is close to India's heart in a way the US could learn from.  Looking at river goddesses, Varaha saving the Ganges, the snake on Shiva's shoulders - nature and religion have a more friendly relationship here. Smells - yeah, some are stinky - but they are THERE (at least when I don't have a cold!) - and some are amazing - spices, sandalwood, rose, jasmine and kanakumbrum flowers, food - it's all smelling in high fidelity, even for a lady with one of the poorest senses of smell in the best of times.	Buildings - Perhaps it's anti-environmental of me, but the serious insulation and window technology of our buildings is down right cozy. Non-intrusiveness - perhaps the counter of willing to help? In New England (not all of the US) - we have a fairly prohibitive set of norms around getting into each other's business. For example, in the month i was in India, I was asked at least weekly by various random strangers "Are you married?" and when I said "no", the reply was "oh, I'm so sorry" - and I just sort of KNEW, it wasn't "so sorry I asked that really intrusive question", it was "so sorry that you weren't able to do what you were supposed to.  (My friend from Delhi would note, the impact is more felt in the South than in the North... but the majority of my trip was South) Predictable systems & processes - sounds like a lame thing to be thankful for, doesn't it?  But when you do just about anything here, the process and result is predictable.  Shipping one package in one city is the same as in another city.  Flying in one airport is a lot like another.  Buying from one store or getting cash is the same wherever.  In India, every flight is different, every package sent is different, every shopping experience is different - there's no pattern...  it's exhausting.  Let my surprises be under the Christmas tree, thanks. Water - is a luxury you don't miss until it utterly changes.  First - given my American immune system, unfiltered water in India wants to kill me... so I end up toting a water bottle not just for health, but for survival.  But that also means no coconut chutney outside the house (made w. water) - which makes for sad dosa eating.  And changing my routine so I brush and take pills w filtered water, not tap water.  Stumbling into the bath and just wetting my tooth brush with tap water this morning was a real luxury.  Also - public water and water tanks run dry.  Water from the public pipes is often off at night in some parts of India.  And Hyderbad is facing serious shortages in the next few years given its growth.  And let me tell you - we use water for a whole lot more than drinking!!  Say good bye to showers... and laundry! Look for yourself, fixed price shopping - square footage in Indian stores is at a premium and the style of Indian sales is "maybe if I push harder, they will buy something".  Fending off a merchant so I can think isn't a necessity in the US.  Hell - generally the teenage sales girl doesn't even want to ring me up.  But the price on the tag is the price, and my wits can spend time on finding the right store with the right stuff for the right price, not trying to outwit a merchant and wondering if I got screwed. Cars - Indian car (and road) technology is quite a bit behind.  I'm pretty sure an automatic car would not survive India very well... and they DO have cars with backup cameras and blue tooth everything - but the cars are still small. Some of me is embarrassed - my Honda HRV looks like a gas guzzling monster right now - even though it's got all sorts of green fuel efficient add ons - it's a heck of a lot more mass to haul around.  But I am a 6' tall Amazon and I like my knee caps.  And I routinely haul a 6' tall Amazon's pile of stuff around. Connectivity - I suspect that I had not made a good setup for myself, but also that unlike my Indian tech friends I have a propensity for going into less urban spaces.  I got an extended T Mobile International pass for the month, but it really wasn't up to my needs.  Apparently I could have probably gotten a hub, and/or an Indian prepaid phone, and I think that WOULD have been better - but also the # of places I went meant I was pretty demanding.  But it was a demand that would be not such a big deal if this was a Burlesque tour of small towns in Maine.  Even when my cell signal dies in the wilds of Maine, I could count on all sorts of public spaces having free or cheap WiFi for a quick hit - and I could upload photos and other bandwidth consuming things without more charges.  In Mysore - even the airport had no WiFi, and in the Hyderabad airport the WiFi booted me in 15 minutes! Power - Outages in India are less than they were 10 years ago, but it's still routine enough to be a normal thing. Shoes - Despite my love of Indian clothing you can have my Fluevogs when you take them off my cold, dead body.  And don't believe Scratch when he tells you I used to wear shoes w/out socks.  That was lifetimes ago.   Toilets - I'm sorry if TP hurts the planet... I like it, and I like the satisfying WOOSH of US toilettes.  I also like that I never (? hardly ever?) think "will me sitting on this toilet destroy it utterly or rip it from the wall? Showers - I was a kid that used to freak out about water pouring down on me from above.  But the reunion of me and my newly renovated home shower was a thing of profound joy.  My hair is even happier than that.

There are things I can't compare:

• People I love.  They are in both countries and regardless of where I go, I will miss the others so much that my heart aches.  My US family will always be the ones who I take for granted but whom I could not live without and who spell the essence of home for me.  But my far away loved ones across so many cities in India who opened their hearts and homes to me will always be a reason why I am sad that seeing them requires 14-16 hours of plane flight and a head spinning level of jet lag one way or the other.
• Language - I'm impressed and humiliated that so many people in all walks of live in India are bi- if not tri- lingual, while I struggle desperately and with such hopeless frustration with anything but English.  And yet I am unashamed at how very happy I am to sit here in a restaurant hearing the familiar cadences of not only my mother tongue, but the familiar lilt of the Boston accent.  It isn't the most lyrical form of English. but it's mine.  I love that human minds manage all sorts of languages, combined with the new and different ways of thinking opened with each one.  And to me the sounds of Kannada, Malyaram, Telegu and Hindi really DO sound quite different and each is beautiful in their own way.  But I do so like knowing what's being said, even when it's not addressed to me.  Or hearing the radio play and knowing the words...
• Being on vacation - being on vacation for 3.5 weeks is just great.  Pretty hard to go wrong there.  I highly recommend it.  Maybe in a week or two I'll say that work and regular life is great too.  Right now, i'm having trouble imaging that.  I needed a chance to put work down for more than a few days, and I definitely got that.  I'm treasuring this last < 24 hours before jumping back in.

Writing this puts it in perspective... the time flew by.  I had my hard moments, sure, but they were short, not painful, and the hardest was always saying goodbye, which is an unavoidable part of enjoying time with those you care about.

I'm thankful for the opportunity to do this and I'm hopeful that India has rejuvenated me and given me some new energy for tackling regular life.  It certainly brought me a great deal of joy that I intend to hand onto.