January 24 - February 20, 2005
Pictures Here
I visited India last month first time after coming here. It was, surprisingly, not as surprising experience, as I had expected it to be. Looks like I am still Indian enough! Except that for first week there I had pretty hard time crossing roads. Being accustomed to cars stopping before me, when I so desire in US, I had difficulty finding gapes in the continuous trafffic stream. My risk threshold has perhaps decreased.
I also had this wonderful opportunity to visit my communty fair, a once-in-a-twelve-year rare event, where all my family members and all relatives and everybody from my community gathered in a village for full eight days and seven nights. We stayed under tents and cooked food on chulhas and slepts on sheets on farmland and bathed at local well and had great time together. The purpose of this kind of gathering is to meet all your acquaintances at one place and thats what happened all the time. You just go to tents and meet people and they offer you snacks and you eat & chat. There were various rides, more specifically Indian jhula, and vendors as typical in any fair.
Staying among village people, who would not be tired geting too excited on being weighed on a talking (taped) weighing machine was nice opportunity too see rural India from so close. I liked this so much, and I didn't even make fuss about poor quality of drinking water even after being NRI, that I enjoyed every moment of my stay. I had chance to meet my numerous relatives, and see lots of new bhabhis and neices and nephews and friends, and pretty girls! Only part I didn't like in this whole affair was where I had to fill up a jug in the morning and look for ....