We reached our house at around 10pm, where our in house cook, translator, guide, and soon to be teaching assistant, Saroji had a large hot dinner waiting. A mother of two (who refused to marry her daughters off until after they had completed a full education), Saroji is self described 'brave woman' -- meaning she is more independent than your average forty something Rajasthani woman ("but not as wishful to be independent as your women of the West"). Accompanying us everyday to class, occasionally team teaching in our village, she never hesitates to bargain or defend on our behalf. As we passed through our front yard gate that first night, Saroji was there to greet us and adorn a traditional red paint dot on our foreheads (which normally signifies marriage but forehead marking can be symbolic for a great variety of other things; perhaps ours was a sort of welcoming wish). Sohan looked visibly happy to be settled back at camp Jhalrapatan.
Saroji's cooking is perhaps the single greatest discovery I've made while in India. Using only fresh ingredients (and you can't get much fresher than locally bought vegetables grown on locally owned and dry-farmed family agro plots), her dinner entrees usually consist of potatoes or okra or ladyfingers covered in various Indian (curry) spices and oils, served aside butter flavored white rice (usually with potatoes or tomatoes), cut fresh vegetables, and a bean and spices soup or two. And with chapati (or naan, but I prefer to call them tortillas). Always with chapati. A lot of it.
Breakfasts are usually some mix of bananas, toast, hard boiled eggs, or japarti stuffed with either potatoes or simply more japarti dough. Meat is never a part of the equation, though she does fry a delicious mixture of vegetables and uniquely savory dough into bite sized morsels with the texture and look of chicken strips. Cheese is a rarity but milk and plain yogurt are not. Soda is relatively expensive (which is to say pop here is priced on par with Walmart back home) and fruit juice is downright extortionate (along with toilet paper, artificial and fruit juices are strangely 'overpriced' -- probably due to some mixture of low demand/low production possibility?) but the food is usually flavorful enough that an old fashioned glass of filtered water is well enough for most days' in-meal beverage.
The house is not air conditioned, instead relying on ceiling and stand fans. Our room does have a water cooler, a sort of humidifyier that uses only cold water and a very big and noisy fan (it says "Snow Cool" on its side), which we're told is actually more effective here than air conditioning. It spends most nights unused because it causes too much cold water to condense on our sheets. There are two lounge spaces with great views on the third story. At night, it provides the best escape from the heat the house traps in its rooms during the day. The view is great and you can often see the celebratory Christmas lights hanging on far off houses (marking a family wedding) or hear Hindi DJs drop beats in the streets for neighborhood dance parties.
We have a high speed internet connection here too which I use to write retroactively on this blog and stay up to date on Facebook (because knowing that the new Harry Potter was 'SUUch a waste of my time' or 'AHHH bestie movie ever' is essential to living a fully satisfied life in India). And while the power (and sometimes water) is shotty, especially during storms and the hottest part of the day, we also have a TV with +70 cable channels.
While tradition still tells women it is inappropriate to show their bare shoulders in public, Indian TV tells us the best way to get the ladies to rip off their clothes is to use Axe. Commercials often fall into one of three categories: actual American commercials (sometimes redubbed in Hindi; ex. Axe, Garnier Fructis), Indian commercials for American products, or Indian commercials for Indian products but with a distintively American marketing flair (ex. Axe imitators which still carry on the typical body spray ad script; see: 'Set Wet' spray -actual heavily advertised product). Ads for condoms and birth control occasionally dawn the small screen (though never in actual daily conversation), and the music, reality, and soap channels always feature the sort of not-so-subtly sexed up styles and motifs normally reserved in the states for the Spanish language stations.
Before coming to India, I never thought the opinions of the nut jobs outcrying that immoral media ruins societies were worth much. But in a society that is adopting an appreciation for tooth brushing and TV concurrently, I'm having second thoughts. I'm not saying that no citizen outside of the G8 can grasp an appreciation of pop TV for what it realistically is, pure entertainment; yet there's no question that the current presence of the kind of popular Indian media that I'm talking about (see: last paragraph) will affect the future mindset of its people differently than the rise of similar popular entertainment forms affected the US in the last twenty/thirty years.
The result, which is already beginning to unravel -- as in the case of Bollywood, will be a national attitude towards its pop culture that will seem to an American vaguely familiar and yet totally strange. An example is the way the Japanese regard their video games or cartoons: both forms of entertainment arose at the same time as their US contemporaries, but the different national and cultural environments the two grew up in resulted in largely varied views of what is acceptable and normal within each (Americans tire quickly of cutesy Japanese characters and become confused with common anime conventions, Japanese largely view American story lines and styles blunt and overly unambiguous).
An India-relevant example would be the road/driving system: its a very typical cultural hallmark within America, but when viewing the Indian way it seems hectic and otherworldly (and dangerous). The difference, obviously, is how the car and modern road system were basically invented and gradually integrated into American life, while India's need for cars came later and quite abruptly post-independence. Only certain aspects of the overseas systems were appropriated while new conventions were invented; the resulting beauty (or terror) can be seen on every Indian road and within any Indian tuktuk driver's methods. You can easily define it as cultural hybridization, localization, or neoglobalism - but deciding whether it is a good or bad thing is a bit trickier.
All I know is that fifteen years ago it was legal here to set your wife on fire if you did so in your house and there was a legitimate reason (you wanted to). Whether or not the hundreds of millions of rural Indian TV viewers contemplate what kind of cultural reformations their ages old country is setting itself up for is unknown. What kind of thoughts they have, as they gather and sit on the dirt in the dozens every night, while watching images of McDonalds, Chevy, Axe, and their sexy Bollywood idols, and how these will in turn affect that very reformation is even more a mystery.
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