a boring post about studying

It's 12:30 am, New Delhi time and 3:00 pm in New York City (did I mention that India time, it's bizarre, is on a half time-zone?). I'm studying hard for our first major Hindi exam tomorrow morning; I have an especially large amount of material to cover owing to the week of classes I missed during the excursion. I'm hoping to get thru Okay, though. Classes begin 1.5 hours late tomorrow (at 10:00 am), which gives me a little extra time.

Busy Busy Busy. We're definitely moving towards high-gear on the academic side of things, here. The workload has always been rigorous, but in the past three weeks, there has been a two-part, complementary change in focus: less and less on living "effectively" in India; and, more and more on the readings, lectures, excursions and assignments. It's amazing to me, but, if you account for the upcoming week-long workshops we'll all be participating in, there are just two complete remaining weeks of formal classes. And then we all ship off to the freedom and intensity of our month-long Independent Study Projects. We'll be living on our own in whatever region of India we choose, conducting research of our own design.

For my part, I have done a complete 180 on my topic--and I was one of the first students to nail things down. I decided to study Indian Art Cinema in Bombay--not Bollywood, but its neglected sister. Serendipitously, I found an adviser in Sangeeta's border Mena; she has spent most of her journalism career as a film critic for the Time of India, and has been on the selection committees for several festivals, including Cannes and Toronto. Moreover, I already had some good connections through Sangeeta in another way: she knows a woman documentary film maker in Bombay. I decided to take the angle of gender portrayals in the contemporary art cinema catalogue, so this was perfect.

But I couldn't shake this feeling that I was wasting an opportunity. One of the principal guidelines for our topic choice is that it must entail research that can only be conducted in India. My interviews would meet this requirement, but the prospect of spending endless hours watching films (films that, with some perseverance, could be obtained in the States) felt like missing the point.

So I have decided, with Storm-Ji's endorsement to switch my topic. Picking up on a course from last fall at Wesleyan, I am going to research traditional N. Indian village planning. The course at Wes was on West African architecture; it was remarkable to me to be studying the most humble of structures made of mud bricks, many of which only survive in descriptions and drawings. My term paper was on the Dogon society: what are the social implications of how the Dogon arrange their villages, on the level village planning and compound planning.

I'm real excited about taking this project to India. The first hurdle will be locating a traditional N. Indian village that has, for the most part, survived modernization. I will spend the better part of three weeks in the village drawing bird's eye plans and conducting interviews. And then (like everyone else) I'll return to Delhi for the last week of the semester to turn all this data into some sort of something... hopefully a convincing term paper. And who knows, maybe I'll learn something about something--I've always wanted to.

If anyone out there in digital land is actually reading this, send me Hindi brain power for tomorrow morning. I'll need it.