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On Inhabiting India
this will be brief as i'm hungry:
i love my new classes. i'm taking environmental and political science.
i like environmental science class because besides learning about india's geography and many wonderful places to visit, we have also learned about head hunting communities and a settlement called widow land because all the men have been eaten by maneating tigers. the male i'm traveling with doesn't want to visit that area for unknown reasons.
we've been also further learning about caste (don't ask me how this really relates to environmental science). i know that my host family is jain. apparently almost all jains are in the second to lowest caste (excluding the untouchables), yet jains tend to be very wealthy. i don't understand this caste ideology. someone of brahmin would be superior socially, yet not economically. it seems like in the U.S. they tend to go hand in hand. not by my standards, of course, but american society as a whole.
my political science teacher, shrikant, is amazing. according to bob (our advisor from coe college), he's been to about half of all major government meetings in the past 30 years or something. i think he said he worked in defense. i have yet discover one piece of information he doesn't know. you ask him a question, he pauses, and you expect him to have a filler (such as an "um" or "uh"), but he goes off completely en pointe. many of us just watch him in awe, when we aren't taking pages and pages of notes just because we are interested in the facts, not for the grade (we don't get tested on any of the lectures).
we were talking about indira gandhi today, the prime minister who declared an emergency and the prime minister after her first term. bob mentioned that the next prime minister (i can't remember his name right now) used to drink his own urine. shrikant then went off on a tangent about urine therapy. what a guy, that srikant. the end.
oh...i'll try to make entries about my classes a bit more intellectual next time as i don't have my notes with me.
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