Thursday, September 16^th

Today, I wore my new pants. According to Shridita, they're called harem pants. They're quite comfortable, and I think I might get a few more pairs.

We had Contemporary India and Indian Literature. In Contemporary, we basically just talked about the structure of the Indian government and how it's basically an amalgamation of British and American structure. It has the bicameral government with an upper house and a lower house. It has autonomous states. It has a written constitution. It has three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judiciary. However, the executive and legislative branches are kind of lumped together because the president is part of the congress and things like that. Despite the fact that states are autonomous, they don't have their own constitutions. They just have governors and chief ministers that work off the national constitution.

In Literature, we talked about Train to Pakistan. It basically divided into a few separate arguments. One lead to the statement by our professor that Americans are uncomfortable with ambiguity. The end of the book describes the martyrdom of an unnamed man; however, despite not telling his name, it vaguely describes the main character in the book. A lot of people in the class were uncomfortable with assuming that the martyr was the main character because the author, despite hinting at it, did not unarguably state that it was.

Another topic was selfishness. The martyr in the book martyred himself in saving an entire train full of people. However, he was doing it for one girl on the train and every other saved life was merely a side effect. Part of the class seemed to think that this was a selfish act, and that he wouldn't have done it had it not been for the one person on the train he wanted to save. The other part of the class tended to think that it was selfless of him to give up his life just for the one person. Personally, I don't really see why it matters what his motivation was or even his intentions; it should just matter that he did something. We also discussed love to some extent; more specifically, we talked about the difference between love and possessiveness.

This morning, I learned a very important lesson. My host father is more insistent on feeding me lots of food than my aai. This morning, Baba was in charge of making me breakfast. So, I had two apples. And before I was done with the apples, he put a pot full of oatmeal in front of me... so I had about three bowls worth of oatmeal. And, as I was finishing that, he says, “wait! You will have an omelet!” So I had an omelet, too. I always compare our cat Panda to the fat cat in the Swedish folk story, but now I kind of feel like that. The story is something along the lines of “He ate the gruel, and he ate the pot, and he ate the old woman too... and Skohottintot and Sir Linkinlot and a flock of birds... etc.” (And Dr. Nick would say something about linking that comment to the fact that vegetarians are just cannibals waiting to happen).

Also, today at lunch, my aai made a comment about “when you go back to America, Baba and I will always remember you because of how much you eat.” I think I might need to reevaluate my eating habits a little bit. But then again, it makes them happy that I like their food so much, and it makes me happy to eat their food... so maybe there's not a problem.

My host family is remodeling their kitchen. Today, they showed me cloth samples for the chair cushions and asked my opinions. One of the options was a reddish plaid fabric, and immediately upon seeing it, my unconscious mind recoiled and was like “NOOOOO!!! Not the plaid!!!” Thank you, Monmouth, for giving me an aversion to all things plaid.