So sari shopping today was a bust. I was seriously disappointed. Our resource guide took five of us as a group to get saris. However, the other four people were looking for traditional Maharashtran saris to wear on Saturday for our farewell dinner, and I want saris that focus less on the Maharashtra and more on the pretty. Not that the traditional ones aren't pretty... they're just monochromatic. A blue sari is blue with different tones of blue and another color blue and then gold trim. And that's nice. But not what I want.

Also, since the other four girls need one for Saturday and it has to get tailored and all before then, they were made priorities in the shopping scale. So, I basically tagged along for two hours and wasted time. But things were really pretty, and it did give me a better idea of what I don't want.

Tomorrow is the last day of my evil political science class of doom that everyone's gonna fail. We have to turn in a final paper. The prompt is really ambiguous and only tells us that we should reflect on our time in India and write four pages. When we asked the teacher, he told us that it would be nice if we wrote about politics in it, even though he didn't mention it in the assignment. But basically, it was a really vague assignment that was supposed to possibly talk about politics or India... so I wrote about Rome.

No, really. I did.

However, I connected it to India and politics by comparing ancient Roman boundaries and borders to the ones in India today.

This just in: We got our Contemporary India tests from last week.  The results?  Shockingly enough, we all failed.  Again.  However, each of us failed a little bit less than last time.  

Being a Classicist here is actually kind of entertaining sometimes. With the intertwining history along with the British influence here, a lot of academic people have a little bit of knowledge about Classical stuff. They know a few Latin terms and whatnot. What they don't know, they make up. And, since there's the stereotype that all Americans are unaware idiots, they assume we don't know anything about anything. There was one day that Raj (our Lit teacher) was talking about a book we were reading. So Raj started talking about the significance of that mention... the main character in the book was just an average Indian person reflection on life and trying to make his way just like any other man. The character mentions Marcus Aurelius at one point. Raj got to discussing that part, and told us it was symbolic because Marcus Aurelius was just another average plebian citizen who wasn't anything special, and yet his Meditations have made it hundreds of years through history. I made the comment that Marcus Aurelius was actually a really important Roman emperor who wrote the Meditations in the midst of a war. Response? “No, no... that is not right. He was a common man.” I'll probably lose points for that on my paper.