An India Survival Guide

1. How to Survive Crossing the Road in India

There is really no way to avoid getting hit by a motorcycle, gored by an ox, crushed by a truck, or run over by a rickshaw when crossing the street in India. The only thing you can do is try to minimize the damage. In America, the government, educators and health workers focus on how obesity can kill you. But what they don’t tell you is how obesity can SAVE you!

Before crossing any road in India, proceed to the nearest cafeteria and eat fifteen samosas. This additional fat will provide crucial protection to your vital organs when you are inevitably hit by any of the vehicles / animals listed above.

In addition, Indian traffic seems to follow one rule: the biggest, loudest vehicles get the right of way. After you have gained a couple of hundred pounds of body fat, you will no longer be trying to get out of the way of cars, oxen, motorcycles or rickshaws. Instead, they will be swerving to avoid YOU. Although this extra weight may compromise your speed and agility, it will not matter because eventually the only vehicles you will need to avoid are trucks and buses, of which there are relatively few. As a result, you will live a long, full, traffic mortality free life before dying of cardiovascular disease at age forty.

Also: as for loudness, you are already at an advantage because you are American, and therefore at least four times as loud as everyone else. For additional help in the loudness department, you can call your favorite obnoxious celebrity for tips. I would recommend Snooki. However, if she is too busy disgracing Italian-Americans or shooting pistachio commercials, you can always turn to some of your louder med school classmates. (I will not name names.)

2. How to stay awake during an Indian Public Health Class

When you are sitting in a sweltering room, listening to people you can’t hear, explaining health programs that will never be implemented, it is sometimes a bit of a struggle to remain conscious. However, I have three tips.

a) Move your eyes every three seconds. If you keep your eyes still, soon you will be staring into space. Within seconds, your eyelids begin their unstoppable descent. Before you know it, you are snoring loudly and drooling into your neighbor’s Sari.

b) Cause yourself physical pain. By pinching yourself, biting the inside of your cheek, or forcing yourself to remember the Celtics playoff loss to the Heat, you can cause yourself enough physical pain to stay awake.

c) In addition to occupying your body, you must also occupy your mind. Look for any cute guys / girls in the class to alleviate the crushing boredom. I have always dreamed of being with a man whose waist was the same circumference as my calf, and I believe that a well-groomed moustache is the height of sexiness (as long as it does not look too much like Hitler’s). Therefore, I have no trouble finding attractive men to think about in class. However, if you do not like your men skinny, spectacled, and moustachioed, you may have to use your imagination. Try to envision Hugh Jackman, Tom Brady, or whoever.

d) Another good way to occupy your mind is to imagine the foods you miss from home, such as fresh fruit, vegetables, or basically anything that is not served in a curry sauce accompanied by white rice. If you so wish, you can also combine the two fantasies. For example, imagine Daniel Craig emerging… glistening and in slow motion… from a giant fruit smoothie. But I digress…

3. How to answer any question that is asked in a heavy Indian accent just above a whisper.

As mentioned above, Indian people speak very quietly. Or perhaps Americans are just extremely loud. Regardless, this low volume, combined with a heavy accent, can make communication somewhat difficult. So if someone asks you a question three times and you still have no idea what the hell they are saying, answer with… the head bob! You do not need to commit to a nod or shake of your head, just bob away and it will be taken as a satisfactory answer. I am convinced that the head bob is the reason India’s government has remained so corrupt over the years. It is impossible to dispute the head bob! Here is a sample court interrogation:

Prosecutor: Did you, or did you not take seventy million rupees from the Japanese Encephalitis Prevention Program to build a villa in Goa for your secret family?

Corrupt politician bobs head.

Prosecutor (shoulders slumped, with a look of total defeat on his face): End of questioning.

Bill Clinton is brilliant, charismatic, and powerful, but none of that helped him with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Really, all he needed was a good head bob! Don’t worry Bill, I will teach you.

Anyways, that is it for India survival tips. Hope it’s helpful!!

One week!

Soo it’s been a week in India ... Marissa, your entry is so organized. My blog / diary / emails tend to be pretty jumbled but here it goes:

I’m slowly adjusting to life in Vellore and I think I should be able to make it. For the first week we took a public health class with the medical students at CMC. Here are a few interesting things I’ve observed:

1. Head Bobble - this amuses and confuses me quite a lot. For the first few days I didn’t even notice it until other people pointed it out to me. Now, most locals seem to do the head wiggle whenever I talk to them. It’s supposed to mean: “yes, maybe or I don’t know” depending on the context. I think that most of the time, they just don’t know what I’m saying :( I wonder if I can work the head wiggle into my communication with the locals especially since I can’t speak Tamil. I think I’m getting better at it.

Here’s a youtube video I found trying to show it:

I should really take more videos myself. On a side note, I have to say that the people here are super nice.

2. Clothing – I totally packed the wrong clothes. I just didn’t know what to do so I just brought random clothes from home. I should have brought more light weight long pants and light colored short sleeves but I don’t really have any of either. It’s really hard to wear long anything when the weather forecast says it’s supposed to feel like it’s over 107 degrees. I don’t know how the people here do it. This is the only place I’ve been to where all females do not wear Western clothes. Most of the women wear gorgeous saris. As I sit in the hot classrooms, I often end up admiring the saris that the female professors wear, wondering how they wrap it around themselves so perfectly and handle themselves so well in the heat with so much fabric. People who can’t handle a sari, like me, wear kalwar sabeez which is a long tunic with gypsy pants. I’ve gotten a few pairs and I’m starting to get used to it but it’s still super hot and I feel super baggy. Students also wear a scarf with this outfit. I didn’t realize that a scarf made a difference especially in this hot weather but it’s supposed to cover up your cleavage even though the tunic is already pretty high cut. I should probably get some scarves

3. Food – This is also interesting. I really like food but recently I’ve gotten into eating health so it’s challenging for me to get used to the food here. Normally, I only eat whole wheat foods with lots of vegetables but now I just eat white carbs and curry. Most people here are vegetarian so I haven’t had much meat in a while. So normally, breakfast is a kind of tortilla w/ curry, lunch is rice w/ curry and dinner may be a masala dosa. We’ve discovered a chicken fried noodle that’s supposed to be an Eastern Asian dish which is pretty good. I’ve also managed to buy boxed milk and I’ve stored it in the dining hall fridge so I can have milk with cereal and banana in the morning. I do love the chai tea here though. They have morning tea around 10:30 am and afternoon tea around 4:00 pm. Chai tea is served in a small espresso sized cup and they make it like this: http://cf1.netmegs.com/memestream/coffee%201.JPG

I’ve also discovered fruit stands outside the campus so I can eat mangoes, pomegranates and oranges. I wish that I could eat more street food though so I can explore more local dishes but I have to be careful or else I might get sick. Today I tried badam milk because the person in front of me got it and that was alright. It’s this almond flavored condensed milk like milk. At least I know what it is. They have these huge jackfruits that they cut up on the side of the street that I’ve been tempted to try.

4. City / Hospital- Ahh Vellore. You are only 2 pages in my 1300 pg Lonely Planet travel guide and you are quite a small town indeed. It’s not that small in terms of size (I’m still not sure how big the city is) but in terms of what is offered. There seem to be more stands rather than stores and most of the city seems to lie around 1 major road. It’s pretty difficult to find specific things although we’ve been lucky enough to find most necessities at the college store. There are definitely no chain establishments. It’s tricky to find a good restaurant but we’ve found a stable at Darling Residence, a hotel that also seems to have the best restaurants in the city. It would be nice to have a good A/C café though where we can just relax and unwind. The hospital is pretty intense. It’s definitely unlike any hospital I’ve ever been to. There are private and general patients. Most patients are general so they can see a resident for 110 rps ($2). If you want to see the doctor, you would have to pay the private patient’s fee = 550 rps. There are sooo many patients and there doesn’t seem to be many doctors. In class, I think we learned that each doctor needs to care for at least 100,000 people based on the India’s population of 1.2 billion. I’m excited to start rotations next week. I’m doing Medicine 1 – Infectious Diseases but I’ll soon also be doing obstetrics, neonatology, ophthalmology, cardiothoracic surgery, urology and doing outreach to the villages.

Last night we sat on the roof with a flashlight / lamp as our “bonfire.” We went around saying our highs and lows for the week. That was cute. At times, life here is challenging but I have to say that our group is pretty awesome. It’s like summer camp except you don’t have to try so hard to make friends and fit in.

I need to take more pictures… hopefully the next entry will include them!

Amy

Chaos or not?

First off, I am so glad Nemo initiated this group blog. I’ve only been in India for three and a half days and yet I feel like I could write a novel’s worth of commentary. Nevertheless, I will abstain from ranting and discuss strictly one topic; the absurdness of India’s road systems. So far I have rode in a van, private bus, government bus, and multiple rickshaws. I’ve been almost hit by a bus in a rickshaw, inches away from being mowed down by a scooter while on foot, and rode in a bus that side-swiped a car. I want to share with you my first impressions and how my attitude about the road situation has changed in just these last few days.

Well, my initial impression was formed on our 3 hour ride from the airport in Chennai to the CMC in Vellore. It was around 4am in the morning and I was utterly appalled by the seemingly chaotic way everyone traveled. The road was filled with buses, vans, scooters, people on bikes, animal-drawn carts, rickshaws, and people walking and crossing the street like a sick version of frogger. Inside Chennai it sounded like an orchestra of horns. Seriously, our van driver beeped the horn every two to three seconds. The van was traveling at least 70 miles per hour and passing everyone. Then out of the blue the van slows to a stop and some cows cross the road in front of us. If this isn’t crazy enough, I forgot to preface that in the city all these drivers are lined up sometimes 3-4 rows deep in a one lane road. The bus passes the others by going into the lane of traffic coming the other way. From an aerial view it must look like a cluster of epic proportion.

With all that said, after three and a half days I see a pattern in the traffic that makes me believe there are actually some rules of the road. I am going to give my best hypothesis on what I think these rules are but I could be completely wrong and fabricating this whole thing. I say that because every time I am on the road my adrenaline is pumping thinking back to lecture when the professor announced that statistically I am more likely to die from a car accident than anything else in India (that is true for tourists, not natives; yesterday I learned that diabetes takes the cake on that one). Ok, so here it is. Everyone drives on the left side of the road. Slower travelers stay farthest to the left, with the exception of people on foot or bikes (not motorized bikes, just your run of the mill pedal bike). The pedestrians walk on both sides of the road but almost exclusively on the soft shoulders. The animal-drawn carts are always on the road hugging the farthest to the left. Motor bikes and rickshaws travel on the farthest left too unless they approach an animal-drawn cart in which they pass them on the right. Some rickshaws act like US taxi drivers and attempt to pass cars too but this isn’t always the case. Buses and cars tend to travel farthest to the right so they can travel faster and pass everyone else. Whenever a bus or vehicle is about to pass someone they beep their horn, almost analogous to a directional signal. When you are in the downtown area busses and cars often have to pass in the opposite side of the road in which all the other bikers and rickshaws coming the other way move over. When downtown the buses also beep before approaching a crosswalk to warn the people not to cross. When people do cross they usually cross in increments during the busy times. Initially I was terrified that the cars would not stop and just mow people over, but that doesn’t really seem to be the case. From what I have seen the vehicle gives a warning beep to the pedestrian to make them hurry up but if they are too slow the vehicle does actually slow down. When I was on the bus that side-swiped a car the bus actually pulled over and talked to the driver. Not quite what I pictured happening. Well, I say talked but it was more like a heated argument with arms flailing in the air. Nevertheless, there is some humanity present amid this crazy system.

Ok. That’s it for today and sorry for making it dramatically long.

-Marissa

And so it begins...

Jun 02- 11:14 pm-

I have finally got some semblance of internet and have set up my computer without an explosion that I was dreading due to the voltage conversion. The first thing I check is Facebook, some things never change. After getting only 5 hours sleep in the last 48 hours I feel surprisingly awake perhaps due to the excitement and anxiety of being in a foreign country. From arriving at 330 am local time to spending a full day at the university, I have noticed a few aspects of India that are seemingly unlikely to change during the trip.

1.       There are people everywhere no matter what time of day it is

2.     All locals will pretend that they can’t speak your language, especially if service is involved

3.      It is hot, really hot. 

Despite the uncomfort that I would normally feel in a crowded, noisy inferno (there is actually garbage burning on the streets since there is nothing else to do with it), I am already enjoying the trip. The early chaos has already provided me some interesting and odd new scenes. One that pops into mind is the somewhat tragic and puzzling sight on the taxi ride to the college of a family of four all cramped on a small motorcycle weaving and honking their way through traffic with a relaxed ease. 

When going to a school in a city you can forget that animals can exist as more than just pets or pigeons. One creepy, seemingly eternal, night walk through the dark forest to reach the dormitory where some of the others in the tufts group stay can make you feel as if you are in an episode of ‘Planet Earth’. The wild monkeys (I find them scary because they look like the monkey from golden compass) and stray dogs (I still find them cute) scurry and howl in a primordial fashion in search of their next meal. The dozens of fruits hanging upside down from the trees turn out to have eyes and wings on closer inspection. When trying to calm myself down I try to forget that some of the first words we heard from the Doctor in charge of us were “watch out for cobras in the grass”.

A great day one has been filled with 2 longs plane rides, (one where I had my own personal Natalie Portman marathon as I watched ‘Black Swan’ and ‘No Strings Attached back to back’), a 3 hour van ride, and lots of entertaining uncertainties. Time to scratch the jet-lag itch and go to sleep with hopefully no nightmares of killer golden monkeys that hang around Nicole Kidman. 

 

- Nemo