The first question I'm asked after telling someone I'm going to India is almost always "why?" The short answer: I want to. Here's the long answer.
I had never left the North American continent. In fact, the last time I was abroad was back when you could still get into Canada with a birth certificate and a promise that you're not carrying any fruit. Up until now, I've spent my life as your average young American woman from the working class: a college student on scholarships and grants, a total media addict, a hedonist, sloth, and glutton- to put it simply, the killer from Seven would have saved himself a lot of time if he had gone after me first.
Like so may others in my situation, my media addiction has grown to a level that I spend most of my life living vicariously and the rest of it a little unsure of what to do, as if actual experience was a sea-bound ship and I hadn't gotten my sea-legs yet. Overall, the whole set up worked pretty well for me; there's no end to the delicious stories one can get from media, from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett books to the thousands of hours of shows like Lost, Doctor Who, Firefly, and yes, even Star Trek (don't tell anyone about that- I'm still in the closet). Between the prolifera of geek media and my strenuous undergraduate work, I've had every excuse to avoid “real world experience,” to get by with a entertaining but shallow social life. Without action there is no character, and I was turning out to be quite a poor protagonist to my own life.
I wanted to live. To get dirty, to fall down, to suffer, to rejoice, to smell, touch, taste, and feel the world around me, to hate, to love, to exalt in something, to believe in something. I had been so comfortable in my life that I had been napping my way through it, and was left with only a nagging feeling that I knew nothing about myself and the world around me.
I bought a plane ticket to India.
I was in that horrible limbo of the Graduate school application process during which you wait for decisions. For the last few years of my undergraduate career, I had devoted myself to cultural anthropology and research, and was studying the Tibetan diaspora. My fieldwork revolved around a Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Center, an outpost of the Karma Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist Lineage, which is playfully referred to in America as the “hippie” lineage. One cannot help but enjoy research when it involves blessed-water squirt-gun fights, the ongoing antics of fun-loving American Buddhists, parties, ceremonies, retreats, color, vibrancy, and a seemingly never-ending philosophical debate. After my time with the Karma Kagyu, I enthusiastically signed on for another 6-8 years of education, with the hope that maybe I would be lucky enough to do something so interesting for the rest of my life.
With a whopping ~130,000 Tibetans living in India, many of whom have settled in the Northern city of Dharamsala, the choice of where to go was not a difficult one. I would go to Northern India, stay for five months, and spend some intimate one-on-one time with the place and the people (and, even more frighteningly, with myself).
So shortly after my college graduation- Ohio State University with all the laudes and pomp that I could stand- I was on my way to the fierce and beautiful Mother India. I had hired a small volunteer vacation company to make the arrangements for just about every necessity after my plane touched down, and approached the date of departure without too much apprehension and an inability to make any kind of educated guess as to what was waiting for me. I put myself in their hands.
