School Day

Having stayed in Delhi for over two months now, my daily life has started to develop a routine. Everyday life in the city is still a series of micro-adventures and even though my life has started to develop some daily recurrent patterns, it is still far from humdrum.

Since I'm a hopeless night owl, I usually tend to sleep late. The day starts somewhere between 10 o'clock and noon by sparking up the caffeine binge to get the system in operation again. Before finding a coffee maker, waking up was even more of a chore, now at least I have the equipment to prepare the daily fix of my drug of choice. After system is restored, I trod down from my room past the yawning and napping guards to the streets. Here's where the day starts rolling.

Near the hostel is a rickshaw stand where all the rickshaw-wallahs loiter around gossiping, smoking beedis and touting customers by aggressively patting the rickshaw seat whenever a potential one walks by. Although I prefer walking, sometimes laziness prevails. Before climbing into a rickshaw, one has to always go through the usual ordeal of bargaining with the wallah, who is usually tempted to test his chances in overpricing an unsuspecting gora, which is usually double the amount an Indian person would need to pay. After the negotiation,which usually ends with a frown combined with the trademark Indian head wobble, the wallah jumps on his seat and steers the rickshaw to the chaos that is Indian traffic.

As I mentioned in my first post of this blog, moving around in Indian traffic is an art of crafty dodging of all manner of vehicles and creatures. The rickshaw-wallahs seems to have mastered this skill into near perfection. Rolling down the street towards my college, a series of encounters challenge the wallah's hierarchical position in the pecking order of traffic. Size determines where you stand. A pack of street dogs run along the rickshaw barking wildly as it has seemed to intrude their turf. A gigantic truck that looks like a prop from a Mad Max movie honks with a somewhat unfittingly chipper and melodious horn and speeds past our rickshaw nearly sending it to the gutter. Nearing the college, the intersection is blocked as among the cars, mopeds and auto-rickshaws, an elephant is standing with a banner wrapped around to it advertising an anti-smoking campaign that Delhi University is promoting to stop smoking on the campus area. Thinking nothing of it, our rider steers his vehicle nonchanantly through the disarray to the college gates. I wipe the cold sweat off my forehead, jump off and reward a dauntless rider with 20 rupees (0,34 euros) and a "dhan'yavād"!

The guard at the college gate looks at me suspiciously and asks for identification. I give him my student card, reminding him that I was here also yesterday and the before that and that I also then showed my ID card. However, it seems that to him all white people look alike.

Right now I'm studying at the Ramjas College of Delhi university, where i'm taking some classes in economics. Although I'm a linguist, mostly interested in the global spread and variety of the English language, I figured I could avail the university's opportunities to raise my awareness on global affairs while killing time trying to come up with a potential PhD topic and studying Hindi. Furthermore, spending a semester with Indian undergraduate economics students gives me an excellent grass roots perspective on the present and future of the Indian society. The classroom serves as a kind of a microcosm.

The lecturer enters the classroom and almost even before putting his backback on the table starts spraying the blackboard with graphs, equations and economic jargon while swinging from side to side trying to catch the half empty classroom's attention. Meanwhile the students are slowly drifting to their seats. Most of them do not seem too interested in the teacher's ramblings, some stare out the window with their iPods on, others are reading John Grisham and Ken Follett novels or chatting with their classmates, the few in the front row are actually listening. To many, the classes seem to be more like a forum to meet friends than an actual place of learning. This was confirmed by one classmate, who said that nobody really listens to the teacher, everybody studies at home and just comes to class to get attendance marks.

The teacher disrupts his monologue every now and then and catches some of the students by surprise by asking a question, to which the students usually answer surprisingly effortlessly, but their answers are always almost by default disregarded as inadequate or completely wrong by the teacher. "First of all, you're completely wrong..." "I don't know what your problem is but what you just said makes no sense whatsoever...", yet the ones that are listening persevere and keep trying.

This goes on for a while. At some point comes the daily power cut, ceiling fans stop rotating and the room becomes a sauna within minutes. The teacher opens the windows, exposing the classroom to the noise of the students loitering in the hallway playing the latest Bollywood hits and ringtones from their mobiles. Rivalled by the noise coming from the hall, the teacher raises his voice and picks up the pace and is now firing the class room with 200 words a minute on the wonders of the Hecksher-Olin theory and comparative advantage on free market economies. He keeps running between the blackboard drawing new graphs and the hallway telling the kids to get lost, while the students in the front row keep following his movements back and forth, making the classroom look like a tennis game audience.

Capturing the teacher in action was difficult, as he was constantly on the move.

Class is disrupted again by a random student who marches in with a couple of guys who seem to be his homeboys to promote himself as a candidate for the upcoming student elections. He spits out a fervent five minute manifesto on how excellent a candidate he'd make and how he is going to shape the future of student politics. The students seem even less interested in him than the teacher. The guy disappears with his posse as quickly as he appeared, targeting the next classroom for similar treatment.

The class continues and the teacher loads another clip of economic theory for his listeners while at the same time running back and forth in the room, as if trying to catch everybody's attention by addressing everybody personally. While doing this he almost stumbles on a sleeping street dog coiled in the classroom corner. For a few passing seconds he stares blankly at the dog, who is now staring back with apparent indignation that someone dared to disturb its nap. "A dog...", mutters the teacher, and gets back to explaining the intricacies of the ricardian model.

The dog didn't seem too enthusiastic about my photographing.

The class ends and the teacher calls out the student's names, to which everybody answers with a "Yes, Sir!".
Outside the classroom I am stopped by two girls who tell me they are doing a survey for the Hindustani Times  on beauty ideals. Thus I am coerced to answer questions about shaving chest hair, using hair gel and bleaching one's skin, which apparently is rather common among Indian girls, as a fairer complexion is highly desired and seen as more beautiful. By being short and diplomatic in my answers, I try to squirm out of the rather awkward situation.

Making my way out of the college gate to the street, I am once again greeted by an army of rickshaw-wallahs with their mantra-like sales pitch "Yes, Sir? Hello, Sir! Metro Metro?!"