Still more random thoughts...

In case you were wondering, apparently there are a few other people in India that wanted to see the new Harry Potter film since the concierge could not even get through to the theater to purchase tickets. From what I understand the movie theater experience is very unique in India. Although we won’t be able to see HP, we have a Bollywood film scheduled for Mumbai later this month.

We had one person from our group that did take a dip in the Ganges. I will let you decide if you think she got sick from the river or from something that she ate…

For the American Idol fans out there, I have “Indian Idol” on the TV right now. It is mostly in Hindi but occasionally they switch and speak in English. Among the 4 judges, one appears to be “Simon-ish”…currently getting into an argument with the other judges over one of the singers.

We’ve been in a couple of newspapers since being in Calcutta. Every school or educational organization we have visited her has had photographers and/or video cameras. I don’t know if our group or the people taking pictures of us have used more film. (I have new sympathy for celebrities that have to put up with people following them around everywhere they go.) Our group has also been approached to have pictures with random people off the street. (Apparently they can tell we aren’t Indian – those of us who burn, peel, and freckle in the group are suddenly exotic looking, I guess.)

In Varanasi we learned quickly to not look at the cute little kids that came up to the bus or the cars. Once you look at one, a huge group of them would suddenly appear. Often running across the street and banging on the windows saying “hello, hello, hello” very quickly. Although many of them seemed to know how to avoid the vehicles on the street, it was troubling to see them run through the street following us. In some cases we could see the parents sitting nearby on the street watching their kids weaving between the vehicles. These students were not being reached by the typical school settings since we would run into them day and night. I think we will be meeting with an organization that is trying to reach these children later on this month.

The number of people in India is still hard to comprehend. Since engineering and medicine is highly respected, even if a small percentage of the Indian population pursues those fields, those numbers are still going to outnumber the amount of people going into those fields from the US. We’ve had people share statistics about religion and society in India and it really is amazing to think how “10%”, a small section of the Indian population, still means 100,000,000 people…or a third of the size of the US population!!!

Parts of Calcutta and Varanasi could be picked up and placed in Hawaii. We were even offered coconut water today direct from coconuts at one of the schools! (Although I did not notice the dead bat behind the chair next to me in one of the schools until someone showed me the picture of it later…I don’t remember bats in Hawaii.)