Diwali, Work, etc. – 11/2/14

                Last week was Diwali, a festival that celebrates the god of wealth in the Hindu faith. Basically it’s a huge mashup of New Year’s and Christmas – there are tons of fireworks/firecrackers, Christmas lights everywhere, and people by a ton of new stuff. There is actually a day dedicated to buying new metal objects/appliances and it’s considered auspicious to wear new clothes on Diwali. The days leading up to Diwali were crazy. Every night on my way home from Hindi the streets would be packed with people buying stuff and as October 23 (the official day of Diwali) came closer, the number of firecrackers going off through the night drastically increased. We had a shortened week of school at South Point because of the huge festival, but we might as well have not had school at all because so many kids were absent and the kids who were present spent the entire time being excited about Diwali. On the Wednesday before the 4 day weekend, we actually didn’t have any classes. The whole day we spent cleaning and decorating the school with langolis (sand art) and candles. That’s another interesting thing about Diwali – the god of wealth, Lakshmi, is said to enter your house and bless your family only if your house is clean. This means that there was some furious cleaning going on that week in my house and in houses all over the place. On the actual day of Diwali, at night you light candles in front of many different temples and you exchange sweets with friends and family. After doing pooja and sweet exchanges, everyone goes to their roofs to watch/set off fireworks. I let Deep and his cousin do all of the setting off of the firecrackers. I just sat back and enjoyed the view of hundreds of fireworks being set off (there aren’t any rules to buying fireworks like there are in the United States, so anyone can get their hands on any size firework). This holiday is by far Deep’s favorite (as you could probably guess from my previous post about him and firecrackers), and, even though he was sick, he still managed to be exuberantly excited to celebrate the holiday. He had bought so many firecrackers that he just finished setting off the last of them yesterday evening (unfortunately when I was trying to take a nap).

                School has been going much better since the first week. The kids are finally starting to listen to me more and I even had all of the fifth graders doing their work for a solid five minutes on Friday! Every day there is a mix of good and bad at school – if one grade is especially good that day I can bet that one of the other grades will be particularly challenging, but I have learned to take it all in stride. Many times I feel like the day goes by much as an 800 m race would in track. The first three hundred meters go by quickly and easily (these classes include 3^rd grade English, 12^th grade math, and then my one free period). At the three hundred the first inklings of tiredness set in and the next one hundred is a little more difficult (my 7^th grade math class). After the four hundred there is a small spurt of energy as I tell myself that I’m halfway done (lunch), but then the next two hundred meters are the worst of all (my 6^th and 5^th grade math classes). During the last one hundred meters I am exhausted, but the prospect of the coming finish line propels me forward (the time from 2:15-4:00 when school is over, but teachers stay to plan classes and grade papers). Like my track coach says, you just have to take it 100 meters at a time and it all seems easier.

                Here people have a very different view of Hitler than people from the west. First of all, they just know a lot less about World War II in general (which is to be expected since India didn’t play a huge role in that war). Secondly, apparently Hitler sent pro-nazi minions to India to spread his beliefs, a lot of which were already supported here (ie people here are very racist and everyone wants to be as white or “fair” as possible). The Hindu sign for peace is a backwards swastika and is actually called a “swastik”. During the Diwali decorating time at school, all of the kids were drawing them everywhere. I walked into my seventh grade class and found that someone had accidentally drawn 5 of them backwards – a sight very jarring for me considering the deeply ingrained hatred I harbor for all that the Nazi swastika represents. I asked the kids to redraw them in the correct direction and then later Ben P told me an interesting/funny story about what some of his students had said to him earlier in the week. When asked what religion he was, Ben P replied “Jewish,” to which one of the girls in his class said “Oh, wasn’t Hitler Jewish!” Not quite. When Ben said that Hitler wasn’t Jewish, a different girl then said, “Jewish people normally have blue eyes, right?” and again Ben had to correct her. When we recounted this story to the group, Chase told us how some people here actually liked Hitler. Hitler is probably one of the only historical figures that almost everyone dislikes in the West. If you want a non-controversial villain, you pick Hitler and the Nazis. It’s weird being in a place that knows so little about something that we are taught about from the time we are little children and that views someone who is completely demonized in the west as an “okay guy.”