McLeod Ganj is where I was, the tippy top of Dharamsala. The bus ride crawling up there at 7am in the morning was probably one of the scariest things i've put myself through. Groggy, tierd and aching from an extremely bumpy bus ride, i was seeing some of the best scenery of my life, completely taken back by wonder while simultaneously dealing with gripping fear of looking out the window, not seeing the edges of the road but vertical height below. It felt like I was being taken up, and I had no idea where I would be dropped off, it felt like I was dropped off in the middle of nowhere.
Over the course of 4 days, I learned quite a bit about the place that's placed a stronger desire in my heart to go back to Dharamsala, to spend more time there. InshAllah I'll go there again, or find a way to go to stay there for an extended period of time.
I don't know if this will sound cliche, but the atmosphere there needs to be felt and experienced and its hard to coin it in terms. There's peace and serenity and you are enveloped by the gorgeous Dhauldar Range. but you are also enclosed in the energy and vibe of a 'refugee' home where the Tibetan Government in Exile resides. I've had pleasant conversations with vendors at bakery shops where their faces break into a beam of smile when they start talking about Tibet and talk about how long they've lived in Dharamsala. Both the co-existance of sweetness and pain. The bakery shop man asked me how I liked Dharamsala and when I said that I loved it, he responded with a smile saying " You should go to Tibet. It's so beautiful that if you go once you will never want to come back. The air is different". When I asked him how long he's been here away from Tibet, he said about 10 or 12 years. Goes to show how much he must always be yearning for Tibet.

Seeing how so many individuals have had to create a home for themselves away from home makes you realize of the things that you so readily take for granted. like the feeling of belonging to a country, being able to call your motherland your own with the utmost sense of liberty and ownership, being able to fly your flag, having an allegiance, having recognition. I have to say I don't know what it must feel like to not have that. To not be able to practice your own religion in a land where you come from, or not be able to utter the name of the person/being you consider god. I might have been able to mentally empathize with the 'situation' and the 'conflict' and pack it away in some brain compartment without thinking so much about it if my first exposure to the Tibetan issue came from an article in the news or if it came from a textbook. but my first exposure to this was a personal story and perhaps thats why the impact is much bigger. Looking into the eyes of a woman who had fled her home when she was 13, crossing the Himalayan range on foot with barely any food, making her way to India, not having contact with her parents for the next 10 years, all for the pursuit of education and freedom literally gave me chills.


The following is an email I had sent out to some friends my second morning of being there (which sort of captures my initial impressions of being there) :

i am in Dharamsala safe and sound (It's a city in northern India, in the state of Himanchal Pradesh), after a really really really interesting and not so positive experience getting here by myself. i took a train from lucknow to new delhi, where i was essentially flocked by a group of men to pay for this ridiculously expensive lodge and book a ticket with a travel agency that essentially ripped me off pretty badly. the bus ride in one word was terrible, in the middle of the night, i jolted up from a nap after hearing this incredibly loud noise that immediately made me think someone was shooting at our bus. no there werent any shooting. for whatever reason, the large front windshield of the bus had SHATTERED to pieces. and the driver just kept on going, and drove on for another 5 hours as if nothing had happened. i was also startled because, half of my body was completely wet. it was raining cats and dogs outside. and sort of raining inside the bus too, as in all this water was seeping in. the guy sitting next to me was being so obnoxiously flirty and gross that i had to yell in his face for him to stop. at like 1am, we switched buses in the middle of nowhere. and i got to dharamsala at 7:30 in the morning.

and it felt like i stepped into another country.

it's an india that i have not seen, tibetan monks everywhere, and tibetans everywhere, INCREDIBLE MOUNTAINS, scaling the skies, where you can't see the top because they are covered by clouds. everything is on mountains, and you essentially drive up the edges of it, literally one slight wrong move and there's no way you wont die. but people still manage to drive like crazy here! i realized later on that i'm lookign at a corner of the Himalayas. The scenery here..i could have never imagined because literally if you don't see it you can't imagine it. it's shocking amounts of beauty.

i felt completely ignorant my first day here. why are there so many tibetans here? the only thing i knew about dharamsala before coming here is that it's pretty, my friend is working here, and that the Dalai Lama lives here. that's literally all the information i had.

over coffee and a sandwich, i was with a friend, his friend, and this girl that was helping us look around, who is also working with the friend at the NGO where they intern. I thought she was from here, so when i asked her if she was, her response was "no i'm from Tibet". there's pictures of the Dalai Lama EVERYWHERE here, and "FREE TIBET" merchandise everywhere. I literally did not know anything about the tibet issue at all and all of this felt like a sensory overload coming at my face. my ignorant self was thiking "Free Tibet from what?". This girl's story gave me chills as she was talking to us about it. At age 13 she fled tibet, without telling her parents to come to India, this entails crossing ACROSS the Himalays, with barely any food, and this trek took them one month and 45 days. she said they would go without food in the cold for 3 or 4 days. some got terribly frostbitten, and a kid on their trek lost his vision due to health problems in the cold. her father is a farmer in tibet and she had no access for education when she was there. so at age 13 she made the decision to leave home without telling her parents to pursue education. she got here, and was sent to Southern India, and this was in 1995. This is 2009 and she has completed her Masters Degree. Talk about amazing. makes you look at education in a completley different way. Before comign to India she didnt' even know how to read. This is the part that gave me chills, she was alone in India and spoke to her parents for the first time after coming here after 10 years. she heard their voices after 10 years of being here by herself, and when she talked to her mother, her mother told her how everyone thought she was dead. she cant go back to tibet, so there's no guarantee of when she'll ever see her family again.

I've been reading a lot about the Tibet issue and have been learning a lot. It's been occupied land since 1949 by the Chinese, people there can't fly their flags, can't show any signs of following Tibetan Buddhism (The Dalai Lama to them is the 14th reincarnation of Buddha, essentially he is god on earth for them, the kind of connection that is felt for him is unimaginable), if someone even whispers the Dalai Lama's name or has a picture of him, they are automatically arrested. The way i'm understanding it, it's sort of like a cultural genocide. There's no recognition of TIbet from the UN, so that makes thinsg more complicated.

Besides all of this, visiting temples has been really awesome. There's prayer flags everywhere. and most people here are tibetan refugees. It's such a different kind of India, and like I mentioned befoer, it feels surreal and feels like I stepped into another country.
It's overwhelmingly beautiful to see the terrain as it is here. If I had not seen this, I would have never believed that people can make life work so well in this terrain, as in bazaars and markets and temples and residential areas, all along the sides of mountains. There are tourists, but not that much, and its reallyr REALLY peaceful, and it's been one of the most friendliest atmospheres I've experienced.

So all that discomfort getting here was definitely worth it :) I'm really really not ready to leave india, and i wish i could stay here for much longer, but i'm really happy that it's ending here in Dharamsala.

-Fahmida

a post is absurdly over due, i'm not sure how i never got around to making a post. i guess with sending emails here and there with scattered updates i neglected to comprehensively put things up here. I'm back in the States, and transitioning into Fayetteville from India is much harder and challenging then dealing with 'culture shock' in india. it's been a week nearly since coming back here, and it's funny how looking at old belongings and looking at how you left things before leaving, and re-evaluating very very familiar things can screw with your mind. i guess for 2 months i let myself completely forget about everything, and opened up to an experience that kept on taking surprising twists and turns. so coming back has been sort of a mental whirlwind, seeing things the old things bit differently now. really differently actually.

The last I wrote was about Lucknow. I was there for a total of 10 days, and although I had a great time staying with a friend of mine studying Urdu there (from UNC with a whole bunch of other American students) it would be a lie if I said I was having an awesome time in the city. We had gone to Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, and we had gone to Fatehpura Sikhri. I hate to hate on a city, but Agra was the worst I had seen in India, in terms of pollution. I can't generalize for the whole city, but the places where we were was insanely overwhelming. Fatehpura Sikhri presented to us the most intense vendor harassment of our lives. Seeing this historically rich city was wonderful, especially exploring the architecture of these amazing structures. however, the flock of vendors (young, old, all sizes) was unfortunately a huge hinderance in being able to enjoy these sites. Below is a picture of Buland Darwaza in Fatehpur Sikhri where we were :


Abruptly, about a week before my flight back to the States, I decided to push for going to the mountains. Another friend from UNC was at Dharamsala, interning, while another friend from UNC had just flown into Delhi, and had wanted to go to the mountains.
2 days after having this thought of just making the journey up to the mountains from Lucknow, the result was 3 tar heels in the gorgeous peaks of northern India. I could not have ended my India trip in a better way. My last four days in India were spent in Dharamsala, which is a city that I completely completely fell in love with.

It's been a couple of days in Lucknow so far and I think I'm getting used to the city again. It's very different. My favorite thing so far has been riding the cycle rickshaws! Gosh I missed those! Bangladesh is filled with cycle rickshaws but I hadn't seen any at all before Lucknow here in India.
My friend and I went towards the old city yesterday, towards some infamous landmarks, like Imambara and a whole bunch of other stuff. Unfortunately it turns out that everything in the city, all the markets (at least on that side of town) is closed on Thursdays. Why Thursdays I'm not sure. There's been many instances when we go somewhere to find out that a random day of the week everything in that area is closed.
But we did manage to stop at lots of fresh fruits/vegetable stands! and that was AWESOME! pomegranates always always make me feel nostalgic so I couldn't resist and bought a couple. Outdoor, open bazaars to do groceries..that's how it should be. it feels wonderful.
Another impressive and memorable sight as we were going towards the old city :
My friend and I were on the rickshaw when we saw about 3 or 4 mango stands lined up side by side and we got really excited. Driving up the street we realized that there were even more mango stands, and even more mango stands. For literally a mile, it was a street with vendors and their mango carts, all different kinds, just lined up. and it kept on going and going and going!
mangoes filling up the side of the street? that's like heaven.






















we'll be leaving to go to Fatehpura Sikri (a 10 hour car ride from here) and then going on to Agra tomorrow to see the Taj Mahal, and Sunday we are back.

more to come later :)

Saras Che

After a 26 hour train ride by myself in a cramped sleeper bunk (on the very very top) I am now in Lucknow, safe and sound in one piece. I didn't know I could do a straight shot 26 hour ride, but sleeping off 14 hours of it, trying to not wake up the toddlers around me made time go a little bit faster. trains in india are interesting places, and this is my fourth time going from one place to the other on these lovely carriages.

time in gujrat flew by so fast, and the last 10 days in the village (Vasna) has definitely been a trademark highlight of this summer. I didn't think I would get this attached to the life there, until I was leaving. The genuine warmth and kindness of people, and the inherent sense of community is inescapable and i miss it terribly. my train left at 5am which meant we had to leave the village at 3:30 in the morning. I didn't think anyone would be up at that hour, it would just be me and my friend driving to the station. Not only was the ENTIRE house up, so was the neighbor to bid me farewell!! i was truly overwhelmed by their sweetness.

I didn't really think or know at the beginning of my india trip that I would spend time in Gujarat at all, until the friend that i stayed with came to the rescue. his family just took me in. homecooked food, going from one relatives house to the other, and just going on mini excursions, all of it was immersion like no other. i've picked up scattered bits of gujrati (i said "saras che" to everything, which basically means "it's really good!") and have adapted a taste for the food as well! Everything about the experience was new, and it was a completley new zone for me as there was no connection to Islam at all. I saw things from a completley, completley new perspective, and let myself engage in it. And by doing so, I guess I realized a lot of things about my own ignorance about Hinduism. Up until now it has always been me trying in some sort of way explaining or justifying either Islam or Muslims or me as a Muslim, or whatever and what not to engage in dialogue to talk about stereotypes about my faith. Doing so I didn't realize that I had my own stereotypes about other religions, and there are other faiths that though I respect, i don't really "get". I stayed with a Hindu family, lived with them, saw the things that they did, and was completley isolated from my safe zone, and saw the community around them, and went to temples and had things explained to me. and all of that was such a learning experience! it was really beautiful.

My friend and I taught an English lecture to a classroom full of 10th graders at the local high school. 59 students in a non ac classroom in the heat, eager and beaming with excitement, had me on a high. We first sat in on an English class being taught by their own teacher to see and observe how the language was being taught and to get a grasp of their level. I was floored by the teacher and the way that she taught. I wish we had more professors like that at UNC! She had a beautiful way of not just covering the subject matter but connecting with the students. She spoke of loving even those who may hate us, helping those who don't help us, and going out of our way to understand people. One of my favorite things she said during the lecture was "We got our freedom through tolerance"

As soon as my friend and I entered the classroom, the entire class rose up in unison to say "Good Morning Sir, Good morning Madam!".
Madam?? I had to do a double take. I thought there might have been other teachers, but no they were actually speaking to us. We were there to help them feel more comfortable with speaking English, so we had mini exercises to get them to talk.
One of the things that sticks out in my mind soo clearly, is how their faces would light up and beam when I used to look at them and smile. They were all so eager! Before leaving Vasna, I went with my friend just to say good bye to that class, and all of them as they were leaving the classroom would individually say "Bye Madam".

I can't believe I only have a couple of weeks left in India! And I can't imagine going back to the States. At some point in my life (like soon) i really have to find some way to live on this side of the world for an extended period of time. It's like some strange sort of thirst to absorb everything about this place.

more to come later :)