15 Tulip Bungalow & The City of Dust

A lot of my time in India will be spent in Ahmedebad, Gujarat, also known as the City of Dust, and for good reason. I'm staying at a family friend's house currently that some of you know. Rajiv Kaka and Mona Auntie are doing fine and are as caring and generous as always. The kids have grown up a lot and are in our equivalent of high school. Staying at their beautiful bungalow reminds me of how different everyday life in India is, the close family and efficient household; only what is needed is used, fresh organic food is bought, cooked, and eaten daily, 15 year old solar panels help heat your morning shower, and the lawn man cuts the grass with an old school manual mower.

There is, of course, the other side, overpopulation, littered streets, those less fortunate, and the smog. I experienced all this riding on the back of Ayush's scooter through the city. It has been 8 or 9 years since I have been here, and I hardly recognized the city with its main highways, huge shopping malls, and condos being built left and right. I was surprised to find all the newest style clothes in the mall, and shocked to find T-shirts that read "Textually Active ;)" and "F.B.I.- Female Body Inspector", if you have seen these shirts in America, or don't think its funny, say them aloud in an Indian accent. With all the changes though, there was still the infamous dust, the occasional camel trotting down the main highway, and the feeling that a car, rickshaw, scooter, or bike was going to slam into you every time you headed around a roundabout. In the words of Mona Auntie "if you can drive here, you can drive anywhere."

The first day I arrived was the day after Uttarayan, a huge kite festival ushering in spring where literally every rooftop teems with people, from children to grandparents, flying kites and tryin to maneuver them to cut other peoples' kite strings. 3 hours after I came home from the airport, I went with Ayush's friends to celebrate the festival in an area where a lot of the buildings reminded me of the outside of the Towers (my freshmen dorms): discolored, stained concrete. The inside, however, was a fully contemporary condo with all the modern amenities. His friend's condo was in the middle of hundreds of full rooftops of kite flyers (the picture at the bottom is before the rooftops were full and my camera battery died). It was real wild. Music blaring from all directions, people dancing, and every so often the happy scream of "Lupetttttt!!!" when someone cut someone else's kite down. At first I thought I was just jet lagged and hearing things, but no, there was the faint sound of Maroon 5 coming from one rooftop and Ne-yo from another, and, rest assured Katie Bauld, the backstreet boys are still very popular among 15-18 year old boys here, even on religious holidays. I couldn't imagine what the day before (the actually date of the festival) must have been like. It was my first real Indian festival, not some knock-off in a high school gym or an intramural field. I now know what kids from India mean when they are in America and say "you have no idea." Not bad for the first few hours in India.