Today was my first day of Indian classes in Mysore. I will be here for the next three and a half weeks studying. The day of classes started at 9:00am and went to 7:30pm with breaks for lunch and chai. I am really getting used to having tea time everyday!
My classes today were Women and Gender studies, Science and Technology, Culture and Civilization of India, and Hindi (the language, Hindu is the religion). My first two classes were pretty interesting and the teachers were easy to understand, however, I had trouble understanding my teacher for Culture and Civilization of India. For that class, the teacher spoke at least 4 Indian languages and he had a very thick accent when he was speaking in English. The lecture style is also very different that I am used to at university. There were no visual aids other than a board at the front of the room that the professor rarely used. There are many Hindu myths and stories that are important to Indian culture and during our class, the professor told us two important stories. Initially I was able to keep up but as the stories got longer and more elaborate I was totally lost. Each one contained many characters that were related to one another in some way and many had names that sounded very similar to me. Apparently there is symbolic meaning related to each of the characters and the stories are used to influence people about what to do and what not to do. In true Indian fashion, there was a power outage in the middle of this class. We continued the class as usual as these things happen all the time and the power usually returns quickly.
My teacher for Hindi seems really enthusiastic and patient, which will be nice because I think that I will have lots of trouble learning such a different language. Hindi will be more useful in the North, which is where I am headed in about a month.
We started to learn the vowels in Hindi and were practising writing the alphabet when we heard a girl from our group screaming from outside of the classroom. We ran out to see what had happened and there was a monkey, sitting on the ledge outside of the classroom eating bananas. Apparently this monkey had walked into the girl's room while she was in there and stole the bananas from her shopping bag and ran away to eat them. We all wanted to get close to the monkey but our Indian professors strongly warned against this and tried to scare them away instead. I learned that these monkeys are very dangerous as they can bite and scratch. As with many animals in India, monkeys are sacred and you can not kill them. We were told that every morning, the groundskeeper at our school residence goes around the property shooting the monkeys with a pellet gun in order to scare them off.
After Hindi we had a presentation on yoga from the Vivekanada Yoga Education and Research Center. Yoga is derived from the Sansrit "Yij", which means union or join. After a brief introduction to yoga, we had a demonstration by a group of kids who practised yoga at this center. These kids were so flexible that it was hard to see some of their poses without feeling sick. One boy was double jointed almost everywhere and could fold in half and fold into a pretzel very easily. Many of the children started yoga when they were very young and participated in competitions, like children do at home for dance. The owner of the Yoga center told us that it was best if the children started practising yoga at 8 or earlier.
My classes today were Women and Gender studies, Science and Technology, Culture and Civilization of India, and Hindi (the language, Hindu is the religion). My first two classes were pretty interesting and the teachers were easy to understand, however, I had trouble understanding my teacher for Culture and Civilization of India. For that class, the teacher spoke at least 4 Indian languages and he had a very thick accent when he was speaking in English. The lecture style is also very different that I am used to at university. There were no visual aids other than a board at the front of the room that the professor rarely used. There are many Hindu myths and stories that are important to Indian culture and during our class, the professor told us two important stories. Initially I was able to keep up but as the stories got longer and more elaborate I was totally lost. Each one contained many characters that were related to one another in some way and many had names that sounded very similar to me. Apparently there is symbolic meaning related to each of the characters and the stories are used to influence people about what to do and what not to do. In true Indian fashion, there was a power outage in the middle of this class. We continued the class as usual as these things happen all the time and the power usually returns quickly.
My teacher for Hindi seems really enthusiastic and patient, which will be nice because I think that I will have lots of trouble learning such a different language. Hindi will be more useful in the North, which is where I am headed in about a month.
We started to learn the vowels in Hindi and were practising writing the alphabet when we heard a girl from our group screaming from outside of the classroom. We ran out to see what had happened and there was a monkey, sitting on the ledge outside of the classroom eating bananas. Apparently this monkey had walked into the girl's room while she was in there and stole the bananas from her shopping bag and ran away to eat them. We all wanted to get close to the monkey but our Indian professors strongly warned against this and tried to scare them away instead. I learned that these monkeys are very dangerous as they can bite and scratch. As with many animals in India, monkeys are sacred and you can not kill them. We were told that every morning, the groundskeeper at our school residence goes around the property shooting the monkeys with a pellet gun in order to scare them off.
After Hindi we had a presentation on yoga from the Vivekanada Yoga Education and Research Center. Yoga is derived from the Sansrit "Yij", which means union or join. After a brief introduction to yoga, we had a demonstration by a group of kids who practised yoga at this center. These kids were so flexible that it was hard to see some of their poses without feeling sick. One boy was double jointed almost everywhere and could fold in half and fold into a pretzel very easily. Many of the children started yoga when they were very young and participated in competitions, like children do at home for dance. The owner of the Yoga center told us that it was best if the children started practising yoga at 8 or earlier.
Hi Heather,
ReplyDeleteDid you try to do one of those yoga posses that you have posted? If you are not understanding what the instructors are saying, how will the exams go? Do they give you any text books or is it all lectures?
We are now doing yoga in the mornings before classes with a crazy yogi so I have been trying some of the basic yoga poses. Mostly we are doing sun salutations. I am getting a bit better at understanding the professors and we are helping each other out. They are giving us copies of their lectures so we can study off of that and we have a few text books between us to suplement the class content.
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