chartandwaters

Some smiling faces at the paying guest house with the 10pm curfew in Bangalore: Dishaa, daughter of the owners, shows off her Bharata Natyam for me. I got to know the owners somewhat as their son acted as a host to me. Dishaa's enthusiasm at dancing for me and with me, her clever problem solving (when I locked her out of my room she dragged a chair to the window and looked through it) and her sometimes ferocious frustration if she stopped getting attention highlighted made me think her active brain was hungry for stimulus.

The beautiful woman holding her--name already forgotten, how sad is that--in the second photo is a lecturer at a university. She stays on a dormbed in a two-person room because this is how well lecturers are paid. As with most of the women there (they are called girls here most if not all of the time) her parents are searching for her husband and, when they find him, she can't wait to be a housewife because her mother worked as she was growing up, and she was lonely... but no one believes she wants to be a housewife because she graduated with such high honors and has such a good career.

The next two photos are of two young women from Kerala, one of the southernmost states in India. They and two others came to do a year of their MBA in Bangalore. That they are so gentle and loving and openfaced is fascinating to me, because they're entering the corporate world with a passion. They say they are not nervous because they have all their friends with them, but they miss their families passionately since they've never been away from home before. Each of the first nights they tried to talk they were jumpy, one ear listening for the phone. The first days they are in Bangalore they eagerly scout the city for new clothes and cosmetics, but they all brought a sari from home because they will need it if they have to give a presentation. Like most Indians I've met they are passionate about their "native place" and think it is by far the best of native places.