My mom has a small scratch under her eye from some mysterious "argument with the leaf blower." My brother the crew champion has returned home from college with arms like tree trunks, and my Dad as always has the same goofy smile on his face. It is good to be home. Riding in the car is a completely different experience here--it's a small sound-proof bubble in which drivers can enjoy their Elton John uninterrupted by incessant honking and cows in the road. Driving up my street I felt not unlike the Hippy Princess returning to her royal estate, complete with hot water, clean bed sheets, new laminate flooring, and a refridgerator full of chicken salad to be devoured. I had sort of promised myself I wouldn't start making any vapid comparisons between there and here, but when I ran into my roommate at the Chicago airport and she started saying how rough her $13.50/hr job was, I was thinking about how Shyamji got nineteen cents per fourteen-hour day in the fields. I guess the whole endeavor of weighing how absurd the disparites between what I saw yesterday and what I see today doesn't require much intellectual prowess--it's fairly simple, and I'd start to sound like a broken record if I expressed every comparison that passes through my mind. But I guess all I mean is that the priveleges I've grown up with are far more than all of my previous guilt had addded up to.

This time on the way home the airplane did what I always wish it would--we made a full circle around Gibson Island at close range so that I could pinpoint our little house and the pond and the boat. There, and in the airport, I wasn't really outraged or upset, I was more just overtaken by how silly this whole argument about development is. The extra things that we have like yachts and dog toys and massage chairs really don't add up to a better quality of life at all; and even those who supposedly haven't got a care in the world still find things to preoccuppy their minds. What the hell do poeple live for? How much of our existence really devoted to amassing a huge pile of silly shit from Ethan Allen? Yes, there are people who are worse off--everyone desrves to have enough food to eat, a roof over their head, some clothes if they want them...but I do think that our present preoccupation with "the growing disparity between rich and poor" is misguided.

After a few pukey days in Jaipur, I hopped a train with Laura and Kristen and an embarassing quantity of luggage to the little island of Diu off the coast of Gujarat. It was a sleepy little beach town that still smelled of Portuguese influence...it was gorgeous. We ate plenty of ice cream and coconuts and rented rickety bikes with no brakes to ride around the island and its banyan trees and ancient sea forts. Travelling around here is a far different experience when you can speak a little bit of Hindi--we had tea with a few really enchanting families. We went swimming on a beach where women were mounting jet skis in sarees. I hadn't realized how shy I'd gotten over the past few months--I am a little reluctant just to show my ankles, let alone wear a bathing suit on the beach. The neighboring states have banned alcohol, so vacationing businessmen and students flock to Diu for a drink and "a peek at the foreign ladies." Even though we were swimming in full on baggy t-shirts and long shorts, it felt like they might as well put in stadium seating on the shore. We exited the situation, though, and caught really incredible sunsets every day we were there.

In Delhi Kristen and I were quickly overtaken by the whirlwind chatter of a couple of other guests at our bottom-of-the-line rooftop guest house. A retired pharmacist from Fiji decided to take it upon himself to show us around--which actually turned out to be really rewarding. After playing with a bunch of sweet little kids outside Jamma Masdir (sort of like the Taj Mahal Jr.) we wound our way through Chandi Chowk to a Sikh temple. The worship they have their is really beautiful, but even more amazing was the twenty-four-hour soup kitchen they run. Thousands of people come in and out and eat dhal cooked in pots that are sometimes six or seven feet in diameter. Sikhism renounces the caste system in favor of the belief that all people (even women!!) are equally holy and wortwhile. Mr. Fiji saw the sparkles in my eyes and made some mystical comment about how he could feel that I would go there again one day, and I would really love to believe him.

In Ahmdebad we visited Gandhi's Ashram by the riverside. His belief held that anything you have that you don't need is actually stolen from the poor--every extra pair of shoes you have is another pair that a shoeless man does not have. Food, likewise, should never be enjoyed as a pleasure, but rather a necessity for the existence of the body. After a too-expensive dinner at a restaruant where all the stools are saddles and all the waiters are dressed as cowboys, I started to feel pretty uneasy about the money I'd spent goin' cahootz. Although the rational side of my brain has all sorts of explanations for why I don't agree wholeheartedly with Ghandi's vows of poverty, I started to feel like the way I'd been acting almost negated anything that I could have pretended to have learned during my time in Amarpura. I guess above all I would like to remember that I am not entitled to anything I have, and to be grateful and intentional about every little thing that I own or consume. My track record thus far is very poor. On the airplane I abstained from a couple of meals after I realized exactly how much plastic was being smashed up and thrown away throughout the process. And even now, I think it will be a little while before I'm back to buying things that come in plastic bottles.

The next day Kristen and I journeyed out to the International Toilet Museum. It was a long metro ride through the vast New Delhi sprawl followed by a long rickshaw ride and a trekk through a construction site blocking the road to the establishment. It was well worth the trip. In addition to a wealth of fascinating trivia, they had a long display of the many different designs of oh-so-practical compost toilets that can be made for cheap virtually anywhere and don't require low-caste women to clean them. They also had designed a machine that both captures the methane gas produced by human waste for cooking fuel and purifies its water to be re-used again. I'm not sure why, but their poop laboratory really sent chills down my spine and had me itching to go on a toilet crusade after I've got my bachelor's squared away.

Last night jolly old St. Rakshat with the blue-ribbon moustache took us all out for a ridiculous amount of fried food to bid his farewells. Afterwards, a few of us piled into his car to go home, and he ended up speeding up off the mountain to Nahagar fort with his rap music blaring. He knew some particularly exciting way of sneaking in, so we all sat and talked staring out over the Jaipur city lights and listening to the brass band music drifting up from the weddings below. We wandered into a step well of maybe a hundred feet and stared up at the stars. This place is wonderful.

The last few weeks of my internship were spent largely preparing for the public hearing we were hosting on the fifth about the Bheeladi land issues we had been working on. We went on a long jeep tour of several dozen villages telling people about the problem and asking them to come…sadly enough the car was mostly men, and in nearly every place they would call a meeting, the men would gather round, and their wives would squat about forty feet behind them. Occasionally a woman would raise her voice, but invariably she would either be ignored or hushed by her husband. The jeep tour was a lot of fun; I managed to injure myself swinging on a Banyan tree and for some reason my companions were all extremely concerned with whether or not I was entertained. The jeep itself was exciting; somehow the driver was managing without first gear or brakes.

On one of our long hikes through the mountains at sunrise, I ended up on the brunt end of a bet that I couldn’t carry Kapil on my back. Punkaj was confident that I could hold the both of them and hopped on for the ride. I fell and split open my knee; rinsed it off in the temple well nearby…thus began a long process of pretending like I wasn’t hurt so that I wouldn’t have to see the inside of the government hospital again. To say that medical care here is frustrating is an understatement; even if you can manage to find a doctor who actually has a medical degree, it is even more work to get him to pay attention to you, let alone make the correct diagnosis and treatment. The chances of finding the right medicine at the corner pharmacy are often slim, and in the process the pharmacist will probably persuade you to buy the “non-name brand substitute” and take a hefty percentage tip off the top when he charges you. We educate women and children about health issues, but it feels so useless when they face so few choices.

There is a notorious contingent of “Bengali doctors” in the area. Apparently, in China in the 1970s there was a scheme made in which certain local people were given very rudimentary medical training and dispersed among villages throughout the country. Somehow some of these people slipped over the border into India along with the concept that anyone is capable of fixing someone else as long as they’ve seen someone else do it before. Throughout the area there are doctors who have about four different medicines to address any problem; all in the form of drip bottles. Villagers have a notion that they aren’t going to get better without getting an IV; and the glucose pumped into their systems always makes them feel nice. Thus people go into debt paying ridiculous prices to be pumped full of sugar instead of actually being treated.

Anyway. I guess my last week was mostly governed by the dramatic social life I’d acquired around the village. Palkah had moved back in to get away from her idiot husband, and was so starved for companionship that she always insisted that I not go on field visits so that I could putter around with her. I became the walking equivalent of a Chia pet; she did me up in pretty flowered tattoos up my arms, put oil in my hair, dyed it with Mehndi, and convinced me to pierce my nose. The day before the public hearing I looked not unlike a muppet. I became pretty well-versed in asking all for the gory details of nose piercings in Hindi. The recommended remedies ranged from butter and tumeric powder to kerosene and cow dung. Eventually in Jaipur I had a decent jeweler perform the equivalent of triple by-pass on my nose, but now it’s looking good and I was sure through the process that I never contracted HIV, so one might as well forgive and forget.

The drama with Kapil was never really resolved if there was anything to resolve; kind of culminated into him breaking his hand in a motorcycle accident and then waving his bandaged hand goodbye from a jeep while I marched along in a protest a few days later. I left behind an intricate web of lies that I think will be slowly untangled someday soon. There was something really strange about how chivalrous he always was, but I’m so glad that he’s trying to keep in touch and that I can feel like I have a few dear friends to speak of in this hemisphere. On the last day he was there we climbed a new mountain to watch the sunrise, and I noticed that it actually overlooked the burial ground. It is so tucked away, I first spotted a few mounds clumped together in a field. Then I noticed that the vast expanse of brush that we’d clumped through before was strewn with graves that stretched off into the distance. It seems to be such a different attitude towards death…no tombstones or markers or sacred blessings or any kind of distinction that anything was there at all.

The dharna itself was incredible. Four thousand people came. Twenty five tractors pulling flatbed trailers full of fifty or sixty people each lined up along the dirt road leading to Bheeladi. I eventually surrendered to the army of reporters desperate to talk to the white girl an ended up saying things about Bush in the national press that are worthy of getting me sent to Guantanamo. Aruna Roy came, and several Bheel women actually got up the guts to speak from behind their veils at the microphone. Indian protest songs and chants are so much more passionate and catchy and varied than our own “give peace a chance” spiels. The upper castes staged a counter-protest about three kilometers away in town, but the police were so numerous that there was little opportunity for violence to break out in the first place. Afterwards the flashy guys from the rival non-profit in Bhadesar insisted on giving me a ride home. Khemraj scoffed when I wrinkled my nose at them and shoved me in just to prove some sort of political point. RamRai came along, and the whole time we ended up snickering about their tight jeans and sunglasses instead of actually listening to anything they said. I am pretty judgmental with regards to fancy-pants men. My bathing habits tended to side along with Khemraj and Madhu in the “do-teen din” camp; and coming from an office where most people have no more than three changes of clothes, I can be pretty cynical about anyone who reeks of cologne.

That night everyone was so excited by how well the hearing went that we broke out into a drum-less drum circle that lasted pretty late into the night. Embarrassment about dancing in front of everyone is completely out of the question; I love it. If anything my newfound belief in music has been reinforced—I would love to learn more of those songs that everyone can scream along to…I don’t know, music seems to become something really fantastic as soon as the ego is removed, as soon as it stops being about the performance and more about the experience. Oh God, I’m starting to talk like all of the other hippy dip-shits. I guess it was inevitable.

Saying good-bye in Amarpura was really dramatic with lots of little kids following me around…if someone were to take a picture I’m sure that it could have made some sappy brochure for the Peace Corps. Manoch picked me a flower, but when he held it out to me a little boy named Ankesh grabbed it and smashed it. Manoch was so angry he smacked him on the head, thereby turning the incident into a minor spectacle because I wasn’t enthused about him hitting little kids. And saying good-bye to the office was also rough; I bawled the whole time and they all waited with me on the road to find me a truck to hitch a ride into town…Khemraj kept muttering that Marxists don’t cry, but Karun told me afterwards that he did, too. If I could speak Hindi I would fly back and work for them in a heartbeat…the whole time I was there I was trying to convince myself that maybe I’ll take some classes so that I can go back in a few years. It was strange; for the most part I had been concerned about being a burden to them, but now I can see that they really had never gotten to know women who speak and act as freely as we Western gals. It meant something to them.

The next day I met Jeremy and Laura and Ryne in Udaipur and spent the day wandering around the lakes. The city has a fairy-tale air to it. Laura finally showed us ShikShanter, a non-profit she’d been working with that is devoted to alternative education. The whole place is engaged in stuff like making things out of trash, homeopathic medicine, cow dung soap…there is a large contingent of really intelligent young guys who have dropped out of school. It was nice to have someone scoff at my human rights scholarship while they pounded lemongrass into pulp for tea. One fascinating guy named Ram told us all of the intricate details of urine therapy. It would be very easy to lose yourself in a place like that.

One of the founders, Manish, pulled us aside as we were leaving. He started talking to us about our opinions about development…and how all of us are even more cynical than we were at the start about the entire enterprise. He had a really great way of articulating what it is that feels so awful about it…he said that our way of thinking labels millions and millions of people as failures and worthy of help on the basis of numerical indicators. We see certain people as problems to be solved simply because they don’t fit into the box of what we deem as acceptable. I do believe that almost all of the programs started are well intentioned, but how many of them are in response to shocking statistics? How many are genuinely an effort to solve the problems of friends? So much of it really lacks respect for people’s abilities to understand their situations, to have their own attitudes towards economics and power. It’s true, I’m guilty of the same thing, I see simple lifestyles and think of simple minds. The language barrier makes it really difficult to realize that that isn’t true at all. Some of them are truly blessed to have never heard of Marx because they have a better grip on reality. Manish had grown up in the US, went to Harvard, and worked for years for organizations like USAID, UNESCO, the World Bank as an educational consultant. He’s been everywhere and he’s seen it all and the whole shbang lacks the basic principle that perhaps local people have something to contribute themselves.

Along with that, he picked up an abhorrence for the idea that he could tell other people what and how their children should learn. Or just that in general, billions of us worldwide are listening to someone else who is telling us what is and isn’t relevant to know. In America we spend thousands of dollars just to prove to someone else that we’ve jumped through an educational hoop. A lot of it feels artificial and empty. Like diplomas come in Happy Meals. Ugh it sounds so dramatic. But really, he did drive the point home that our whole lives we’ve been letting someone else tell us what should take priority in our lives, and we haven’t really been taught to recognize the voices inside of ourselves that tell us what we want out of life. Manish was the final straw that broke the camel’s back in convincing Laura to stop going to school, and I’m sure he’s done the same for thousands.

I’m a little worried about next semester because after this internship I’ve lost a lot of my reverence for academic discourse. The whole thing will be about ‘globalization and inequality,’ but to me I think it’s going to feel like pulling conclusions out of thin air, muttering incantations…I’m afraid that it’s going to feel so arrogant. How can any of us really say anything about the state of the world? And who is going to care? Who is going to read our papers anyway? The only real reason that we’ve been given this opportunity is so that Macalester can boast about its brilliant students and climb in the rankings of US News. I’m really looking forward to going to Holland, definitely, am feeling far more grateful than anything else…this conversation shook me up but I can still see flaws in his argument. I guess I’m just going to have to work pretty hard to make the academics feel real to me and to stay honest but not disrespectful during the seminar.