This Swatch was my major fashion statement for several years, until (as you can see) I wore it out. The design isn’t easy to understand at a casual glance, so people would ask me about it: “Is that a mermaid?”
“No,” I would explain: “It’s Eve, gathering apples.” (As for the snake, take a close look at the strap…)
It goes with my theme song, by Cole Porter from his show, Nymph Errant.
The weather is cold, damp, and grey – it’s definitely time to leave the Himalayan foothills for warmer climes.
This week saw the last two days of exams Monday and Tuesday, then everyone had a day off to pack on Wednesday. Midlands (the high school girls’ dorm) was a chaos of trunks, clothing drying on racks, and shrieking, giggling girls:
Ross, as a SAGE student, was granted a trunk to put her stuff in, but this wasn’t sufficient. One of the suitcases she arrived with had gone moldy in storage, and I’m using the other one, so by special dispensation she was decreed a second trunk.
All the rooms must be completely emptied during vacations, I presume so that they can be thoroughly cleaned. And many people will be changing roommates. Ross was actually well-matched with her roommate this semester – somebody evidently took notice of her answer to the school questionnaire that she is very messy! Next semester she plans to room with a tidier friend; either Ross will reform, or they’ll drive each other crazy. Such are the lessons of boarding school…
Today was the last day of classes. Tonight there’s a farewell dinner at Alter Ridge, then Midlands and Hostel are having separate parties (why separate? don’t ask me – I’m told the boys are really lame these days…). Late tomorrow morning there’s a final assembly, then the students will walk down to the New Road to climb onto buses for Dehra Dun, to catch the Shatabdi Express to Delhi at 5 pm. Their luggage already left for Delhi by truck today.
Ross and I, since we have to deal with our luggage personally, will be taking a taxi down to join the train. I suspect they might as well call tomorrow’s train “The Woodstock Express”.
Yesterday morning I woke early to make coffee for our guest, out-of-boardingSAGE student Laura, before her 8 am exam. The sun had not yet risen when we came downstairs. I peered out the windows. “What’s that white stuff on the trees?” I wondered. “Frost? Is it that cold?”
We gazed. “It’s snow!”
We opened the door. “It’s snowING!”
We shrieked with delight. Laura, who lives in Paraguay, doesn’t usually get to see snow falling. (I, too, was raised in the tropics, and never saw snow coming out of the sky til I was 11 years old, in Pittsburgh.)
The ground was too warm for it to stick much, and the snow stopped falling after about an hour. Then the temperature plunged; last night was cold, even in Sanjay’s (unusual for Mussoorie) centrally-heated home.
This morning, the snow is back with a vengeance. Still not quite cold enough to stick, but we may be getting there…
It’s almost unheard-of for students to be around when snow begins falling in Mussoorie. Going Down Day – the end of school, when everyone heads down the hill towards home – was traditionally around December 7th, several weeks before the first snowfall was usually expected.
But this year the calendar has been experimentally changed, so school began August 8th (about two weeks later than usual), winter vacation runs December 14th to January 22nd, and the school year ends May 28th. Graduation is after that, on May 30th – ours, in 1981, was on June 25th!
The rationale for this change has not been well explained; I’ve heard that it was intended to allow more time to prepare (or less time to forget) before external exams in the spring, and/or to align better with the American school calendar.
There are historical, practical reasons for the school to have a long winter vacation. The average altitude of the campus is 7000 feet: it gets cold up here! Word on the hillside is that Mussoorie is in for a colder-than-usual winter this year, and, with a looming shortage of propane in the region, the school may have trouble heating itself. Staff usually have bukharis – woodburning stoves – in their living rooms, but in classrooms and offices these have been replaced with gas heaters. Dorm rooms are not heated at all.
Students are allowed to have electric blankets which, along with flannel or fleece sheets, can make getting into bed a far less traumatic experience than it used to be. The only problem is that, eventually, you have to get out again…
Beyond mere physical discomfort, the calendar change has upset the plans of this year’s SAGE (exchange program) families. The Winter Tour, a multi-week gallop all around India, primarily – but not only – for the benefit of SAGE students, has been compressed to 31 days. For some it will be even shorter, as students join or leave the tour at odd times so that the kids also have an opportunity to go home and see their families.
This is undoubtedly a headache for the tour organizers, especially as the tour is moving so fast that it will be hard to catch up with it along the way. Ross wanted to spend some portion of her vacation relaxing in Goa, and the only reasonable solution I could find was to have her join the tour just a week before its end, in Mumbai. It’s a pity she’s missing so much. On the other hand, after a long semester she needs some rest, and this year’s Winter Tour will emphatically not provide that.
The shortened vacation also eats into a beloved staff perk: the opportunity to travel in Asia during the dry (but still warm) season. Woodstock staff don’t get paid much, so these perks count for a lot.
All things considered, I suspect this calendar change is not going to stick, at least not in as drastic a form as we see this year. It’s a pity they had to run this experiment during my daughter’s year here; it would have been nice for her Italian relatives to see her at Christmas.
When I attended Woodstock School, I never saw Hindi movies. This was partly a matter of logistics: Mussoorie’s two cinemas were available to us only on Saturdays, and a dark movie hall struck me as good mostly for getting groped by strange men – not something I was anxious to encourage; I got enough of that elsewhere in India. (I did venture once or twice, with a gang of friends, to see a rarely-offered English-language film.)
But Hindi films were such a large part of Indian culture that I couldn’t help being aware of them. We heard, and sometimes even sang, fun-silly songs with refrains like “My name is Anthony Gonzales!” or Chal, chal, chal, meri hathi, o meri sathi… (“Let’s go, my elephant, my companion.”)
During our senior year (1980-81), the original Om Shanti Om, a disco ditty, took India and the school by storm – we played it, to enthusiastic reception, at every school dance (as shown above) …but most of us (even some of the Indian students) still thought Western music and movies were cooler.
Our opportunities to see films of any kind were limited – there were no VCRs or DVD players in those days, and Indian television offered only one state-run black-and-white channel, Doordarshan. The sole television set on campus belonged to Brij Lal, our Hindi teacher, who used it mostly to watch cricket.
These days, Woodstock students have far more choices in entertainment: satellite TV and DVD players in every dorm, and of course you can watch DVDs and Video CDs (widely available in India, and cheaper than DVDs) on your laptop. Mussoorie’s cinemas have both closed down, but are not much missed (though people do happily go to the fancy multiplexes in larger cities).
At the same time, Hindi movies (now bearing the epithet “Bollywood”) have gotten better. The stories can still seem ridiculous to cynical American tastes: full of improbable coincidences, with plot points that often hinge on non-Western cultural norms. Bride & Prejudice worked as an update on Jane Austen’s classic because the “transgressions” of the sisters would seem shocking only in a relatively conservative culture like India’s.
Bollywood eye candy has also improved. Though Indian female stars have always been gorgeous, some of the male stars I observed in the 70s could get away with a bit of a paunch straining their fashionable safari suits. No longer. Nowadays they all work out with professional trainers, with results that speak for themselves.
All this, plus a larger Indian population at the school, has led to burgeoning interest in Bollywood movies among Woodstock students – not least, my daughter, whose current dream is to meet Shahrukh Khan. I was amused to have a houseful of (mostly) American exchange students enthralled by this year’s big hit, Om Shanti Om.
And I could understand why. It’s a great, goofy, fun movie. And, contrary to what some reviewers have said, you don’t have to understand all the Bollywood in-jokes to find it amusing.
So what if everyone bursts into song every ten minutes? That just adds to the fun! (And fans of western musical theater can enjoy themselves picking out the musical and scenographic borrowings from “The Phantom of the Opera” in the climactic scene.) Oh, yes – our old friend Arjun Rampal is in it, too.
If you’re new to Bollywood, I highly recommend Steve Alter‘s new book, “Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief” as an introduction.Among many other things, the book is a sort of production diary for Omkara, an Indianized retelling of Othello directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, who also composed the wonderful music.
As soon as I finished the book I rushed out to buy the movie, which is excellent. I can tell good acting when I see it, though I’m having trouble with the dialog: the VCD we bought has Hindi subtitles instead of the promised English, and my Hindi has not yet come back strongly enough for me to follow complex sentences in hifalutin’ semi-Shakespearean language which is at the same time in a western Uttar Pradesh dialect!
What is this strange wedge of wood doing between the door frame and the door?
There are lots of ways to keep doors and windows closed, but what about when you want to keep them open on a windy day? Our home in Italy has many windows, and doors that open onto balconies, which I mostly like to keep open when the weather’s not too cold. But, when there’s any wind at all, they bang shut – which is especially annoying when we’re trying to sleep at night!
I have often reminisced about these useful little items that are common all over south Asia (as far as I know), but don’t seem to have penetrated anywhere else.
Here it is deployed to keep the door open:
Flipped over on its hinge, it jams the door open – no amount of wind will slam it shut!
Simple, cheap, effective. Why can’t we have something like this on our doors and windows in Italy?
This Swatch was my major fashion statement for several years, until (as you can see) I wore it out. The design isn’t easy to understand at a casual glance, so people would ask me about it: “Is that a mermaid?”
