A New Hole in My Face

I had no idea what to title this post. "I Got My Nose Pierced"? "Getting My Nose Pierced"? "Nose Piercing"? So I called it the most ridiculous (and true) thing I could think of. I do indeed have a new hole in my face. On the right side of my nose, to be exact. My mother tells me that the piercing is in the wrong place on my nose, that it should be a bit lower and more forward. Unfortunately, she [and a nice old lady that we're family friends with, and my gay best friend, all three of whom told me my nose was pierced in the wrong spot as soon as they saw it] is completely right. But since my piercing was four (or five, depending on which side of the international date line you were standing on) days old by the time my mom pointed out the problem, there was nothing I could do about it. It's all a bit upsetting, since I was really pleased whenever I saw my nose ring in the mirror before the misplacement was pointed out, but now when I see it I can't help wishing it were shifted slightly. I have to get used to it though, and I'm sure I will, because I'm stuck with this piercing for the rest of my life. All in all, I'm pleased; it looks much better than I thought it would. A recap of the experience:

I got my nose pierced in Little India in Singapore, at an Indian jewelry store called [charmingly] Ani Mani Porchalai. [and by charmingly, I meant slightly ridiculously] I stayed with my closest girlfriend from college and her family while I was in Singapore, so both she and her mother accompanied me to the jewelry store. The whole process was relatively unceremonious: we walked in, said I wanted to get my nose pierced, and the jeweler called over the resident piercer. I chose the nose ring I wanted (small, gold, with a diamond-looking stone) The piercer dude asked me which side, I said right, and he marked the spot with a pen [ah if only I had asked him to move it!] and then handed me a Q-tip dipped in anesthetic ointment to rub on the spot. I rubbed, the jeweler told me to close my eyes and brace myself, and the piercer began to pierce my nose. Without a piercing gun. Instead, he stuck a sterilized needle into the stem of my nose ring, and proceeded to poke a hole in my nasal cartilage with said needle. Since the outside of my nose was anesthetized, it felt at first like an ant bite, a prick:

[my friend has a fantastic SLR camera, so she took pictures for me]

But as the needle penetrated the skin and began going through my actual nose, I started to feel the pain a bit more:

It definitely got to a point where I was thinking "when is it going to end?!" as he was piercing. I'm proud that I didn't scream, but I definitely whimpered a little. Getting your nose pierced is no joke. It hurts. Thankfully, the pain of piercing is the worst of it; during the recovery period, the area around the piercing was a bit swollen and tender, but I was pretty much completely healed in four days. So overall: yay! I got my nose pierced! I survived, and it looks pretty good. Sadly, the nose piercer guy definitely said that I have a "thick nose" and it was a bit difficult to pierce. FML, a little. For most of my life, I've had a bit of a complex about my nose being large, so it was kind of the cherry on top of the sundae (in a non-good way) to hear that. I wasn't really hurt; I mostly found it funny, in a sort of wry way. I mean how many people are told that their nose is thick? Ha.

Aaand hopefully this is the first of many posts about my Asia trip now that I'm back home. Hope you found this one entertaining!

Chetan Bhagat [By Which I Mean His Books]

So a large portion of my time in India has been spent reading. As I [sort of] mentioned in a previous entry, I used to read ravenously during any and all school vacations all the way through high school. Then, some time after I began college, my thirst for books began to wane. I'm not sure what caused the change; perhaps, tired of reading and analyzing so many novels for my classes, I preferred to veg out in front of the television during my free time. Or maybe I decided that a college-age English major decided to read more literature and less chick lit, and I just couldn't muster the same kind of reading fervor that The Princess Diaries series elicits in me for books like Emma. I'm not saying classic literature can't be great to read, but it definitely slows my reading pace. (Case in point: I read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, definitely the most literary of the books I brought to India, for the first two weeks of my trip here. In contrast, I read three of Chetan Bhagat's novels in five days this past week.)

Anyway, all of this was to say that one of the best parts of my trip so far has been the rekindling of my obsession with books. I owe a fair amount of this rekindling to the works of Chetan Bhagat, author of four novels, the titles of all of which I only just realized begin with a number:

1. 5 Point Someone
2. One Night @ the Call Center
3. The 3 Mistakes of My Life
4. 2 States

It seems that all of his books have inspired Bollywood movies, though the only one I was aware of was 5 Point Someone, upon which the recently released blockbuster 3 Idiots, starring the ever-charming Aamir Khan, was based. I had actually heard of this novel two years ago, the last time I visited India, but didn't read it until just now. For a quick rundown:

• 5 Point Someone is about 3 male protagonists and their time at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, AKA IIT Delhi, pretty much the most prestigious engineering college in this country. The guys screw up in every which way. One of them falls in love, one tries to commit suicide, they struggle with familial pressure and academic pressure, and somehow manage to forge an incredibly strong friendship, all while drinking and smoking weed quite a bit. The book is funny, dark, and at times rather incisive. In fact, these three descriptors can be applied to all of Bhagat's novels.
• One Night @ the Call Center is about, well, one night at a call center, this one in Gurgaon, a borough, I believe, of Delhi. 3 men and 3 women working together see themselves and their lives sort of unravel over the course of one night's events, and emerge on the other side of the darkness--with the help of a mysterious call from God--with renewed senses of themselves, their hopes and dreams, and assurance of the paths they must take in order to reach their goals. This book was pretty inspirational, and also dark, funny, and incisive. The only part I didn't like about it was the rather blunt and sweeping characterization of Americans as stupid, paranoid, and smug. Nationalism and patriotism are all well and good, but I don't think they need to be pursued by demonizing or putting down other nations.
• The 3 Mistakes of My Life is the most unlike the others of Bhagat's novels, because it is set in the old part of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and is about three boys who are not very financially privileged, unlike the main characters in all the other novels. Also setting this one apart was the examination of religion, politics, and cricket (the sport), and how the three affect daily life in India. Bhagat was definitely trying to push a certain agenda in the novel, making his villain part of a religious political party and his first-person protagonist disinterested in politics, but as I didn't disagree with the views he advanced, I wasn't bothered. I may have liked this one the best of Bhagat's novels.
• 2 States is subtitled "The Story of My Marriage," and it's basically just that: Bhagat is Punjabi, and his wife Anusha, whom he met at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (IIM-A), is Tamil Iyer (incidentally, just like me). The protagonist of 2 States is a male Punjabi student at IIM-A who falls in love with a Tamil Iyer girl. The bulk of the book details their struggles to gain their families' approvals before getting married. This was the first of Bhagat's books that I read, and I found it funny and fresh. It was especially humorous to see my own culture from the vantage point of someone outside of it but trying to find a way in.

Bhagat's books definitely have some grammatical moments that I take issue with, but I think it might just be a matter of different kinds of grammar being acceptable in India than those that are considered correct in the US. I really like that Bhagat seems to be trying to do something with his novels. He's not just telling stories; he's saying things about India, about the schooling system, the linguistic pride that divides the country, the dangerous mix of politics and religion, the disenchantment of the youth, and the hopes of his still-infant nation. He's the best-selling English language novelist in Indian history, and I feel this distinction is definitely well-earned. A few more things about Bhagat's books:

1. All of his protagonists are having sex with their girlfriends. Are most young people in India sexually active before marriage? The idea inspires both horror (ew are my cousins doing that? [Somehow I doubt it]) and surprise. Growing up in the States, I, like most other children of Indian immigrants, have been exposed to a sort of fossilized version of Indian culture, courtesy of my parents. In my mind, Indian people never have premarital sex. But I mean, some of them must; otherwise Bhagat wouldn't put it in each of his books.
2. All of Bhagat's protagonists are first-person male. This is rather refreshing, because I most often read books with female protagonists. Much of the comedy in his books comes from his protagonists' candid descriptions of heterosexual boys' reactions to girls and their physical attractiveness. Also, the male point of view allows for some level of incisiveness that may be lost with a female protagonist. For instance, in One Night @ the Call Center, the protagonist [rather insightfully] notes that "only women think there is a reason to thank people if they listen to them."

Not much else to report on the topic of Bhagat's novels, except that they're definitely worth a read. All four managed to make me tear up at times, which is saying something, because though I'm kind of a crier, I hardly ever respond to books, a trait that sometimes makes me wonder if I'm an emotional rhinoceros. I wonder if, in keeping with the numerical theme, Bhagat's next novel's title will begin with Four...

Diglossia

Disclaimer: I totally am not a linguist and don't really know anything about diglossia (or the Tamil language) on a scholarly level. I'm just venting a little here.

I wish I could write an exciting entry about all of the cool things I've been doing here in Chennai, but I've honestly not done that much cool stuff. More than anything, I'm sort of wrapping myself into the fabric of my extended family's shared life here. I eat lunch with my grandma, tiffin with Akhil, and dinner with the rest of the family. I'm reading quite ravenously (books by Chetan Bhagat, author of Five Point Someone, upon which 3 Idiots was based, for now; I'll write an entry about his novels once I finish the last one I have by him), surfing the internet, and learning a sloka (prayer) in Tamil from my grandma. Which brings me, actually to the title of this entry: diglossia.

Diglossia is defined as "a situation where a given language community uses two languages or dialects," "the use of two varieties of a language by members of a society for distinct functions or by distinct groups or classes of people," and "the existence of two official languages in a society." And it's one of the characteristics of Tamil, my mother tongue (a phrase I believe only South Asian people seem to use...). What diglossia does to my world is mess it up. While Indian Americans whose mother tongue is Hindi can [with some effort] understand Hindi song lyrics, and Hindi poetry, can read a Hindi newspaper or watch a Hindi newscast and understand what he or she is reading or hearing, I can't do the same with Tamil.

Of course, I'm simplifying this a little: you'd have to be pretty proficient at Hindi to really understand a newscast or newspaper or poetry in the language, and I can definitely pick up words here and there in Tamil film songs if I try hard enough. But really: because I've never studied Tamil, only learned it through speaking to my family, I'm largely unaware of the true forms of most of the words I speak in this language. For example: if I were to say "it's raining" in Tamil, I would say "mazhai peyyarthu." But if I were to write it (or if the same phrase were to appear in a song, say), it would actually be "mazhai peygirathu." [And don't even get me started on transliterating Tamil; something as lovely as "moonlight caught in a bowl" looks a little ridiculous when you have to spell it out as "vennillaa velicham kinnaththil vizhinthu"] In short, the spoken form of my native language is kind of like AIM talk: abbreviations and shortenings galore. This would all be fine and dandy, if only I had been aware of this some time before I was around twenty years old. But I wasn't. So I went through a fair chunk of my life bemoaning the fact that I just didn't get Tamil. I could understand Hindi film song lyrics, for crying out loud, but lyrics in my own language, the first one I ever spoke, went over my head. What's wrong with that picture, right?

Thankfully, finding out about diglossia served to relieve me of my slight inferiority complex/identity crisis. It also, though, makes me feel a little cheated. Wouldn't life be so much easier if I were a native Hindi speaker and didn't have to work so darn hard to decipher my own language? I feel a bit like I'm being cheated of some sort of linguistic birthright. I mean, Tamil has a proud literary tradition: It not only predates Sanskrit, but has outlived it as a spoken language. But I find myself on the outside of much of its beauty, simply because I never formally learned it. I was hoping to learn Tamil in earnest (from my grandmother, a retired schoolteacher; she taught music in school, but she definitely knows Tamil well enough to teach it) during my time here, but I kind of lost interest somehow or other. Maybe I should do what I can in my last seven days. When all you're doing is reading novels and playing on your iPod Touch and bumming around, I'm sure you could squeeze lots of learning into the time that would have been whiled away otherwise.

To that end, I'm going to go chill with my grandma now.

Born Confused

The title of this entry is a reference to the book, by Tanuja Desai Hidier, of the same name, and not a descriptor of me. If anything, I think I was born utterly confident of myself and my place in the world (the expression on my face in various baby pictures attests to this). It's now that the confusion has begun to settle in.

I borrowed this book, along with two others, from a friend shortly before leaving for India, and brought all three with me to read while I'm here. So far, I've read three books in toto: Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin [itself borrowed, funnily enough, from the aforementioned friend] and 2 States by Chetan Bhagat. I thoroughly enjoyed all three, though the first was definitely the most literary, if you will, of the bunch. The other two were good stories, and I read both in two days flat. They're the sort of books people in India would call good time-pass: not exactly life-changing, but entertaining, and not a bad way to spend a few hours of your life. Especially when I was reading 2 States, and now while reading Born Confused, I found/ind myself looking up from the pages of the books groggily, having forgotten that I'm still in India, or that the day has progressed around me while my nose was stuck in a book. I can hardly remember the last time I used to feel this way.

During my elementary, middle, and high school summers, my sister and I would go to the library every two weeks (or whenever our books were due) like clockwork, to return the read ones, renew the unread, and select a fresh new pile of books to delve into. Somehow, that ritual became more and more diluted as I entered college and neared its completion, so that the two-week stretch I still have in Chennai, with little else to do but read books during all my free time, feels almost like a foreign concept to me. But I'm beginning to remember and love the way I used to feel about books, when they were just stories to dive into and not literary masterworks to analyze, as I began to see them in college.

All of that, though, was a preface to the real topic of this entry, which is Born Confused. I've known of this book's existence for quite some time, first becoming aware of it around that time somewhere during high school when books about young adults searching for their South Asian identity became all the rage. I never read it, though, because I was a bit disillusioned by some of its kindred spirits, which portrayed petulant children of immigrants who just didn't get "it"about their heritage and somehow managed to find "it" by the end of the book. I thought this one started out a bit the same, but as I'm getting further into it (it's rather long for a book of its genre), I'm beginning to relate more and more to the protagonist. The poor girl (Dimple) is completely lost about Indian culture, and somehow seems less Indian at all junctures than her very-much-white best friend, a "friend" who manages to outshine her, ignore or not notice her feelings, and steal the spotlight away from her whenever possible. It actually really makes me angry. The boy that Dimple's parents think is perfect for her (he being super-Indian and all that), the boy that she never thought she would like but actually ends up falling for, is also the boy that her best friend decides to set her sights upon, oblivious to the fact that Dimple still likes him. (Though, to the best friend's credit, Dimple never comes right out and says so, which is both infuriating and completely relate-able; she doesn't think anyone would ever prefer herself to her best friend, so when the boy seems to like the friend [though any non-idiotic reader would see that he likes Dimple], she doesn't speak up for herself, because who wants to put herself on the line like that?)

Anyway. I'm really not liking the best friend in this book. And though the book has its cheesy made-for-immigrant-kids moments, it still has strong imagery and some rather lovely phrasings, not to mention characters that really do jump off the page. I'm thinking Dimple will end up with the boy her parents think is perfect for her. Or at least I hope so. Let's see.

[Interesting aside: Something Borrowed, borrowed from the same friend who lent me Born Confused, also features a protagonist whose best friend has always overshadowed her--and always been allowed to do so. Interesting that my friend called both of these two of her favorite books. I wonder if there's something to the similarity of the characters that speaks to my friend's own personality.]