Trip to Delhi and Agra

I just returned from my first "vacation" here in India. I'm back in Bangalore now at our favorite coffee shop Matteo which has wireless internet. Shreya left this morning on her flight back home to Dubai, and my sister and a few other volunteers from Shanti Bhavan will be arriving here this evening. So I'm spending the day alone in Bangalore which feels surprisingly relaxing.

So now I can reflect on our trip to Delhi and somehow describe it in words. This will be a challenge. I'd like to pick one word to describe India, but I have too many to choose from. The closest I can come is the word "excessive." But not with the negative connotation we naturally assume with that word. It's not a negative thing - it's invigorating.

All of your senses are engaged here, whether you like it or not:

Your eyes are overwhelmed by the brilliant colors everywhere around you - bright orange saris decorated with sequins, women with huge gold earrings and nose rings, bright purple turbans, houses that are painted neon pink and yellow, trucks on the highways with painted designs covering every inch...

Your sense of smell is assaulted by the sour smell of garbage...the exhaust from rickshaws, buses, cars...the raw smell of livestock - cows roaming the streets, donkeys, goats, and buffalo...then your nose is delighted by the scent of jasmine flowers sold on the streets, dropped into your hands at temples, and decorating women's hair. My favorite smell, though, is rose. Rivaling the popularity of jasmine, rose water, rose soap, and rose petals are found everywhere.


Your ears are overwhelmed by the incessant honking on the streets and highways - instead of turn signals, cars honk to signal their intentions. Trucks and buses have the most interesting yet obnoxious horns I've ever heard - usually three or four different notes played in some sequence as opposed to just one tone. When cars are backing up, instead of the beeping we're used to with trucks in the USA, they instead play a melody. Your ears are still overwhelmed by the constant music coming from all corners. Everything from car radios to a lone man on his bike singing a Bollywood song to himself.

Your sense of taste is perhaps the happiest of the senses here. Though it takes a little getting used to. I never thought I'd see a day where a plate of onions is served with breakfast - and I happily add them to my plate. Raw onions?? But they're SO good. Spice for breakfast, spice for lunch, spice for dinner.

Lastly, the sense of touch. In Delhi there is 85% humidity. You step outside and your clothes stick to you. Something lightly tickles your skin and it's either a drop of sweat rolling down your skin or a fly crawling on you. I guess it could be a variety of other insects, but I won't go there. Then there are the itchy mosquito bites - can't forget those. But then there's my favorite sense of touch which is what you feel with the bottoms of your feet. You must take off your shoes in India more times than you can count - temples, mosques, people's houses, etc. But by far, my favorite time I took off my shoes was at the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara in Delhi. We took off our shoes and then there was a shallow canal of sorts that was at the base of the stairway leading up to the Gurudwara. We all had to walk through the water to cleanse our feet before climbing the stairs. I've written about this feeling before in earlier blog posts - but there's something about being barefoot with everyone else that instantly grounds you and connects you to those around you.

It's been a while since I was in elementary school studying the five sense, but where do emotions come? Sense of "touch" there? Like homesickness, loneliness, happiness, gratefulness...? In the interest of not being "excessive", I'll save that for another blog post.

Being a piano teacher in rural India, I constantly battle the nagging thought that piano lessons are, well…I can never find the exact word for it – but something along the lines of “not really necessary or useful.”

The odds the children of Shanti Bhavan face are enormous. They come from extremely poor, disadvantaged families – and in India, the words “poor” and “disadvantaged” take on entirely new meanings when you truly start to see the effects of the caste system. These children are the first in their families to make it through high school. They do not have any academic role models: no father who is a lawyer, no mother who is a doctor, no one pushing them to go to college and follow in the prestigious footsteps set before them. Instead, they are blazing a trail. And they must walk this trail with the weight of the poverty of their entire family resting on their shoulders. They do not go home after school to parents who ask “What did you learn in school today?” or “How did you do on that math test?” They live here, amongst each other, with only themselves, their teachers, the volunteers, and their “aunties” (residential staff) to guide them – personalized attention and support is never a guarantee. If they do not succeed at Shanti Bhavan, if they were go to back home – they would face the realties of manual labor, factory work, early marriage…

So given these circumstances – where they come from and what they are trying to achieve, it is literally IMPERATIVE that they do well in their classes and successfully pass the entrance examinations for college. They need to learn math, physics, chemistry, biology, English, writing, Hindi, Tamil, economics, civics, history…the list of needs goes on. But where on that list does “learning how to play an E-harmonic-minor scale” fit? Does playing a Bach Sarabande REALLY help?

This is my existential dilemma. Is my year’s purpose really to equip these students to fight against the odds with…piano?

Inevitably, I return to my own experience to begin to answer that question. Music has never paid my rent or bought me food. But was it useless to me? What has it given me? Besides the obvious: work ethic, patience, artistic sensibilities, “culture” – it has also given me who I am. Quite literally. Sometimes I forget how much music is a part of me – but subconsciously, it’s always there. I felt this my first week at Shanti Bhavan when I walked to the cafeteria for lunch one day. My jet lag was waning, I had begun to settle in, and get used to life here. As I was eating, the music that had been playing on the CD player in the cafeteria switched suddenly to a Mozart piano sonata. It was like someone I knew and loved had walked through the door. It was the first time I had listened to classical music since leaving Colorado and starting my life over here – and without even realizing what was happening, my eyes completely teared up. The purity and depth, the meaning, the memories… If in the middle of rural India, an American girl can instantly feel at home through a few clear notes of Mozart, the implications of music must run deep in the veins.

So there it is. If my piano lessons can provide that touchstone in the hearts of my students here…if I can help them cultivate their own self-discovery, self-acceptance, and self-confidence…then I won’t just be teaching piano lessons – I will be making a real difference.

And 5-6-7-8: Performance Time at Shanti Bhavan!

It’s now July (is it really, already??) and my sister Summer is here! She’ll be here teaching at Shanti Bhavan for six weeks. She brought a ¾-size cello to donate to the school to go with the regular-sized cello she donated last summer. However, that original cello was a near disaster. When I first arrived in June, Summer had me email her an update on that cello…when I found it in the music room, there were no strings on it, the bridge was nowhere to be found, and when I picked it up to see if the sound post was still standing (on the inside of the cello), I heard something rattling around – the sound post was most definitely NOT still in place. So Summer met with a luthier in New York City who gave her a lesson in re-setting a sound post in a cello and loaned her the tools to use.

The day after she arrived here in India, we brought the cello into our room, laid it out on a table and basically did some major surgery on it. I held the flashlight through one of the F-holes while she stuck the “sound post grabber” in through the other F-hole – it took a couple of tries to get the sound post standing again, but in about 30 minutes, the cello was playable! The sound post and bridge were back in place, new strings were strung up and tuned. Pretty crazy.

The crazier thing was that we had no idea that within a few days that cello would be a part of a concert in celebration of “School Day” – the anniversary of the founding of Shanti Bhavan. Concerts at Shanti Bhavan usually come together within an afternoon. It usually freaks out most of the Western volunteers who are used to planning, organization, and preparation time – but like I said before, one of the greatest lessons India has taught me so far is to just let go.

By show time, Summer was ready to play a prelude from one of the Bach cello suites, I would be playing a Chopin piece, we’d both be playing “The Swan” from Carnival of the Animals, and all of the volunteers (over a dozen!) danced a Bhangra – successfully choreographed and taught in under one hour by one of our really awesome volunteers Sabala who has been doing Indian dance for a number of years. It was SO much fun to learn an Indian dance and put it together as a group. Shanti Bhavan is known for making all of its volunteers somehow participate in these performances – and just about every volunteer who’s come through the door here has at some point learned and performed an Indian dance (complete with Indian attire). It’s just part of the program here!

Some volunteers – especially the professional musicians and/or actors – are at first pretty nervous to have to perform under these circumstances. Nothing is ideal for performing – the instruments are in rough shape, the lighting can fail at any moment when the power goes out, loud and exotic bird calls interrupting your concentration….you name it. One tends, at first, to try to make the usual excuses “Oh no, I can’t perform - I haven’t practiced in weeks” or “I don’t have anything ready to perform” or “I don’t dance”– but you quickly learn that here at Shanti Bhavan, everything is about love and support. Everyone is accepted here – no excuses. Everyone wants the happiness of listening to you play, watching you dance, hearing you sing, etc. – judgment never crosses their minds as it seems all “performances” are not performances but simply celebrations.