Jetlag (See also: Junglecasts 2 and 3)

An autorickshaw is a three-wheeled vehicle that runs a tiny, presumably two-stroke engine that makes a very loud buzzing noise. There are no doors; there is a motorcycle-like handlebar instead of a steering wheel, and the back seat only has room for three college students. In rush-hour Bangalore traffic autorickshaws are slightly less than a smooth ride---but jetlag sees no such distinctions. Jetlag is falling asleep twice on an autorickshaw in the heat and noise of a Bangalore evening; then, of course, having a hallucination that I dropped something while on the auto and yelling at the driver to stop, jumping out of the rickshaw and running at least 50 yards back up the street to find what I was sure I had dropped, and sullenly returning to the rickshaw when I found nothing. (Meanwhile, Sandeep, forgetting how to say "he dropped something" in Kannada to the driver, told him instead that "[I] fell out.") When I got back, Sandeep and Katie were very understanding but quite sure that I hadn't dropped anything, and there is no evidence that I ended up missing anything. The image and sensation of a white bag falling out of my hands and into the road, however, are still firmly in my memory. This is jetlag.

UPDATE: I finally found my bags this afternoon, after being tossed from airport employee to airport employee like a rugby ball (at 7 a.m.) and delaying our plans to travel to the Sanctuary by a day. So now we're going tomorrow. On the bright side, now I can take a shower!

Junglecast Update #3

The first post

Flight was good. I promised myself that I would make the most of the 18 or so hours I had in transit-- reading Gandhi, listening to audiobooks, and watching great films like Milk and The Reader, stuff like that. But I ended up reading light things like the in-flight magazine (great tips on my next trip to Aruba) and listening to light music like early 2000s pop-punk, and watching light movies like Marley & Me. I’m determined to avoid making any of my time here “light” but I’m worried that I won’t be able to. I think I’ll get better once we get to the Sanctuary and my focus is renewed.

Also, I am a language geek. I’ve been reflecting a lot on airports and the languages used in different terminals around the world. Bilingualism, trilingualism, or more than that in airports has made me really think about English’s place in the world-- and ours, as first-language speakers of English. Learning English as a first language has made us profoundly lazy; we don’t need to learn other languages because everyone wants to know ours. In the business world, to be at all internationally successful you must have a great grasp of English.

We already have that. Now what? One used to have to know French, but now English is a lingua franca (or lingua anglica, as the case were) unlike anything seen before. So where do we go from there? What’s the point of learning another language? The most practical answer is that there isn’t. We already have the key to international success, first-rate English skills, in our hands. Any reason to learn a language different from your own (except maybe one that your parents speak), one could argue, is just fluff. Maybe I’m just being overly practical and reductionist.

I had bilingualism on my mind because as I look forward to the trip, I wonder just how much my Kannada skills will come in handy. The mother tongue of the villagers we’ll be working with is Kodava, but Wikipedia and my parents tell me that most of them will be bilingual in Kannada. But the use of any language except Kodava -- whether English, Kannada, Hindi, or anything else -- is so culturally loaded. English, of course, is a foreign tongue. Hindi is a North Indian language, and its use isn’t regarded too favorably down south where we are. Kannada might as well be a foreign language, too. It is the state’s official language, and so to the Kodava villagers, the use of Kannada could be an embittering reminder of the fact that they speak a minority language in their own home state. So whatever any of us speak-- me, Kannada; Katie, English; Karan, Hindi -- we have to be mindful of what the language we choose to speak means to them. Translators will help, I hope.

Language! Plus, our GPS unit is working.