It's been a few days since I've written or posted anything. Everyday I think about what I'd like to write about. I'm really enjoying exploring the city and looking at it from the viewpoint of what I'd like to share about my experiences and how I'd like to describe what I'm seeing and hearing. I am taking some pictures and videos. Really trying to get into the habit of taking pictures. I still find myself feeling self conscious, being too much of a tourist or something. I feel particularly self conscious about taking pictures of people (and there are ALOT of people I want to take pictures of!). I find people here one of the most fascinating aspects of this experience - what a person wears (a little girl in a ragged, dirt stained red dress, that is wearing her rather than the other way around - her short stringy black hair shining with oil and sticking out in all directions, small sections randomly clumped together with grime), a person's mannerisms (the Bengali habit of gently tilting the head to one side to indicate... well, I still can't always figure it out - are you blowing me off? are you agreeing? what the hell!), the story they tell with their body language (a lean street-side tea-stall vendor: furrowed brow, standing erect, chin held high, leathery skin, and sinewy arms ), what they are doing (standing in a large puddle by a street gutter, bathing by dunking a makeshift pitcher into the water and pouring it over their heads, scrubbing their armpits and chests with a who-knows-what substitute for soap). Do I ask them first? Do I just go ahead and take a photo? Is that presumptuous, is that unethical?
Despite my reservations, I'm still taking some pictures and videos. I will post the videos to youtube or something and attach a link here once I do that. Still having some photo uploading issues. I'm using my ipod touch and my phone, but they aren't loading onto the computer here (this is a windows pc and I usually work with a mac). So, out of necessity, rather than innate interest, I'm getting more savvy with the ipod, like loading more apps onto it that help with this type of thing.
Today I did absolutely nothing except eat, sleep (a lot and all day), surf the web, and read. Yep, I didn't put shower in there because I did not bathe today. I do plan on bathing before going back to sleep, I really do. We're all just fighting a cold here. For me that means piping hot, fresh ginger tea, and chopped garlic, swallowed raw and chased with water, and, of course, sleeping all day! I admit it, It's midnight and I am still wearing my pajamas from yesterday.
PAJAMAS AND LANGUAGE
I learned from Rebecca recently where the word 'pajama' originates. It's a Persian word originally. And if I remember correctly, means shirt-pants. So, basically, pants that are worn with a shirt. It's used in both Hindi and Bengali as pants as well. In Bengali, you can just use the word Jama to mean pants. In hindi, if you say 'Kurta Pajama" you mean the long shirt (kurta) with pants (pajama) that men wear (especially for traditional social events like weddings). There is a large range of fancy to very simple fairly informal kurta pajamas. So that's where that word came from! We use it practically every day in the English language. (Milena, now every night when you get ready for bed you'll think, "ha! I know what this word means in another language!"). Milena's my 10 year old sister, for those who don't know :-)
So, yeah, a lot of hindi has Persian words in it and Urdu even more so. Now i know that bengali has that as well. Which is interesting, because as i begin to learn a little bengali, ive definitely noticed sound similarities between persian and bengali words. The round vowels and the use of "sh" sounds, rather than "s" sounds, for example.
As far as the script goes, Hindi uses the same script as Sanskrit, while Urdu uses the Arabic script, which is the same script the Persians use even though the languages are different. Bengali uses a different script altogether. I've learned the Hindi and Tamil script, but because Bengali is it's own, I am now learning this script in order to better learn the language. It makes a pretty big difference, in the sense that one is much better able to utilize proper pronunciation when speaking. As in Hindi, there are aspirated and non aspirated, as well as certain consonants (like t and d) that are dental or palatal in pronunciation. And then vowels are in both a long and short form. So while a word may be transliterated in English as... hmmm, as... Okay, the best I can come up with at the moment is 'rabindranath', in Bengali it's actually pronounced more like row-bind-row-naught (roughly).
Okay - I'm exhausted, time to rest. I've had some pretty awesome adventures the past few days though,which I'm really excited to share. I'll write about it tomorrow. (teaser: I checked out a few spots last night where the modern hip calcuttan crowd hangs out. Went to a "slow Joe and the ginger accident" concert. Check it out on YouTube. All I can say is - awesome. Slow Joe is this wild eccentric 60-something dude from Goa (party central of India). You have to see it to believe it. Wow. You. Have. To. See it. ;-)
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