Impressions of India

I applied to IAESTE in the hope of finding something wild, something drastically different from the world I would leave behind in the United States. I wanted to get away from my home, my friends, my family and everything familiar – not because I had anything against them, but simply because it was familiar. I wanted to expand my understanding of the world beyond that of my immediate surroundings. I wanted to meet its people, to see its beauty, and see the monuments of its history. But I wanted, most of all, to see just how different the world really could be. From within my tame and developed country, I caught only glimpses of the external world. A few images on the evening news, a paragraph in a history book or the newspaper, a few words in
conversation with a foreigner: these were my only means of knowing the vast world beyond the borders of my native country. Yet it was clear, even from these limited views, that the wider world was one of difference. I was fascinated by the fact that everywhere, people worked, raised
children, prayed, ate, slept and generally just lived so differently. I wanted to experience that difference first-hand, to understand the human experience by coming into contact with that variety and thereby coming to understand what are its essentials.

So, during my final year at my university in the United States, with the inklings of these thoughts in my mind, I applied as an intern with IAESTE, and opted for a position in Manipal, India. I was accepted soon after graduating from my Mechanical Engineering program and I began to prepare for what I hoped would be a great experience.

Before going, I had only vague concepts of Indian culture, but I found even those shadows of the truth wildly interesting. The thought of a culture that worshipped various gods and built temples as mysterious as the few I’d seen in pictures were the ones that chiefly transfixed my imagination.
I had in my mind, too, a notion of India as a dignified nation, a nation of courtesy, peace and conservatism; and I wanted to understand how it was so. I went to India hoping to find something
drastically different; and I found exactly that.

It would be difficult to underestimate the value of spending time in a foreign country, especially a country that is so particularly foreign to one’s own – as India is to mine. Typically mundane experiences, such as walking down a nondescript and common street, become the
most incredible adventures. Surrounded by novelty, the world is suddenly alive and fascinating. I remember very clearly my first impressions of India, and how enamored I was with everything that I saw around me. Nothing could bore me, because everything was colored with the culture of my surroundings – and what a different color it was! I was mystified by the cryptic languages I saw on billboards and the towers of Hindu temples along the roadsides. I was entirely bemused by the animals in the streets, as well as all the rickshaws and the old British-style taxis that I saw everywhere. I was pleasantly amused by Indian courtesy and impressed by Indian attitudes towards marriage and the family. Everything, everywhere, jumped out at my senses and engaged my mind like it could never have at home.

It was these small and everyday things that made India such a wildly different place. The extraordinary things, of course, were impressive; but they were impressive because they were extraordinary. It was far more remarkable to find the merely common things that seemed extraordinary. Each one revealed either something truly singular about India, or something in my own conception of the world that had been clouded by my relatively sheltered life. And recognizing
either one was incredibly mind-opening. It was by getting in touch with these common differences that I was able to understand India, at least in a limited sense. By dealing one-on-one with the
students and faculty at Manipal, I gained an insight into Indian character and by speaking with friends about their futures, I learned a little about Indian values and aspirations. These tiny and individual experiences eventually add up to the whole that is Indian culture and while I would never pretend to comprehend that whole in its fullness, I am incredibly grateful to have come to understand a portion of it.

But while the more common experiences were subtly fascinating, the uncommon things were brazenly so. I should pause briefly to note how thankful I am to IAESTE India-MIT for understanding that, as foreign exchange students, our primaryconcern was exploring the country and culture at hand, and not only the projects that we had undertaken as technical students. Our supervisors and administrators were infinitely generous with their time and flexible with our schedules and their flexibility and understanding allowed us to truly appreciate the time that we
had in India. Intermittently during the four months that I spent in Manipal and for three full weeks afterwards, I travelled all over India with my fellow IAESTE interns, and had countless opportunities to see the most awe-inspiring sights and places the country had to offer. Almost every weekend, we would set out to explore our surroundings. We gradually ventured farther and farther from Manipal: into Kerala, Goa, Tamil Nadu, and beyond. We saw ancient mountain-top temples, and temples covered in the most intricate and delicately detailed carvings; we saw holy pilgrimage sites in the remotest places; we visited beautiful Portuguese mission churches in Goa; we watched the day dawn with hundreds of other people on the southern-most point of the country, where India’s three oceans converge; we climbed mountains in the pouring rain and swam as the sun sank on the horizons on the most beautiful beaches of the Arabian Sea; we traveled through the green and humid forests of the Western Ghats; we rode camels across the sun-baked sands of the Thar Desert and slept on the dunes under the stars; we rode a mountain-train up into the clean air and quiet streets of Shimla in the Himalayas, and climbed higher still up to the snow-capped peaks of Sarahan. We stood atop the ramparts of the most
colossal forts in Rajasthan and on the tiny tops of mosque minarets, and from them commanded views of vast cities; we rode in dugout boats through the backwaters of Kerala; we hiked through the rural regions of Karnataka, and we watched the sunrise amid the majestic and rolling
green hills of Munnar’s tea plantations. Of course, not every moment in India was so romantic. There were the calmer days between trips that were spent working on internship projects or socializing with the other interns or students at Manipal. But those times were equally valuable. It was chiefly during those quiet moments that the true face of India could be seen, and of course the academic experience was also rewarding. As a Mechanical Engineer, I worked with one
of the professors at Manipal Institute of Technology to develop a Finite Element model of the human wrist joint, modeling the bones in a program called ANSYS and subjecting them to different loading conditions to determine the results. I was even allowed to have a CT scan taken
of my own wrist, so that by the end of the 16-week program, I had actually built a model of my own bones on the computer. It was extremely interesting to interact with the professors and students, and to learn such similar material in such a different setting. I think it is safe to say
that I learned the most about India from the hours I spent on my project, because it was there that I was a student first and tourist second. The other interns agreed. Some of them had projects in nano-technology, some in computer science, others in fluid mechanics. A good number did
work that ultimately contributed to their undergraduate or Master’s degrees at their own universities.

Squeezed somewhere in between our project work and traveling, were countless conversations with the other interns about culture, language, history, religion, politics and a thousand other topics. I remember remarking to some of the other IAESTE interns towards the end of our time there that I probably learned just as much from them as I had learned from India itself. By listening to their stories and opinions, I learned not only about their countries or cultures, but even about my own, because I suddenly had theirs as points of comparison. I left India with a far better understanding of the United States and what it meant to be American than I had when I arrived, or ever could have gained from being in the United States.

Looking back on those four months, my mind is full of memories of excitement and friends, long train rides and small hotel rooms; of new foods, places and experiences, exhaustion, laughter and wonder; but everything was underwritten by a sense of sheer awe at my immediate surroundings, whatever they were. It was the sense that accompanied my recognition of the fact that I was in a place so far from home, so far separated from everything familiar: it was an acute awareness that I really was in the midst of that very difference I had set out to find. If I had known before leaving for India that such adventures were possible, I am sure that I would have been frozen in fear of not realizing them. But they did happen, those memories are real, and it is no small pleasure to sit here and write this, knowing that they are safe in the realm of the past.

Brian Gallagher, U.S.A.