New Beginnings
As 2020 winds down and a certain laziness settles over the rest of the year, I lie wide awake as the magnetic energy of something new fills the air, electric with jubilation.
I write this as I sit in my quarantine room in Udaipur. I just finished my orientation in Odisha for the SBI Youth for India fellowship and words completely fail to describe the past ten days. Sixty-six people from all around India came together with only one thing in common: we were to spend the next twelve months of our life in remote Indian villages.
Room 12: My roomies and I took photos everyday to document our outfits ♡
It was my first time experiencing India in its fullest and most diverse. There were people from the Northeast, whose mother tongues were remote tribal and Adivasi languages I had never heard of. There were people from the North, whose hometowns were mountain villages in the clouds of the Himalayas. There were people from the coastal East who insisted on having fish with every meal. And of course, there were us, the South Indians, our English tinged with the melodies of Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu as we begged for proper idli and sambar.
Celebrating Deepavali together
We would all be away from our families during Deepavali this year so we had our own lamp-lighting as chosen family.
We spent every second together, from our classes on gender and sexuality to our case studies on rural livelihood to late night sessions singing old Hindi songs in the slight breeze in the jungles of Ganjam. We didn’t have WiFi or network to provide us with a connection with the outside world. We taught each other constellations, saw fireflies (some of us for the first time), and sang each other love songs. It was just us, the jungle, and our dreams.
Exploring the farm and the 200-acre jungle 🌴
With Joe Madiath
Joe is the founder of Gram Vikas, the NGO that hosted our orientation in Odisha. He cycled around India twice in his life and forested 200 acres of barren land, which in turn forested all the surrounding hills. He’s responsible for all the greenery the eye could see when in Gram Vikas.
It’s difficult to describe how close we became, a group of foolish starry-eyed daydreamers. At the end of orientation, as we all departed to our long-term placements, there were countless tears. We were all shocked at how much we came to love each other in the span of ten days, which felt closer to ten years. We had all changed so much in those few days, into beings that only we could recognize, despite the fact that we hadn’t even known each other a simple ten days ago.
Sheethu and the queens 👑
Which brings me here. Shocked. In awe. Unable to process everything that’s happened, which feels like several lifetimes. Grateful. Inspired. Terrified. But knowing I’ll be ok.
With that, a departing thought from Joe. He had talked about his life story, from braving the elements as he biked around India during the 70s to how he had to bury bodies during a plague near the India-Bangladesh border. He’s a man of few words, so when I asked him how he coped with such tragedy and how he was able to center joy:
“To experience India in all its raw form was fantastic... How transient is life.”
So here I am, in Udaipur, near my permanent placement. My eyes are raw from crying after all the torrid goodbyes over the last 24 hours (which were really more of see-you-laters). All the fellows have been FaceTiming and WhatsApp video calling each other the past few hours, showing each other our locations, from the new foods some of us are tasting for the first time to the strange desert creatures some of us are seeing for the first time. We’re laughing, joking, teasing each other as we fumble and get by our first few days in our new locations. We’re giving each other advice and figuring out what in the world we’re going to do for the next few months.
Whatever it may be, we’re all in it together. Even as I sit here in a quarantine room in Udaipur, I feel so connected. The spirit of collectivity that was created during our orientation lives on.
