First Impressions

I don’t think I ever really thought I would make it to India. It has been a goal of mine since a I was young child sitting in bed as my grandfather shared tales of all the adventures in the country as he had living here 60 years prior. Thus when I learned about the India Initiative Program it seemed silly not to apply. In the planning process for the summer a trip to India never was the focus. However during the first week of March I received an email telling me that I had been offered a chance to work at Arbor Brewing Company in Bangalore, India.

3 months later, and I found myself setting off on a 27 hour trip to get to Bangalore (which involved one of the top 5 longest flights, 16 hours from New York to Delhi). It was half way through this trip, at 3am that it finally hit me. I was going to India, to sell beer, in a culture so drastically different from my own. Quite frankly, I was terrified. But I came to realize that my grandfather (who was the same age as me when he left for India) was gone for 10 years where as I was just off for 6 weeks, his trip took 2 months, and did not have the luxuries of skype and FaceTime.

Now I am here I couldn’t be gladder that I made the trip. There is this magical, organic fluidity to India. On first sight, it seems to be chaos – cars and bikes swerving in and out of traffic (ignoring the presence of lanes), wild dogs hanging around street corners, and hundreds of people trying to sell me real Ray Bans. Yet when you look a little closer, you realize that it just works. Life here may be missing some of the luxuries which I take for granted in the US, such as drinking water from a tap. But people are working hard trying to make a better life for themselves and their family, and they are happy doing so. I have been greeted with nothing but kindness and a real interest in me, which is a refreshing change from a lot of the superficial interactions which take place in my life back home.

Bangalore is particularly interesting; as a friend told me ‘it is the biggest little city in the world’. He said this because there is quite clearly lots of new money in Bangalore. It is the IT capital of India with lots of international companies opening offices here. The result is a population of Indians who are quite well off. It is this wealthy class that you will see in all the breweries in the city and this small circle seem to all knew each other because of it. I find this disparity, and its implications, between the wealthy group which frequent the brewery and such a large very poor population of Bangalore interesting. I hope to write on it more as I spend more time talking to people here.

Having left my parents in Detroit 7 days ago, I still can’t quite believe that I am here – yet at the same time it all seems terribly natural (I wonder if my grandfather was feeling the same way 7 days into his tip). Well, that’s all I have so far. I’ll keep you posted.

Cheers,

Oli