On the way to Bangalore

So I spent the day at the USIEF headquarters in Delhi serving on the selection committee for the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant program.  It was truly an honor to participate even though it took me many hours to read and score each one before the meeting. Now I now a little more about the intense team labor that goes into a grant selection, I bet it will help me be a better grant writer. All of the applications were so strong, of the 49 we had to select 25 and 5 alternates and really all of them were worthy…. then you’re getting into interesting discussions about the intentions in the essays, gender and regional diversity, all kinds of criteria that might be outside of the knowledge of the applicants. Writing these grants is really a challenge and the respect I have for the people that carefully read them has deepened.

As luck would have it, I was invited to a screening at the nearby American Center .

It was filled with students from Manzil, an educational NGO that Pradeep is involved with and I certainly want to work with too, in some way. More great connections were made and the next day I packed up and headed out to the airport.

Before leaving I took a last look at the sweet roof top garden and surveyed my collection of empty water bottles I had consumed over the weeks. There was good filtered water so I didn’t need to keep buying.

I was quite anxious dealing with my first domestic flight, I’m not sure why, maybe because everything is new and I am by myself. Pradeep pretty much got me all the way there, thanks dude!

Once inside having waited in lines for the printout of my res, then the printout of my boarding pass, then the baggage check in meshugas, then the dreaded security,  I headed right into my comfort zone and discovered my Indian name.

The flight to Bangalore was pleasantly uneventful, I spent the time reading Craig Storti’s book Speaking of India  which made me super self conscious of all the unintentionally rude things I’ve done over the past month. For all the serious cultural differences, however, I know I have learned a lot in a pretty short amount of time.

I landed in Bangalore and Manju from DPS North Bangalore had come through with a driver with my name in big letters who drove me right to the school, we passed a major air show in town.

and then I was shown to the guest house they have on the school campus (!)

I was going to wake up in the morning at this school. Manju was crazy generous but as I was to start to find out the next day, crazy smart as well as I can now work here without distraction.