First impressions of an India innocent

Events: Yesterday, after a long sleep I went for lunch with Dhruv, an old schoolfriend of the groom. We were soon joined by Amit, the groom, and we hung out for a couple of hours swapping live stories(bizarre connection for Dublin people - their old school does and exchange with Belvedere), eating wonderful Indian veggie food and drinking beer. Dhruv had to go to a meeting, so he dropped Amit and I off at his parents place. I met the parents, drank some tea and then went up to the roof of the building with Amit, where we sat and looked at events in the smoggy city at sunset. He told me of the parties people have up there.... of going up there with beer, weed and music and staying up till the sunrise.... we did not stay up there quite that long, though....we decended at 8 for some pre dinner drinks, drank while sitting cross-legged on a bed watching cricket....Dhruv arrived again, dinner followed, Amit went to see Sanhita and I set off in a car with Dhruv, Amit's little brother(will list name when i remember it), and some friends of his.... we sat and drank tea in a roadside stall(a cult activity for the young middle class of calcutta, it would seem) in pottery cups that you smash after usage(i saved one as an example)..... I was driven back to the hotel where I lay in the dark listening to music and contemplating my first 24 hours in India

Thoughts: Tradition, modernity & Globalisation

Virtually all the knowledge i have garnered about India in the last month comes not from travel guides, but from some of my english language students, whose company has just been taken over by a huge Indian steel company. One guy I talked to, who had grown up in an era of russian domination in eastern bloc, and who had learned fluent russian as a result said he would be advising his daughter to get very familiar with the culture of the east, to get to know India, to learn Chinese perhaps. 'In my day' he said, the russians were rising.... now it's the east'.... all of this was very clear to me almost the moment I stepped off the plane...

All the roads here.... though still a bit rough around the edges are new... within 24 hours of arrival I had a new simcard for my phone.... this internet cafe is indistinguishable from the ones where I live.... the people i hung out with last night do pretty much exactly the same as I do, just with a slight twist.... they go to elegant restaurants with impecable service for business meetings.... the grooms younger brother, who has just graduated from college, plays in a band, hangs out with a mixed sex group of people... they go out, get drunk, go clubbing, and swing by roadside food stalls afterwards for tea and food....they hang hang out on rooves drinking beer and getting stoned.....hell, i used to do exactly the same thing when I was 23. My first thought then was the Kolkata is not so strange at all.... hanging out with the middle classes I can relate very well. Their lives are not strange, they are familiar. The search for a traditional world should not bring you to a modern Indian city....the world here is not traditional, rather it is in many essentials hyper-modern. In fact, in some respects, the world I have come from, living among the turkish community in berlin Kreuzberg may be more traditional than many places here. Case in point, the honour killing in of a Turkish woman in Berlin 2 or so years ago. When I mentioned this to Amit, stitting on the party roof, he mentioned that he had heard of nothing like this in Kolkata in 10 years at least..... such are my thoughts so far....