If there’s one thing I’ve been acutely aware of as a student abroad in India, it’s that the US dollar packs a lot of punch against the Indian Rupee. When I stepped off the plane in Delhi three months ago, what little cash I had in my wallet multiplied by about 50 times as a function of the conversion rate.
The extreme weight that my dollar carries here has some implications. Of course, there’s a pretty uninhibited feeling at any bazaar. Say it’s a pair of camel leather sandals you’re looking for: haggle them down to 200 rupees, and you’ve just spent $4. Maybe it’s a nice hotel room you want instead? That will usually come out to about $30 a night.
Here’s another illustration- for the past three weeks, I’ve been in south India conducting a month-long independent study of organic certification for small farmers as part of the SIT study abroad program I’m currently in. SIT gives each student a 32,000 rupee (around $640) living stipend that is supposed to last the whole month. On the last day of the month, even after airfare and a few nights in a hotel, I have well over half of it left. Life is cheap in India, and as an American, it’s easy to reap the benefits.
By far the most affecting implication of my new found Indian wealth is the mobility I have. Because airfare/buses, lodging and food is so cheap, I really can flit about anywhere I fancy with little financial consequence. Or at least that must have been what it seemed like to the villagers of Mankulam, the little hill y jungle village where I lived for three weeks while I carried out my independent study project.
The people of Mankulam are perhaps the kindest, most instantly welcoming folks I’ve yet come across. As the only foreigner to spend much time there in a while, I attracted a bit of attention. One particular perk of my insta-celebrity status was that I’d often get invited in to people’s houses for tea and food while I was out taking a walk or something. This way, I got to meet and talk with several families. Usually, they’d ask when I would come back. “After you visit me in America!” became my response, but it was usually met with a moment of awkward silence or a dismissive chuckle. Not a fair trade-off: me coming to India where my wallet becomes huge, and a farmer family coming to America where theirs shrinks in the same proportion is just not the same thing, I came to realize. Many people I met had never been outside of India, much less too far out of the southern half. Going abroad sounds like a far off hazy dream to most of the people I met.
The more conversations I had like this, the sillier I started to feel as a well-off American traipsing the globe for “school projects.” After all, I’m a biology major in a sociology program studying organic certification? That’s hard to explain to a society of students that largely pick a course of study after the equivalent of high school and stick with it. At times I felt a little frivolous, like I was only here for a funsies fake project that didn’t really count towards my degree. Throwing rupees around like monopoly money because I’m American and I can and that’s what we do. Meanwhile, students in Mankulam study without distraction or nonsense.
But that assessment of the American abroad experience is not entirely true. Sure, I’ve had a privileged opportunity to experience a lot of a foreign country doing work that doesn’t totally relate to my major at Whitman. But why is that unproductive? That for-funsies independent study project taught me more than I could ever have learned at Whitman about the interdisciplinary aspects of doing primary research in a foreign culture, and the experience was one of the most difficult and rewarding ones I’ve ever had. I’ve learned so much about existing in a place where my role in its society is often unclear, or where I often feel incompatible. Through experiencing life abroad, I’ve had the chance to incorporate another culture’s way of life into the conception of my own. I don’t feel that much different right now from a semester of not living at “home,” but I will live differently. That’s inevitable. I’m sure everyone else who’s currently coming back from being abroad will say something similar. I’m trying to say that the things I’m taking away from the abroad experience are tangible and valuable, but hard to explain and quantify. They’re realizations like how lucky it is to have the chance to spend a semester doing nothing related to your major, but learning just an incredible amount of things anyway. Or realizing that this kind of opportunity is so far out of reach for many.
Getting on a plane right now back to Jaipur feels like quite a time warp. The last month very often felt impossibly long. But after all the interviews have been done, the longest-paper-of-my-life written, and some big and little friendships made, it’s hard to believe it all happened in more than a blink of an eye.
Speaking of which, some eye candy:
