due to popular demand

Due to the fact that everyone has told me to do a blog while in India I have decided to do a blog about my year in India. For those of you who do not know about my impending odyssey... here's a little about what I am going to do in India and why.

I first heard about the study abroad program in India when I was a first semester freshman here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Instantly I felt that this program was for me. It was like an epiphany. All of a sudden I had a new goal in my life that needed to be accomplished. The program was a year long and was centered around a field work project of the participants choice. It was the field work project that drew me in. I have always dreamed of doing my own field research, without really knowing what I would do it on. Also the location of this program seemed perfect. It is my opinion that study abroad should be about taking a person out of their context. Karen Blixen said once that you can only know yourself when you take yourself out of your normal context, when all of the social markers that once meant something to you become meaningless, when people do not know that you are polite because you open the door for them or well dressed because you tuck your shirt in. Only then can you see what's left, which are the tings that make you really you. I feel like going back to Denmark, which had been my original plan upon entering college, would not give me ample opportunity to completely know myself. India however, particularly Varanasi, a city lost in time, would be the perfect place for soul searching.

So not, almost two years later, I am sitting here trying to work through visa applications and finish off some preliminary research. I leave on the 20th of August and it almost doesn't seem real. I am nervous for what I will discover about the world and myself, but mostly I am excited to embark on what will hopefully be a life changing journey. I have narrowed my research topic to a sociolinguistic survey of Urdu and Hindi language communities in Varanasi. I feel both ready and unprepared for my research. There is so much more to know. so much more that could be useful to my field research, and at the same time I have read so much already and I just want to jump in and begin finding informants doing elicitations. I have taken a year of Hindi and will take another two semesters this summer. This will hopefully be enough to let me conduct my research mainly in Hindi while in Varanasi. But more on my research later! I have a minigolf game to get ready for!