Friday adventures

I had the ride of a lifetime today -- on the back of my Sanskrit teacher's motorbike.

Professor M rides a bike like she teaches grammar: slowly, safely, quietly assured of her prowess. As I struggled to kick down the foot-rest, she chuckled and scolded me, "Don't move!" Calmly rolling her eyes at my awkwardness, she added, "I can't balance if you do that." And, just as she does with grammar, M innocently underestimates the task at hand. Surrounded by at least fifty other honking motorbikes, rickshaws, trucks, buses, bicyles, and oxen at a traffic light, she remarked--and this was not a deadpan--"Traffic is less today."

What a ride it was. We rolled through the slums and the army encampments in our school's neighborhood; we zoomed over bridges and through winding side streets. The city never looked more beautiful.

Our destination was the Pune office of Samskrita Bharati, which (we discovered) is actually just the apartment of the man who runs the Pune branch. He spoke to us in very slow and easy Sanskrit, with a lot of English words thrown in, about how Sanskrit was no longer just a language for Brahmins and Hindus. He then showed us an array of books published by Samskrita Bharati, all highly Hindu in subject matter. The first-year Sanskrit primer's first chapter read, "This is Shiva. That is Saraswati." "The Brahmin goes to the temple." But -- length and quiet Hindutva aside -- his lecture was hardly fire and brimstone. At the end of the afternoon, his wife served us delicious homemade ginger sweets.

Breaking news: it looks like our class is going to go on an overnight field trip next week to witness part of a five-day Vedic animal sacrifice, supposedly the only rite of its kind done in India today. Twenty-four animals. Too exciting.

And now off to prepare for a dinner party my flatmates and I are throwing tonight. Feels great to be done with the week, though I'll admit that one thing I'm *not* done with is today's exam -- three hours spent working on it in school this morning, and two essay questions to go. The thought of the animal sacrifice keeps me going.