At the evening ganges aarthi (prayer ceremony) in the holy city of Haridwar.



My roommates and I jumping in Rishikesh.

A short update:

I have started working for an NGO in a poor Muslim quarter called Nizamuddin Basti in Delhi. The neighborhood -- a Sufi community -- goes back to the 14th century, and is full of beautiful, ancient tombs and mosques. Crammed alleyways and dirty roads will suddenly open up into majestic tombs or anonymous graves hundreds of years old (since so many famous people were buried there, everyone wanted to be buried there). It is a common sight to see residents of the neighborhood sitting on these anonymous marble tombs, going about their business. The daughter of Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal) is buried here. I have been teaching English conversation to girls aged 11-19, all of whom have had to drop out of school for various reasons (their families are often very conservative). The girls are very sweet and VERY eager to learn English. While they don't know much English -- I taught them a simple "How is the weather" dialogue last week -- today I found out that they have been hiding their vast knowledge of English beauty terminology from me. In a conversation about what things they had bought for the upcoming festival of Eid (the end of Ramadan, which is apparently celebrated by buying new dresses, earrings, shoes, etc), it emerged that they knew how to say lipliner, eyeliner, mascara, face powder, lipstick, earrings!

I just came back from a weekend trip to Haridwar and Rishikesh, two holy cities along the Ganges to the north of Delhi. It was nice to get away from the heat and crowds of Delhi, although we almost got attacked by several vicious monkeys. Kyle learned an important lesson: when encountering a baby monkey, don't try to kick it, especially if its mother, father sisters and brothers are surrounding you. Check out my most recent flickr album for the pictures!