12.08 prepping for india

for anyone who hasn't heard me raving about my trip, here's some background. i'm a regular canadian girl who always wanted to go to india. in my head i dreamed i'd go to india with my husband, perhaps for a honeymoon, to start married life with a bit of adventure and exploration. reality check! i'm 32, nowhere near married and certainly not waiting for a husband to take me to india!

my first reason for going is more than just for travel. unlike max, the kid in one of my fave books, where the wild things are, i travel towards, not to 'escape from it all'. on this trip, i want to see the places my grandparents lived, and left, to relocate to africa. i was born and raised in toronto and have traveled around north, central and south america, europe and east africa, but never been east of that. i'm also very intrigued about how culture evolves, which has historically been by conquest or through survival instinct. listening to swahili on my first adult trip to east africa in 2004, for example, i was stunned to hear the portuguese influences and equally stunned to hear words my parents use when speaking kachhi or gujarati, languages of their indian anscestors. words like "haya" or "kaabisah". words i never knew they stole from swahili... not to mention the foods! 'vitumbua' is way african!! additionally, i have always wondered about my own family history. in school we were taught about the champlains, the windsors, the washingtons and the kennedys. never the singhs, the patels or the piranis to say the least. and my parents never told us much so... i'm off to see what i can see for myself.

the second reason for going to india is to see, literally. to improve my eyesight naturally. two years ago i gave up the idea of laser eye surgery and decided to naturally improve my vision. i vaguely recalled reading about it in a sociology class during my undergrad (mostly laughing about it with my classmate kiran). i raided the library. Take Off Your Glasses and See by Jacob Liberman was like an arrow to the heart. i started seeing Elizabeth Abraham, a vision educator in Toronto and had remarkable improvement in my vision in only a few weeks of exercising and relaxation with the Bates Method. after a couple of years, though, my improvement has slowed. this is where india came in. at the sri aurobindo ashram in pondicherry there there is a place called the school for perfect eyesight and i'm hoping that spending a week or so there will help me get my vision improvement back on track.

so those are my two big reasons for heading to india. my parents have now decided to come with me, and they are the close-knit types. so the third thing i will be doing is a crash course: learning how to get along with them, 24-7 style.

without valium.

wish me luck...


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