The program has started! Here is the group posing in front of the beatiful banyan tree at Kalakshetra, the school for Carnatic music and Bharatnatyam dance in Chennai. You can see them all wearing traditional kurtas and salwars to fit in to the traditional feeling of the school.

After a weekend of airport pickups all accomplished with unending cool by our program assistant, Jamie Munro, we gathered in our apartment in Besant Nagar on Sunday for our first get together. It was a great relief to see everyone safe and sound in the same room after numerous delayed flights, missed connections, misplaced passports and the like! Toward the end we watched the Hindi film Lagaan to get some sense of history, music and of course, cricket!

We've been welcomed most warmly by the staff at Kalakshetra and at Women's Christian College, where we are having most of our lectures on religion, history and contemporary issues. Our basic schedule while we are in Chennai is for our WCC lectures to take place on Mondays and Wednesdays, and our time at Kalakshetra to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays are set aside for volunteer work at Aid India, and NGO that supports the Indian public schools. At Kalakshetra we have a routine of morning prayers under the banyan tree, followed by an hour-long Carnatic singing class. From there, the students split into separate lessons on dance, veena or mridangam. After having lunch with the students, they will receive instruction in some of the traditional Indian arts that are being preserved at the school.

On Tuesday night, we gathered at the Woodlands Hotel, our initial home, and saw everyone off to their homestays. The "parents" were all very exciting to meet the students and the students are learning about the diversity of India through the diversity of their individual homestay experiences. This is the first weekend that they get to spend unprogrammed time in their homes, and we look forward to hearing their stories when we all gather again on Monday.

Next week, we spend most of our classroom time on the Ramayana, the great Indian epic, led by Arshia Sattar whose translation we are all busy reading! She is making a special trip in from Bangalore to be with us next week. It will be a great opporunity to get to work with her. Our daily study of the Ramayana culminates with a vist to Pondicherry next Friday and a live performance of scenes from the epic, followed by visits to Auroville, the Sri Aurobindo ashram and, on the way home, the famous shore temple and rock carvings at Mahabalipuram.

All told, it's been a great first week!

Forrest
24 August 8PM