Greetings from Mysore! I’ve officially been here for a month, and what a wild ride it’s been. When I heard that AIF had matched me to Mysore, with the Public Health Research Institute of India, I was beyond thrilled. I had been wishing long and hard to end up in South India, and I’d heard so much about how nice the people in Mysore were. Having familiarity with South Indian languages and cultures, I’d also thought that would mean the typical trials and tribulations of culture shock and communication barriers wouldn’t affect me too much.
To some degree, that was true. As soon as I landed in Mysore, I was enveloped in sights and smells that were as familiar as it could get. The humidity, the greenery, the cool mornings and nights, the cows on every street, heaps of jasmine flowers in baskets outside of temples — everything was so reminiscent of my mother’s hometown, Coimbatore, that I immediately felt a sense of comfort, a sense that I was at home.
While that has remained true — I’m loving Mysore, and am growing more attached to it by the day — I did have my moments of mild culture shock. The expectation that nothing would rock the boat wasn’t very accurate, but it did make for a few funny stories, which I’ve collected below. I hope you enjoy them; I have, in retrospect!
Chai time!
There exists this stereotype about Indians and chai — that we are obsessed. To be honest, it had always confused me a little bit, because that simply wasn’t my experience. I’d never really liked chai myself, and I’d only seen my parents drinking chai every few afternoons or so. I always felt that cravings for filter coffee rather overruled chai in my family. I chalked it up to there perhaps being a North-South difference; most of the memes I saw about chai-loving aunties and uncles were written in Hindi, and filter coffee is, of course, distinctly South Indian. How wrong I was.
However, my first week in the office didn’t reveal anything different, since everyone was frantically pitching in to shift desks and lab equipment to our new location. It was a flurried and hurried atmosphere, and there was simply no time for a leisurely sip of a hot drink.
Then we shifted to our new premises. On the very first day, sharp at 11:15am, the office driver arrived carrying a giant, swishing drink dispenser. Paper cups were passed around to the staff with not so much as an explanation, and everybody exclaimed with delight and eagerly hopped up, heading to the veranda.
I turned to one of the other fellows working with me and asked where everyone was stampeding to. She told me that our morning chai breaks had returned, and glanced eagerly to the doorway to see if cups were coming our way. When one of the staff approached with cups, I politely declined one. She was taken aback.
“You don’t like chai?”
I shook my head. I had tried chai in the US several times, and I just never took to it. She gave me a strange look and shrugged, handing cups to the others, who all immediately headed to the dispenser.
After everyone had had their fill of chai, a few staff members asked me, individually, whether I was sure that I didn’t want any, seeming utterly puzzled by my refusal. We’ve had chai breaks every day since, and without fail, I’ve been asked at least twice daily whether I would like chai and if I’m sure that I can do without it. I had no idea it carried such workplace importance.
However, seeing that I was missing out on the daily midmorning beverage tradition, the other fellows and a few staff have been accompanying me to a coffee stand down the street, where we all have a cup of what is supposed to be Mysore’s best filter coffee (picture below!). It has certainly lived up to the hype — and I’ve been very touched that they’ve been willing to forgo their chai a few times a week, considering the hold it has over everyone.
I have to admit, the office-wide fervent chai admiration has piqued a curiosity that I’ve never felt before. I may just have a cup myself soon— I thoroughly underestimated its influence and power. If I do get sucked in, I will update!
Lunchtime?
I’m not a morning person. At all. That’s not for lack of trying — I’ve truly tried to do the whole “wake up at 6 am and watch your life change” thing, and I just don’t think it’s physically possible for me. The number of hours that I need to wake up prior to 9am is directly proportional to the number of extra hours of sleep I’ll need (on top of the prescribed eight) to make it happen. 6am wakeup means 7pm bedtime.
That’s why I was pleasantly surprised by my work timings at PHRII. We’re expected to arrive at the office around 10 am, and most people leave between 4 pm and 5 pm. That meant I wouldn’t need to wake up any earlier than 9 am — unless I wanted to have breakfast, and who needs that? College life had conditioned me to prioritize an extra fifteen minutes of sleep over everything else, and this would be no different.
On my first day, I woke up bright and early (yes, 9 am is bright and early to me) and was ready at the office at 9:45 am, watching the staff roll in. Everyone greeted me with some variation of the same thing — “Good morning! How are you? Did you have breakfast?”
After my third or fourth “No, I’m not a breakfast person”, I started feeling a bit uneasy. My statement seemed to be consistently eliciting a baffled and shocked reaction, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. So I’m not a breakfast person. So what? Lunch was in under three hours anyhow. What was the point of eating two meals so closely together?
I realized why everyone was so taken aback by my lack of breakfast very soon. Around 12:15 pm that day, I leaned back in my chair and glanced around the office surreptitiously, wondering if it was an appropriate time to take out my lunch. Everyone was busily tapping away at their laptops or absorbed in discussion, so I went back to work. Perhaps at 12:30.
Fifteen minutes later, I looked around again. Still no indication of lunchtime approaching. My stomach was starting to rumble. Then it was 12:45 pm, then 1 pm, then 1:30 pm, then 2 pm, and I was starting to think my stomach was going to collapse upon itself. While it had only been five hours since I’d woken up, I was accustomed to eating at least a morsel or two much earlier — and I was still battling too much new-girl-syndrome to be bold enough to pull out my lunchbox when no one else was.
By 2:20 pm, I had given up hope and resigned to the fact that, if I could get through the rest of the workday without fainting of hunger, I would simply have to make up for the missed meal at dinner. Then, finally, finally, ten minutes later, chatter broke out, laptops were shut, and tiffin boxes were taken out of handbags. I don’t think I can put into words the kind of ecstasy and jubilation I experienced in that moment.
Anyways, lesson learned: breakfast is a must, because lunchtime is LATE. I now have a standing morning engagement with a couple of hot idlis or a vadai drenched in sambar at a nearby tiffin center.
(A minor discovery — sambar here is rather sweet. I wasn’t a fan at first, but it’s been growing on me.)
“Furnished”
My biggest anxiety about starting my Fellowship period in Mysore was about finding housing. While it was more straightforward than I had imagined it to be, it was still an incredibly stressful process because my my expectations for apartment hunting didn’t quite align with what I’ve discovered are the norms in Mysore.
I downloaded about five different apps during my apartment search, and I was really impressed with how easy it was to find available properties. I was even more blown away that so many of them were furnished! It was head and shoulders above and beyond anything I had seen or experienced in the US while apartment hunting, and I was so excited to be touring apartments within just a day of landing. I thought I would move in with plenty of time to spare.
The next day, I arrived ten minutes early to my first apartment tour, my leg bouncing up and down anxiously as I sat on the bench waiting for the landlord. The pictures for this apartment were very promising; the inside was spacious, air-conditioned, and the place was furnished top to bottom, with some really comfy-looking couches in the living room. It even had a TV!
The landlord finally arrived as I had just started daydreaming about triumphantly signing my lease within the hour, and he led me towards the front door, pulling out a massive set of keys. As he swung the door open, I stepped in hurriedly, ready to greet my new home, but stopped dead in my tracks.
The apartment was empty. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the apartment, and the TV seemed to have been recently removed. Even the size of the rooms looked different in the pictures. I was absolutely bamboozled; the apartment was tagged as furnished! Why was there no furniture? The landlord was watching me anxiously.
“How do you like the flat?” He asked.
I tried to be as polite as I could. “It’s a nice apartment, I like the layout! But… I thought the listing said it was furnished?”
He gave me a look that plainly said he was as puzzled as I felt. He glanced around the apartment vaguely, tilting his head. “But it is furnished! See, lights, AC, fan, gas connection… all the fixtures are there.”
I was still confused. “The pictures showed lots of furniture though, I thought the apartment would come with it.”
He laughed heartily. “That was all the previous tenant’s furniture! We just kept those pictures to show you what all can fit in these rooms!”
That was a lightbulb moment. ‘Furnished’ here meant living facilities, not furniture. I made sure that I explicitly clarified what the apartment’s furnishings included after that experience, and luckily, I was able to eventually find a fully-furnished apartment in Vijayanagar, Mysore’s oldest residential area! I’ve really started to regard it as ‘home’ recently; I surprise myself every time I hear myself saying that I need to stop at home for a phone charger or my water bottle. The terrace above my floor has become my favorite spot to decompress; I have a beautiful, colorful view of my street during the day (picture below!), and a brilliant view of the stars at night, no matter how cloudy it is. Between that and the Smart TV in my living room, I really can’t complain.
I’ve settled in quite well now, and while I’ve continued to experience small epiphanies and surprises, I think the bulk of my culture-shock moments have passed. I’m really looking forward to moving into the next phase of my fellowship period with more stability and a better grounding in Mysore life!
