I was in one of my random internet-surfing modes that I sometimes get into, and ended up watching the video below. I sometimes consider that India is a country near the top of my list of countries that I would consider “moving to next” if I give up on this “South Korean project.” The natural scenery in the video (Ooty, Tamil Nadu state in South India) reminds me, vaguely, of some train trips I took in southern/eastern Mexico in the 1980s, or, also, the tropical setting that is my mother’s home in the Atherton Tablelands of Far North Queensland, Australia.
The video is interesting in part because it was apparently a low-budget, no-special-effects undertaking – those people dancing on the train are really just people dancing on a moving train (picture at right). The song, like most Indian hits, is Bollywood in origin, but according the wikithing article about the song, its lyrics come from a Sufi folk tradition. Which perhaps incidentally explains why I ended up discovering the video due to an article somewhere about Urdu, not Hindi (Urdu [Pakistan] and Hindi [India] are dialects of essentially the same language, often mutually comprehensible). But the video and song are clearly Hindi, although the setting of the video is South India (Tamil Nadu) which is neither Hindi nor Urdu, culturally.
Well, I’m kind of rambling. If I went to India, the South and Northeast are the parts that most interest me.
As a digression… I once came rather close to taking a month-long trip to Kerala (in the South), when I was still considering myself a computer professional. The story was that I’d worked out that, in net financial terms, it would cost me the same to fly to India and enroll in an Indian computer certification program as it would to stay in the US and get a much higher-priced but precisely identical (content-equivalent) certification. So I was going to go to Kerala and become a Microsoft Certfied Database Administrator, or something in that vein.
I never went to India. But I still think about it. My current status as an EFL teacher doesn’t really “work” for India – India has plenty of EFL, of course (it’s an official language, still, even), but it’s so large and so “self contained” in EFL terms that they’re mostly uninterested, as far as I can tell, in foreign native English speakers (especially American-accented ones) – there seems to be no market for my type of work, there. So if I went, I guess it would just be as some kind of long-term tourist. Or else something like the above, where I was trying to break back into computer work.
What I’m listening to right now.
Malaika Arora and King Khan, “Chaiyya Chaiyya.”
I like the somewhat obscure, almost mysteriously ominous ending of the video – perhaps a reference to the movie from which the song is taken, or some other pop-culture reference that is lost on me.
