Leaving India Six Months Later

So I am back at home in New York City, and jet lag has me far too awake at 5:00 AM. The twenty-four hour travel day to get here from Mumbai was taken up with multiple periods of waiting… to check-in (45 minutes)… to go through security (1 hour 15 minutes)… to be processed at immigration (35 minutes)… to get on first flight to Delhi (1 hour 30 minutes)… to go through two security checks in Delhi (45 minutes)… and finally, to get on flight to New York which took sixteen hours in and of itself. Customs and immigration coming into John F. Kennedy Airport in NYC is going through some changes and it seems as though everyone has to get used to being partially (if not wholly) processed at an electronic kiosk. Astonishingly, from my plane touching down on the tarmac to getting in my front door took only about an hour, which has to be some kind of new record for me on returning from an international trip.

Landing approach for transfer in Delhi

As I was flying “economy” on a full flight for this trip home, it was neither easy nor comfortable to try and pull out my computer and write this entry, so I opted to contemplate what I wanted to write and to reflect on the past six months I had spent in India. The conditions also reminded me how air travel has come to feel like a necessary “evil” of my “wanderlust”. Fortunately, I was very tired from my last week of work and “wrapping up” all business arrangements in India; so I also got a good ten hours of sleep on the trans-world leg of my journey. Still, my jet-lag addled brain has also been challenged to focus on writing this post as I return to teaching and picking up my old routine in New York. Thus this will be posted well past my typical weekend into Monday efforts.

Some of the "class photos" from the last six months.

Since many of the people and students with whom I had made friends while in India all wanted to have a chance to spend some time with me before I left, the past week was definitely filled with “goodbye” meals and drinks. It was nice to feel so appreciated, and it gave me an opportunity to ask them in-kind as to what differences they thought my being in India had made to them and their environment. The three most common questions I got asked before I left were, “How has your time been? When are you coming back? What will you miss most about India?”

In short my answers were that India was exactly as I imagined it to be, with the exception that I was continually surprised at how many times a memory of my childhood in Jamaica was elicited by a smell or minor event. For instance, seeing and smelling fresh, ripe naseberries (chikoo), sweet sop (sitafal), and guavas being sold from carts on the street, or expecting electricity and water to be inconsistent. I can’t say that India made me nostalgic, but it was also not exotic to me. In many ways, my life in the USA is still exotic to me. I don’t know that I will return to India, and at the same time, I would not rule it out as a possibility if an opportunity presents itself.

What I realized that I will miss most about India is the friendships I’ve made and the young dancers I’ve seen earnestly trying to define how “dance” might fit into their lives. Having lived through the AIDS crisis in the USA and watched the disease decimate the Performing Arts field and half of my address book, I now find myself bearing witness to the passing of even more peers, mentors and longtime friends due to age, accident and other diseases. A few years ago, I noticed that my personal network of friends around the world was shrinking as I was not making as many new friends as those that were dying. I used to make friends quickly, and many that I knew only briefly were lifelong connections with whom I corresponded regularly through postcards and letters, and ultimately email. This is not to say that I measure my worth by the size of my address book, but close personal connections are harder won as I get older, and I believe this to be true of most people.

My Fulbright fellowship provided me a chance to openly make connections without requiring a “quid pro quo” exchange as is so common in the business of life. And once I jumped the hurdle of introducing myself, with the caveat that I am not expecting an individual “fee” of any kind for any professional service I might have to offer, I did find a handful of associates with whom I felt a mutual ease of interaction. Socio-cultural and economic business realities occasionally presented as differences between myself and associates, yet I am relieved to report that all sides were mutually open and invested in finding resolution and moving beyond such difficulties. Out of such interactions, I imagine I will still have a friend or two in or from my time in India as the years wear on. So “yes”, the thing I will miss most about my time in India is most likely the people I have gotten to know.

A social life...

So what is it that I might have left behind after six months? I was able to interact with multiple institutions and many more people with strong ties and influences on dance and music in India. By spending time in different institutional environments, I witnessed and brought a perspective to the students and the faculties of the potential possibilities of collaborative sharing of resources, especially when foreigners are visiting and willing to share their Art and expertise. Most of the students never experience other teachers in their local city outside of their institutions, until they decide to leave. And most of the institutions seem to be developing their curriculum without the benefit of knowing exactly what other local training academies are doing and have developed. As a free-lance teacher in the USA, it is common for me to be teaching at multiple institutions while having an open dialogue about the differences in the missions of those training academies and programs at which I might be teaching. Some of my conversations have left me feeling positive that a new generation of teachers in India are interested in sharing both their knowledge and their resources, to the benefit of the dance field in India as a whole. But I cannot take any credit for this shift, only that I happen to have been an outsider bearing witness to a change within an age-old tradition of Guru-Shishya (enlightened leader – disciple) for most disciplines, to a culture where young students and dancers are being encouraged to become leaders, or at least responsible for their own “paths” in life.

For the most part, as dancers and individuals learned more about my own career in dance, a typical comment was that my story offered inspiration that there is a possibility to make one’s way in life as a dancer. The commonality I think that Indians find in my story is that when I was growing up in Jamaica, professional dancer was not a plausible option as a future goal. Yet I am still working in dance, in ways that I could never have conceived, no matter how imaginative I might have thought myself. At the same time, my career had no clear “path” where I could have said that “A” led to “B” led to “C” in a linear prescribed fashion. In truth, the very nature of dance and creativity is often born out of the unexpected and making choices with no rational expectation of a particular outcome. Ironically, I had to leave Jamaica for me to have the career I do, and a few years ago when I had an opportunity to do a short Fulbright Fellowship in Jamaica, the institutions I approached did not respond, and I had to let that Fulbright opportunity pass. I can only speculate on the non-response from Jamaica, but in India, there was a decided greater interest in getting to know who I am because I was not Indian. I sincerely hope for the Indian dancers that are able to build a career in dance, and who want to remain or return to India, that the growing interest and small factional acceptance of dance as a career will continue to build a future for them.

"Dancing Across Borders" is an existing documentary film, and an appropriate slogan for my time in India.