Chaos in Chennai

Today was our first day of the new year which brought on new adventures for our group. After our morning lecture of Buddhism, Christianity and Jainism we ate lunch with our speaker. In talking with him, we heard about his story which was very complex and different from our customs. He discussed how him and his wife were of different castes and that because of this and the high regard in this structure it was forbidden for them to marry. However, they tried to defy these odds and by doing so went against their family, to this day he still does not speak to his father-in-law. Another thing he had talked about was the birth of their first child. His wife and him had been trying to make end meet while having their first baby and so he was going to school and working multiple jobs. So, one morning his wife was having severe pains in which he told her to wait until he was done with class and he would take her to the hospital. They rode to the hospital by motorcycle which is a very common transportation. However, for a woman that is 9 months pregnant seems very out of this world for us. Then to make matters worse, they were stopped by a train. He then discussed how Indians go about getting around trains in a matter by of sliding under the train to what appeared to be. So just imagine that! Looking back on that experience he just laughed and thought how ridiculous it was but thats what he had to do in order to get there.

After talking with him we embarked on our first major trip into the city. Before we left, we were warned about what we were going to experience as it was the busiest shopping place in Chennai. Busy in India is a term were you cannot move around at all. In the U.S. busy for us would be the entire country of India as a whole. When we got there though it wasn't as busy as we had expected as the New Years was a holiday so much of the town was less crowded then it normally was.

After shopping for a few hours and getting our sari and salwar kameez we headed off to another concert. This concert was a veena concert. The veena is an instrument typical to South Indian music. It seemed to us very comparable to the guitar. It was an interesting concert as it was more upbeat then the classical one we heard the night before and their wasn't singing. As one of our guides pointed out their music is a mathematical rhythm. It was very noticeable throughout the crowd as many audience members were keeping the beat of the music. This was a very tiring day for all of us and we headed straight to bed.

The pictures are:
The classical musicians talked about in earlier post.
Rigshaw
Golf course (If you look closely you can see a red and white flag in the distance)
Traffic
Trains