India Rotating University: Studying abroad but feeling at home

You may think it would be easy to answer the seemingly simple question, ‘What was your experience on the India Rotating University?’ Well, I have been back from Maharishi University of Management’s version of studying abroad for a month now and am still having difficulty putting my experience of India into words. Crazy, beautiful, profound, dirty, vibrant, silent. I usually try to summarize and say something along the lines of ‘It was an amazing experience’ but am well aware that it doesn’t properly convey the list of adjectives running through my head. The problem is that you can’t describe India in one word. India is absolutely ‘about to get hit by an on coming multi-colored bus that swerved into your lane to avoid hitting some cows taking a nap in the middle of the highway’ CRAZY. But India is also ‘an entire city pausing to gather and watch you put fresh flowers and tiny candles in paper boats into the Ganges” SILENT. More often than not these extremes happen at the same time.

Author Mark Twain describes India as:

“The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday’s bear date with the moldering antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined.”

India is a BIG country and to go there is a BIG experience. It could have been easy to get caught up in the sometimes-assaulting extremes of India. They are after all, extreme. But I loved being in India. I will never forget rafting the Ganges or having twenty-two buckets of water from the temple wells at Rameshwaram thrown at my face or the Maharishi Vedic Pundits showering me in flower petals when we arrived at the Bramahstan. That is why I feel especially luckily to have gone on the India Rotating University. I know without the organization and insight it would be much harder to see past the crazy and the dirt and the different and experience the profound and the silent and the beautiful. Because really India is profoundly crazy and crazily profound and not every study abroad program makes you feel instantly at home.

Tagged as: India, Student Life