Jawaharlal Nehru University

Editor's Pick Award

Our Editors awarded this travel blog entry for providing relevant information that may be useful and inspiring for other travelers.

This is the highest point on the campus. You can see how wooded it really is from this view. With the city all around, it reminds me of central park in New York

View more photos 

I moved from my hotel in downtown Delhi onto campus yesterday afternoon. I'm staying at the Aravali International Guesthouse, right down the road from my future dorm building (Yamuna). They had nice rooms for 250rp/night ($5.40). I decided to splurge on the 500rp/night ($10.40) room that has air conditioning. I figure I will take it while I can. If I could, it would be tempting to stay there all semester, but alas, it has a maximum stay of 2 weeks. They have this really charming tea service in the morning. A boy comes around and knocks to bring you a hot cup of chai. The little tiny snag is that he does this at 6am and he bangs like there is a fire until you wearily come to the door wrapped in your bed sheet and give him 3rp for your cup of tea so he'll go away. Cute kid.

The campus definitely has a jungle-like quality that is a great break from the bustling city of Delhi. Many of the paths are brick or concrete, but there are also numerous little dirt paths through the woods. There is a wide variety of plants, birds, and animals (including many peacocks that were introduced to kill the cobra population before they built the university.) There are areas for students to congregate though you wouldn't recognize them if you didn't know what they were. There is no formal furniture, just designated areas with good rocks in the shade. I don't know if they intentionally positioned the rocks or if we just got lucky, but they are very nice granite, um, "benches."

Most of the buildings are brick like this. The university was only founded 50yrs ago, so everything is fairly new, but still not it top shape.

View more photos 

The hostel I will be staying at, Yamuna, is an all-female hostel that is envied for it's all private room arrangement. If I can get into "block 1" they can even guarantee running water 24hrs a day. In block 2 and 3 it only works in the morning and evening. There is no air conditioning and no heat as we look ahead to the winter temps that bottom out around 30F. So, it's definitely going to be different from home, but that's the point right?

The university itself is the most prestigious social sciences school in the country. Indian nationals often have to try for years to score high enough on their entrance exams to be accepted. (We foreigners have it much easier.) I told many of you before I left that the university was very large. I was confusing it with the University of Delhi, which is about 150,000 students. JNU only has about 5,000 students, about 150 of which are foreign students.

There aren't a lot of cows on campus yet, but here is one. I've seen peacocks jumping into the trees, parrots on lightposts, and lots of dogs and cats.

View more photos 

I have not signed up for classes yet. The entire registration process takes about a week so I will start on the specific class stage tomorrow. A week seems long to you too? Well, it's really quite simple. You simply:

1. order 28 copies of a passport photo for the numerous documents

2. copy every official paper in your possession (multiple copies recommended)

3. Wait 45 min for the picture place to open so you can get your 28 prints.

4. Wait another 2 hours while one university official goes through the admissions documents for all 150 international students. (This is not sooo bad because this is one of the few rooms with air conditioning.)

5. Take the papers he gives you to the cashier to pay your tuition and get a receipt.

6. Fill in 6 copies of identical forms now including your receipt number.

7. Have those 6 copies signed by the dean of students, your school chair, and some other guy.

8. Oh yeah, the dean won't sign until you've filed your request for housing and the other guy won't sign until you wait in line at the library and get an ID number. (The housing form, incidentally, is a blank piece of paper that you write a request on.)

9. Then you quit for the day, because by now you have been walking all over this 500 acre campus for 6 hours and you're exhausted.

By the way, this entire process is done by hand, on paper, no computers. Today I'd even say without a typewriter. Each students file is in a brown folder tied with a piece of string to stay closed and stacked high on desks. Like Shane said though, the incredible thing is, that at the end of the day, it works.

So, I guess I'll start again tomorrow. The bureaucracy is what it is. I don't understand it, but i'm not going to get frustrated or angry, just tired. So, between housing and class registration, this should take the rest of the week to finish. Next week (at some unknown time) classes will start to "trickle" into being as Shane put it.

I decided I will take at least a crash course in Hindi language if not a full year course. Though most people do "speak English" their accents make them very hard to understand. It's also helpful for taxi and rickshaw drivers, some of whom do not speak English. I have learned some numbers so far, but that's about it. I also plan on taking a course in International Relations, and some is sociology or history. As a casual student I have the great benefit of being able to take whatever mix of classes I want. So, I will just find out which professors are best in the subjects I am interested in and go from there.

I am still looking around for volunteer opportunities but there seem to be plenty of those. The foreign students association (FSA) ran an informal program last year for education and caretaking of the migrant workers children. These families come from Nepal or other parts of India to do construction and odd jobs on campus. Since both parents generally work, the kids aren't always well attended to. They typically do not go to school at all. The families live on campus in squatter tent villages. Working with these families would be wonderful. In my second suitcase I packed art supplies, so maybe I could do some art projects with them. One of the boys that I passed walking today several times spent the majority of the day playing with a rock and a brick. So, it wouldn't take much to be a step up from that.

Overall at this point, I am intimidated, but hopeful for the year. India is a very crowded and different place than I am used to, but if it were the same as home there would be no point in coming here. I have really enjoyed picking the brains of foreign students who are back this year after past experiences at JNU. There is no doubt that this place can be very emotionally taxing, but all of these students came back here for a reason. They have all said that it is a challenging place to live but that it can be tremedously rewarding as well. (There is also the food to remember as a perk. Some good Indian grub on campus can go anywhere from 7rp-50rp/$0.15-1 for a meal.)

I won't have my own internet connection on campus until I get moved in and have several days to arrange it. So, my connectivity until then may be reliant on access to this cyber cafe and the condition of their machines at the time. Keep the emails coming though, they have really been a pleasure. I miss you all.