Gayyash Abducted in India

I've been in Udaipur, India for nearly two months now, interning (for lack of a better word) at Shikshantar. Throughout my life I've been mistaken for an Indian many many times and have always felt a strange intuitive sort of familiarity with many things Indian. It's probably for this reason that I haven't been blown away or super-stimulated as many visitors are here. Instead my stay has been very serene, it's like I've found a second home with all the perks of my own and far fewer annoyances. I'm alone here, noone calls me, my circle of friends is small, I get to read a lot and talk about things that really matter to me. Udaipur is a beautiful, pleasant, easygoing city. The food is wonderful, especially the sweets. I haven't seen anyone get angry (in public) yet and I've been marvelling at how different that is to Cairo. It's because I'm not from here, though, that my daily interactions are far less colorful than they are back home, where the opportunities for play and creative engagement are what gave rise to this blog in the first place. That said, there have been many experiences worth writing about, some that inspired me to reflect on issues of wider social concern and others of the good old zany variety (like the grandmother of a friend who accused me of stealing her spoon after I put a plate of ba2lawa on her bedside table... she said I was narrow minded and didn't like to share; she had no teeth and carried a little dagger [Sikh tradition, I later learned]).

I've been writing long emails back to friends and am thinking it might be good to post them up here, even though I don't intend this blog to be about my life as such. In any case, this is just to check in. I miss fuul.

P.S. The title of this post is just a ploy to draw more readers through the aggregator. Ha2aw.