Jashan 2008

On Friday night I went to the Jashan festival on the South Mall with my roommate. We had a great time! The Festival featured dancing and singing as well as several informational booths about different aspects of India. The most interesting booth I found was the booth about travel. The pamphlet the volunteers handed out detailed important tips on traveling to India that I didn’t know about such as buying a local SIM card for your cell phone while in India so you can call people back home. Another suggestion was to meet a friend in India through a website called couchsurfing.com. It allows people to meet others around the world so that when you travel, you know someone in that country who can help you out.

I also visited a booth where you could try on Indian clothes. Most Indian women are a lot shorter than me, so most of what they had was too small, but I did manage to put an outfit together. I felt kind of insensitive and tourist-y while dressing up, but I guess that is the point.

Me "blending in"

In addition to dressing up and travel, there were booths that featured Indian games such as cricket and hoopla (both very fun), architecture, performing arts, community service, language, henna, Bollywood, and of course, food. The performing arts booth featured a man playing a sitar and another man playing a set of drums. I’d never seen a sitar in real life before, so that was definitely a treat for me.

The dancers on stage were also very fun to watch. I was able to see three different groups perform and each had a slightly different style. The first group was a bit more contemporary, but the third group was very traditional. There were moments I wanted to get up and dance too! Something about dancing and music really brings people together, from people who don’t know hardly anything about a culture to people who have been raised in that culture their entire lives.

Facts about Indian Architecture

My favorite part by far would have to be the food. Though I didn’t purchase dinner, my roommate and I enjoyed a drink called Mango Lassi. We had had this before at an Indian restaurant on Guadalupe past MLK called The Clay Pit and knew how tasty it is. The drink is mostly straight up mango juice (something Conrad would love, of course) with milk and sugar; like a smoothie, but with more ice. Hopefully I’ll learn to replicate this for the future.

I gathered that the point of us going to this event as extra credit was to experience another culture and to feel out of place. I definitely felt that way. There were other people at the event besides UT students: mostly older Indian community members. I didn’t feel unwelcome there because I am white, but I did feel like I was intruding a bit into another culture and their traditions. I didn’t want to make the “adults” think I was being disrespectful by being there. This is something I have felt before, even earlier this year. My roommate goes to a church that is comprised of mostly Chinese-Americans and I visited a few times. The people were friendly, but my lack of knowledge of Asian culture definitely was apparent and I was worried about making a faux pas. I think the unique challenge to me in visiting events from other cultures is my height: I’m usually taller than most women and in the case of Vietnamese and Chinese-Americans, I’m taller than the men as well. This makes me feel more conspicuous, but I think visiting things like Jashan is a good way to get over this feeling.