Welcome to Karnataka

Like the subject says, I made it.

All is well and no rest for the wicked.
It's been a whirlwind since I landed. After Zack picked me up at 5 am we immediately hit the market. Zack wanted to give me the raw experience first thing. There are 6 million people in this city. The market is the place where everything hangs out. It was both nauseating on an empty stomach and rough mentally and gave you a wide view of life in Bangalore. We then left for the school since Zack had to teach a class that day. Most classes last a week and run all day from 9:30-5:30 with lunch around noon. We had a great breakfast that first day with some rice and these pancakes with a sort of potato chutney along with chai. Altogether the meal was about 40 cents from a cart vendor along the road. We huddled under a tarp with other faculty on stone benches and talked about what we were teaching.

Srishti is incredible. The architecture of the school alone makes you feel like the warm golden glow of the early evening sun is upon you all day.

Zack is teaching a class called "copying is cool" about remix cuture, copyright, appropriation, and post-modernism. The students here are amazing...so much more engaged and involved in the discussions (these were sophomores). I have to say that the level of discourse was better than most grad classes I've had..no joke. Watch out.

Everyday lunch is served buffet style for the faculty and staff. Awesome south indian food..all you can eat. We held class until about 2pm, then we interviewed some prospective students for the new program that I am helping to form. The Center for Experimental Media Arts as it is called is the first interdisciplinary arts program in India. People are really excited about it and not just from India.

After crashing early, we awoke early at 5 am to the call to prayer from the mosques and went searching the city for a restaurant that would be open and had coffee. We lucked out by 6:30 and by 8:30 we were once again on another high-speed game of chicken-in-a-rickshaw on the streets of Bangalore on our way to school.

Today we planned further the architecture of the new program and even began to lay out the interior space for our labs and offices.