{"id":17545,"date":"2019-10-28T15:42:04","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T10:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/?p=17545"},"modified":"2019-10-28T15:43:03","modified_gmt":"2019-10-28T10:13:03","slug":"back-on-home-turf-nirupama-rajan-outbound-participant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/back-on-home-turf-nirupama-rajan-outbound-participant\/","title":{"rendered":"Back on Home Turf – Nirupama Rajan, Outbound Participant"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yesterday, I lay\naimlessly on my bed, staring at the ceiling fan rotating at its lowest speed,\nwondering how I barely noticed its absence over the past year. Hoping to find\nsomething better to do, I picked up my phone and saw that I had a message from\na friend \u2013 another volunteer who\u2019d returned to Bangalore from Berlin last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cMe too\u201d read the\nmessage, a response to one I\u2019d sent a few hours earlier saying \u201cI want to go\nback.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I left for Berlin a year ago, I was told by everyone that I would (or wouldn\u2019t) listen to, that I was going to go through a massive culture shock on arriving there. Nothing is the same abroad, especially in a country like Germany, I was told. To be fair, that is for the most part, true. Things are very different there and life itself functions differently. But I didn\u2019t go through so much as a shock, as a gradual settling down into a different lifestyle, one that I felt very suited to, after very little time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The real culture shock actually hit me the morning after I returned to India, when I was angrily honked at by a motorcyclist for blocking his path by being a pedestrian on the already-barely-discernible footpath that he was trying to ride on, to avoid the weekday morning traffic in Ulsoor. All merits and demerits aside, I think what stands out the most about India is that it stands out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s a complex but in-your-face melody \u2013 or cacophony, hard to decide which \u2013 of car horns and exhaust fumes, broken footpaths and ambitious city-to-airport metro projects, economic inequality, separate seating for men and women in buses, and somehow simultaneously, the potential for social change, ripe for the plucking, especially in the voices of the young and the young-minded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 It\u2019s all of this and more, with each element playing its uninterrupted and undisturbed role, day and night, in this dramatic theatre that over a billion people call home. And that can be a little difficult to get used to after you\u2019ve spent some (noticeably quieter) time \u2013 even if only a year \u2013 somewhere like Germany, where every supermarket will have its own brand of the product that you will always invariably find in another one, where the trains and even the buses are almost always exactly on time, and where nobody, ever, rides a motorcycle on the footpath. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I think of Germany right now, I\u2019m reminded of something a (slightly pompous) couch surfer from New Caledonia told me on a late-night walk in Vienna earlier this year, when he was describing what he felt the first time he visited India as a young boy. He said, \u201cto think that you can get on a plane and go somewhere that\u2019s on this planet, and when you step out, you feel like you\u2019re in a whole new universe \u2013 that\u2019s amazing!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s been a year that I landed in Berlin on that crisp, sunny September afternoon. A lot has changed since then. I\u2019ve made friends from many countries and learned so much about the commonalities and differences in life across the world from my conversations with them. I now speak a foreign language decently enough to say that I do, in fact, speak it. I have new habits, new interests and I found love where I almost didn\u2019t expect it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019ve also lost friends \u2013 some voluntarily, and others the way people just fall out of touch without consciously meaning to. I\u2019ve shed parts of my personality that I no longer identify with and after giving it some thought, I\u2019ve come to believe that I know myself just a little bit more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yesterday, I lay aimlessly on my bed, staring at the ceiling fan rotating at its lowest speed, wondering how I barely noticed its absence over the past year. Hoping to find something better to do, I picked up my phone and saw that I had a message from a friend \u2013 another volunteer who\u2019d returned to Bangalore from Berlin last week. \u201cMe too\u201d read the message, a response to one I\u2019d sent a few hours earlier saying \u201cI want to…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":17552,"comment_status":"Closed","ping_status":"Closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[397],"tags":[502,575,491,490,928,501,1036],"class_list":["post-17545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-outbound","tag-intercultural-exchange","tag-international-cuisine","tag-personal-growth","tag-self-discovery","tag-travel-in-europe","tag-volunteer-abroad","tag-volunteer-in-germany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17545"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17585,"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17545\/revisions\/17585"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsl-india.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}