It’s been a flurry of paperwork, and orientation, reading guides, asking questions, learning protocols and so forth, to move on to the next step of clearance by the Indian Consulate for Fulbright research and visa. What a lesson in following directions! After lastly traipsing through torrential rain, a fat stack of organized forms and documents with regulation passport photos in hand, to New York City where I applied in person, here I am with the green light GO!
Wow, this means that I will now be working on the nitty-gritty of travel plans.
Meanwhile, it’s been wonderful to “meet” the USIEF staff as well as other Fulbrighters traveling to India during the virtual orientation. Someone also set up a Google group so we can all chat with each other and perhaps connect when we’re abroad. It’s inspiring to hear about what others are doing. All different scholars, areas of expertise and research–Islamic intellectual and cultural history, Ragamala painting, management science and information systems, Indian philosophy and the Transcendentalists, ecology and the environment, recovery from serious mental disorders and why India does better than other countries in this area, climate change and energy efficiency, Holocaust refugees in India during WWII, Indian public pension and health system, Indian and American portrayals of democracy, Tamil poetry, Ayurvedic medicine, ancient rock-cut monuments, deployment and commercialization of renewable energy in villages, Hindu-Jewish encounters, ethnography of divorce, domestic violence, courts and marriage, national parks. The list goes on…