US - India Relations

Today we had an amazing lecture on US - India relations! Riley said it best: if this was the only lecture we heard the whole trip, the plane ride would have been worth it. The professor was the chair of the American Studies Department and specializes in teaching on US Foreign Policy and US history and politics.

Four of us couldn't stop asking her questions (myself included), so we arranged a meeting with her in the afternoon. This was so cool. In the US, that would have been impossible. She's very well connected and influential in policy making circles, and she still made time to talk with us at the end of a busy week for an hour and a half!

Anyway, while we were waiting, we talked with several students, drank chai tea, and observed the political signs up on campus. It has a leftist movemement called AISA and a rightist movement called ASDA. I'm posting the posters here because I thought they were so interesting. In the U.S. competing groups probably would have pulled the other's posters down (we always had this problem), but here they were undisturbed.

We also saw a notice posted about students who were punished for being too disruptive on a hunger strike! This really is the land of Gandhi.

And this is the inside of a graduate classroom at the best school in the country for social sciences.

Wow. This is a scene most Americans never get to see. According to our second lecture, Indian graduate schools are so competitive for Indian students (15 admitted out of 8,000 at one), they are unable to admit many foreign students. This explains why so many Indian graduate students earn their degrees in the U.S.