No, Reed, that's an angry cow.

We had our Hindi camp this previous week. The three day trip out of Jaipur and into pushkar was interesting, frustrating and exciting all at the same time. Pushkar is a beautiful town, nestled at the foot of some mountains in central Rajasthan. Pushkar's famous for a few reasons. Due to Hindu myth, Pushkar is the location of one of the world's few Brahma temples, because when Brahma dropped a lotus to earth, it landed on Pushkar and became holy lakes. The lakes are surrounded with ghats, which are bathing locations where Brahmins help (read: extort from) pilgrims do Pooja, or as the free brochure we were given said, "The ghats are stain-like (sic) places where pople (sic) like to take holy dip (sic?) in the take (sic)." The lake is absolutely filthy, though. There's no inlet water flow, and there's certainly no exit. The lake is fed by rain, which is pretty nasty because of the heavy metals used in the factories upwind of the lakes. It is a holy place, but you'll need some prayers to keep your body clean. However, the real reason why the town is such a popular stop for tourists is the hands off stance they take on drugs. Since bhang, a cannabis preparation, is legal in Pushkar for religious reasons, tourists, especially Israelis, flock to the town. It's really strange to see signs in Hindi, English and then Hebrew, and to have have shopkeepers blaring hora music from their shops or greeting you by saying, "Shalom Aleichem, come and see my shop." In any case, we largely exhausted the sightseeing opportunities of this town in an afternoon. And we were there for two days. Then what did you do, you might ask... We spent the rest of the time making asses of ourselves. There was a very elaborate set of programs planned for us, which we'd skipped many of the scheduled classes back at the institute (at the behest of the teachers of course) in order to put together an unparalleled program of embarrassing things that'll end up on youtube at some point. I was personally involved in a few acts. Our whole group's act, where we sang a song from the classic movie Sholay largely went off without a hitch. We didn't have issues like some of the other class groups did, like when the stereo broke for the other intermediate group, or when the advanced kids were out of sync with their backing track. The other thing we did put my bad dancing center stage. We spoofed (if you could call it that) a song from the recent bollywood film Jaane tu...ya Jaane na. The track was called Pappu Can't Dance, Saala. I was the Pappu for this. In essence this meant that I basically came in during one of the verses and during all of the gaps between verses, choruses, etc... and danced as badly as I could. I'm hardly a good dancer, so this was either really easy or really hard depending on how you look at it.

The coolest moments of the trip were really pretty varied. I can't decide whose skit was the best. My roommates Drew and Reed and their friends Jocelyn and Stella did a great send up of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, where Drew portrayed the female characters in the title song while Jocelyn portrayed Shah Rukh Khan's character. Reed and Stella were their playback singers. Watching Drew open his mouth to "sing" and hearing Stella's voice come out was priceless as was Drew's coy bollywood film actress face, enhanced by his mustache peeking over the top of his hands. Another great moment was during one of the advanced class sketches, which spoofed the wedding of stars Aishwariya Rai and Abishek Bachchan. In the end of their sketch, a hired wedding band burst onto the stage and started playing. The trip to the Sufi shrine in Ajmer Sharif was equally memorable, if only for the cramming into the shrine, which was the least personal space I've ever had in my life. The funniest moment of the trip was almost definitely when we were first wandering the city and we came down to the most famous bathing ghat. There was a cow hanging around and Reed, the guy with the tattoo in the picture of water bottles below, started looking at the cow. He looked at the cow and said, "Hey cow. Are you sad? You look sad, cow. Let me cheer you up." He started moving towards the cow quickly and purposefully. This was obviously to pet it, but the cow literally saw red and charged at him. It just missed butting him pretty well and he got the message. I deadpanned, "No, Reed, that's an angry cow."