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WILLIAMS-IN-INDIA
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Uncomfortable Learning on Horseback, In the Ganges (With Corpses) and From Dogs (The Rabid Variety)

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I remember walking around the village, going to shopkeepers to see how stuff was made, how transactions took place. I asked this official if I could go on an inspection team. He spoke a little bit of English, enough so you could have a minimal conversation. He said, “OK,” but somehow they asked me if […]
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When we were in Banaras, on the way to Calcutta, I remember Bruce Dunne and Andy Hurst — Andy’s the one who is the son of a doctor — and of being in a boat in the Ganges and bodies floating in the Ganges, dead bodies, like a significant number of them. And this is […]
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Varanasi is a place that people come to die. So there’s an entire industry set up on the banks. It’s very much kind of a teaming town, a lot of rickshaws. All of a sudden you come to the river and there’s an entirely different experience of basically people who no one knew who die. […]
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Parker and Andy and I, I guess we wanted to go bathing in the Ganges, but there were Indians bathing and bodies being burned and corpses floating in the water so we thought it would be a good idea to at least hire a boat and go to the other side of the river. The […]
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I didn’t go swimming. No, no, no, no. See, Miller and I, we were the colonialists and the conservatives. Again, there were different models. We had no interest in doing that kind of stuff. We didn’t have to get rabies shots either. There were three segments in the group. There were these kind of flower […]
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When we left Williamstown and went to India [Mr. Gaudino] maintained a formality that I think really spoke to his commitment to teaching. It was very uncomfortable. Many of us had physical illnesses of some kind, in the case of Bruce and I bitten by rabid dogs. And he would be there as a man, […]
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I made two calls the entire time I was in India. No, my parents got a letter quite a while after the fact. You’d stand in one line in India at the post office to buy the stamps and another line to mail the letter or they’d steal the stamps to resell them.
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