Sunday, April 20, 2008

Getting ready to move

The time to leave Hyderabad is approaching quickly. My movie is finished (by the standards of turning things in here). I will submit it tomorrow. It's pretty, but it needs a lot of work still. Work I just can't do very fast on a g4 iBook with final cut 3.0. Truth is, i am amazed I was able to cobble together something over 15 minutes long with the system I am using.

Watch the trailer. Some of it is very lovely...



I made it all in my studio (I "took" a room at the International Students Hostel). Working on it was really the only thing that made me homesick. What a nerd. Homesick for the level of technology I have access to at home. Thinking about it like that, I guess that solves the "will I go to grad school?" question. If I want to keep making my little movies, I guess I better do a little better so I get a free ride somewhere. Or I had better set up some kind of movie based business this summer that allows me to keep doing this. Something.

My stay here has been very wonderful, and all of us are in that retrospective frame of mind around the campus. My local friends are all about to graduate, and my fellow foreigners are all about to leave. We are all rehashing the last 4 months and mostly wishing that we weren't going to leave each other. I only know of one person who doesn't want to leave this city though. It isn't me. Hyderabad has some good points, but only if you're from here. That's my opinion. The harsh opinion is that this is one backwards fucked up city, addicted to bureaucracy in the strangest of ways, dirty, corrupt, and segregated. It makes Milwaukee seem like some kind of progressive paradise.

Yep. It's time to wrap up and go home. First though, I am going to Darjeeling, and then Nepal. I mean, I'm over here, I better go while I can.

Friday, April 4, 2008

I'm Hungry

It's late. I'm hungry. I have a lot of material to go through for my independent project. Most of it is very promising, but there is a lot of work to be done an I am completely out of the element I am used to. No one really gives the feedback like I am used to. It's lay-feedback mostly. So I hammer at it slowly, looking for some kind of structure that will reflect how I felt the first half of my semester here. Over privileged outsider.

This in itself is funny, because as easy as my life is, I know I am living far below the means of most of the people around me here. My impulse buys do not even approach the traveling, eating and shopping of so many of the people I am on this trip with.

I have long since gotten over any hope of defining the rights and wrongs of this place, or western vs. eastern, or all of the issues of gender here. Frankly, all of the "issues" orientation here is, as it is at home, divisive.

I'm hungry. I'm going to eat.