In preparation for India, I have been doing some admittedly kitschy research by watching some films and shows that some folks recommended. Of course, I also did some research on Wikipedia, but that’s a topic for another day.

Slumdog Millionaire probably would have been a good start, but Emily and I had actually watched it a while back. The capital of the Bollywood genre is Mumbai though, quite far from Hyderabad (715 kilometers away, in fact). I learned that even Indians generally don’t drink the tap water in their country – earlier, I thought that was only something that visitors had to do since they didn’t have the same immunities. Anyhow, one tip that Em’s Uncle David gave me is to make sure to inspect the seals on bottled water since people sometimes fill up old bottles with tap water and re-sell them, a trick which was depicted in Slumdog Millionaire.

Sita Sings the Blues was a fun take on an old epic, The Ramayana. I could have done without the unrelenting self-pity of the modern story that was woven in, but the banter among the three narrators who argue over the plot of The Ramayana made it enjoyable. The soundtrack is great as well, featuring Annette Hanshaw recordings from the 1920s. Anyhow, the cultural takeaway for me was the intense gender double standard, at least in stories of Indian legend.

Emily was excited to watch Gordon’s Great Escape in order to get a sense of the food. The show features celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay and his ego as two separate characters who travel to some culinarily-interesting regions of India and learn about local traditions of food harvesting and preparation, then prepare meals based on what they learned. As a side-note, I am really excited to jump on a moving train (Ramsay stages this in one of the episodes), though it seems unlikely that I’ll get to do so. The duo struggles with their carnivorous tendencies in the third episode, in which they spend some time in an Ashram and eat only vegetarian food. I realized vegetarianism was quite common in India, but I learned that in some places, landlords won’t rent to non-vegetarians.

Dialing the kitsch up to the max, my coworker, Marc recommended the series, Outsourced, in which an American guy walks into his call center job to learn that the entire staff had been outsourced to India and that if he wants a job, he has to go there too.

The second episode covers the head bobble, which apparently usually means yes but “is actually used in place of no when the person doesn’t want to say no”. Also, the series touches on the caste system, which has some parallels to the developments in American Civil Rights.

All in all, I’m looking forward to seeing the country and the people firsthand. I told our host, Anil, that I’m not very interested in tourist destinations and I would really like to see what everyday life is like for Hyderabadis. I think we are actually in for some sightseeing though – Anil was quite excited to show us some old parts of the town.

Major props to Em for offering to drive me and one of my traveling buddies, Coryndon, to the airport at 5:15 am. Somehow, she is actually excited about it.