I first decided that I was going to India early in 2001. My original plan had me quitting my job in the Fall of 2002 and travelling for six months. In the end I put off my trip for 1 year. This has given me lots of time to prepare.

Having lived in Germany, Sweden and Denmark, I firmly believe that being fluent in the language of a country is essential to getting to know the poeple. There is such an intimate interplay between culture and language, that one can’t get to know one without the other. If I was going to India, I was, by God, going to speak a language. The only question was, which one? [note: English is one of the 16 official languages of India]
This decision was simplified by the fact that UC Berkeley, where I intended to take the class, only offered Tamil and Hindi. I chose Hindi, fistly because it is an Indo-European language and should be easier to learn, and also because it is spoken beyond it’s original borders. So, I enrolled in a Hindi Class taught by Usha Jain and a graduate student. The class was good, but tended to focus on grammar and not on creative use of the language. This is understandable, since a good 80% of the class were ABCD’s, who probably already understood Hindi (or at least Marathi, or Gujarati).
As an aside, it turned out that the GSI, Shobna, had grown up in Germany, and was more German than Indian (if she’ll forgive me for saying so).