|
Pleasant encounters and surprising insights marked the experience
of Huck Gutman as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in India. An English
professor at the University of Vermont who specializes in American
poetry, Gutman was full of praise for students, administrators
and fellow teachers after his stay from November 2000 to mid-March
2001.
At Calcutta University and Jadavpur University, Gutman was received
with much enthusiasm and support. He was especially impressed
by the students he encountered. In a graduate course on the history
of American poetry at Calcutta University, he met each student
outside of class. "I suggested we have coffee or tea together,
and they recommended we meet at the famed India Coffee House.
The meetings were very pleasant and I ended up meeting with most
of them for several hours."
Gutman was surprised by how dependent his students were on testing
well. India has over a billion people and a limited number of
good jobs. Those jobs are awarded mostly on the basis of test
scores. "Tests are everywhere," he observes. "Important,
tough, implacable, uncompromising. One mediocre mark, and one's
career is over even before it starts."
His students were warm, interested, respectful, questioning and
in many ways not unlike their American counterparts. "I don't
mean to brush aside cultural differences, which are profound,"
the
English professor recalls, "but I found, over time, that
more unites the young of the world than I had first imagined."
Calcutta itself was a feast for the senses. The Gariahat Market
10 minutes from his lodgings soon put Gutman on friendly footing
with the sellers of potatoes, onions, eggs, rice and dal; sharing
a cook with a Fulbright neighbor turned his purchases into tasty
Bengali dishes.
As Gutman walked throughout the city (now known as Kolkata),
he says, "I found myself astonished, entertained, enriched."
He adds that Walt Whitman "was a lover of mass transit (horse-drawn
trams and ferries) because it put him in actual physical contact
with the people of his place. He would have loved Calcutta!"
The professor also eagerly sought out and accepted invitations
to lecture. Gutman offered to go to a distant, relatively impoverished
city to lecture at two small colleges where no American had ever
lectured. Once they realized he was serious, he was "hosted
in wonderful fashion."
The Bengalis' love of talking and "respect for intellectual
pursuits make Calcutta and West Bengal an ideal place to spend
a Fulbright," Gutman believes. He has become a regular op-ed
contributor to the city's most influential paper and writes for
other South Asia publications.
Please contact us
if you would like to submit your own story and/or photographs.
|
