Overwhelmed!

India is a huge place.  This week, I saw the entire country, in all its immensity. Not in the way an eagle flies over and sees the full landscape. And not in the way the ancient sage has visited each town and village over a lifetime.  But I saw the all of India in the way a field mouse sees the elephant, looming above him and potentially crushing down with every step.  This is the India I saw this week.

I moved to India on Friday August 26th.  I arrived in New Delhi and two days later flew to Bangalore for a two-day series of project meetings.  Most of these projects I am not directly involved in, but was there to understand roughly my colleagues’ work.  Flying back to Delhi then, I had three more full days of meetings with government secretaries in urban ministries, directors urban research institutes, and heads of city-focused NGOs.  My work here will involve implementation planning for balanced environmental and economic planning in cities across India.  We will work closely with a handful of medium sized cities, and all of the relevant agencies and organizations involved in such planning.

But this week was overwhelming.  Each day had at least 5 meetings.  All were intense.  All involved large bureaucracies that have been working on countless projects for many years.  All are related but not related at the same time.  India has thousands cities of various sizes, climates, geographies, and levels of development.  I had arrived to India and realized I knew next to nothing about all of these cities, organizations, and programs.  This week, I saw the entire country looming above me, in all of its complexity.  I have a lot to learn.

This week came with waves of excitement, and anxiety.  Moment to moment I could swing between a sense of new adventure, and the overwhelming despair of the monumental task ahead.  Some days I felt quite good. Other days quite sad and lost. 

But in the end, the last few meetings helped to lock everything into more of an order.  I could see what I needed to do to get ‘up to speed’, and I could see how my projects and programs would fit into the larger picture and link with some sympathetic, existing organizations.

And in the end, it makes a lot of sense… To be overwhelmed by India is not surprising.  And to also appreciate the sense of adventure and opportunity is normal.  So ends my first week here, and so begins a long journey ahead.