Weekend: Bara Imambara

Summary: Exploring Bara Imambara with some coworkers-turned-friends over the weekend heightened my experience as a foreigner and a tourist. I’m looking forward to improving my Hindi so I can pass as a local more easily.

After a full week of work, we took advantage of our free day on Sunday by touring the Bara Imambara, one of the only tourist attractions in Lucknow. It used to be a palace / fort, and contains in it a sort of maze or labyrinth. Anna and I originally planned to visit after Elizabeth and/or some other friends arrived (Anna has already been there countless times), but we had a visitor in the office (Matt York) and wanted to show him around Lucknow. (Matt was trying to test and set up a solar panel / projector / hard drive as an alternative to our current generator / TV / DVD setup.)

That’s how Matt, Anna, Sumeet, Anand, and I ended up at the Bara Imambara. The place itself had some impressive architecture (e.g., arches that reminded me of Stanford), though some looked dangerously close to disrepair. But the architecture was only half the experience.

I’m somewhat used to being stared at around here (my eyes are inadvertently glued to the ground to in order to avert the stares), but this was a whole other experience. We were the subject of many pictures; some of the best were from folks who pretended to take pictures of the scenery but whose camera followed us as we walked past. When Anna and/or I stopped to admire something, we were often approached by people who wanted to talk to us (us being these weird creatures from a foreign land). At one point, Anna’s posse spanned five different arches.

While I want to see and explore the city, I think in many ways I’d like to experience it as a local and not as a foreigner. As much as I want to wait for my Hindi to improve to achieve this, I also believe doing some exploration itself may be a means of getting to that point faster. (In my interactions with kids at schools, I’ve had them teach me Hindi. The best was the second graders who were learning the Hindi alphabet; I couldn’t keep up.)