Thursday, September 24 Class, Delhi-the rape capital, The New (and improved?) Facebook

For the second time in Delhi since my arrival at the onset of the monsoon, it was raining. Equipped with my bumble bee umbrella, I set off for class. As usual, Veena Kukreja class was horrible; this time she sat in a desk facing us and read to us verbatim highlighted parts of someone else’s article. The other class was canceled at the whim of the professor. What’s funny is that Ro and Puran had slept in for the first class, but showed up for the one that was canceled. As for the rest of the people in my house, here’s the deal. Tara and Snehal are always together, both working part-time for an NGO, and at the moment trying to finalize plans for the October break in Western India’s entirety; Gujarat, Mumbai, Goa, and Kerala. Meanwhile, I never see Mariel, Kim, and Alix anymore, who cannot even travel during the two-week October break because they decided to work full-time for an internship for a womens’ rights organization nearby. Mariel has also bought an oversized wooden spoon, which she carries everywhere for protection. Although it’s pretty ridiculous-looking at first, as a man I can’t really say anything. I recently read in The Hindustan Times that Delhi is the most unsafe city in India (and most of the world) for women. Delhi accounts for one-third of the rape cases in Indian cities with population above one million. This means that in Delhi, every 17 seconds a rape case is reported, or a rape case occurs every 29 minutes. They’re not in our house, but I just wanted to touch on it; Alan and Nick both bought scooters, honestly I don’t see why; transportation is cheap and easy in Delhi, and if you didn’t know, Indian driving is well….crazy! For example, on the road at night, one headlight could mean one of five things; a pedestrian, motorcycle, car with a broken taillight, motor rickshaw, a 10-ton semi with a dead headlight…get the idea? Ro and Puran are also connected at the hip, and usually spend their weekends with their families in Punjab or UP. Ro just got like 25 free designer shirts direct from the India factory in Gurgaon where his cousins work, but they’re ALL awkward golf shirts. They always wake up late, prompting Rajesh to ask me, “Do they ever go to class? They’re never awake, so I can’t clean their rooms”. They said they’re considering turning off internet because they don’t talk, and spend four hours a day on Facebook. That reminds me: While conducting my everyday routine and logging onto Facebook, I noticed that recently Facebook has introduced a live news feed, so it tells you exactly what each person’s activity was on facebook. For example, it’s like “Tyler has tagged pictures”, “Tyler has changed his profile picture”. It’s pretty creepy, and almost takes all the work out of stalking people; now it’s incredibly easy. And with all these features, some guy started a petition group saying “Stop the Facebook News Feed”, and in three days it had grown to 750,000 members, and each hour it was increasing by like 50,000 members. Because of this mounting pressure, Mark Zuckerburg (of whom I hate for not accepting my friend request a year ago), had to send out a formal apology that appeared on everyone’s homepage. But basically, this exemplifies the fact that Facebook has enormous power to mobilize people like never before. And I love it, hence the average five hours a day I spend on it. But at least I’m being social….right…? Anyways, as long as they don’t show whose profile you’ve looked at, I see no problem with the new face of Facebook (pun intended). If they do start saying whose profile Tyler Rapp has looked at, then it’ll take all the fun away from stalking, and that’ll be the day that even I, king of facebook, will cease to login. Also from Facebook, Macie told me that Naan Stop (the Indian fast-food restaurant in Isla Vista which I used to patronize at least twice a week) shut down (because I wasn’t there to give them business). Moreover, she had spent like an hour getting the guy to print out a gift certificate (they don't have ready-made gift certificates, because let’s face it, who gets someone a gift certificate for Naan Stop), which is now worthless.