Hello!

We thought that this week we would talk about the start of our trip to India last summer, and how we planned the whole thing. Our trip to India was part of a third year module in which you go to India during the summer, and then write a dissertation about themes you encounter while out there.

We initially heard about the trip on an open day as prospective students, and so even before we were in Lancaster, or even knew each other, we both knew it was something we wanted to do. We first started planning the trip about 6 months before we left, with a lot of help from members of the department, and students who had been on the trip the year before.

The whole purpose of the trip was to go to Visthar- an NGO for Social Justice and Peace Studies in Bangalore (South India). We would spend 3 weeks here having informal lectures learning about a range of social issues in the context of India. We thought, however, that since we would be in India for 3 weeks anyway, we might as well spend a few more weeks seeing as much of India as we could.

The first thing we did was write a long list of all the places we wanted to see in India. These ranged from the south to the north and where we finally ended up going was pretty close to our original list. Our plan was to travel from Bangalore up to the Himalayas in 5 weeks, stopping at various places on the way. We bought several travel guides and maps to help plan our route and receive inspiration for places to go to. From the start, we knew we wanted to see the more popular places associated with India, such as Mumbai, Goa and Delhi. We also really like the look of Kerala, a southern state, as well as many places we hadn’t even heard of. Even just planning our trip meant that we were learning so much about India already.

Because we knew that this was something we wanted to do, we picked second year modules in sync with our plans, such a Indian Politics and Hinduism modules. Not only did we find these modules very interesting, we found that, once we were in India, we could relate to a lot of what we saw and understand them on a deeper level.

After planning our route, we booked the flights and the countdown officially began. The next few months mostly consisted of excitement and sending each other various relevant links to the places we’d be going to.

We will write many more blogs about our time in India, as we would talk about it forever! We thought we’d talk about this subject because it is such a great opportunity that the department offers!

Becky and Katie x