Pantleg Ponderings

I could speak for pages about gender roles in India. Even after all of the time I've been here I still don't have a good understanding of gender in this society. The two conclusions that I can safely draw are 1) Gender roles in India are very very different than they are in the United States. 2) Indian women are a lot more modest in dress than American women. It would be somewhat frowned upon to wear shorts in the hot weather for example. Now, I am not a person who has the capability to get a tan by any stretch of the imagination, but dressing modestly in India has left my body with a very strange color scheme. My legs, which haven't seen sunlight in months, remain the ghostly shade of translucent white that they were in December in Oregon, while my forearms look like they have been in India for three months. Since I can never see my legs behind the long pants and long skirts that I typically wear here, I had forgotten entirely about them until my friend Nick posted this horrifying picture on Facebook. One hot day in the desert of Rajasthan, I had decided to be scandalous and roll up my pants. The result, as you can see, was blinding.