One lazy afternoon during our first week of classes, my program mates and I found our way to one Damle Road to experience some expressive Indian culture. We were excited to see dance, drums, sitar, and the mysterious water bowls that we’d heard so much about, knowing that we would be choosing to participate in one of these activities throughout the semester. 
(The violin/violinist in question.)
The first presenter, to my surprise and trepidation, pulled a very ordinary violin from it’s case before taking a cross-legged seat on the floor. Well, this was not exciting or foreign, I thought, what’s so Indian about a violin? Moments later, my mind was blown. When this talented musician pulled the familiar bow across the familiar strings, the familiar instrument let out the most foreign sob of a sound I had ever heard.
I was dumbstruck. It’s not that I had never heard the sound before, it was one I commonly associate with Middle Eastern and meditation music, but I suppose I had always imagined this sound coming from some strange and complex instrument, teased from the desert sands perhaps, or carved from the bark of a sacred palm tree. Watching the violinist bring these sounds from the violin was like watching the animals talk in Dr. Dolittle, my brain was saying, “No, that’s not right, cows go moo, ducks go quack, and violins sound like violins.”
(North Indian Dance, my cultural activity.)
Something in my brain that likened the violin to an animal yearned to stop the woman frommaking it cry and shriek and moan. The gritty, harsh sound that echoed through the violin’s wood expressed raw and blurry emotions like pain and joy and jealousy. It’s neck rested not in the white-gloved hand of a first chair violinist in Carnegie Hall but on the bare foot of a women in the upstairs hall of a restaurant down a side street in India. But as the woman played on, something else (maybe my East brain?) began to feel as much as hear, buried within and scattered around what I thought was anguish, the beauty of the music. In the very strange way that my brain was personifying the instrument, part of me said, “Wait, I think it likes to be played like this.” I suddenly realized that there was more than one way to play a violin, and suddenly, Iunderstood something about India that I hadn’t before.
(This man plays the water bowls. That is no typo. I said water bowls. Water. Bowls. ITS SO INTENSE.)
Butt Naked Travels 