Reprise: A Valentine to the German Bakery, Pune (from February 13, 2011)

Since I've just returned from India, I thought I'd re-post this.  For lack of time--with barely a day in Pune-- I didn't visit the German Bakery.  And I heard that the old staff had left; that it was completely changed.  And so it has (link to photo at the end).   

So here are my memories, in honor of the Class of 2005 and Class of 2006 MUWCI reunion, 2015.

It was neither German nor bakery, according to the German students at Mahindra United World College of India, an international high school where I worked from 2003 - 2006. Usually one sweet shop in any larger Indian city was named “German Bakery,” a moniker which was infallible bait for dazed, sensory-overloaded, stomach-weary Western tourists.

Westerners don’t have a corner on the bread market. The taxonomy of Indian breads, with their myriad of flours and techniques of production and shapes and textures, gives the pain au levain and the ciabatta and the bagel a run for their money. Our Indian faculty colleagues patiently explained the differences between parathas and naans and papadums and rotis, many times, with a pride and reverence that I admired. I can’t say that I ever remembered how each bread was made, or which type of flour was used. Those were details I could not assimilate without making the breads myself, which I never tried. The different types of pans needed, let alone the ingredients and the techniques and the ovens required, were all in the category of Not Enough Available Time or Brain Space given my job. I just ate the garlic naan, the cheese naan, the papadums and the rotis gratefully, and liked them all. I’m sure my Indian students and colleagues possess bread memories every bit as firmly implanted in the pits of their stomachs and as deep in their brains as Westerners do. Their bread memories just smell very different.

The first savvy Indian or Nepali who named his shop a German bakery would be a millionaire if he’d patented the idea, understanding that the connotations of “German” attached to “bakery” would hit the inner expat button of every Westerner who walked by. The German Bakery in Pune was no different; in fact, it must have been among the most successful in its genre, and maybe the most international. Pune’s German bakery was, it seems, named by a German. It had been owned by a local Indian family, though, and had been managed all those years by a Nepali man. He hired a crew of Nepalis who kept the restaurant open eighteen hours a day, seven days a week.

The German Bakery looked more like a big love shack from Gilligan’s Island than a tidy confiserie in Munich. The outside walls were a solid green box, roof and all, with a couple of palm trees outside and a small door cut out of the box in the front. Directly in front of the door, past a small seating area, was the counter for ordering food, with the busy kitchen behind. To the right side of the entrance, a large, dusky room lined with picnic tables beckoned to smokers of all types and provided room for larger groups to spread out.

The Bakery was located adjacent to the leafy, manicured grounds of the Osho Ashram, the headquarters of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) who had infamously run a huge operation in Oregon in the 1980s and was eventually expelled from the US for immigration violations. The ashram in Pune is, officially, an internationally known center for meditation, a tranquil refuge for re-orienting oneself. Unofficially it was, we heard, a haven for meditation blended with sex: anyone checking in to Osho was first required to have an HIV test, on the spot, with of course a negative result. I never tried Osho myself, although Osho’s reputation for sexual freedom was confirmed by an Iranian woman I met who had stayed there with her mother, disappointed with its component of the physical along with the quasi-spiritual. To be fair, others I knew had stayed there and found the simple calm and beautiful grounds an essential respite. Nevertheless, as three years at the remote mountaintop school wore on, a few of my single colleagues and I came to bemoan our lack of sex with vows that we’d check into Osho for a weekend (separately) if we really couldn’t take the isolation any more. Visions of a weekend of plentiful and mysterious liaisons in small white rooms with European beatnik strangers behind those tree-lined Osho walls often flashed before my eyes as I lay alone in my huge double bed on the mountaintop.

But a Saturday-morning visit to the German Bakery always brought me back to reality. While chatting with friends, I’d scan the red-robed-clad Osho devotees hanging out in the German Bakery, looking for anyone vaguely enticing, wondering if I would, in reality, be attracted enough to have a romp with any of these men. Inevitably the answer was No. My Scottish friend’s word for them popped into my head every time: "mingen." Mingen was the only way to describe those Aussie and German guys, heads shaved or hair too long and too dirty; bodies ridiculously tattooed or pierced or too fucked-up from traveling and drugs, or just too old. And those pretentious long red robes sealed the deal, making the men look like unwilling monks who’d been plucked from hitch-hiking into a monastery, not yet cleaned up and sobered up. The blinding light of day just outside, the hard-packed dirt floor, the come-hither coffee smells and the stale-cigarette scent under the roof of the German Bakery started my week all over again, cleansing me of the previous week’s Osho fantasies.

The bakery—really a combination bakery/restaurant/high-end grocery—was a huge success, the Haight-Ashbury of Pune. Not only did those at Osho provide a steady business; anyone wanting a place to have a cappuccino and a piece of apple tart, a mango smoothie, a pomegranate juice, homemade hummus, or an omelet with a salad that was safe to eat, flocked to the German Bakery. It was a place for something different. It was, above all, a place to watch and be watched: everyone, Indian or foreigner, who entered the Bakery wanted their coffee spiced with some vicarious pleasure as they viewed the parade of robe-clad Westerners from Osho, the ordinary white travelers, the cocky young Indian men who wore tight t-shirts and even tighter jeans or the stylish, kurta-and-jean-clad Indian women.

Our own students and faculty, an incredibly diverse bunch, were part of the regular scenery which attracted people to the German Bakery. And the all-Nepali staff only added to the restaurant’s internationalism: they had come to Pune for better jobs and working conditions. The same four small, patient, smiling guys were always behind the counter, slicing cheeses or pies or handing us the bread and drinks we’d ordered. They were probably thirty years old, or more, but must have thought this would be a work gig that would last them many years if they wanted it.

Despite what our German students said, somebody was doing some baking: many Saturdays, we’d come home with two loaves of multigrain bread, some coconut macaroons and perhaps their version of apple strudel or croissants. The pastries never achieved the exact lightness as their Western forebears; it would have been difficult to do, given the difference in the milk and flour produced in India. But they were close enough to the real thing to be soul-satisfying and sustaining—and delicious. And not cafeteria food. Going to a place every couple of weeks with a glass-fronted, three-shelved bakery counter and seeing foods I recognized, whose names I knew, reassured me that I was still who I was.

The German Bakery anchored its own little shopping mall of sorts, having spawned a travel-agent’s booth, a cigarette shop, numerous outdoor Tibetan jewelry merchants, and a couple of shops upstairs which sold the requisite hippie-traveler stuff: tie-dyed T-shirts, faux-Indian billowy wrap-around trousers for women, Asian-style flip-flops, inventive hats, more jewelry, rolling papers, cheap shawls, and cloth shoulder bags. One of the stores possessed the only bathroom in the whole compound, a disgusting affair that was nevertheless necessary; knowledge of this single bathroom was one of those bits of Pune advice the seasoned students and faculty passed on to each year’s new batch. The whole three-story building immediately behind the German Bakery seemed patched together with tape, with creaking wooden stairs and appearing from the outside as precarious as a movie set from a 1930s Hollywood Western.

It wasn’t my last time at the German Bakery, but one of the most memorable was at the end of my final March break when I got the rickshaw driver to rush me from the bus depot to the Bakery on a Sunday morning before 7 am, waiting outside until they opened their doors for the day. I had just returned on an overnight bus from the beaches of Goa, during which I’d been wedged into a reclining seat between three snoring, farting businessmen. After a couple hours of fidgeting and fighting off a panic attack from my claustrophobia, I had crawled over them and found an empty, lone seat elsewhere in the bus. It didn’t recline, so I hadn’t slept at all.

As the sun rose and the bus approached Pune, the anticipation of a couple of cappuccinos and a croissant at the German Bakery calmed me through the last hour of snores and traffic. The school’s driver couldn’t pick me up until noon, and the Bakery was the only place I could think of where I could, and wanted to, spend five early, restive hours. Getting out of the rickshaw while the air still smelled fresh, with red smearing the treetops, the late-March summer light still gentle, sitting on the curb outside and finally seeing the restaurant’s green patch of a door half-open felt like rebirth. The sleepy waiters looked surprised to see anyone at that hour; they hadn’t yet cleaned the dining room and straightened the picnic tables from a late Saturday night of Pune University students. Moving slowly, they fixed my cappuccino and sent me up to their rooftop while they cleaned. I clambered up the three flights of stairs hauling a backpack and my coffee, amazed to find a bathroom heretofore unknown, and an unkempt little rooftop deck with three small plastic tables and a few chairs. I had it all to myself, looking over the treetops and the Osho walls, above the developing bustle of the street. It was heaven.

I drank coffee and wrote in my journal until the sun was fully up and the temperature rose. At eight, I relocated to cool of the dining room, bought a Times of India and joined the shifts of mild-mannered coffee-seekers reading their newspapers; ate pastries; people-watched; dozed; bought some of their cheeses and breads for the week. At ten, I browsed at the Tibetan jewelry shop outside and experienced again the futility of bargaining with the proprietress for the red coral earrings I liked. At eleven, I bought some lovely figs at a cart in the lane outside the Bakery, from an old man who knew me from repeated visits. Laden with backpack and groceries, I spent the remaining time inside the Bakery, drinking iced mint tea as the sun baked the roof on the late-March summer morning. After that morning at the German Bakery, my previous night’s claustrophobic bus ride had faded the blessed fade of bad travel memories. In the daze-inducing heat of mid-day, I bobbed into half-sleep on the jeep ride back to campus, to face the emotional, sweltering last two months of my stay in India.

Four years later, on Saturday, February 13, 2010, a bomb exploded in an unattended “packet” in the German Bakery, as a waiter attempted to move the bag. It happened at 7:15 pm, only two hours, I’m told, after all the Mahindra UWC students and faculty had left. Seventeen people were killed, including one of the Nepali waiters (no doubt the one who found the package). Some fifty others were injured, including four of the staff. The police believe the bombing was carried out by the same organization that bombed and attacked major tourist sites in Mumbai in November 2008. As in the Mumbai bombings, many more Indians than foreigners were killed, although the targeted locations were ones frequented by foreigners.

All the German Bakery victims were students in their late teens and early twenties at the local Pune colleges. For us faculty, and apparently for most other foreigners, it was never a place we had considered hanging out in the evenings. I’m not sure why. Our students, of course, at ages sixteen to eighteen were younger than the German Bakery’s average age, and had a 5 pm return time to campus. It was logistics, perhaps, and exhaustion: we typically met our driver in a different part of town, and were eager to go home.

My Indian colleagues would surely know this better than I, but it seems as though the German Bakery had two identities. During the day, it felt like we foreigners were supposed to be there, that we were part of the parade of nations envisioned by the German Bakery’s founders, seeking a respite from whatever restraints or bewilderment we felt during the week. During the evenings, the restaurant apparently assumed another identity, reverting to those who were entitled to be there: students as well, but for the most part young people who actually came from India, who lived there, hitting the funkiest club in a college town on their Saturday night. I never saw the place at its hippest and rowdiest. For those nineteen to twenty-eight year-olds at the local Pune colleges and university, hanging out at the German Bakery in the evenings must have been like strutting down Colaba in Mumbai, to see and be seen, maybe to sneak a joint or smoke a few cigarettes they would never dare smoke anywhere else; to wear sparkly sandals and show off their newest gadgets; to talk to a guy or a girl from a different place. I imagine that big room at 7:15 pm as the sun had gone down, the decibel level unbearable with the animated, rapid-fire conversation of young adults released from six days of studying, maybe with some lights turned on so they could see each other, gesturing and laughing and flirting, these bright young adults who had been sent to Pune as their family’s best hope. The bag must have looked like any other one slung under a table, a blue-and-yellow plastic Adidas bag or a tattered dull-green messenger bag, except that there was a curious package spilling out of it.

Among the dead were two Sundanese, one Iranian and one Italian student, as well as the Nepali waiter. The other twelve killed were Indians.

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The new German Bakery

Rock of Ages, rediscovered

Normally in my church choir--Episcopal--we sing mass settings, psalm settings, chant, motets, and anthems of various genres.   Of course, we sing hymns as well.   Last night during the first half of rehearsal we had sung a recently composed mass, tonal (anchored in a structure of tones) but not without dissonance.  All the mass settings we rehearsed were of that flavor.

But during our break, our director
was messing around with the well-worn Protestant hymn, "Rock of Ages." Anyone who's been to a Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist church, or listened to gospel or country music, knows it well:

Rock of ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in thee.


The melody even sounds rocking (that is, the rhythm of someone rocking back and forth in a rocking chair):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM7gt_cSxjw

In searching YouTube for clips of "Rock of Ages,"  I discovered that many famous contemporary singers, such as Amy Grant and Vince Gill, have "covered" it.   I was surprised at how widely it's been covered, in gospel, country, operatic, and choral a cappella (unaccompanied) style.  I was surprised at how much I liked some of those covers.

At my grandparents' Baptist church in Morganton, North Carolina in the 1970s, and at my own Presbyterian church, I remember it sung differently:  with lots of slides and plenty of diphthongs (slurry lazy vowels) here and there, with a strident male voice and a painfully vibratoed female voice sticking out like twigs from a bunch of kindling wood.  Kind of messy.  People were happy to sing the easy melody, and almost shouted it.

Rock of AAAEEEeeges, cleft for me

Let me huIIIIIeee-ed mahsef in thee.

Playing it during our break last night, Robert improvised a non-traditional accompaniment on the piano, sliding away from anchoring tonic-dominant chords toward sevenths and ninths, sort of jazzy, the chords making you laugh because they were unexpected.  (He's very good at that).  But Robert's tempo was reverent, not rushing, lingering to capture the hymn's words.  Hiding oneself in Jesus the Rock isn't something that needs rushing.  You could be in that crevice for a long, long time.

I love singing music I don't know, sight-reading every week.   I love singing lines that express the text.  I feel, in my marrow, the bloom and wane of a long note held out.  The dissonant grating of two notes against each other, stretched until they beg for resolution, thrills me when I get to sing that suspension.  Purcell or Monteverdi or Handel's possibilities for ornamentation--those improvised extra notes that you toss in once you get the hang of where they can go--make me jump and tingle to do them.   After twenty years of early-music and other classical singing, I've found the sounds that fulfill me.

But hearing Rock of Ages, out of context and as funny-incongruous as it was, filled me with something deeper: my childhood.  That Southernness that I tried to rid myself of is still there in hearing Rock of Ages, even more me than a long gorgeous high phrase from 16th-century John Taverner.  I laugh that hymns like Rock of Ages, and Just As I Am, are still me, but they are.  And damn it, singing them still comes out more easily than singing that swoon-worthy high solo from the Taverner mass.  Damn, I say.  Rock of Ages comes flooding back just as easily as those 1970s disco lyrics lying dormant in my brain, as easy as a knee reflex kick.   There's none of the striving and nervous excitement of wondering whether that high A in the Taverner will come out.

What is it about music when it's associated with an event, with a place, a dance, your grandparents, music firmly implanted even if you don't like it? ("Just As I Am" is another story).  Our childhoods are complex tangles of doing things because the people dear to you do them.   I sang those hymns because they were what we had.  They are what I was given, along with the Southern accent and the humidity and the inferiority complex.

I'm grateful to be reminded of what's buried, lying dormant, in me.  It often happens most clearly through music.

Eleanor Roosevelt the cleric? Who knew!

I am lucky to sing in a wonderful church choir at St. Paul's - K Street Episcopal Church in Washington, DC.   We sing enough music to fill a concert, every Sunday, all year.  Although I've been singing my whole life -- sacred music in particular -- I'm constantly amazed at how little of this music I've sung before.  There are new composers, new pieces, every week.

Last Sunday, we sang an anthem by Timothy Hagy (b. 1958) with a text by Eleanor Roosevelt.  It was called, simply enough, "A Prayer of Eleanor Roosevelt."  I don't know more than what's commonly known about Eleanor Roosevelt:  her strength, her resilience in the face of all her husband's weaknesses and challenges; her travels, her independence of mind.

But this: she wrote prayers, too.  Hagy, the composer, set it beautifully and simply, without accompaniment, so that the words were made prominent.  In this season of Lent where (sometimes confounding) scripture abounds, Eleanor's words spoke to me with immediacy.  Here they are:

A Prayer of Eleanor Roosevelt

Our Father, who hast set a restlessness in our hearts and made us seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life.  Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far off goals.   Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to thee for strength.

Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world  Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them.  Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of the world made new.

Just putting that out there . . .  it all speaks to me.

Mes anciens élèves sont généreux et généreuses . . . et vous?

http://fnd.us/c/3EzS3
Springs of Peace: Clean water

My former students--all of them, young men and young women--are generous and determined.

A group of young women who are now in grad school or are working have created a charity for their classmate and my former student at the school in India, Sylvia Gift Nabukeera, who was found dead in Nairobi in June 2011 as she was traveling back to her home in Uganda.

My former students have worked tirelessly through their grief to make something positive out of the death of a friend.   Sylvia was generous and determined and powerful, too.   She had started an initiative--Springs of Peace (click link above)-- to raise money to bring clean water to people in her home area.   This may sound like an easy thing to us in the West, who drink water from city-wide sanitation systems that we assume we can rely upon.   In rural areas in much of the world, women walk for miles every day, often accompanied by their young children or carrying a baby,  to bring back water for their families.  They carry it in a huge jug balanced on their head, a stunning and beautiful picture in itself.  But this keeps women in a place of almost Biblical servitude; of course, it also means that families rely on women and girls for water.   Finding, and competing for, clean water in an area with no distribution system is an all-consuming job which keeps women and girls from education or from tasks which might earn them a small living.

There are many effects of the lack of clean, readily available drinking water.  I am no expert.  My former students have educated themselves, though, and some are working in these areas.  They know.   You can trust them with your money!

There are two more days in this month of February to give to Springs of Peace.   We are over 90% there to raising $10,000.  If Springs of Peace can raise this amount by the end of February, a donor will match that amount.   This means work can get started on Sylvia's dream.

Sylvia was full of love:  for people who didn't have much, for her friends, for those around her, for every new day she was given.   Please consider a donation, large or tiny or in between, to help the people Sylvia knew receive the love she wanted to give them.

One of the saddest things I've ever seen

It's hard to know what to say, watching former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head at her own political rally two years ago, now pleading with her former colleagues for laws to promote responsible gun use and curb gun violence.   She is partially blind, needs help to walk, and is very slowly re-learning how to speak.   Today, her little girl's voice and child's hand-gestures implored members of Congress to Be bold and Act now.   I felt guilty thinking, as I watched her painful testimony, that her prepared speech and its delivery had the look of a Saturday Night Live sketch except it was much too real and sad.    Gabby Giffords will never be her former self.   She will probably always speak in a child's voice, with a child's hand gestures, to people who sympathise but have no empathy for her situation.

And this is because of a crazy twenty-something guy with a gun.   Yes, it's true that we need better mental health care in this country.   It's true that in some cases, it should be easier to commit someone showing dangerous, unhealthy behavior to a mental institution.

But Wayne La Pierre of the NRA (National Rifle Association)  would have us believe that knowing the  whereabouts of severely mentally ill people, keeping some of them in a national database, is fine while keeping a national database of gun owners is not.   It infringes on our right to privacy; to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

He asserts that keeping guns out of the hands of criminals is all we have to do, so we won't infringe on the rights of lawful gun owners just trying to protect their families.

To me, the first statement is hypocritical and the second is simplistic.   Because when does a criminal become a criminal?   Maybe he's already committed some criminal act before he buys a gun at a gun show.  OR, maybe she doesn't become a criminal until she takes the gun out of her purse one day and shoots someone in the grocery store parking lot.   Maybe he's always been a mild-mannered dentist until one day he gets depressed or angry, slides the gun out of the drawer, and shoots his wife and children.

Criminals may be able to get guns, and that's "criminal,"   but using a one's own legally bought gun when you've never used one before can make you a criminal.  It usually does make you a criminal, immediately.   Charged with murder, attempted murder, or something else.

So I hope we can get beyond the simplistic, the hypocritical in this issue and pass legislation that's practical, based in public health and common sense.  Guns are too easy a tool for killing and injuring people.

Foreign fallacy

I watched the Obama - Romney debate last night on foreign policy.   I didn't catch onto Romney's strategy until I listened to the PBS commentators afterwards:  Romney was trying to be calm, agreeable,  less aggressive, even the hurt puppy, to appeal to women.  He wanted to come across as someone who isn't scary, isn't ready to go to war at the drop of a hat, in order to appeal to women who evidently worry more about that than men.  (And perhaps that's true).

I'm voting for Obama anyway, but I have to say I thought he came across as more personally connected to foreign policy than to some of the other issues they've discussed.  (Except health care).  I was thinking about why it appeared this way to me, and I've concluded this:  So much of the news in the last four years has been economic:  to tax or not, to bail out or not, to spend or not, the price of houses, how many people are out of work, the percentage of increase or decrease in unemployment and home sales . . . numbers, numbers, numbers.    This isn't completely the case, of course:  some news stories focus on human examples of these economic realities.  But more than ever in the last four years, I find I can't listen to the news on the radio for more than 5 or 10 minutes, because it's so much about numbers and financial institutions and strategy.

Obama seemed very personally connected to foreign policy last night, because he's been living it the last four years.  He's been living all the issues--economic, environmental, health care--but health care is (at least in the news, often when it's discussed) completely intertwined with money, too.

But, as I was pondering why the president seemed to take all the issues so personally last night, why he glowered at Romney as he realized that Romney was just going to repeat everything he said about foreign policy because he didn't want to appear scary--as I was thinking about this, I realized that foreign policy, more directly than any other issue a president tackles, involves people dying.  President Obama--anyone who's been in that office after four years--has seen people die on his watch, die as a direct result of him sending them to war, or of the results of what other countries do because of our relationships with them.  People dying is not necessarily the US's fault, and there's not necessarily anything the president can do to prevent our citizens, our soldiers, or other countries' citizens from dying, but that's very often what the stakes are in foreign policy.

I thought of all the students and faculty I've worked with, from the Middle East and all over the world, and how they would react to the unmistakable assumed superiority of the US that both candidates projected.   How we arbitrarily say that Iran must never have nuclear weapons and Pakistan, who already has 100, can't have any more.  Nobody mentioned India, an enormous presence (and nuclear-armed too, right?)  I understand that these issues aren't so simple; that the nuclear arms race was called a race for a reason, and I can accept arbitrariness in who's nuclear-armed and who isn't.  

But do WE always get to decide?  Really, the US gets to be the decider of these things?  I guess a candidate for the US presidency can't say otherwise.   And if I'm honest, having grown up in this country it's hard for me to imagine the US as not having some kind of major influence in the world.  I just wish it didn't have to be voiced in such starkly simple and arbitrary terms; that Obama didn't have to say, "If I am president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon."  And Romney to say "Me too, and I'll even cripple them some more."

At least, to me, the debate brought out Obama's decisiveness in an area of experience that Romney just doesn't have.   In that way, it seems a bit unfair even to debate foreign policy, when one of the debaters has been in charge of it for the last four years.   It made me think of the sobering influence a US president has over the lives of people.  That foreign policy means life or death at times, and it's complex and messy and important.

Teenage passions

I'm a college counselor at an international school.   My students apply to colleges/universities in the US, Canada, and UK.   If you've attended any admissions information sessions or applied to college in the US in the last 10 - 15 years, you've probably been urged to tell colleges about your "passions."   For colleges with a selective admission process--that is, who require more than rigorous classes/high grades/strong test scores--they distinguish between students based on what makes them interesting.   Interesting in the context of their particular campus, to be sure--but increasingly, it's the student with a "passion" for an instrument or a cause or a subject (multiply that times 10 for a sport) who is "interesting," rather than the classic "well-rounded" applicant.

When I first started working as a college counselor almost 10 years ago, I may have used those words:  "Tell them about your passion."  Eventually I stopped doing that because it began to sound trite, to ring hollow.  To me, it assumes that everyone who's seventeen or eighteen is passionate about something, and that if you're not, then you're not okay.  It even sounds like that to me, 30 years older than my students.   I did have a passion when I was a senior in high school--music, specifically playing violin and flute--but  even though I applied to a couple of music schools, I don't think I ever said "I'm passionate about playing violin"  to anyone.   I said I wanted to be concertmaster in a major orchestra someday, which was much more recklessly ambitious, but I don't think I would have ever called playing violin or flute or singing in ensembles a passion.

I suppose that concept, as a catchphrase for college-admission cachet, is relatively new, developing as more students apply to college and more students apply to more of the same selective colleges.

In the last four years--since I've worked at a school that teaches the French national education system--I've noticed more keenly a blank stare or a whisper of fright across a student's face when an application, or a university rep, has asked a student to describe a passion.  I'm not sure it's a concept that is contemplated as much in other cultures as it is in US culture.   We toss around the word "passion"  freely here in the US, without embarrassment (not a love-of-another person passion, but a consuming drive for an activity or subject), as if we should feel free to go around telling people we have a passion for reading Faulkner or rowing or blogging about sports.   If it's truly a passion, shouldn't it be obvious to others?  Do we have to name it?

Well, of course we have to name it when its importance is implied, or directly asked about, on a college application.   I find that many of my students have a difficult time naming a passion, and I'm on their side where that's concerned.  Their school day is consumed with classes from 8:30 - 5:30 on many days, working toward huge end-of-2-year exams whose results can determine a lot of your life.   This is the case in many, if not most, other countries.  

I put this out there to wonder if I'm right, whether the concept of having a "passion"  for something is a particularly American one . . . or if even naming something as a passion is a very American thing to do.  I don't know.