When I was three and a half years old, my parents informed me that in a few months I would no longer be an only child. They took me to childbirth education class for kids, where a kindly earth mother told us how wonderful it would be to get a little brother or sister while our parents watched approvingly. At the end of the class, we were each given a large baby doll and shown the proper way to cradle it. The doll had hardly been in my arms a few seconds when, overcome with revulsion, I threw it on the ground and stamped its head with my foot as hard as I could. After my new baby sister, Lydia, was brought home, I was not permitted to touch her, no matter how many times I asked.

But I never hated my sister. It was dolls that repulsed me. At four, my best friend Jacob had several dolls, but if I came into contact with one, I would throw it across the room immediately, much to Jacob’s confusion. When given a doll as a gift, it was exchanged the next day at Toys “R” Us for an art kit or a gumball machine. When cast as Mary in the church production of the nativity scene, I refused to touch or even be within five feet of the baby Jesus.

When I was five, some relative sent me a Barbie doll for Christmas. This was different. Instead of a lumpy ball for a head, this doll had elegantly defined features with purple eyelids and breasts. My parents put the doll in the pile that needed to be exchanged, but when no one was looking, I grabbed the unopened box, took it into my room, and opened it. Barbie’s sexy clothes could come off, be put back on, and promptly be taken off once more. I was intrigued.

My sister Lydia received her first Barbie one year later. Not sure what to do with it, she tried pointing it at people and shouting, “Pow pow Barbie.” Guns were a no-no in my house, and even imaginary violence was frowned upon. My mother forbade us from using our Barbie dolls as pretend guns. Naturally, I encouraged Lydia to keep it up.

When I was six, I was introduced to cable television, and subsequently the “Cut ‘N Style Barbie.” The commercial showed the multi-racial little girls gradually cutting off all of Barbie’s hair until she had the equivalent of a crew cut. While the voice sang, “You can cut and style it, over and over. Long hair like magic, over and over,” the hair sparkled, and an instant later was as long as if it had never been cut. I was less impressed by the opportunity to cut and style a doll’s hair than I was intrigued by the magic that would make hair grow long in mere seconds. I imagined all the things I could do with this newfound power. Determined to see this magic happen in my living room, I diligently saved my two-dollar a week allowance for five weeks, until “Cut ‘N Style Barbie” was mine. Expecting a magic wand, I was surprised to find a foot long hunk of Barbie hair. Nevertheless, I avidly cut off all of Barbie’s hair and incanted the lines of the commercial. After several varied attempts, my crying attracted the attention of my parents, who gently explained that “long hair like magic” meant Velcro on the back of Barbie’s head.  This disappointed me even more than the absence of a shower of foam berries after taking a bite of Berry Berry Kix.  Cut ‘N Style Barbie would be the first of many Barbies to lose her head. We buried her in the back yard next to our dead cat.

Cut ‘N Style Barbie was not the last advertisement to catch my attention.  That same year I discovered the my-size Barbie Car.  After seeing it on the shelf of Toys “R” Us, I could think of little else.  All day at kindergarten, I daydreamed about how I would make my escape, zipping down the road like a grown-up headed to a pink hotel with turquoise walls as my parents begged me not to go. I asked Santa for a pink one but he made no promises.  Undeterred by the foot long “Barbie Glam Convertible Car” I found under the tree, I resolved to force myself to dream about driving one every night henceforth so as to enjoy the experience in my imagination. My recitation of the words “Barbie Car, Barbie Car, Barbie Car” before falling asleep failed to make this happen, although they did succeed in aggravating three year old Lydia sleeping the bunk bed below me.  One night my wish did come true, except that my “dream car” was equipped with an en suite toilet as well as a miniature version for the forty or so stuffed bears that were along for the ride.

As our collection of Barbies grew, so did the intensity of our games.  The addition of a Ken doll changed everything, as all the women now had to compete for the one man. Our Barbies developed a violent streak, and our collection was divided into villains and heroines. I instructed dark-haired Lydia to bite off the hands of the brunette Barbies, in order to mark them as villains who would then antagonize the blonde heroines more closely resembling myself. Several years later, she asked if I knew how her Aqua Barbie lost her hand. I told her that I couldn’t remember.

There was often trouble in the paradise of Barbie and Ken’s romance. Barbie disappointed Ken the day after their marriage in her refusal to wear sexy lingerie. Every time they passed by Victoria’s Secret, he would offer to buy her a sexy present only to be reviled as a “Terrible pervert!” and that he mustn’t say such things in front of the imaginary children. In art class, I made small ceramic plates (after finishing my clay dinosaur) that Barbie could then throw at Ken during their innumerable marital fights. Only one of our many Kens managed to keep his neck whole throughout his life and was permanently christened “The Ken Without a Broken Neck.”

However, domestic scenes of tax arguments grew stale when Lydia and I learned about the mechanics of sex. Our mother was very straightforward in her description of the process. But it was Barbie and Ken who taught us about sexuality. When Barbie was adorned in one particular pink and gold dress, we knew just how badly Ken wanted her. Our family discussions about sex were so frank and without taboo that some social cues did not come naturally to us. We were very confused when our mother told us that the airplane was not an appropriate place to shout, “She’s sooooo irresistible,” nor was it a good place for naked Barbie and Ken thrashing. To prevent another scene, she temporarily confiscated our Barbies before visiting our seventy-one year old grandmother.  The discovery of our grandmother’s collection of harlequin romances from the 1970s kept us occupied during the trip and inspired many new storylines for our Barbies to re-enact.

At thirteen, I could no longer publicly admit to playing with Barbies. While I may have “given” my Barbies to Lydia, I still could be found “watching” her Barbie plays continually, giving her extensive directions on what the plot should be. It came to Lydia’s attention after seven years of sharing Barbies that I had made it a habit to suck on Barbie shoes. We could never find two of a kind, and the shape fit so comfortably in my mouth that I never thought of them as good for anything else. Lydia was appalled by my behavior and blamed me for the absence of matching shoes. She informed me that I was no longer permitted to “assist” her in the Barbie storylines. I proceeded to object, but she pointed out that the Barbies were now her property. When she wasn’t looking, I pocketed four high-heeled shoes.  They vanished from my desk the next day and were found in the back of the piano (our new cat’s favorite hiding place) one year later, along with a dozen other tiny shoes.

The day came when even Lydia would abandon her Barbie games in favor of real boys and evening gowns she could fit into herself. Our favorite surviving dolls, who, coincidentally, were all blonde, and “The Ken Without a Broken Neck” rest peacefully in an Adidas box at the bottom of my closet until the day when our children will be old enough to discover the keys to their own innocent childhood imaginations.

—Julia Winn is co-director of staff writers.

Remember when academic disciplines were divided into five categories: English, science, math, social studies, and foreign language? (Foreign Language was one category, no matter what the foreign language.) This may have been roughly the same period in which members of the opposite sex were smelly, distasteful bundles of limbs, to be shunned on the playground if acknowledged at all. Since then, academics (like everything else) have become a lot more complicated. Each day new disciplines appear, like fresh-faced, hunky cashiers at the grocery store: first Social Studies split off into History and Government and Economics, then Math spawned Algebra and Calculus and God knows what else… and then you got to college. Suddenly, academic disciplines were as plentiful as cuties to covertly covet at the library. I saw you… limniology, the study of inland waters, lookin’ fresh. I saw you… memetics, the study of self-replicating units of culture… and did I mention that I saw you?

The newest raisin studding the musty fruitcake of my academic knowledge is toponymy: the study of place names, or toponyms, a subdivision of onomastics (the study of names in general). I uncovered it in a late night Wiki-frenzy, hidden, like all good things in life, in a related article. “It can be argued that the first toponymists were the storytellers and poets who explained the origin of certain place names as part of their tales,” said Wikipedia, and so began my fascination with a discipline as variegated as the names it classifies. “It can be argued that the first toponymists were the storytellers and poets who explained the origin of certain place names as part of their tales,” said Wikipedia. I have yet to determine whether this is factual or just Wikipedia spinning tales, but the idea of some beard-shrouded bard reading a country’s name like a tea leaf for its story amused and fascinated me. Thus began my fascination with a discipline as variegated as the names it classifies.

Toponymy contains elements of many different disciplines.  It is principally a linguistic discipline, as it traces etymologies, but the nature of place names means that historical, political, and even mythological considerations are fair game for an aspiring toponymist. Toponymists have the strange task of guarding the map; they are the frontmen, the go-to guys, for your questions about the ever-shifting nomenclature of embattled regions, or just who, for example, the town of Jeff, Missouri, was named after.

The political end of the spectrum is perhaps the most institutionalized: the UN has a toponymy commission, with the unsightly acronym UNGEGN: The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names. It’s part of the UN’s Statistics Division. According to UNGEGN’s brochure, “UNGEGN is involved in outreach to countries that do not have name standardization mechanisms, databases, or national gazetteers, as well as supporting the use of single romanization systems.” (For those outside the name standardization community: single romanization is not the process of being unattached while wearing a toga; instead, it refers to a standardized method of representing a certain word or sound in the Roman (i.e, Latin) alphabet.) Though the earnest rhetoric of UNGEGN calls to mind a somewhat comical secretariat of map-checkers (“Hey, Joe, is Chile still called Chile today?” “Yep.” “OK, coffee break!”), the staff of this organization includes “names experts, cartographers, geographers, historians, linguists, planners and surveyors”—testament to the diverse elements of the toponymic discipline. And though UNGEGN relies on local governments to implement their changes (making their slogan, “Making It Happen—UNGEGN,” rather comical), the very existence of an international regulatory body for place names makes me reconsider their unique character.

A quick glance at a European map from 1595 reveals just how far toponymy (and its companion discipline, geography) has come. A few scrawled names dot the borders of most of the continents, and their bellies gape blankly; whole regions are labeled only with directional suffixes (India orientalis, or “eastern India,” for example, covers… all of eastern India). Only Europe contains both city and country names; the whole of Australia is a green orb with nothing but Terra Australis (“Southern Land”) written on it, in outsize letters that seem to overcompensate for the emptiness that surrounds them. Flash forward to a map from 2010, and suddenly the earth is a rainbow patchwork filled with cramped letters: everywhere, names strain to fit on even the smallest specks of island, Africa bristles with outsized monikers, and the only huge masses of land with just one name are Canada and Russia, stewards of enormous, frigid wastes.

These four-hundred-odd years of progress towards single romanization have been complex, and often ugly. Students of history will cringe at the process that turned Africa into the heavily named continent it is today—the torrents of blood that washed away each of the Congo’s successive names, or held “Rhodesia” in place for eighty years. And yet, born in a colonized land, I can’t help but imagine the consummate excitement of naming an unknown shore. A name is intangible, but absolute: there is no square inch under its dominion it does not fill completely. Though it’s primarily a tool of communication, there is a kind of primal power in a name. To turn a frothing, gleaming river into a tidy blue line is the work of a few syllables, and you don’t have to leave sea level to proclaim your name from the highest of hills if you’re the first to label them. A name is a covenant, a contract: it can bind a country with the chains of empire, or proclaim its freedom from those chains. It can even, like Palestine, proclaim the desire for that freedom. The change from “Rhodesia” to “Zimbabwe” is the final rejection of the conqueror; it ousts him from every rock, every tree, every brick of every hovel, nullifies his dominion completely.

And yet, even independent of historical conquests and ruptures, toponyms are powerful: they provide insight into changing residential patterns, testify about historical relationships between countries, express national myths and cultural signifiers. Country names differ in different languages, and the dissonances often have enormous (or simply peculiar) significance. For example, the Russian term for “a German” is Nimyetz: the folk etymology of this term claims that it derives from “ni moy,” “not mine,” an expression of historic animosity between the two peoples; relatedly, it may also stem from a Slavic root which means “mute” or “those who do not speak our language.” The Hebrew word for India is Hodu; this name is derived from the Book of Esther, in which a Medo-Persian emperor rules “from Hodu (the Indus river) to the kingdom of Kush (in modern Ethiopia)”; modern Hebrew, oddly, retains the ancient Persian name of the country. Hodu, like “India,” is itself a corruption of Sindhu, the Sanskrit name for the Indus river; ironically, the Indus river is now located in Pakistan. The endonym (self-appellation) of India is Bharat—derived from Bharata, a king in Hindu legend who was the first person to conquer and unite ancient India.

The subject of endonyms (a name used by a people or country to represent themselves) versus exonyms (names applied by foreigners) is touchy, and enormously complex. Endonyms often relate to a national founding myth, legendary figure, or ancient ethnic group: for example, Armenia’s endonym is Hayk’, derived from Hayk, the name of a legendary founder-king who freed his people from the wicked giant Bel and established his kingdom at the foot of the mountain of Ararat. (Hayk slew Bel with a longbow—so the Orion constellation is also called Hayk in Armenian.) The etymology of “Armenia” is unknown, but it is first attested to in a sixth-century Persian scroll. A better-known endonym is Japan’s: Nihon means “land of the rising sun,” a name established by Japanese rulers in the 670s during diplomatic relations with China. The ancient name for Japan, Wa, was represented in Chinese with a character that meant “dwarf,” which can’t have helped its case. Bhutan has the excellent endonym of Druk-yul, meaning “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” which refers to the violent thunderstorms that come down from the Himalayas.

Exonyms tend to describe countries based on geographical features, such as Anguilla, named for its long, skinny shape (anguilla means eel in Italian and Spanish). They can also refer to ancient ethnic groups—the Russian name for China, Kitai, stems from the Khitan people, nomadic Mongols who conquered China in the tenth century; “Bhutan” derives from the Bhotia, a group of ethnic Tibetans who emigrated to Bhutan in the same period.

Where attested etymologies are unavailable, there is often a rich tradition of folk etymology to draw on: for example, the unknown origin of the Latin exonym Germania has given rise to theories as various as “land of the spear men” (from gar, spear) and a compound stemming from the Celtic word for “neighbor.”

In his short story On Rigor in Science, Jorge Luis Borges describes an improbable map of an empire that “had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point,” covering the entire territory it described. A physical map may be useless if too large, but a name is infinitely expandable, and generations can peacefully live under its auspices. It is, of course, impossible to make meaningful concrete generalizations about toponyms—there are as many toponyms as there are places on earth to describe, each with their own significance, history, and etymology (or etymologies). After all, toponymy doesn’t stop at the level of countries—its domain extends to territories as large as continents and as small as three-house cul-de-sacs. (For the names of oceans and lakes, see its companion discipline, hydronymy—but that’s for another article.) But every toponym shares the power of a name: they bind together disparate geographic and ethnic elements, tying them to a common history, government, ethos. They provide clarity in communication, a powerful medium for national self-expression, and symbolic dominion over even the most unruly natural territory. They also make great material for Wikipedia articles, and thus for procrastination. You never know—the name of Chile might change while you’re writing that essay, and so you might as well check. Just to be sure.

I had dozed off in the oppressive heat of the absent monsoon. Beside my sandal, several flies sipped at the syrupy dregs of my morning chai—one of many cups that had appeared on the dining table each morning. I was just starting my second week on the job as the American teacher at the neighboring grade school. In a community where the hobbies of an eleven year-old boy include farm work and cricket, where most children are barefoot, and where scorpions, toads, and cobras are common roadkill, my arrival had been greeted with a full parade, salutes from the school flag guard, and speeches from the principal and one of the directors of the Rural Development Foundation (RDF), the family-run charity that had sponsored my stay.

They asked me for an inspirational speech. But what they received was a nervous incoherent ramble in English about the boundless opportunities offered by education, things they and their families clearly already knew. Despite the fact that most students did not understand any English, the director reminded them how lucky they were to have a student from the greatest university in the world speaking to them. For reasons other than the heat, I had sweated and squirmed throughout the ceremony.

Rolling my head to the side, I caught sight of eleven girls from the junior college clad in brilliantly colored panjabis and saris coming toward me, chattering excitedly. Junior college in Andhra Pradesh is the equivalent of the last two years of high school in the U.S.

“Madam. Photos, photos,” echoed the few that could speak some English. The other day, I had shown Priyanka photographs from my father’s birthday party. As the warden’s wife, she was like a mother to the girls, and accordingly, rumors of the questionable glamour of my southern California suburban life had spread quickly throughout the small college. These girls had moved to the college from neighboring agricultural villages as far away as a couple hundred kilometers. The living arrangements were forty girls to three small bedrooms. They somehow managed to position themselves efficiently, sleeping on thin mats that offered little relief from the concrete floor.

I gestured toward the empty chairs arrayed around me. “No,” they said, waving their hands as if I had just suggested that I had three eyes. As they settled at my feet, I stood up in protest.

“We sit on the floor, madam.” Sensing that this arrangement did not sit well with me, a few of the girls reluctantly agreed and nervously scanned the courtyard before sinking into the chairs. Soon, the photographs were distracting them from the fact that we were seated on the same level. Nagini spoke English best, so she had been assigned the task of asking me questions. “Madam, this is your home?” she asked.

“Yes,” I responded, stopping myself mid-nod as I remembered that nodding was a meaningless gesture in South India. “But this is my mother and father’s home,” I was careful to add, “not mine. I am a student, like you.”

Suddenly, one of the girls gave a little scream. Priyanka had swatted her neck with a rolled up newspaper. On the floor! she seemed to say in Telugu. You know better than to do this.

As they crossed their legs on the tile, I resisted my inclination to join them. As with most sentient Americans, the notion of equality had been seared into my consciousness at a young age. And it was noticeably missing in this context. But it seemed unfair to think that its absence meant that Indian society could be distilled into a relationship between the oppressed and their oppressors.

However, this was often the easiest inference to arrive at. I encountered Westerners who found the hierarchy so offensive that they took matters into their own hands. On his second day in the village, a fellow American visitor found himself accusing an Indian man of mistreating the students. “Stop barking at them. You intimidate them,” he said, knowingly.

Then, carefully enunciating in English, he tried to explain his own more appropriate procedures to students who spoke only Telugu. This endeavor was futile, and perhaps the last time he tried to interact directly with the students. He spent the rest of the month photographing the villagers as they staged various activities for him—scaling toddy trees to tap the fermented juice that was the source of their livelihood, sacrificing goats and chickens so that their buffalo would enjoy greater prosperity, readying the fields for when the monsoon should choose to appear—and very seldom paused to exchange words with them. Dismay at the culture had transformed first into dismissal and then perhaps unintentionally into a sense of superiority.

Other foreigners skipped the thought that the hierarchy should be “fixed” and instead took advantage of their default position at its top. Over sambhar and sitting idly in a hotel in Chennai, I watched from another table as an Australian man forced his Indian waiter to consume marmite, a yeast paste. “You must try this,” he pressed, as if the waiter had a decision to make. But the waiter had been trained to obey every whim of the hotel guests and could not refuse. As the waiter gagged, smiling weakly, the Australian was unable to contain his laughter.

These instances were notable, although rare. It was more common to encounter travelers who tried to understand India through the lens of their own culture than it was to find someone so blatantly cruel. Although the former was seldom deliberate, using one culture as a metric by which to label another as right or wrong invariably paved the way for misunderstanding.

In spite of the difference in our seating preferences, Priyanka and I were quite close. One monsoon-drenched night, as I stayed up taking video footage of the ubiquitous flashes of lightning, she and her husband remained awake out of concern that the crazy American would be struck dead by lightning. Later, she visited me when I was bedridden with the mosquito-borne fever that seemed to sweep the village in the days following each heavy rain. When she wasn’t busy taking care of the girls at the junior college, we sat together exchanging language lessons. Her abidance by the hierarchy was not indicative of her character or compassion.

It also seems inappropriate to simply ascribe this hierarchy to India’s longstanding caste system. The history and former practices of the caste system bear little relevance to their modern function in India. Much has happened since the days of Hindu and Mughal rulers and British colonial social theory. A look at the trajectory of the subcontinent since it officially gained independence from British rule on August 15, 1947 reveals the unlikely unification of hundreds of minorities, twenty-two recognized languages and hundreds of variations on them, and perhaps just as many religious practices. In forming the world’s largest democracy, India’s Constitution was written with the diversity of its constituents in mind; chief among its principles are “freedom and equality before the law, the cultural rights of minorities, and the prohibition of such practices as untouchability and forced labour” (India After Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha). So invested in ridding itself of inequalities was this incipient nation that it put in place reservations, which allocate a certain number of legislative and other government positions to each caste. Reservations function as a caste-based version of affirmative action.

Although these reservations had been intended as a temporary measure, they have lasted to this day. In modern India, caste now serves more as a political tool than as a social marker. Rather than eliminating the social stratification in India, reservations have simply rearranged it and highlighted the importance of categorization: there now exist impoverished communities of Brahmins, who were traditionally at the top of the Hindu caste system, while Christians are one of the fastest growing castes – in part due to the seats set aside for them at top political and educational institutions. Instead of caste and cleanly drawn historical roots, the true delineators in the hierarchy of the village are the same ones found in most societies: age, education and wealth. The primary difference is how these markers are treated.

At one point, after not having heard my name in days, I tried to convince Priyanka’s son to call me Marena instead of “Madam,” one of two words in English that everyone in the village knew (the other being “Sir”). “I’m not happy when you call me that,” I said. “In my culture, everyone is the same.”

“But, Madam, it shows respect in Indian culture to say ‘Madam,’” he replied, “We say ‘Madam’ and ‘Sir’ because we respect education and success. I am not happy to call you Marena. Then there is no respect.”

When understood as the manifestation of respect rather than control, the hierarchy no longer felt so abrasive. One weekend, Priyanka dressed me in one of her saris and brought me to the naming ceremony of her newborn niece three villages away.

The two grandmothers were seated on the family bed, watching over the sleeping infant for whom the entire extended family had gathered. Priyanka, her husband, and their two teenage children sat on the concrete, massaging curry and rice with their hands. They brought a chair for me. For a brief moment, I considered refusing the chair, but it suddenly seemed wrong to disrupt the calm of this very personal occasion. I thanked my hosts for the chair and sat down. I was in their home, after all. And my culture had no place.

As much as the hierarchy was evidenced by these formalities—where I had to sit, how I was to be addressed—my status as a foreigner and my general oblivion toward these traditions made my actual position in the hierarchy indeterminate. Unlike upper-class Indians, I had no expectations for the way I was to be treated. Barriers to friendship did not exist unless I created them myself.

Although we continued to keep up appearances of madam and pupils in the presence of other madams and sirs, it was not long before the junior college girls were telling me what to do. Photography was something that continued to captivate their attention, and they often asked to use my digital camera. On one occasion, they had flattered me to the point that I was grinning very stupidly. After stringing my hair with jasmine, they corrected my pose, asking that I cross my arms and hold my chin—like a Tollywood starlet caught somewhere between coy and giddy. (Tollywood is the Telugu-language film industry, based in Hyderabad and analogous to Bollywood of Mumbai and Kollywood of Chennai.) Fifteen long seconds later, I read consternation on their faces as they reviewed the photographs they had taken. “Open your eyes!” they advised, their brows furrowed. My eyes had certainly been open. I tried my best to hold back my laughter and made an effort to raise my eyebrows. It was a special occasion to witness the possible birth of a stereotype in earnest.

In other instances, photography greased conversations where language barriers caused them to stall. When the photographs of my father’s birthday party had become old news, I resorted to showing pictures of my stay in China. As it had always been, food was a common subject of my photography in Beijing. My audience puzzled over the wooden sticks set atop a bowl of rice and eel. They were appalled by the fact that a pair of these sticks was all I needed to enjoy a good meal. At that time, I had not quite mastered the art of eating with my hands, which, in South India, was a skill acquired at birth. After using my right hand to work the curra and okra into the rice and transport the mixture to my mouth for consumption, I usually ended up looking a little like the Gerber baby. I could understand their skepticism of my ability to consume food with two wooden sticks if I had trouble eating with my hands.

Beyond the humor they often generated, cultural differences had the potential of reshaping the same lenses through which they were observed. As a visitor from a town where the average household income was nearly a thousand times that of this village, it was hard not to notice the things that the villagers did not have: the man who sold samosas at 6 p.m. each day did not own a gas stove, Priyanka and her husband did not have a mosquito net, and most of the village did without indoor plumbing and endured frequent power outages.

Yet, every day, I walked an extra three kilometers to the samosa stand in Parvatagiri, easily doubling my caloric intake through eating fresh samosas. On warm nights with only the pulsing stars and straggling clouds above, Priyanka and her husband preferred to sleep on the roof with a thin blanket beneath them. It was cooler there, among unidentified insects and geckos; below them, I baked on a bed shrouded by a mosquito net inside the brick walls of the junior college. (I had tried to sleep on the roof once. After a few hours of tossing around on a blanket and fending off phantom geckos and mosquitoes, I crept back into stifling heat of the building and took refuge beneath my mosquito net.)

And when the power was out, fewer insects intruded and families did not think to light candles while they continued their conversations. As I came to know my friends, it became not a matter of what they lacked, but how they flourished with the things they had.

It took me a while to see the village as it was, to gain some understanding of the people hidden behind the often overwhelming categorization of economic poverty.

Knowledge of village life occasionally came from tactless mistakes. In one lesson plan, I taught my students how to describe their parents’ professions, inadvertently defeating the purpose of their uniforms. Twelve year old Ravi went first. “My father is a toddy-tapper.”

Then Pranitha, “My father is a farmer.”

And then slowly, in perfect English, Kavitha said, “My father died in 2007. My mother is a teacher.” My breath caught in my throat. I apologized for asking and expressed my very belated condolences. “It is okay,” she said quietly, perhaps confused by my reaction. Later, when I visited her home, she pointed out a color photograph of her father hanging beside the doorway. It was wreathed in fresh yellow flowers.

“Auto-accident,” she explained. This was not hard to believe. My host in Hyderabad had told me that he absolutely refused to drive on the village roads after dark. At speeds of thirty kilometers an hour, motorbikes and auto-rickshaws would drift through the early evening while shining their high beams, blinding oncoming traffic and endangering the pedestrians and cyclists who braved the roads at those hours.

Next to this memorial of her father was a photograph of her mother on a stage. Kavitha proudly described the teaching award her mother had received in Delhi and the national award ceremony that had been broadcasted on television. Her grandmother, a long-haired woman of sixty, offered me a chair and presented me with a bottle of water. Next to a bed that the entire family shared were a foot-powered Singer sewing machine and spools of turquoise, pink and lime green thread. While Kavitha’s mother taught, her grandmother sold and tailored saris and panjabis from their home. Beside her mother’s teaching award and their thriving clothing business, the photograph of her father seemed to be a daily reminder of the tragic circumstances from which they had risen.

Tragedy does not change with cultural background. However, it seemed to have greater immediacy and presence in the village than it would ever have in my hometown. Deaths—by suicide, natural causes, and accidents—were reported frankly as events that seemed especially commonplace. Kavitha was hardly the only student who had lost a parent. One morning, school was dismissed early due to the unexpected death of a young school attendant from heart problems. He left behind a wife and an eleven month-old daughter.

On a walk back from a visit to the samosa stand with some boys at the junior college, we passed by a large crowd that stemmed from a home and spilled onto the dirt road. Drumming and chanting reverberated in the night air. I spotted Samskruthi’s father, a kindergarten English teacher, seated on a nearby ledge. He smiled when he saw me. “Funeral,” he said without much hesitation, “The laundry man died.” In the face of mounting debt, a clothes washer had killed himself with a draught of poison. He left behind a wife and children.

The junior college boys did not seem the least bothered by this. Thinking that I had not understood the concept of suicide, one of them tried to describe to me how suicide could be accomplished with a rope, a stool and a ceiling fan. I stopped him.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised that he had such an explicit understanding of suicide. Suicide has become much more common throughout rural India. In recent years, strings of farmer suicides throughout the South and West Indian states of Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh have claimed the attention of international media and academia. The livelihood of these small farmers relies on scarce and uncertain groundwater and rainfall and on prices dictated by the international market. As developed countries raised their exports, commodity prices, such as those for cotton, dropped precipitously. With nowhere to turn, poorer farmers borrowed against their next harvest through informal rural financial markets at very high interest rates, often without considering the devastating risks of drought and an absent monsoon.

In Andhra Pradesh, the monsoon had been expected in mid-June of 2009. Although there had been intermittent heavy showers, it had not yet appeared by the time I left in late July. Subsequently, the price of rice jumped to thirty-five rupees per kilogram, up from twenty-five rupees per kilogram at the same time the previous year. For entire families already struggling on a per capita income of less than five thousand rupees per year and whose diets were completely grain-based, this increase could only mean starvation and irrecoverable debt.

Comparable circumstances are impossible to find in the United States. But their dependence on decisions made both domestically and abroad suggests that bridging these cultural chasms is as important globally as it was in the remote and isolated setting of my stay in this village.

On one of my last evenings in the village, I visited Ramesh, whose daughter was in my eldest class. His family seated me in a plastic white chair. A breeze drifted through the doorway as dusk settled into darkness, rustling the dried mango leaves that hung above us and diffusing the fragrance of cardamom from a pot of semya, a dessert made with vermicelli noodles, cardamom, buffalo’s milk and sugar. I compulsively rubbed my bare shoulders in anticipation of the mosquitoes that often congregated at that time. This gesture met no language barrier, eliciting giggles from Upagna and her mother. She’s afraid of the mosquitoes.

As with most of the families I had visited, Ramesh wanted to know what I thought of the village life. He was pleased when I told him that I enjoyed the slower pace and simplicity of it. Looking around me, it was clear that Ramesh was comparatively well-off—he had a gas stove, a motorbike, and a television. But Ramesh’s beginnings had been humble. His father had been a fisherman, and as a boy, Ramesh had ventured door-to-door, selling the day’s catch by the kilogram.

When asked why he had not left the village after acquiring his physics degree, Ramesh responded that places like Delhi did not have the same values, the same sense of community. He expressed to me that he did not view himself as a citizen of India. “I am a global citizen. A citizen of the world. The universe.”

Earlier that week, Samskruthi’s father, a man whose family could afford to eat chicken once a month, had distilled life in the village into one phrase: “simple living, high thinking.” Even though the English he taught as a kindergarten teacher was limited, this was a phrase that he had chosen to learn well.

Given the immense hardships associated with rural life and its apparent insularity, I had not expected the kind of happiness and worldliness that my friends expressed. I had been narrow-minded to even think that the material comfort that I had associated with happiness could apply here.

These understandings were as much a product of willingness to acknowledge and shed preconceptions as they were of a realization that we shared much more common ground than apparent cultural differences let on.

When I contacted my mother, she often joked that she had emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. precisely to leave similar living conditions—only for me to undo her efforts by voluntarily moving back to them. Although 1960s Kaohsiung was a more developed place than today’s rural India, she could still relate to rural life, the relative poverty, and the valuing of education as a mechanism to escape it.  My own family’s background is perhaps not as far removed from this village as the United Nations and the C.I.A. World Factbook statistics have suggested.

However, although 1960s Taiwan suffered from political instability, it was in the midst of rapidly rising incomes and literacy rates. Today, about 70% of the Indian population continues to live in rural agricultural villages, mired by fickle monsoons, a government too slow and corrupt to build roads and fairly allocate resources in rural areas, and an international grain market that is insensitive to the plight of the small rural farmer. Mahatma Gandhi’s words from nearly seventy years ago suggest that not much has changed:

“We town-dwellers have believed that India is to be found in its towns, and the villages were created to minister to our needs. We have hardly ever paused to inquire if those poor folk get sufficient to eat and clothe themselves with and whether they have a roof to shelter themselves from sun and rain.”

Today, town-dweller can be extended to the rest of the developed world. And rural villagers are hardly unique to the Indian subcontinent. They can be found throughout the developing world in South America, the Caribbean, Asia, and in much greater destitution throughout Africa.

Although there is a tendency to say that global market forces are independent of moral decision-making or character, let alone any cross-cultural empathy, the fact is that the prices of commodities are almost entirely the product of human decisions in developed countries.

Human decisions are the reason that a quarter of the corn harvested in the United States is used for the production of ethanol fuel. It is estimated that the grain used to produce 25 gallons of ethanol is enough to feed one person for an entire year. This allocation was a product of the U.S. 2008 Farm Bill, which also imposed tariffs on refined sugar that are nearly half their world market price per pound, severely limiting imports and raising the price of domestic sweeteners. Worldwide, sugarcane is in such abundance that Brazil uses it to derive ethanol, trailing only the U.S. in ethanol production. However, the differences between Brazil’s ethanol and ours are stark: sugarcane-based ethanol is produced at a lower cost and is at least three times as sustainable as grain-based ethanol, and its production does not compete with the ability of an impoverished family to feed itself. Despite these benefits of sugarcane-based ethanol, sugar trade agreements continue to prevent its economic viability in the United States. The American allocation of grain for fuel is thus entirely manmade rather than the direction of market forces.

Domestically and internationally, these legislative decisions are made by people—rarely with any consideration of the population that bears the true costs of these choices.

At the time, my friendships with villagers in Andhra Pradesh seemed completely detached from their wellbeing and livelihoods, but the relationship  is clear now. Until the devastating earthquake, Haiti and its already dire economic and political state was seldom given a second thought by most Americans. Many weeks after the deadly earthquake, headlines and images of the tragedy continued to be a fixture in newspapers and on television screens. In the aftermath, two of the solutions for reviving Haiti’s fallen economy have been proposed: one involving the rejuvenation of its rice production, which was replaced by imports of U.S. rice in the 1980s, and another that aims to spur sugar production in Haiti by revising the prohibitive U.S. quotas on sugar imports.

For India, however, analogous devastation is more likely to come in the form of severe droughts and the emptying of its aquifers. Resource exhaustion could be the nail in the coffin of stability, as many rural regions in northern India already suffer from joint corporate-government exploitation and politicized religious tensions, which continue to breed a new generation of militants. Hopefully, it will not take a tragedy of this scale to understand the value of cross-cultural empathy in motivating a change of heart in  developed countries.

Perhaps Ramesh encapsulated it best that night: We are not really citizens of individual countries. Given the worldwide repercussions of our decisions, it may be fair to say that we are indeed global citizens.

The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is an academy in Paris so prestigious that Louis XIV, the Sun King, gave it his patronage and renamed it after himself; previously, it had been simply the Collège de Clermont. It would go through many name changes again after the revolution, but in the end, it was the king’s name that survived the centuries. Thanks to the monarchy’s money, the academy has nurtured some of the greatest intellectuals in French history. There, young Lafayette resolved to go to America to aid its revolution. And it was there that Voltaire found his calling as a writer and political philosopher. In 1770, royal funds provided a scholarship for a poor yet brilliant young man who would use his education to change his homeland forever: Maximilien Robespierre. At only eleven, Robespierre was plucked from a life of poverty and entered the rigorous world that would mold him over the next twelve years.

In the same year, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was accepted to the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, then one of the world’s premier schools of music. Mozart was only fourteen years old, but he was already loved across Europe. After completing the entrance exam in a mere thirty minutes (the composition exam usually required several hours), Mozart was admitted by a unanimous vote from the academy’s board. If there was ever a doubt about the young musician’s future, it was eradicated then and there. For all anyone could see, he was neatly on the path to someday become the court composer of a powerful and wealthy patron. Any alternative was unthinkable; unthinkable, that is, except for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

1770 also found Marie Antoinette receiving a different kind of education. At fourteen, the same age as Mozart, she left behind her Austrian homeland to become the wife of Louis XVI. In France, she was stripped of her Austrian clothing, Austrian customs, and even her Austrian name, Antonia. They adorned her with fashionable silks and satins and thrust her onto the stage of France, where she was forced to quickly adopt French culture under the fierce eye of the public.

And, on December 16 of that very same year, Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, to a father who would grow obsessed with fashioning his musically gifted son into a second Mozart.

Every now and then, the threads of history cross, tangling in subtle knots, and its most noteworthy inhabitants cross paths.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did not know in 1787 that he was four years away from death. Mozart was far too young to care that sixteen year old Ludwig van Beethoven was clumsily making his way through the streets of Vienna for the first time. The bright and gilded world of the imperial capital provided a stark contrast to the home where Beethoven had practiced through the night while his father drank himself into a rage and his mother lay dying of tuberculosis.

An appointment was arranged for Beethoven to visit and play for Mozart. As he listened to the teenager perform, Mozart was initially indifferent. He was not concerned much about his influence on the coming generation of composers; as he saw it, he was the coming generation, and he was poised to be the future of music for many years to come. In many ways, he was still the child that had performed for the royal family in Vienna, then run off to play with their children. As nimble as his tiny hands were on the harpsichord, he was clumsy enough on his feet to slip and fall right into the arms of little Marie Antoinette. Impulsively, he kissed her and cried, “I am going to marry you someday!”

She might have been better off that way. Instead, in 1774, she became queen of France. That was the year that Robespierre knelt before her.

Every morning at 5:30, when classes commenced, and each evening at 9:00, when they finally adjourned, Robespierre walked under the name of the king, which was wrought on the gate of the school. He was as loyal to the monarch as any other Frenchman; perhaps even more so, because it was the monarchy that provided the money to lay the wealth of the world’s wisdom at Robespierre’s eager fingertips: Cicero, Aristotle, and (likely through slightly illicit means) contemporary writers like Voltaire, who had attended Lycée only a generation before. Discipline was law, and classes dealt with history, religion, and morality. Music and the arts were not encouraged. But what was encouraged, despite the strict standards, was the spirit of independent thought that blossomed in the Enlightenment. Years later, Robespierre would refer to the king’s school as his “Republican Nursery.” One day the king and clergy would discover that they had been some of the most hated nursemaids in history. But for the time being, the republican ideals seeped into Robespierre’s young mind and simmered.

Robespierre had been chosen to read an ode for the new royal couple when the coronation tour visited the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. The ode was in Latin. In its words he infused with sincerity his gratitude and devotion; through the generosity of the nobility, he could not only read, but read Latin. But even as he knelt at the base of the carriage, the dirty cobblestones digging into his knee, Marie Antoinette was disinterested and preoccupied. (She may not have understood the Latin.) She scarcely turned to look into the face of the man who would one day kill her. If she had, it may have made no difference in the end. But then again, maybe that was the catalyst after all. Maybe even then, a storm was brewing beneath her silk-clad feet, behind the downcast eyes of the young man speaking fervently to the closed door of her carriage.

Robespierre completed his education with rebellious tendencies. He haunted the Paris coffee houses and political clubs where talk of the Enlightenment flourished and the boundaries of French society were pressed, if only in conversation. But in 1787, Louis XVI ordered that the political clubs be closed. The soft rumblings of the coming revolution had risen enough to meet the ears of the king.

Enlightened music, as Mozart was taught at the Accademia, was similar to the Enlightened view of many things. Reason was key; form and grace were sovereign. Delicate balance must be maintained between loud and soft, high and low. Structures were well defined. A sonata invariably began with the subject, the main theme, was followed by the transition, the second theme, and finally came to a close with a codetta. Mozart mastered the formulas, but sometimes he tried to break free from the structure. He composed operas in his vernacular German, rather than in Italian. And most revolutionary of all was his struggle to survive not as a court musician kept by a master patron, but as a freelance composer relying on his own skill and inspiration.

Mozart was wiser than Marie Antoinette, or so the story goes. We cannot be sure of what happened, but according to legend, his demeanor changed at some point as he stood looking down at young Beethoven’s furious performance. Perhaps it was some whisper of his own mortality. Perhaps it was a sudden burst of empathy. Whatever it was that moved him, legend has it that Mozart turned to those surrounding him and said, “Keep your eye on this one. He will make a noise in the world someday.”

It was all cut short; Beethoven’s performance, his time in Vienna, Mozart’s own life. By the time Beethoven returned, Mozart was dead. Had he lived longer, Beethoven would have been his contemporary, and likely his competitor. But as things stood, Mozart could instead reach briefly from the end of his life to touch the beginning of Beethoven’s. He may not have directly taught much of anything to the talented sixteen-year-old, but he was able, in a manner, to pass him the baton, and approve the man who would become his heir.

Which was, after all, exactly what Beethoven and his father had wanted all along. When Beethoven’s father had claimed, at his son’s performance in 1778, that the boy was seven, not eight, he was competing with the famous child prodigy Mozart. Even in the midst of his intensive recital for Mozart, Beethoven may have stolen a glance at the great man and tried to imagine himself someday in those shoes. It was granted him; Beethoven became the next great renowned and innovative composer, with all the same emotional turbulence and instability.

Marie Antoinette could have seen her future like a prophecy, as well, had she been perceptive enough to see that the student she met on her coronation tour bowed to her with a head heavy with the words of Rousseau and Voltaire.

Robespierre, infamous and inflammatory orator that he was, could not speak at the hour of his death because he had been silenced by a bullet to the jaw. In silence, his mouth shrouded in bloody bandages, he mounted the steps to the Guillotine to which he had sent so many, and by which Marie Antoinette had met her death just a year before.

Beethoven, too, was barred from what he loved. When he realized he was deaf, he sawed the legs from his piano and pressed his ear to the ground, desperate to hear the vibrations spin across his eardrums, across his heartbeat. After that music was a kind of dream for Beethoven; he could know only the music he created for himself. Yet the music did not become trapped in the confines of his mind. Even after going deaf, Beethoven could pour out an Ode to Joy.

Whether he knew it or not, when Ludwig van Beethoven sat down to write his music, it was with the weight of this legacy behind his pen. His revolution was of an entirely different kind. Where Robespierre followed the dogma of reason literally to the point of worship, Beethoven composed music that needed no reason. He forever altered the world of music, turning away from the structure of the Classical era into the passionate, dramatic music of the Romantics. Before his death on March 26, 1827, Beethoven had poured out ingenious scores, beautiful music riddled with pain. In his own way, his music had become a sort of warped reflection on Mozart.

I wonder if he realized this as he lay dying in his bed, or if Robespierre, condemned to silence as he mounted the steps to his doom, remembered that the queen had done the same a year before. Her words had also been stifled, for her prepared speech was cut short by the brashness of the executioner and the blood-thirst of the crowd. In the frenzy of her final moment, her last words were only, “Pardon me, monsieur, I did not mean to do it.”

None of them meant to do it—to collide as they did. Yet I wonder if they could have envisioned how their brief and seemingly trifling collisions could split the thread of history.

—Cassie Rasmussen is a staff writer.