Bangalore, Bengaluru?

I will be in Bangalore from July 18th (at 3am) to August 14th. My family and I are visiting my brother in LA the preceding week so I'll be leaving for India from LAX. I will be flying Emirates air and connecting in Dubai, maybe I'll get to practice my Arabic? The first leg of the trip is 20 hours and then DXB to BLR is 4 hours; luckily the layover is only two hours. My dad and I are running a race in Manhattan the weekend I get back so I'm going to fly into JFK. (We also got tickets to go up to the statue of liberty crown which I am unbelievably excited for). I'm going to bring my laptop and camera with me and I plan to keep up with this blog. I actually bought my Canon EOS D-60 in India the last time around so ever since I've been back to the states I've had to use an adapter to charge the battery, it'll be nice to just plug it in!
I will be interning at a magazine through i to i meaningful travel; my brother did community work in Ghana last summer and had a positive experience with the organization. As of now, I am partnered with the magazine Travel & Shop, a relatively new travel guide for Bangalore published every fortnight. I found this press release from last summer: http://www.prlog.org/10102716-travel-shop-new-fortnightly-travel-guide-in-bengaluru.html I'm not sure what my exact duties will be at the magazine, but I have an orientation upon arrival. I will be staying in a group home with other i to i participants who do not necessarily have a newspaper placement, but who could be volunteering with street children for example.
I am in the process of completing my application for an India visa. Unfortunately my visa from the fall expired on June 29th, so it's no good. I have to go down to DC next week, but of course the Indian embassy doesn't issue their own visas: they outsource them.
The visa application asks for "the object of journey." I was told to put tourism so I wouldn't cause a stir or complicate things; I think I came in on a student visa in the fall. What really, I wonder, are the objects of any of our journeys? I went to India in the fall to study for a semester because I couldn't possibly imagine returning to my school after junior year. Of course I wanted to take part in the senior festivities at my school, I so very much did, but you can't have your cake and eat it too, right? I flew halfway around the world and missed the opening convocation of my senior year to be able to walk down the aisle at my graduation this past June because I somehow knew that if my body were at both events, my heart wouldn't be. And so my object of that journey wasn't so much to go to India, but to leave the 410. Well here I am six months later and to tell you the truth I would be perfectly content staying at home for the rest of the summer, volunteering and getting to know my city a little better. So why am I leaving, or going for that matter? I don't really think I can answer that question. Over the years I've spent countless hours conjuring up adventure after adventure in some exotic land via the Internet. I've been privileged to live some of those fantasies out, but others have been safely confined to my computer. What makes one jump off the screen and not another, I wonder? Why am I going to India, not Egypt or Lebanon? Was it a matter of convince or timing or are they both really just the same? Do I dare say that after all the traveling I've done maybe I'm jaded? Perhaps I've come to think of traveling as some sort of default mode that I can shroud myself in if things are going my way. I can only hope that one day the object of my journey will be to go to India-- to breathe in her humid, sticky air and bathe in her water, because you know what, she's absolutely positively fabulous.