A rickshaw and its driver shuttling past a portrait
of the venerable Mother Teresa, her eyes ever watchful
over the city she spent her life protecting. Kolkata, 2009.
My Indian journey starts here.
Let us ignore platitudes about India. It's steep, rich, longstanding culture, once nascent, it seems, at the beginning of history itself yet still undaunted by the tides of time. By globalization. By the car, the airplane, the Internet, nor by redoubtable cultures administered by force. Indeed, it's rickshaws, many now motorized, are still driven by men with bundled, burning feet and aching back. It's cities cradle de facto tourist spots, net cafes, hectic bazaars, lepers dwindlig on street corners, and flashy cars with drivers lilting limp cigarettes from cracks in tinted windows. Swindlers and ascetics and beggars and merchants alike muddy streets already full to their brim
Perhaps a rephrase is necessary. We cannot avoid the platitudes popularly fed to us about India; or, India is as immune to platitudes, and the truth or lack thereof found within, as is a stoic holy man ( a sadhu) to the torrent of fluid life rushing by him, through him. A king on streets which have no such thing.
India the battered, proudly showing scars. India the backwater, now on the precipice of economic behemoth. It's distended new wealth and it's even more distended belly of poor. It's Bodhisattva tree where Buddha gained enlightenment and its ancient desert fort cities from where it played defense to Mongol hordes. Rickety buses charter and swarm through towns of mud-thatched huts, tiny blips on its berth, carrying cell-phone squawking passengers to bustling virtual metropolises. In full circus mode, so feel the cities, and on full tilt so feel all but the locals when navigating them; India's grasp is captivating, eliciting love or hate and often both, from all who enter.
Just a stall like any other in a hive set among the alleyways, lanes, and mere dirt paths that vivisect India's heart, Varanasi.
India occupies its own atmosphere, its own time and place. Many, realizing this, try to adapt to India, try to morph into what they feel India wants, expects, of them. Draped saris and dreadlocks are the traveler common. Not to forget fisherman pants. Abercrombie & Fitch: India Collection. Many others get lost in its grip, consumed by its crooked alleyways and cobbled lanes, chai stalls, and its overall unparalleled weirdness to modern Western sensibilities. To be sure, India is modern : it has skyscrapers, amenities that will argue any money you can offer, and a soaring upper class. But it does not cloak itself (it cannot) in its own tale of modernization. India is raw, unfiltered, and, truly, mystifying.
But of course it's been so long now since my one and only trip; 3 years. My beliefs, my idealism, regarding India may be just as moored in the fantastic dreams of a young man yet to meet its shores as it is in my own crumbling vestige of mental snapshots of a journey undertaken with the dubious mixture of naivete and purpose.
Please enjoy, but take it upon yourself to go.
