Goodbye for Now

So... my time in India is at a close. If you have been reading, following, and supporting me through this trip then thank for keeping this malfunktioning traveler company. India is the most difficult and easy place to write about all at the same time - kind of like the travel. The histories, the complexities, the ambiguous social knowledge about everything from Ayurveda and herbalism to colonial influence and conquerors can melt away with the brightest smile or disappear into the everyday continuities such as a head wobble that transcends all 300 Indian languages as well as most international ones, including English. I am more than aware of the incredible amounts of literature written about this country and sprouting from its populace; I have begun trekking its vast literary mountain range over the past six years. In offering my own thoughts here in this blog I have joined the traffic jam, adding my irrepresible desire to join the fray and share my experience of India with all of its eccentricities along with the well-worn paths of cliche and assumption. But India for me is best described in the details, best seen in the cracked knuckles and faces of the people - a place where recycled plastics, muck and human beings in the gutter are as telling as the bright billboards above their heads of Shah Rukh Khan or Amitab Bachchan or some other Bollywood star advertising skin-whitening cream or Pepsi or a new car. For India in numbers or generalizations is as debilitating as it is illusory.

In trying to comprehend India's bipolar nature I have read about Maharajas who paraded a thousand elephants adorned with gold and emeralds through Udaipur, Mughal temples that put European architecture to shame and dwarfed palaces like Louis the XIV's Marsailles, the Nizam of Hyderabad's secret underground chambers that contained wealth five or six times greater than the Queen's jewels, a popular and (predominantly) nonviolent revolution that helped to free the land of colonial condenscension after WWII, only to be followed by the largest human migration in history (after the Partition of Pakistan) and a massacre larger in scale than Rwanda, the completely materialistic, gaudy, and ostentatious show of wealth by much of the middle class today who have drivers to handle their Marutis and servants to serve them Fruttis, as compared to a massive workforce of call center ladies and technology whizzes, to the poor consisting of ragpickers, street performers, pigeon fighters, coal/gold/diamond miners, chaiwallahs, migrant laborers, slumdwellers, innumberable farmers, hunters and gatherers,monkey-grinders, and shepherds (not to mention the drivers and servants themselves) who make up the bulk of India's population.  

Inevitably my experience comes through my own eyes, ears and mouth as a foreigner looking through the looking glass from outside of its domain.  I can choose (usually) when I participate in the spectacle and when I want to separate myself and become the observer of the differing customs and social values.  Therefore, I pass the final sum-up to Pankaj Mishra, who explains the phenomenon of the foreign perspective in his introduction to India in Mind,  a catalogue of short essays on India written by travelers over the past century:

"[Those who] traveled to, and wrote about India in the last century; they took their ideas and habits of rational analysis from a successful western civilization. By attempting to understand India through their own cultural and intellectual inheritance, they reveal honestly a variety of assumptions and prejudices whose history goes back to Herodotus, to the earliest images of India in the West.

Such continuities, extending over two millennnia, may seem odd. After all, you are told by conventional history that during the last century... India moved from being a backward British colony to a modern democratic nation state. But these changes often seem superficial to the outsider, and so they are to a large extent. After more than fifty years of modernization, India is far from being made over in the image of a Western country. It remains too poor and populous and bewilderingly diverse. Its history lies in obscure ruins, not in museums, its religions proliferate in everyday life, not in grand organized churches, and its food is best had at homes, not in restaurants. Its heat is severe, its rain unending. It rarely inspires pure affection or admiration in the way Italy or Greece, other sites of great civilizations, do. It often poses harsh challenges. The reactions it evokes are complex, ranging from awe and wonder to repulsion and rejection. They tell us as much about the traveler as the world he describes."

Thank you for following me through this trip, hopefully I will be back here writing again on my next adventure and I will continue to be posting (though not as often) while in the US.  Shanti, shanti, shanti.  Peace, peace, peace.