"What's wrong with India?" my travel companion is found of asking. What is wrong with India? This is a big question.
India is all at once the most beautiful and most ugly of places. It's flooded with billions of people traveling about every day, but has no roads whatsoever. There are thousand year old layers of dirty and filth surrounding the whitest, purest marble palaces, which are topped off with an extra layer of dirt for good measure. Shoeless, naked men in dodies (loin clothes) dig trenches along the street with pick axes all to lay high-speed fiber optic cables for internet. You are required to take your shoes off everywhere in reverence - temples, palaces, tombs, ashrams - but the country is fraught with hook worm and God knows what else. The monkeys want your sunglasses more than your bananas. What's wrong with India? This is a big question.
Indians have cultivated an enormous capacity to sit with discomfort. Here, this may be my biggest lesson. This is a country of too much and never enough. What to do? Sit with it. There is nothing to do. I didn't sign on for a trip to the Bahamas. I came to India. Not the India in "Eat, Pray, Barf" - this not a quaint, spiritual place. As Jill likes to say, India pushes and pulls. It is a drill sergeant whipping you into shape. Time to discover what you're really made of.
What to do? You don't come to the ocean to stay dry.
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2 comments:
Eat, Pray, Barf?! I get it - I know what you mean but please don't throw her under the bus like that!
Miss you here. Wish I were there.
Talked about you in class this week. Lesson on culture, culture shock, & socialization.
You provide my best stories-sociological & otherwise.
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