India - I

It sometimes feels like I can only acknowledge something as ‘real’ in my life once I’ve put it into words.
I’ve never been to India. It fascinates me and I need to find out why.

Bit by bit I am coming to know more about this place of many layers, through reading, talking to people from there or people who have been there, through eating the food, listening to the music, taking yoga classes and going to temples. It is like holding one of those kaleidoscopes you used to get as a kid. You look at it and a brilliantly-colored pattern comes into focus. You are enchanted by the light and the complex beauty of what you see. You think you understand it. Then you turn it just the slightest, to allow for something new to join the picture. But it doesn’t just politely join it. It shakes it up rudely and everything changes, falls into blurred chaos, only to settle into a totally different but no less scintillating configuration. And so it continues. It seems there’s always something new about India to upset your newfound sense of certainty.

I think the power of India might just lie in its naked, unashamed exposition of humanity’s most conflicting characteristics. All our most elevated thoughts, arts and expressions. All our purest wishes and highest aspirations. All our most depraved desires, our most debauched practices, our most terrible exploitations and glaring inequalities.

Maybe this is what comes from doing yoga. You bend one way; then, for symmetry and balance, you have to bend the other way. You become strong, but you become flexible too. And I can imagine that in India you need to be both.
This must be very difficult for the stereotypical Western businessperson, to whom strength traditionally means muscle, force, single-minded focus and determination and for whom flexibility is for acrobats, dancers and, possibly, women.
But I’m beginning to think that to survive in India you have to be focused, possibly bull-headed, yet full of grace and submissiveness.
It seems that in India it’s both what you do AND the way that you do it. And I enjoy the theatricality, the dramatic nature of that.


I love this quote from Paul Theroux (The Elephanta Suite, Penguin 2008):
“India was sensual. If India seemed puritanical it was because at the bottom of its Puritanism was a repressed sensuality that was hungrier and nakeder and more voracious than anything he’d known. The strict rules kept most people in their place, yet there were exceptions everywhere, and where there were exceptions there was anarchy and desire. If India had a human face it was that of a hungry, skinny girl, starved for love, famished for money.”

After reading this, why would anyone in their right mind still want to go there?