I’ve always dreamt of traveling to India, the land of contrasts, mystery and spirituality. A journey almost initiatory I would say, or at least this is the image we create ourselves, about a different and faraway land while living here, in the comfort of a Western civilization. We live in the 21^st Century, so called “The Century of Information”, which follows the 20^th Century, The Century of Speed. These definitions, given to the period of time we live in, reflect the reality experienced only by a small fraction of the mankind. I am saying centuries because, a journey to India is not only a few thousand kilometers journey, but also a journey through time.

It did not take me too long to make up my mind. When the opportunity revealed itself I have bought the tickets. Don’t ask me about money, I didn’t have it, I didn’t exactly know where and how would I get it. The only thing I knew, was that I needed to make this journey possible. Without doing a lot of research, we left on the 15^th of April and returned on the 20^th of May. It was a bit too much I thought. We got there at the peak of the tropical summer. Have we stayed two weeks, the monsoon would have started which brings up four months of rain that lasts from dusk till dawn. Since a journey to India, without spirituality would have been incomplete, our main point of interest was The Sahaja Yoga’s Meditation Center in Belapur- Mumbai. Originally, our plan was to spend three weeks there, but due to subjective reasons, we ended up staying for one week and a half only. Our next stop was Mumbai (former Bombay), then for a week to Ganapatipule (a complex that belongs to Sahaja Yoga on the ocean shore), and another week in Goa.

The tendencies to exaggerate and take everything to the extreme are frequent in India. Just a few steps away from the Shopping Mall you can see naked children playing in the dust, improvised little shops out of some almost ready to fall houses or buildings, fancy restaurants with the air conditioning turned on so high, you would freeze with the spoon in your hand, expensive cars but looking like they would badly need a wash, trucks excessively decorated and painted, ugly buildings, embellished temples, lots of pictures of “gurus”, noisy people, non stop honking, poverty, beggars, jewelries, barber shops everywhere you would look.

Roads of India

I must mention the variety of tasty dishes, sometimes overcooked or too spicy and sometimes made with “dary combinations”, which didn’t cause us any kind of problems except that, sometimes it was to spicy for my taste. Also an abundance of clothes and fabrics. Most of them belong to the category that we call kitsch; they are very diversified on the other hand. Fresh squeezed fruit juices are available everywhere end they are very cheap. The notion of “hygiene” is not very well defined there, so if you want to enjoy the variety of fresh squeezed fruit juices, don’t focus to much on the process of production. Sugarcane juice is delicious and it costs 0.1 EUR.

What shocks you the most in India is the lack of interest towards the human being. The lack of respect for others and the lack of respect for themselves is seen everywhere. A society where you have the feeling that the person is worthless. It looks like ideologies are much more important than people, and sometimes I was under the impression that even a car is more important. This phenomenon is obvious at almost every level. One example is the madness in the public transportation. The way people were transported can not be described in words. We’ve seen a very noisy guy, pushing people into a mini-van the same way potatoes are shoveled, and what was even more shocking was that they had no objection. Building’s scaffolds were made out of bamboo stems, or maybe I should say out of single sticks of bamboo, where the construction workers looked like they were performing stunts. We were joking about it saying that it was probably cheaper for them to replace a worker who fell down, rather than building a stronger scaffold. Now, I wonder if that was a joke or the reality.

Most likely you’ve heard about the trains and rail road transportation in India. We did not dare traveling at the economy class and I will not comment on that. The beds in the sleeping cars of the express trains, that were reserved and paid by people a month in advance, were some racks covered with a dirty piece of vinyl. People were sleeping on those racks without any bed cover. Bribe is very effective there, and that is how we ended up in a sleeping car instead of the economy class. Time is not valuable either. Trains, buses, and most of the people are never on time. If a bus is more than an hour late, and you are concerned, or start to ask questions the answer you get is “It’s coming!”. We’ve heard that sometimes trains are 6 hours late. Luckily ours was just one hour and a half late. Extreme poverty, houses that resemble a pile of garbage. People who are alive just because of the warm weather.

It’s very hard to describe it in words, there’s something floating in the air at every step, in the way people behave, in the way they accept their lives. Traditions are much above human will, arranged marriages are still a common practice, people are segregated in castes and their value as humans is as high as their social status.

When you feel is too much, you go to the mall, a resort of civilization. In order to get in you had to pass through the security filter, through the metal detector, and through the luggage check. Watching a movie could be a good idea. Tickets were sold outside, under the burning sun, and there was a long waiting line. And then, again the security filter and the metal detector and the luggage check. Luckily the security guard recognized us and let us go through. The tickets were checked on the last floor, where there was another security filter, metal detector and luggage check we had to go through in order to get in the movie theater. In the theater was cold, a great feeling, after the torrid heat outside. I liked it, but you if you were not accustomed to low temperatures it might have seemed freezing cold. Before the movie started the national anthem was sung and in the middle there was a 15 minutes break.

In India, because of the rigid social rules, it’s less likely to see affection gestures among couples. By couples I mean married couples, since any other kind of couple are out of the question. During our entire trip we’ve seen only one couple holding hands, and this happened in Goa, a touristic area. Contrary to this, is weird to see on the street young men holding hands, or hugging each other. It has no sexual connotation for them. It is just the way we were taught in the Western civilization. They are very pure in their emotional manifestations, and there is nothing weird for two men who are friends to hold hands, just as it’s not weird for us to see two women, good friends, holding hands. Older men seem to stick to the same custom and you can often see them on the ocean shore holding hands and having fun together. I know is not a nice thing to laugh about people, but it seemed funny to me.

If you get in a cabin that has inside a faucet and a bucket, the first thought that comes to your mind is that you are in the wrong place. Don’t worry! Everything is fine. That’s the shower.

The car horn is a king, in India. If you have a very good car horn you are most likely to make it through India’s traffic. The roar of the city is a combination of continuous, uninterrupted sound made by the car horns that never stop. The horn is used as a substitute for the turning signal, as a warning before a car is overpassing another one (there’s no certainty that the car warned won’t change the direction), as a tool to scare the pedestrians who have the courage to cross the street on a pedestrian crossing, or as a tool to cancel the red light at the traffic light. Traffic rules are just a theoretical concept, and the only rule that is applied is “ Honk the horn!

Yoga or religion? A while ago I’ve read somewhere that the best solution when you don’t know the exact meaning of a word, is to look it up in the dictionary. I’ve became accustomed to this practice. There are so many confusions related to these two words. The etymology of the word “Yoga” is a Sanskrit word that translates to”junction”, “reunion”. The etymology of the word “religion” is the Latin word “religare” that translates to “reunion”, “junction”. Latin and Sanskrit languages are the languages where many of the modern “Indo-European” languages originated. Both Latin and Sanskrit initially originated from a very old language, generic called by scientists, “Proto Indo-European”. If we have the same initial origin, can we talk about the same spiritual roots? Is there any connection between the Gods of the ancient Europe and the Gods of India? Is there any connection between Christianity and the Indian culture? There are a lot of questions that we can ask. In my case I received some answers, I had some revelations, not the ones that I expected but completely different ones. When you analyze things from different angles it makes you think twice. There are pieces that you don’t understand and pieces that complete the puzzle of what you’ve known before. Meditation is a silent prayer in which you stop for a moment in order to receive God’s love. I knew this before going to India, but now that knowledge was reinforced. There are many ways to define meditation but I prefer the above one. Unfortunately, the deeper you get involved in this the more you are surrounded by dogma. This scares me, and pushes me away. Dogma and doctrine, are a dangerous obstacles for the western culture, and the danger feels much greater in a culture with exaggerated ritualism such as India’s culture. Anyway, this is a long subject, and I don’t want to continue it now. I’ll conclude by defining DOGMA, noun, 1 a : something held as an established opinion; especially : a definite authoritative tenet b : a code of such tenets <pedagogical dogma> c : a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds
2 : a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

All of the above are just general ideas, very subjective of course. There is much more left to be said. There are many questions. What I have found in all that madness is something very hard to describe in words. There is some sort of purity, that they are fighting to preserve. The way they are trying to preserve it may seem exaggerated, but it is for sure a lesson for us.

(Thanks to Dani and Alina for helping me with this translation.)

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