living in India…

…dunno where to start…from my ’scarred’ childhood or a rebellious adolescence.. or as a young career woman in a male-dominated pharmaceutical industry or the daughter whose parents needed to ‘fix’ a marriage for her…or as a black sheep or a spiritual conformist (will explain that as we go on)…

India is the land of spirituality, from a western view…true enough, what other place could contain more than a billion people clamouring for space and yet existing peacefully in microcosms of their own……street- side poverty more rampant than nouveaux-riches; cows on the streets venerated more than the civic sense; a mélange of colours- from eclectic, loud, garish to psychedelic, no matter what the season (au revoir the fashion seasons of Paris, New York and Milan); a heady mix of scents- from the deliciously, spicy meal being prepared in someone’s kitchen to the nauseating filth on the roads (beats the pavements of Paris renowned for their dog poop), from someone’s strongly perfumed hair-oil to someone’s suffocating body odour; a serious lack of decent public rest-rooms; overflowing public dustbins; and yet…and yet- a look at its people- they seem to go on perfectly oblivious to all this and more…not just this, they seem to have imbibed the way, some mysterious way to live with the chaos without it bothering them (where else can you find such a personification of the Tao), speak to them and they look perfectly happy in what would seem to be plain misery and insupportable living conditions to an average westerner…no Sir, their smiles of contentment are not a show for you and me, they are as genuine as can be felt…people are not just living there- they are living, dying, born, reborn and overflowing…humanity is overflowing in India…and that is its essence…its humanity and humanness amidst all that undecipherable chaos is what forms the spiritual fabric of India…its people are its core…their ability to live with that which is offered or available to them, without judgment or analysis à l’occidente is its virtue…

Growing up in a Hindu, religiously and spiritually inclined family, i was taught by my parents to accept the vagaries of fate in my stride…to accept it as destiny…this, i am sure, they have been told by their parents, who in turn, have been told by theirs for generations immemorable and that’s how it has encoded, somehow, in our genes to accept life as it is offered, the missed strokes of fate, the misery here and there, lack of this and that….Destiny as a concept itself is somewhat obscure to my western counterparts…i remember, during a lecture at the business school i attended in Paris, our Organizational Behaviour professor asked about Karma and Destiny…my anglo-french classmate shrugged her shoulders saying that there was nothing called Destiny, her life course was based on the choices she made and that was about it…now, that may or may not be the representative view of everyone from the practical and pragmatic western world, but it is a remark one may not easily come across in India…you are more likely to hear an Indian- however educated, urban, modern and well-heeled- resigning, once in a while, to the strokes of destiny and embracing it…this view is upheld not just in the downside but the upside of life as well…every now and then, one comes across elders asking one to contain the enraptured exhibition, and acceptance, of happiness in attaining something favourable…we are taught to be moderate in reacting to favourable or unfavourable conditions…to contend with life…a teaching as old as the divine song- the Bhagvad Gita.

(this is the first in a series of posts on my impressions of growing up in India…others may be getting added under the file ‘roots’…)