Tuesday 24 July 2012

India


This was written in 1990, 19 years after I first travelled to India. This proved to be the first of many visits since.  I consider my many trips to India to have been an enormous privilege where the intensity of learning has been balanced by an apparent constant lack of comprehension.  And where the all too visible effects of human indifference and suffering are intensified by the depth of affection I have received – often to my continuing surprise. 


Two weeks in India.  The cities are horrifying the noise of the traffic with its constant hooting and anarchic progress is abominable.  The stench of the roadside dumps littered with vegetable matter of all kinds, intermingled with articles such as bits of old shoes, assaults the nostrils incessantly.  It is a place of smells: spices, food cooking, excrement and urine, blooming flowers, incense.

Noise: chatter, shouting, traffic, animals, bells, horns, birdsong, coughing, spitting.  Silence:  walking through countryside, walking in the quiet lanes of some ancient town, sitting by the pond in a village.  The animals, people, birds merge and are part of the living earth.  We meet villagers, water buffalo, and goats moving easily along the dusty paths.  Expanding beauty and peace in a land of rock, trees and scrub.  Open skies, wheeling birds, clear light and the lost tread of bare feet.

This is a land of paradox, the rich and living closely together in apparent ignorance.  The horror of the cities and the beauty of the countryside.  The capabilities of the intellectuals and the illiteracy of so many.  The exquisite craftsmanship and the plethora of appalling, garish plastic.  The reverence for life and the wanton killing.  The affection of individuals and the fear in the crowds.

T o sit and listen to drumming, singing and watch the graceful movement of the dancers.  To feel the freedom and lack of inhibition, and to be away from passive entertainment and to be part of it all.

Travelling over the badly made up roads, weaving like a drunken cyclist through the crowded streets, just missing the nose of a donkey.  Beware any innocent who might stray into our pathway.  Driving straight at the lumbering trucks, the arrogant camels and patient oxen.  Cutting back in at the last minute.

Lying back on the first class bunk in a dirty, dusty carriage.  No light, just the sound of the train.  Throwing us about, tossed like leaves in the wind.  Occasionally we stop, voices sound close.  Coughing, spitting, eerie sounds of the night.  We start up again, slowly, jerkily, grinding into action.  The morning light begins to make its way through the shutters and another day dawns.  Through the rattling gloom the sun makes its way bringing brilliant blue and searing heat.

In the city it is difficult to look beyond the squalor, filth and human degradation.  But in the eyes of the beggar girl, the proud bearing of the holy man, the flash of the sari and the turban, vivid explosions in a brown dusty haze there is a different world. 

In the country there is the upright swinging walk of women expertly balancing unfeasible loads, the smile of the child and the weather-beaten walnut faces of men….



In the river of life I have moved from the rushing shallows that vigorously plunge from the mountains to the deeper, slow moving progress towards the sea.  How far away from its completion I am it is impossible to tell.  There is unspoken richness from my long marriage, my grown up children, my young grandchildren and my friends far and wide. 

As the river gathers richness as it journeys through the land creating fertile soil in its final stages, then humanity has that possibility to acknowledge the debt of gratitude and to give back whatever can be given.  Not through superiority of knowledge or experience, but out of the humility of understanding the fragility of all life.

Wednesday 4 July 2012

To be Young.


He is sixteen years old and from Turkey; she is also sixteen and comes from St. Lucia. Shaded from the ferocious Rajasthan sun by the branches of a few trees, a group of young people and three adults from a school in England are visiting India to explore and observe what life is like in a different culture.  The girl and boy are loudly discussing the merits of flat screen televisions.  They are arguing about size, make, quality of picture and sound, comparing the rooms they have in there respective homes given to visual entertainment.  They are oblivious to their surroundings.

A thin man, whose dark face seems to have been etched from the desert rock, talks to us with passion of the work they are doing to ensure that water reaches the fields enabling the people of the village to grow the crops that will sustain their lives.   A little way beyond a group of women are digging out a trench in the stone littered dry earth through which a pathetic dribble of water is running.  Their saris dazzle in the glare of the sun.
 Sometimes, he says, the monsoon sends us so little rain that we have to pay for tankers to bring in water, but that is just for the people to drink.  Drilling has become too expensive, and, anyway, often the ground water is found to contain arsenic, fluoride or is too saline to be able to support food crops.
The boy and girl have been gently reminded where they are and their conversation, which has digressed to films they have seen recently, comes to a close and they join the main group.  Another boy asks for water for he is thirsty and he has already consumed the contents of his water bottle.  It is hot and it is not yet midday.


We quickly blame the young for the shortcomings we see in them.  As parents we want to control, protect, manipulate, own and love them.  Sometimes we see them as extensions of ourselves; too often we forget that they are individual, independent members of the human species.

The vast majority of my schooling took place during the 1960s.  To be young in that decade was to be aware of the growing excitement, colour and richness of life; influences came from all over the world and there appeared to be endless possibilities.   It became clear that it was not necessary to conform to post war expectations and a unifying spirit amongst the young seemed to exist that I could feel, even from the claustrophobic and cloistered surroundings of a boy’s boarding school.  For a brief time there was a sense of equality, search for peace, care for the world and concern for each other, blossoming as values for a generation.  However, all too quickly these delicate flowers withered and died as these values were packaged and made into saleable commodities; for there was money to be made from the empty ‘ everything is beautiful’ mantra in all its fantastical trappings.  There was also the ugly side; the drugs that created lives lived on make-believe; the exploitation of naivety and the desperate disappointment of dreams unfulfilled. 

Now, freedom is viewed as having choice not as a state of mind, aspiration is considered as an important aspect of young people’s thinking and worth is only given to the thing that will bring material success.  The education system serves as the ‘materialistic exploitation of young people’ and ‘being well-educated means economically effective or successful’ (quotations from a recent conversation with the Principal of an alternative school in India).  The future can be described as a grim place or be given the illusion of a paradise; each extreme is a story built on falsehood.  However, if we view education is an ‘exploration into what is happening today without the barrier of condemnation’ (from the same conversation), then we move into a different realm.  This is not dependent on ideals, not part of an ideology, but is an active and vital process of finding out, of discovery.

Listening is exploration.  Not just listening to others, but listening to yourself; not out of a selfish individualism, but out of the realisation that what you feel – the love, fear, loneliness, hope, faith, joy- is the common to all of humanity.  Involving young people in the act of listening may be a key to joining with them in finding freedom them from the tyranny of anxiety, aspiration, despair and suffering.