Friday, April 27, 2012

A Journey to the East

Camille’s French family came to India to visit her and they invited me to travel with them to East India. It was an amazing experience to travel with them. They are wonderful people and through them I learned more about France and India. I am very thankful for what they did for me.  We went to Varanasi which is THE holy city of India located on the Holy Ganga River and Kolkata the city of the British Empire.
Varanasi
I will never be able to understand how I felt in Varanasi. Varanasi will haunt me forever. Never again do I hope to find such ignorance and desperation in the human soul. Varanasi is a place the world would like to believe moved on 700 years ago. We can put men on the moon, and if we wanted to we could program a robot to pick our nose. In times like this how does a place where millions of people believe drinking the water of the most polluted river in the world contaminated with decaying babies will erase every bad thing you did in your life still exist? Seeing the desperation of a human being’s life force them to believe in a clearly twisted belief system is appauling.
                Unknowingly Camille’s father photographed a pile of holy wood. He apologized and erased the picture. However the locals did not accept this. They said, “This no sorry! We take your father and we beat your father, then you say sorry and everything ok. This is not sorry!” Then they aggressively pulled us off the platform and after a lot of bad mouthing we lost them. I was not afraid for my safety, but I was afraid that such uneducated vile people exist . Their animalistic behaviour sickened me.
                The images of the flesh being burning off the bones of human bodies permently stains my memory. I expected this. But more challenging  than seeing this was the benevolence shown towards life and death. More than 300 bodies are burned daily, but not one single tear is allowed to be shed. If a family cannot afford enough wood to burn their loved one, none will be given to them. They will simply half-burn the body. There is no compassion or a final sense of peace. The burning ghatts looked like bloody midevil battle fields.
                All of my opinions towards Varanasi  are knowingly jaded. Maybe Varanasi is too culturally rich for a westerner to ever understand, or maybe it is like this because people are uneducated and desperate. I do not pretend to be an expert, I only know how I feel . I won’t remember that Varanasi is the most ancient city of India or that Buddhism started there. All I will remember is the stinging fear I felt for humanity. As I am writing this I realize my emotions will appear misplaced to most of you. I also cannot understand why I am so scared by my experience.  Also I am not very good at capturing my emotions with words, but I started this blog to share my journey with you, and this is the best I can do.



Kolkata-
Thankfully Kolkata was a much more cheerful experience. Kolkata is the Cultural Capital of India and it is also supposed to be the dirtiest and poorest city. I do not think that I witnessed everything in Kolkata because I experienced almost none of its negative qualities. I loved everything I saw in Kolkata. I love Bengalis. Their attitude towards life is somehow drastically more whimisical and fun-loving than any other region of India. I met a woman on the street who was digging through the trash to find food. It breaks my heart to watch people do this. I watched her as she stumbled upon a rotten bag of potatoes. She cut away all the bad parts and by the time she was done there was the equivelant of three potatoes left. She saw me watching her and she gave me the most wonderfully warm smile. I was stunned because in all of my past experiences if I make eye contact with a poorer person they run to me and beg for money while tugging on my clothes. I also smiled and I inquired about what she was planning to make for dinner. With another delightful smile she said that she was making pav bhaji for her children. I asked her how many children she had and she proudly announced that she had six beautiful children. She has to feed six mouths with three potatoes.....I asked her if I could help her or if she needed something more, but she did not consider my offer for even half a second before refusing. This woman warmed my heart, which after Varanasi I needed very badly. This was not an isolated incident. I saw many people with the same behaviour. Of course there were many people that still came to beg, but even then they were much less aggressive even though they appeared equally desperate. Bengalis have a reputation for being very sweet, but very lazy. I do not find any Indians particularly efficient, but I do feel that Bengalis are lazier than other regions in India. Service in restaurants is often slow. If I ask for a glass I am sure to get it 30-40 minutes later after I do not need it anymore, but Bengalis cannot even do this. If I ask for a glass in Kolkata they will just say no. They simply don’t want to. If I protested I am sure that I could have gotten a glass, but it was funnier to go without. As long as they have their fish and rice for the day they have no other concerns. The rest of the day they are perfectly content to sit and gossip (Bengalis are also famous for this). I have thought many times about why Bengalis have such a different attitude towards life. Is it because their lives are not as difficult, and therefore they can afford this behaviour? It can’t be this because the people of Kolkata are more desperate than any other place. Is it because I only saw good examples of Bengali people? It is probably partially this. Is it because of religion? No, they are still Hindu and there is very little difference between all the sects. After consulting with many other Indians I have come to the conclusion that the reason Bengalis have a different attitude is because they are educated. They are not educated in the sense that they know math and science, they are educated in philosophy and art. Education makes the biggest difference in someone’s life. I have seen many good examples of this in India.

Now I have been to every corner of India. I experienced  a taste of every part of India. However, India’s culture is too rich to discover in only one year. I am sure that I am not done exploring it. Tomorrow I leave for Rajhastan again with my family for a wedding and then after that my travelling in India is over. On the fourth I take a short journey to Thailand for the International Rotary Confrence. Then before I know it I am back in the good ole US of A! I am not sad to go back. I want to go back very much, but that does not make leaving any less painful. Life happens on exchange and off of exchange, but it is time to close my Indian chapter and start a new one. I am excited to apply all of the good things I learned here to my American life. Life has to move on. Being an exchange student forces you to embrace the fact that the only constant in life is change

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