After five days back from India, I've been able to formulate an answer to the question: "How was India?":
India was really welcoming and engaging; partly because many people there love the English but all the more so as we were given almost endless flowers of appreciation for our (Karuna.org) fundraising by the beneficiaries in humbling urban slums.
India was shocking & demanding too. In many ways it's like a magnet being placed in front of my own magnetic alignment; only the magnet that is India has the polarity switching form North to South time and time again; I'm repelled...then pulled, then repelled..
Examples:
- Travelling on Roads - A fascinating repellent. How do they do it?; travel with so few traffic rules, so many abreast, in seemingly random choice of direction; travelling so overlappingly, haphazardly-looking and yet crashing but rarely. Some say it's a shared consciousness that makes it work; it scares the heebee geebees out of me; no cycling in Indian cities by me, me thinks!
- Travelling by rail - Yes, you can pay for comfort, one person per well-padded seat and air conditioning (Chair Carriage 1st class AC). However this is a bit sterile, and fits under the phenomenon of "having enough money to buy your way out of connection with others". Far more memorable is travelling with a mass of humanity -reminiscent of the Auschwitz transport films. Choose the busiest train and make sure not to have any reservations for an overnight journey!. On the Maharashtra "Express" one night-10 hours- I ended up sharing a bunk with a boxer to whom I was never formally introduced, yet we shared the space well. There was no floor space in any corridor or on any seat; just a sea of humanity co-operating as best we could with the scarcity of that resource called space.
- Heat & dust & pollution in the cities.
- Tranquility in some parts of the countryside, yet village life....
