Reflections from India
If I had to pick one word to describe my experience of what India is like, it would be
“relentless.” Think of a meal at a fine Indian restaurant: the smells are complex and unfamiliar,
the flavors are rich and intense, the spiciness is on the hot side (and my body reacts by
sweating whenever I eat spicy food).
Then imagine having that fine Indian
meal 3 times a day, for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner – day in, day out. That’s
what our experience of India was like. I
don’t think you’ve really lived in India
until you’ve had curried peppers and
spicy samosas—for breakfast! And of
course it wasn’t just the food. The
stimulation of all of our senses was
relentless, from the fragrant aromas of
spices and incense as we walked down
the street alternating with the tropical
mustiness and the stench of the
overworked sanitation systems,
to the din and
jostling of the
never-ending
sea of humanity
buying and
selling from
morning til long
after dark, with
endless rows of
stalls piled high
with colorful
fabrics or
jewelry, or tiny
storefronts
selling
hardware
appliances or a
sidewalk shave.
Then there was the incessant honking of horns and the driving beat of the Bollywood
soundtracks we seemed to hear everywhere.
Riding in a car was perhaps the most intense experience,
as the crush of traffic on foot and bicycle and motor-scooter
competed for every inch of the road with every other kind of
vehicle, from huge dented buses to smallish SUV’s and cars
and the ever-present swarms of green and yellow rickshas,
with the occasional bullock cart or cow wandering
through. I’ve sometimes thought the difference
between the pace of life (or at least traffic) in a small
town in the US and the pace in a big city like Chicago is
like the difference between a “full stop” at a small town
intersection and a “rolling stop” at one in Chicago. In
India, it was more like “what stop?” as our driver
barreled into crowded roundabout intersections,
heedless of whatever traffic light may or may not have
been there. What would be considered harrowing
near-misses on the roads here were a
commonplace occurrence literally
every few seconds there. Traffic in
India reminded me of a video game
where things pop out at you out of
nowhere every few seconds.
When we talked about the traffic with our daughter’s host parents, who have been to the US
and Chicago many times, they joked about how “monotonous” driving in America is to them
(though I don’t think they’ve been here in winter…).
Then there are the relentless extremes of
wealth and poverty, which certainly exist here
in the US and elsewhere, but which are more
in your face in India—from the children
risking their lives dancing or selling to collect
a few rupees in the middle of traffic and the
families living under blue tarps along rail lines
and even just blocks away from our
daughter’s house, to the gleaming indoor
shopping malls sprouting up everywhere and
the Mumbai skyline – bigger and more
architecturally impressive than Chicago’s or
NY’s, including a 27-story single-family
residence tower with 600 servants for a
family of five.
Every night the accumulation of fumes from diesel exhaust and coal-burning fires became
almost suffocating for me, and I don’t really want to think about how many beds without sheets
I slept in or how many toilets without toilet paper I used…
Relentless is the word that kept coming back to me again and again. And if I had spent the
whole time trying to resist the relentlessness of life in India, I would have ended up hating it.
Because as Gregory David Roberts points out in his amazing semi-autobiographical novel
Shantaram, the only way to love India – and perhaps the only way to let India love you—is to
give in to it.
We started out trying to find our way on foot around Mumbai the first day, and we did pretty
well – until we couldn’t find the market we were looking for and started getting frustrated. A
man on the street saw me looking around and checking my map and asked me, “Crawford
Market?” When I said yes, he pointed to a decrepit-looking building across the street, touched
my the arm, and started wading into the snarled sea of traffic like Moses heading into the Red
Sea. We quickly had to decide whether to trust him– not only with our itinerary, but in some
sense with our lives, as he led us directly in front of vehicles which were mostly but not entirely
stopped. But follow him we did, and when we got to the Market he showed us his badge
proving he was a legitimate market ambassador. He led us around to various stalls where we
saw the caged animals and touched the ripe
fruit and smelled the powerful spices and felt
the smooth silk scarves. It was wonderful,
and we would have missed it if we hadn’t let
down our guard just a bit and given in to
India.
The next day we decided to take our
chances with a taxi driver named
Mahindra who offered to drive us
around Mumbai. When we did, he took
us to some wonderful places of respite
from the relentlessness of it all. First we
had to let ourselves drink the chai he
offered in small glasses from a hole-inthe-wall tea stand, and again I had to let
him gently take my arm or my hand and
lead us around. But when we did, he led
us to places like Baganga Tank – this big,
ancient, sacred pool in the middle of
Mumbai, created, according to legend,
by Rama’s brother Lakshmana shooting
an arrow into the earth and bringing
holy water from the Ganges River 2000 kilometers away for people to bathe in.
We got to wander around the
narrow streets of the dense but
quiet neighborhood around it, and
take our shoes off as we visited a
couple of the dozens of nearby
temples.
Most meaningful to
me, we got to visit
Mani Bhavan,
Gandhi’s Mumbai
headquarters, on a
quiet residential
street on what is
now tony Malabar
Hill, and see his
simple room, with
nothing but a thin
mattress and a
spinning wheel, from
which he plotted
strategy to bring
down the British
Empire in India and bring about swaraj – self-determination – for 300 million Indians.
There’s also a letter on display in which he wrote to Adolf Hitler in 1939:
“It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a
war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an
object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of
one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable
success? Any way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.
Your sincere friend, M.K. Gandhi.”
People have looked at that letter as a sign of Gandhi’s naiveté, and even of the futility of
nonviolence in the face of radical evil. Gandhi himself was apparently somewhat torn about
how to deal with Hitler, but his letter was perfectly consistent with his approach, which
psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi argues was rooted in a form of insanity. The title of Ghaemi’s book
about Gandhi and other great leaders is A First-Rate Madness—the kind of madness which is
the source of genius. Specifically he’s talking about the mental illness of manic-depressiveness
which, he argues, can increase four specific qualities of genius: 1) realism – suffering through
the negative experiences of depression can burst the illusions that most of us live in and give
one a more accurate picture of reality; 2) resilience – going those negative experiences and
coming out on the other side can give one a sense of resiliency; 3) creativity – which is often the
result of manic, divergent, out of the box thinking; and above all 4) empathy – the kind of
radical empathy which is at the heart of nonviolence, because depressive people don’t just
know about suffering as an abstraction, they’ve lived it.
Gandhi displays this radical empathy when he writes:
“…it is contrary to my nature to distrust a single human being or to believe that any nation
on earth is incapable of redemption… By a long course of prayerful discipline I have ceased
for over forty years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim… I can and do hate evil
wherever it exists. I hate the system of government the British people have set up in India.
I hate the domineering manner of Englishmen as a class in India… But I do not hate the
domineering Englishmen as I refuse to hate the domineering Hindus. I seek to reform them
in all the loving ways that are open to me. My non-cooperation has its root not in hatred,
but in love.”
Elsewhere he writes:
“Three-fourths of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear if we step
into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint. We [may not always
agree with them when our ideals are] radically different. But we may be charitable to them
and believe they actually mean what they say… Our business, therefore, is to show them
that they are in the wrong, and we should do so by our suffering. I have found that mere
appeal to reason does not answer where prejudices are age-long and based on supposed
religious authority. Reason has to be strengthened by suffering, [because] suffering opens
the eyes of understanding.” [emphasis added]
The madness of Gandhi’s genius may have been politically naïve at times, though surely no
more naïve or mad than the politics of war and violence are at times. And he was by no means
perfect; he was sometimes far less kind to his wife Kasturbai than he was to Hitler. He was at
his worst when he lost the balance of being both principled and loving, but he was at his best
when he found that balance and kept his sense of humor rather than taking himself and his
principles too seriously—which is probably true for most of us…
Gandhi’s nonviolence wasn’t the only kind of genius we saw in India, and spicy food and traffic
weren’t the only things that were relentless on our trip. We did an unfortunately too-lowbudget tour of the Golden Triangle – Delhi, Agra, Jaipur – and the succession of incredible
palaces and mosques and tombs and forts was relentless in its own way, and exemplified more
of the genius of India in its art and architecture. For example, the
Qu’ranic script inscribed
around the arches of the
Taj Mahal is smaller at the
bottom and larger at the
top, perfectly proportioned
so that it all looks exactly
the same size when viewed
from ground level. The
four pillars surrounding it
are tilted four degrees to
the outside so that in case
of an earthquake, they will
fall away from the Taj and
not destroy it. The external vaults of Akbar’s tomb at
Sikhandra are so acoustically perfect that you can hear a
whisper from one corner to the other, while the internal
vault can carry an echo for 14 seconds.
Then there’s the evolution of religious and political genius
evident in the architectural history. First there was the brute
force of the giant pillar at Qutub Minar, where 1000 years ago
the invading conqueror Mohammed Ghori destroyed 27 Hindu
and Jain temples and built a mosque with the broken pieces; you
can see remnants of cows and other figures
from those temples in the columns of the
mosque. I thought about the discussions we
had in seminary about how Unitarians
sometimes take bits and pieces from other
religions and misappropriate them into our
own religious schemas…
But then 500 years later in Indian history, there came a
more enlightened approach. The conquerors realized
they either couldn’t or didn’t have to defeat their
religious opponents, so they did the politically expedient
thing and married into each other’s families. This
political and religious union is reflected in the wonderful
Indo-Islamic architecture of so many Indian palaces,
where perfectly geometric Islamic designs and arches
blend harmoniously with the Hindu lotus flowers above.
Then at Laxmi Vilas Palace in
Vadodara – the relatively small
town of 1½ million where our
daughter is living – there's a blend
of Indian and Italian architecture,
with classical Indian arches and
ornate marble carvings blended
with bronze sculptures and ceiling
frescos in a huge pillar-less
ballroom reminiscent of the
Doge’s Palace in Venice.
What struck me there was a pair of
sculptures – one of a warrior, the other
of a saint. It reminded me of the eagle in
the US national emblem, clutching a
quiver of arrows in one claw and an olive
branch in the other, though I’m not sure
we have the same depth of spirituality in
this country, or a comparable history of
honoring prophetic voices (not that
they’re always honored in India either).
Perhaps you can correct me, but I can’t
think of a widely revered prophetic
spiritual figure from the time of the
American Revolution who was willing to
speak out forcefully against, say, slavery
and white racism in the way that Gandhi spoke out against untouchability and Hindu-Muslim
violence in the drive for Indian Independence. There’s something profound about a country
revering a prophetic spiritual figure like Gandhi, not just as a latter-day visionary, but as part of
the very founding history and mythology of the nation…
Gandhi was from Gujarat, the state where my daughter lives and where we spent most of our
time, and Gujarat is in many ways better off economically than the rest of the country. The
roads are in great shape – there’s a four-lane superhighway through Gujarat as good as any
interstate. The buildings are in great shape, and construction is booming. And the captains of
industry all credit the business-friendly BJP state government with making Gujarat prosperous.
I got a chance to meet some of these captains of industry at a party hosted by my daughter’s
host father, who is a prominent entrepreneur in Gujarat, and it was sort of surreal playing
musical chairs (literally) on New Year’s Eve with the CEOS’s of various large Indian
manufacturing and agricultural firms on the lawn of the new resort my daughter’s host father is
building…
But I have to admit, I was most excited to read the news about the new
aam aadmi party or AAP, which is just over a year old and which has just
come to power in the national capital region of Delhi. Aam aadmi means
“common man,” so the AAP is sort of the party of the 99%, and they’ve
had a meteoric rise over the last year. They did fascinating things just in
the two weeks we were there. For example, they were deciding whether
or not to form a coalition
government with another
party, and so they
conducted thousands of
neighborhood caucuses
for people to have their
say.
When they did form a government, they immediately fulfilled their promises of free water and
reduced electrical bills for the poor, publicly declaring their willingness to lose power if that’s
what it takes to bring change. Newly-elected AAP officials have refused to live in government
mansions or accept government security, saying “the people are our security.” Rather than
riding in government limos, they travelled to their own swearing-in ceremony on the new Delhi
Metro subway system. The party symbol is a
broom for sweeping out corruption, and they’ve
set up a toll-free number for people to call and
report bribe-taking – no small deal in India – and
invited whistleblowers who’ve lost their jobs for
challenging corruption to apply to work in the
new government.
They’re setting up regular channels for people to voice their concerns AND suggest solutions.
They’re not pretending they have all the answers, but they’re inviting regular people to
participate in creating their own solutions and rebuilding their own neighborhoods. They’ve
been gaining tens of thousands of new supporters every day since coming to power in
December, and they’re suddenly a contender in the national elections coming up in May, so I’ll
be keeping an eye on the news from India this spring. I’m wondering if perhaps we’re seeing a
reincarnation of Gandhi’s ideals of democracy, of which he wrote:
“My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as
the strongest… No country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the
weak. Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism. True democracy cannot
be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the
people of every village.”
People often ask about the poverty, and yes, there is poverty in India – just as there is poverty
here in the US. But there is also wealth, culturally and otherwise, and there are signs of hope,
just as there were and are signs of genius. For example, the major political parties certainly
don’t see eye to eye, but they’re all talking about both economic growth AND social justice for
the poor. While it took two hours for our taxi to navigate the traffic jam from Mumbai airport
into the city, they’re already at work building a Metro there
that will slash that to a fraction of the time, one of more than
a dozen Metro systems being planned and built across the
country. There are
75,000 taxis in
Mumbai (a city of
21 million people),
but they’re all being
required to convert
to compressed
natural gas to cut
pollution.
The Indian railway system is one of the most extensive in world, and they’re investing hundreds
of billions of dollars in upgrading it. And Indian Railways has the largest computerized
scheduling system in world (bigger than healthcare.gov), and it works! I should have trusted it
when it said the trains to and from the Golden Triangle were full, but instead I listened to the
Western guidebooks which told me not to worry – we’d be able to get tickets. We ended up
having to use our host’s VIP privileges to get tickets to Delhi, and buying last-minute plane
tickets to avoid being stranded 700 km from daughter’s home on our return.
Of course, we were able to do that – we had the privilege. And as one of our host’s friends (an
Indian businessman who lives in Philadelphia) said, it’s all too easy for people in the US to get
hung up on little things going wrong—or even big things going wrong—when our expectation is
that everything will always go as we want and plan. He pointed to the example of an Indian
child who has to share a bike with her brother and her sister and the rest of her family. She’s
not complaining, he said, because as long as her family has a bike, she has a bike. As long as
there’s a computer in the house, she has a computer. Even our daughter has adopted this
attitude; we were amazed at her ambivalence about our bringing her her own laptop.
Sometimes it’s easier to enjoy life when you let go of the need to have a bike or a computer or
a plan of your own, when you let go of need to have control.
As for the relentlessness of it: it’s amazing what you can learn to live with, especially when you
start to learn how it works. By the end of our two weeks we were crossing that busy traffic
fairly confidently; what had seemed like utter chaos started to make sense as an orderly system
where the larger, faster vehicles have right-of-way over smaller, slower ones. What had
seemed like vendors just trying to cheat you by charging too much started to look more like a
relational system of buying and selling, where each side gets to feel better about the final price
because each side has gotten the other to give a little. I got to the point where I could eat
curries and masalas meal after meal without even noticing how much I was sweating from the
spiciness. And we even found ourselves enjoying the new Bollywood blockbuster Dhoom 3
(filmed in Chicago) even if the dialog was almost all in Hindi. Because you don’t always need
words to follow a story line, and wild action sequences, flashy dance numbers, pulsing music
and clever humor can cross cultural and linguistic boundaries—especially when you’re sitting in
a crowded theater with thousands of other human beings just like yourself all enjoying the
same thing. Even if they are sitting there eating curried rice and masala snacks instead of plain,
monotonous old popcorn…
On our final day we visited
Gandhi’s ashram at
Sabarmati, the place from
which he started the famous
Salt March to the sea to
break the British monopoly
on salt. I learned that
Gandhi’s vision for this
religious community was
to develop a group of people with the discipline and the commitment to lead the profound
social changes that needed to take place both within their own society and in relation to the
oppressive powers of the day. And I thought, isn’t that what a church could to be: a community
of people developing their capacity to play a leadership role in society’s transformation? More
about that some other time…