I heart India

There is that flickering moment, when the cyncism drops and I realize all the reasons why I love India. They include the following:

1. I love that I can take a yoga class 5 days a week with warm and funny instructors who chant their instructions in English with a Sanskrit bent (pleeeeeeeease to raiiiiiiise your right leg, namah) for a mere 250 Rs. a month (that’s 5 bucks)
2. I love that I can walk down the street and find a samosa man, a fruit man with 10 different kinds of mango, a chaat-valla with pani puri (crisp puffed puris filled with potatoes and chickpeas and a spicy/sour cumin water) or chana chor garam (crushed and fried chickpeas spiced with chilli pepper, salt, onion, lemon, and coriander), a man barbecuing corn. Sure, you will likely suffer mind-numbing diarrhea from eating from any of the vendors, but damn is it worth it.
3. I love the mind-numbing diarrhea. It makes you appreciate the mundane things in life, like a normal bowel movement.
4. I love my morning rickshaw commute—there is a thrill like being a small child on a scooter for the first time, and if a ride goes by without your life flashing before your eyes at least once because the rickshaw driver is on a suicide mission, well that’s really a ride wasted.
5. I love that the men I work with all get together with their tiffins and share all their food during lunch hour—chapattis, 5 different kinds of sabji (assorted array of spiced vegetables), fruits, and mitthais (sweets) flying this way and that.
6. I love that there is a 20-member troupe of monkeys that use the side of my building as a jungle gym. Sure, urban monkeys can be wicked and nasty, but there is nothing I love more than watching a mother with her new baby, her tiny arms wrapped around her as she climbs up the pipes, and joins the others peeking in and out of the holes, or clambering their way to the top looking for an open window to sneak in and find some stray food. (there was actually a monkey at the place I worked in Ahmedebad who would slap you on the ass if she saw you carrying a lunch tiffin—she terrified the attendants who were in charge of getting food.)
7. I love the way Indian people express themselves. The bluntness, the head waggle, the shouting at each other, the sing-song of Hindi they add to the way they speak in English.
8. I love that this country makes you think every minute of everyday. Little can be ignored if you are an outsider looking in. Your senses are assaulted on all sides, all the colors and activity and people, the noises, the odors and aromas, the spices and foods—your mind is constantly processing it all and can still never take it all in.
9. I love Bollywood—how ridiculous all the characters are, how impossible the stories.
10. I love how impossible this country is. 1 billion people, all (supposedly) with a voice in their government—and the country is actually moving forward. That’s not to say India doesn’t have its rather large share of problems, but countries have fallen apart on far less. India is a living example to the argument that there is some order to chaos.

These feelings of love served me well this weekend on my trip to Amritsar to see the Golden Temple. During the evening, we went to see the flag-lowering ceremony on the India-Pakistan border, complete with soldiers in comic uniforms exaggeratedly marching and scowling at each other during this daily ritual. The ceremony ends with theatrical handshaking, and one soldier from each side slowly lowering their country flags at the same time. On both sides of the gate that separate India from Pakistan, each country has erected a mini-stadium where the crowds pile up with their country flags and cheer on to the national anthem or to national cries such as “Hindustan, zindabad” (long live India).

But behind the whimsical ceremony is the other side—the scary electric wire fence that extends across the artificial border created by India and Pakistan after partition. And the sense that, between two countries where there is so much historical hatred, where there is still continued violent conflict over territory, and flaring up of religious violence (the worst recent case being in Gujarat last year when thousands of Muslims were basically allowed by the state government to be raped, killed, and burned alive in their homes)—you wonder how such a whimsical event evolved out of such a painful history. Do the soldiers have a Sunday morning practice when they go over their steps and critique each others’ performance? Do they talk about their families and their lives across the tall steel-iron gate? And is the ceremony really just a way of saying, well we have done terrible things to each other, but let’s just forget about it for half an hour of each day when all we really want to do is bring down our flags with a bit of ceremony, honor, and entertainment.

I had much time to ponder this, as you have to arrive at least an hour in advance to get a seat while the motivational nationalist/usher would alternate between shouting into his microphone “Hindustan, zindabad!” and “could everyone in the esstadium standing, please, kindly take to your seats!” while he marched up and down the aisles scolding anyone he had told more than once that they needed to stay seated.

While in Amritsar, we visited the Golden Temple twice—once during the day and once at night. There is little else to see in Amritsar other than the Golden Temple, so I wondered whether it was worth the 6 hour train journey just to see yet another religious structure. Turns out, it’s worth it. It’s more than the structure itself (which is pretty freaking amazing)—it’s the atmosphere of the place. With thousands of people coming in and out, it makes the serenity of the temple even more amazing. Amritsar brags that no one goes hungry in its city because the Golden Temple offers 3 free meals per day (and has the long line to prove it). And at nighttime, the marble corridors and walkways fill up with people spending the evening by the water and underneath the stars—some are pilgrims, others are homeless, but all are welcome at all hours during the day.

Most amazing of all, given all this activity is that the Golden Temple is CLEAN! We discovered a partial reason for this at 10:30 pm, when Guru Granth Sahib (the holy scripture) is put to sleep and the temple shuts down for 2 hours as the cleaning staff wipes, cleans, and polishes every inch of the place. We were lucky enough to be in the temple during the half hour right after the ceremony and right as the cleaning staff got started, so had the chance to wander around without the hoardes of people and admire the beautiful and intricate paintings on the ceilings, the carved doors for the windows, all gilded in gold, the colorful and fading paintings on the walls—outside, the temple is pure gold and inside, the temple is pure color.

The Golden Temple is the holiest site for Sikhs—Sikhism was born in northern India with strong influence from Muslim and Hindu traditions in the 15th century. While it is its own religion, has its own rules and traditions, and condemns certain practices (like Hindu “idol-worshipping”), its architecture, from buildings to religion seems a strange blend between Islam and Hinduism. Except, happily, the rules for women. I’ve been trained, when I am either in a Hindu or Muslim religious building, to always wonder where I am allowed or what I am allowed to do. At the Golden Temple, men and women sit (gasp) intermingled! There isn’t the sense there that women are polluters, or that it is their fault that men have “impure” thoughts not fitting of a holy place (never mind the idea that men should learn to control themselves) as is the case in certain Hindu temples in particular.

Now, that’s not to say I know anything about the deeper patriarchal issues in this religion as in any, but from brief visit into Sikhism, the traditions pleased my “Western” apathist feminist inclinations.

We passed the evening going into the temple, then sitting by the water for a while as we watched people settle in for the night. The Golden Temple is even more beautiful by night, when the lights give the temple a strangely translucent appearance, and the activity slows to a low buzz. Some people say the Golden Temple is the most amazing during Diwali, when 400,000 pack themselves into the compound to celebrate. I’m sure it’s an experience to be remembered, but I’ll take my temple experience with a mere 1,000 people and savor the (relative) peace and quiet of having the place (almost) to ourselves.

---

---