Friday 1 June 2018

Learning in First Retirement : India the way I see it

I do not consider myself very patriotic and given I spent a lot of time outside India, I try to look at it the way it is. I do not add spices. I do not wear a special "India is great" glass to look everything at positive spirits. Neither I block off the pains nor I feel terribly sad. I just look at the landscapes and the people of India with my eyes and keep observing. It is definitely not the greatest country on earth, but it is some country!!

Please note, I kept landscapes and people separate. Do not mix them. One is hurting the other. The billion of one kind are hurting and polluting the landscapes even if we are all part of the same nature.

India is not only the mountains of garbage lying in the beaches of Mumbai...
India meditates in the valleys, lakes and mountain peaks of  mighty Himalayas

India is not only the suffocating air of Delhi, Kolkata or Bangalore...
India breathes in the green western ghats and the waterfalls of Meghalaya after a refreshing monsoon

India is not only the streets of Jaipur with child hawkers selling some random things at 45 deg C...
India thrives in the smiles of little kids in school uniforms at remote villages 

India is not only the soul-crushing metro alleys where friends become strangers
India becomes lively in the corners of lazy small towns where everyone knows each other..

India is not only the traffic jams of Bangalore where bad infrastructure haunts Indian Silicon Valley..
India takes you in a roller coaster ride in the hair pin bends of its mountain roads

India is not only the undrinkable water polluted from sewage of unregulated industries
India flows in the Himalayan and rainy rivers meeting seas on both sides

India is not only the choked next generation not ready for the competition waiting for them.
India dreams through the eyes of  some 100 million school going children

India is this,that and much more.

For me, a year of continuous travel across India in the cheapest mode of transit revealed the parts I was never aware of. I threw myself out of the comfort zone. I fell, got angry, stood up and then I smiled. What India meant to me when I was 5, 15 or 25, is no longer the same.

Whether I physically stay in India or not, is irrelevant. India lives in my soul. My India is like a long lost friend. The sense of togetherness is impossible to ignore. Now I know where the heart and  soul of my birth country rest.

That is why India is a very weird country...you can love or you can hate but you can not ignore!!


Me discovering India!

PS: I wanted to put a pic of the garbage heap of Mumbai beach or the water clogged roads of Mumbai but I dropped the idea. Let the positive sides win in my blog (at least).