Ghandi was The Bee's Knees!

India. Into:

I've just returned from India. My first trip abroad, using my first ever passport. It was an incredible and overwhelming experience which I am even now still absorbing and making heads or "tales" of.
I told myself that when I finally did travel I'd like to really go somewhere. With the encouragement and well traveled enthusiasm of my sweet man I was supported in this endeavor and it happened.
India, from what little I saw of it, seems to be a place of juxtapositions. It's a place where beauty and filth collide and get tangled up in eachother. You can find yourself feeling awe and nausea from moment to moment.

It seems like it would be very hard, as an outsider and an american, to truly feel like a part of the Indian culture. Many of the people there are struggling in ways we will never know. That's not to say that people there don't seem happy or lively, au contriar, but they definately see us westerners as a financial opportunity in a place of few. While I can't hold it against anyone, it did dissapoint me to find it so difficult to bond with anyone aside from the wealthier Indians. Two weeks is such a short time, I'm sure more time and familiarity would help but I still found it evident that there would have to be a great deal of skeptism in the initial mix of mixings, before a genuine freindship based on friendship alone could be achieved. And I say that on both sides because I'm sure there is a great deal of exploitation that arises when westerners come to India and see the people as a fetish or a curiosity or worse:an opporunity to seem interesting in the mingling, rather than our fellow brothers and sisters.

For me the trip to India was a chance to feel new vibrations. I felt and remembered a lot of things I haven't conjured up for years if at all. It made me feel very helpless but also very introspective to have so little control over my environment.

On our last night before leaving Jaipur for Goa, a place to regroup, we sat on the steps at the largest movie theater there and watched the crowd. We had some time to kill before our train. I looked into the circus and noticed a man parked out front with his son. His son looked about 4 or 5 and was lying down in a stroller and wrapped in a blanket. The father was feeding him water and alternately both were begging to anyone who passed by. In between passers by they would rest and wait. This struck a huge nerve in me. We had seen lots of beggers everywhere in India. Many much more destitue and heartbreaking than these two. They were not the dirtiest nor the most poverty stricken people I'd seen. Yet for me this conjured up a very personal memory that I must have buried deep. I remembered being about 4 years old myself. My sister and I were in a double stroller.it was around dusk and getting darker as my mother pushed us beyond the enterance to the trailer park and out into the night. I noticed her putting her hand out. The desperation in her as she asked complete strangers she passed for a little money or food to feed us with. She and my father had seperated at the time and though it didn't last, things at that time were very uncertain. It connected me to the man and his little boy in a way I've never experienced before, this flashback. I felt less alien in that moment than any I experienced in India. I cried, and though I couldn't give anything to the two, for fear of encouraging begging to possibly corrupt degrees, in my heart I gave the two my deepest feelings of empathy and wishes for easier days.

I appreciate my good fortune and am very grateful to have overcome some of my more struggling days. I wish it were this easy for everyone. Love to all.

Namaste