From ‘Saffron and Silk. An Australian in India’ by Anne Benjamin

Christopher Kremmer’s explanation of India today as ‘a secular society grafted onto a deeply spiritual society’ ………For centuries, India has balanced its cauldron of faiths and cultures with spectacular resilience…….

……….what it means to be poor as expressed by a Dalit (‘Untouchable’) poet in 1973. The poem, ‘Mother’, starts with children waiting alone at home in the dark in the early morning while around them they smell the food which other families are enjoying. One day, their mother is bitten by a snake and dies.

…In our nostrils, the smell of food. In our stomachs,

darkness

From our eyes, welling up, streams of tears.

Slicing darkness, a shadow heavily draws near.

On her head, a burden. Her legs a-totter.

Thin, dark of body ……my mother.

All day she combs the forest for firewood.

We wait her return.

When she brings no firewood to sell we go to bed hungry.

One day something happens. How we don’t know …

The day ends. So does her life …

Mother is gone. We, her brood, thrown to the winds.

Even now my eyes search for mother. My sadness grows.

When I see a thin woman with firewood on her head,

I go and buy all her firewood.

Warman Nimbalkar

……..a Tamil proverb……

What we have learnt is a handful of sand.

What we have not learnt is as big as this world.

………the man is – like every other Indian I have met – so proud of his country.