From ‘Three-quarters of a footprint. Travels in South India’ by Joe Roberts

I don’t remember having jetlag in Bangalore, let alone culture shock. I felt at home there straight away, even if I was puzzled by what I saw and even when I saw wretched things….

I realized that Indian English wasn’t something quaint but a language in its own right, like American English….. Indian English is full of felicities and poignant poetry.

As I became familiar with this sort of conversation, I realized that many Indian men enjoyed dreaming up business schemes – and liked to think of themselves as entrepreneurs – but the brilliant notions generally went no further than the initial fantasy due to lack of capital.

Suchie told me her impressions of England. ‘It was small and very pretty. I didn’t like the food. Oh, Cadbury’s I liked but that was all.’

That was the first time in India that I felt homesick. But it wasn’t true homesickness, more of a general self-doubt. I wondered if I really liked the country and, if so, enough to stay until October? Could I cope with the people? They were pleasant enough and king to me and much polite and more considerate of each other than people at home …but who could I talk to and, more to the point, laugh with? The Indian sense of humour seemed completely incompatible. I wondered if I’d ever get used to the squalor, the beggars, the flyblown pi-dogs and the ghastly faecal smell of the streets. And then I considered the myriad inconveniences and inefficiencies of everyday life, the difficulty of making a telephone call or buying a railway ticket, for instance, or the days without running water, and this line of thought made me feel disappointed in myself. Such gloomy considerations led to a general malaise and I found myself unable to go back to sleep.

‘Which is better,’ asked Atul, ‘in your opinion, Wendy’s or Burger King?’ Dr Lal thought for a moment then gave a cryptic answer: ‘I believe America is whatever you are looking for. It is there to be found.’ Atul nodded, like the follower of a guru, absorbing some great wisdom.

The travel agents were three identical brothers who looked like pigeons. They always hedged their bets by saying it would be nearly impossible to find a place on such a train or bus (usually because it was a religious holiday) but they would see what they could do. That way, if they got you a ticket you were grateful and if they didn’t, they had a good reason. Generally they managed to get me the tickets I wanted.

Indian public lavatories are nearly always vile, even those in decent restaurants (whereas domestic bathrooms are immaculate) and it took me a while to work out why they let them get so bad. It is to do with the caste system and ‘pollution’ laws; public lavatories are cleaned by bhangis, the lowest of untouchables and very little concern is shown for them and their repellent livelihood. Something nearer contempt prevails. The attitude seems to be: what difference does it make to a bhangi whether you shit down the hole or on the floor?

….Hampi……The region is rich with legend and history and the weird combination of the two that is an Indian commonplace….. Partly its due to a very diverse set of chronologies; calendars varied from kingdom to kingdom and events were difficult to date precisely; this vagueness allowed a good deal of fanciful historic interpretation and the interpreters of history were invariably priests with an outlook attuned to the divine and miraculous…

….I’d often heard similarities between traditional Celtic music (as performed by the Chieftains or Alain Stivell) and Indian music

Dogs, horses, cows, even cats, have eyes that we can recognize emotion in, emotions that we imagine correspond with our own; not so with goats, they are inscrutable creatures. Is that the reason for the old demonic connection, that alien gaze?

At Mandya we stopped for breakfast at a canteen run by the tourist board: two big, bright, light-blue halls and stern notices in English and Kannada: Let Not Your Conversation Be A Nuisance To Others and No Political Activities Will be Tolerated.

A notice was stuck on a pillar….concerned a missing seven-year-old boy. The most poignant detail was that his complexion was described as ‘Bournvita’. That struck me as particularly heartbreaking, so obviously a loving mothers notion. I was reflecting on the poor mothers agony when a tall beggarwoman approached me with a printed card. It was a catalogue of misfortunes, all misspelt. The first couple of lines said that she was an epileptic, that she had fallen down a well and had been struck dumb with shock, that her parents were too poor to support her ….I got the drift and, still saddened by the ‘Bournvita’ child, gave her ten rupees – a generous amount when fifty paise is the normal donation, though ten rupees is less than fifty pence. She must have spread the word among other beggars because soon I was being approached from all sides by ragged figures. The pleasant anonymity that I’d been enjoying evaporated.

….I recognized the smell of Madras, burning rubber and low-octane fuel, that I’d mistaken for the chimerical ‘Smell of India’. Since then I’d come to the conclusion that there were distinctive smells that one associated with particular cities or areas of cities and that a generalized Indian smell would be as hard to isolate as a generalized English one; though it seems to have become a literary convention that the whole subcontinent has a uniform pungency.

….unsophisticated Americans whom I discovered, by eavesdropping, to be missionaries, evangelists with bovine expressions …When I heard of their conversation, with its inherent assumptions of racial, cultural and moral superiority, I found intensely irritating. They sounded far less educated and open-minded than the average Brahmin priest whose teachings they had come to refute.

I was always impressed by this spontaneous Indian capacity for friendship. It made me ashamed that so often, out of shyness, I was standoffish….

…..it seemed to me that Hinduism was flexible and multifaceted enough to adapt infinitely without compromising any of its essential truths, and far less oppressive than either Islam or Christianity could be in many other nations.

There were lots of people washing, cleaning their teeth, scraping their tongues with U-shaped wires attached to their toothbrushes. The colour and texture of one’s tongue is a matter of daily concern to the health-conscious Indian.

I found Indian ‘classical’ music perfect for long train journeys; time passed so slowly that one entered a sort of trance and then the music unfurled like a sequence of short vivid dreams. There was a similarity to the serious jazz of John Coltrane, the same transcendent quality and the feeling of going over and over a melody as if trying to break free some divine message encoded in the notes. Also, as in jazz generally, the instruments seemed to speak or sing as extensions of the human voice. It was as if the landscapes that I could see through the bars of the windows (the glistening paddies, green plains, nullahs stirring back to life with the rains) were being described by the music. That’s exactly right, I kept thinking.

Late in the evening we came to Itarsi. It was drizzling. Cows ambled along the platform….

….two snake-charmers….The melody that they played sounded vaguely Scottish to me…..

Outside, on a wooden pole, were three loudspeakers, the old-fashioned kind that one associates with holiday camps. Intermittently, highly distorted film music would blast out. It was unbelievably loud, an awful screeching, all treble and no bass. I asked the green-eyed proprietor how he could stand it and he told me that it was an idea devised by the Chamber of Commerce (of which he was a member) to encourage shoppers. ‘You see, all these songs are very high in the hit parade.’

…..Benaras. I’d read about it but reading hadn’t prepared me for the crowds, the clamouring, the lunatic intensity of it all. Whatever I thought that I understood of Hinduism flew from me. All the colour and noise that I loved about India were concentrated here into an experience that was weird and alarming. No frame of reference to cling to, nothing familiar, I was out of my depth in a great flood of people. ….Benaras is, more than anywhere else in India, a city of conmen. All Westerners, probably all visiting Indians, are fair game. Cheats and swindlers abounded in the great places of Christian pilgrimage after all. ….Benaras from the river was stunning. A three-mile long cliff of massive and dilapidated masonry. Platforms, temples, staircases and passageways, vast decaying palaces rising in layers from the filthy water. It was like a monstrous Venice, a vision to thrill Piranesi, the fever-dream of a Gothic novelist, the opium hallucination of a doomed French Symbolist. The sun, through the damp mist, was a great yellow beam, Ravi leered at me. ‘Master, single man? You’d like to meet Benaras girl, true virgin?’ I ignored him. ‘Master prefer strong Indian boy, maybe?’

….I listened to mournful sarangi music all the way to Mysore, like rainclouds being sawn in half. At Maddur I bought some idlis from a vendor. Just as I was biting into the first one, I looked out of the train window and on the platform there was a pi-dog with a length of tapeworm hanging from its anus; I was so put off that I threw the idlis to the poor creature, who devoured them with one gulp. An old blind man came down the aisle playing a penny whistle. He was led by a girl who held out a cloth sack for coins. It seemed a Dickensian arrangement.

In front of Mysore Station I stood in line for a rickshaw. A man …..came out of the station and waved to me. He walked over, it seemed that he knew me. But I couldn’t place him. ‘My good friend, hello! How fine it is to see you!’…. ‘At the precise moment I leave the station my eyes land on you! I think, truly, this is auspicious.’ Where had we met before? ‘Ah, a philosophical question. But who can describe the previous life cycle? Perhaps we were brothers? But is not the world one family? Are we also not brothers in this life?’ So he didn’t know me at all? I waited for it. ‘Like you I have just arrived in Mysore. My home is Channapatna. A terrible fire has destroyed my dwelling place…’

….watching Hindi movies generally, made me feel an absolute outsider. The films went against all my Western notions of taste ….these…films seemed vulgar and idiotic…most of the heroes were too stout to dance convincingly. The heroines spent a lot of time fleeing from these portly figures who seemed anxious to kiss them….a heroine would confront her pursuer and then their two faces would fill the screen, their lips drawing closer and closer – at the last possible moment, she would turn away and resume her avian trilling. Then the frustrated hero, presumably for relief, would jerk his pelvis, dog-like, against a tree trunk, or lie stomach-down on the grass with his great bottom bobbing up and down suggestively.

I passed a noisy temple; there were shouted prayers and somebody was banging a drum and it struck me that all that wacky exuberance was closer to the heart of Hinduism than the lofty platitudes of spiritual philosophers.

‘Rain will be coming in one week or two weeks or three weeks,’ said the waiter, hedging his bets meteorologically.

Madurai had more holy cows than any city I’d been to….An elephant came swaying out of an alley, led by its keeper, heading for the temple. None of the merchants or shoppers paid it any more attention than they would have paid a delivery van.

I decided to swim but, remembering the floating turds around the bathing ghat, thought it wise to walk in the other direction and find a clean stretch of water.

Kathakali is the famous dance-drama of Kerala. Stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are acted out by extraordinary dancers in the most spectacular costumes…..I suppose it was all a bit like the spectacles at Versailles and the courtly masques of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A proper Kathakali performance lasts all night …..The movements of the face have become central to the drama. The nine rasa ,dramatic emotions (tranquility, fear, loathing, desire, wonder, courage, pathos, anger and ridicule) are expressed with the weirdest distortions of the facial muscles and, if the lecturer hadn’t announced each one, I’d never have guessed them. They all seemed to express the same thing to me – that the dancer was about to sneeze

By and large, a drunken Indian is nothing to worry about; alcohol brings out a floppy silliness, that’s all – one rarely comes across the confused and pent-up fury that can make a northern-European drunk so threatening.

Somebody, right outside my door, was clearing his throat in the loudest possible manner. It took him a good five minutes to do. Its more like clearing the lungs than just the throat. I’d watched men performing this elimination, the whole neck and chest racked with convulsive spasms…..This obsession with mucus is hard to understand. In certain areas the dust might have something to do with it. There are also breathing exercises that figures in yoga and breathing itself has religious significance (Prana). Perhaps the elimination of mucus is to ease breathing. But women have to breathe as well as men and I’d never encountered a female ‘hawker’…..mucus does hold a real horror for most Indians. To carry a used handkerchief in one’s pocket is about as unthinkable as carry used lavatory paper about.

Spoken Malayalam, which is sometimes compared to the noise of peas rattling in a tin cup, does sound extraordinary, unlike any other Indian language. It has a lot of ‘clanging’ sounds ….

The Black Jews, including the Bene Israel community up the coast in Bombay, probably number a couple of thousand still. I was told that quite a few had gone to Israel but had been treated badly and had since returned.

From ‘The Crown Prince. The Gladiator. The Hope. Battle for Change’ by Ashutosh

Anti-Muslim sentiment has been the core of RSS ideology. M.S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak of the RSS, wrote of Indian Muslims in his book Bunch of Thoughts, which, incidentally, has mysteriously disappeared from the public domain. ‘It would be suicidal to delude ourselves that they have turned patriots overnight after the creation of Pakistan. On the contrary, the Muslim menace has increased hundredfold by the creation of Pakistan which has become a springboard for all their future aggressive designs on our country.’

Patel was strongly opposed to a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, which the RSS has been propagating since its inception in 1925. In February 1949, Patel had said, ‘Hindu Raj is a mad idea, it will kill the soul of India.’

…Patel as home minister was instrumental in banning the RSS…he obliquely blamed the RSS for the assassination of Gandhiji. In his letter dated 11 September 1948 to Golwalkar, Patel wrote, ‘All the speeches were full of communal venom …and it was because of this poison that the country had to suffer the death of Gandhiji …RSS members celebrated Gandhiji’s death and distributed sweets.’ Sardar Patel had written a similar letter on 18 July 1948 to Shyama Prasad Mukerjee who later founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Patel wrote, ‘Due to the activities of the RSS an atmosphere was created in which such a barbaric act could be executed.’ Patel pressurized the RSS to profess loyalty to the Indian Constitution, salute the Indian tricolor, write their own constitution, abjure violence, limit their activities to the cultural sphere and never indulge in politics. Only when the RSS accepted these conditions was the ban lifted.

George Orwell had this to say about politics and politicians: ‘All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.’

From ‘Until my Freedom has Come. The New Intifada in Kashmir’ Edited by Sanjay Kak

Suvir Kaul

Kashmiris have seen too much suffering over the past two decades (and before) not to see themselves as at the receiving end of the policies of an imperial state. The security apparatus is too visible and intrusive on a daily basis to be understood as anything other than a reminder of an occupation force and a subject people. And there has been no justice offered for even the most egregious acts of violence committed by the military, the paramilitary, or the police. There have been spectacular instances of murder, torture and rape, and no immediate moves to bring criminals to justice ……

….the highly intrusive security footprint to think about, I had travelled in Punjab in the worst years of the Khalistan movement, and I remember just how humiliating and fear-inducing it was to be stopped and questioned over and over again, to have your car searched, and occasionally to be patted down. This is how Kashmiris have lived for twenty years now. No one goes anywhere, even in times of relative peace, without being aware of surveillance and check-points. An entire generation – the young on the streets now – have grown up with no other sense of the Indian state. India is the jawan who slaps you because it has been a long day and you are less patient in the checking-line than he would like. India is the officer who smiles sardonically as you are pushed to the ground and kicked for good measure; India is the force that tears you and your family from your home to stand around for hours as entire neighbourhoods are cordoned off and searched. And this is low-level business. There have been far harsher crimes committed by state agents, but no one has been punished, and that fact alone rankles and will not die.

Sanjay Kak

For a people bruised and battered by fifteen years of an armed struggle, every single mechanism by which they could find representation, or hope to be heard, or access minimal justice, had been dismantled and put away, Elections, the judicial process, the rule of law: all had been hollowed out. In their place we had the draconian provisions of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and the Public Safety Act (PSA). Despite the fact that an elected legislature was in place, real power was widely regarded as lodged in three specific sites: Badami Bagh, Srinagar’s cantonment, where the corps headquarters of the Indian Army are located; Gupkar Road, where a slew of Indian intelligence agencies are based; and Raj Bhawan, formerly the maharaja’s palace, now the governor’s home. (Kashmiris don’t fail to make the obvious connection that all three sites are implicated in a century of highly oppressive rule by the Dogra maharajas.)

Aaliya Anjum and Saiba Varma

Since 1989, civilian life in Indian-administered Kashmir has been governed through the presence of more than half a million troops, making the region the most heavily militarized zone in the world. This despite the fact that last year, official government figures put the number of militants operating in the Valley at less than 500.

Ravi Nessman

More than two decades of brutal warfare between largely Muslim separatist insurgents and largely Hindu Indian troops in this Himalayan region have left Kashmiris exhausted, traumatized and broken. The rate of suicide, once unthinkable in this Islamic society, has gone up twenty-six-fold, from 0.5 per 100,000 before the insurgency to 13 per 100,000 now ….Drug abuse is epidemic. Depression, stress and mental illness are rampant …..

Gautam Navlakha

When post-colonial states deploy troops to bring a rebellious people, formally their ‘own people’, to submission, and hand over that area to the military, then in actual fact they act as an alien force. The relationship that ensues between the military force and the people is akin to that between a subject people and their imperial masters. The military force seeks to restore the authority of the state on a reluctant people, however long it takes to do so. ….The reason we do not perceive it as war is that it takes place within the borders of the nation-state, where the deployment of the armed forces of the union is somehow considered legitimate, even when it is engaged in suppressing our ‘own’ people.

…..1 August 2006 …there were more than 6,67,000 security forces in the state. This is an incredibly high concentration of troops for an area whose total population is not more than ten million …one soldier for every fourteen-fifteen people.

There cannot be any dialogue inside an army camp

-          Yirvun Kreel

Nitasha Kaul

IOK has never been an indisputable part of India …It is no coincidence that Kashmir and the North-East were two of the least involved regions during the nationalist freedom struggle which led to India’s independence, and it is these regions which have remained least understood in the mainstream nationalist imagination.

From ‘India. A guide to the experience’ by David Stuart Ryan

….at Kolva this shoreline is the second longest in India, 40 miles of uninterrupted clean white sand …..there are only four longer beaches in all the world.

In Bombay everything has a price, and everyone is trying to sell something. Is it the way all India has to go?

….15,000 feet plateau of Tibet, that begins in Afghanistan and stretches 1500 miles to Burma, that is still uncharted territory in many areas.

Nepal, everyone will rightly tell you, is a place to unwind and relax after the sheer intensity of India and its constant stunning of the senses. Women in particular find it a relief to get away from the Hindu prurient interest in white bodies and be among a people who have always accepted an active role for the female. ….Mountain people, the world over, have a vigour and matter of factness about them that instantly reveals the affectations of ‘civilisation’.

Behind this pantheon of gods and goddesses, lies a worship of Shiva and Shakti, the male and female regenerative forces. India has preserved from its long past a respect for our own creative powers, a belief in their consecrating effect. Where we seek to subdue, the Hindu seeks to be at one with the natural forces. It is the recipe for the ease of tension that the West has induced in itself by a denial of our deepest drives, believing them to be base. Hinduism would disagree.

The streets of India are alive with human bustle – no other country can match both the sheer intensity and variety of street life …..

The women of India … Even though during the day they will have worked in the fields, fetched and carried, looked after children, tidied their house, all done with a tread of light grace and a perfectly straight back.

The magic of an Indian dawn. The intensity of the light in India is wholly different from that of Europe, and brings a drama to the opening of any day that has to be experienced to be understood.

From ‘Kabul Blogs. My Days in the Life of Afghanistan’ by Anita Anand

"Children, everybody, here's what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment."

- Maxine Hong Kingston

Almost all the Afghans I met had a story about loss of loved ones and homes, of migration and return, of sadness and hope. But this experience did not seem to have made them angry or bitter. Just sad.

The fighting that erupted among the vavious mujahideen factions eventually helped to spawn the Taliban….. More than a quarter of the population of 28 million was displaced during this period and between one and two million people were killed – around five per cent of the population. Physical and social infrastructure was devastated…..Girls schools were closed down all over the country. In 2002, only five per cent of women were literate, 54 per cent of girls under the age of 18 were married, and the maternal mortality rate was the second highest in the world, with an estimated 15,000 women dying each year from pregnancy-related causes.

As an Indian, I was greeted by many Afghans on the streets as Indian movies and film music have endeared us to the Afghans. Many sought refuge across the border in Pakistan and India and knew Urdu, and there are DVDs of Hindi movies in many stores.

History is the third parent.

- Nadeem Aslam

Day or night, Kabul is a quiet city. One hardly hears horns, music or loud voices. Breaking this silence is the roar of generators, usually diesel driven, that make up for the lack of power in the city.

This has resulted only 25 per cent of Afghanistan’s estimated 28 million people having access to clean water.

William Dalrymple, while describing the glorious history of Istalif in Return of a King - The battle for Afghanistan, says,

Istalif was always renowned as one of the most beautiful places in Afghanistan. The Emperor Babur fell in love with it in the 16th century and used to hold parties in his rose garden and summer house there. Alexander Burnes, a British political agent to Dost Mohammed in the 19th century, had come here to relax amid the walnut trees. He described the mountain streams as full of fish and the rich orchards and vineyards.

I loved my students; They were attentive, curious, and well behaved . Besides being regular journalists, they were poets and philosophers. I looked at them and wondered how a country with so many years of war and devastation could produce young people with such little malice, anger or hurt. They appeared calm and untroubled, mature beyond their age. When I shared this with expat friends, one said that it is possible they are this way because they had no childhood. Given the situation of war and conflict in Afghanistan since the late 1980s, this is probably true.

Afghan children suffered during the civil wars fought among different factions between 1989 and 2001, when many were recruited into militias. They were kidnapped and sold as terrorists by members of the Northern Alliance to the US special forces, for $5,000 each

Despite these horrors, the students in my classes were polite, respectful and wanted to learn. 

Afghanistan has the worlds second highest maternal mortality rate, and the highest infant and child mortality rate.

In 2005, Afghanistan produced 87 per cent of the world’s poppy, and of the country’s total population of 25 million, 920,000 were estimated to be drug users in 2006. These figures stand out more as ninety-nine per cent of Afghans are Muslims; according to Islam, all drugs used as intoxicants (khan) are forbidden (haram)……….

When the Taliban were in power from 1996 to 2001, they banned poppy cultivation, but they could not stop the smuggling of harvests from previous years, And once the Taliban was defeated, farmers went back to cultivating poppy…….The reason poppy cultivation is extremely popular in Afghanistan is its harsh topography, where growing poppy is not only easier than some other crops, but also one that guarantees a high yield and a big market.

….Cardozo [the psychiatrist] and her team found that almost 80 per cent of the local people in Afghanistan harbor feelings of hatred and revenge.

….he remarked… that this was the only country in the world where even diplomats had dirt under their nails.

About 35 per cent of Afghans are Pashto speaking, and 50 per cent speak Afghan Persian or Dari. Most Afghans are bilingual. In Kabul, Dari is more widely spoken, with the change of regime from the Pashto-speaking Taliban to the Dari-speaking Northern Alliance. Other languages are Turkic, Uzbek and Turkmen (about 11 per cent).

A popular Afghan saying….. “Women are made for homes or graves.”

……….with the rugged Hindu Kush mountains in the backdrop, we reached the most spectacular expanse of blue water I had ever seen. The Band-e-Amir is a National Park with lakes separated by natural dams made of travertine – a form of limestone deposited by mineral springs, especially hot springs. Band-e-Amir literally means ‘commander’s dam’, a reference to Imam Ali, the first Imam of the Shia Muslims and the fourth caliph of the Sunni Muslims. The area is dominated by ethnic Hazaras, who make up around nine percent of Afghanistan's population, and are followers of Shia Islam.

The amazing thing about Kabul is that no matter how bad the traffic is, Afghans do not honk, unlike us Indians.

…..commonly held view among many Afghans I meet. They lay the blame for the state of their country squarely on Pakistan, Russia and the US, often in that order.

…..many Afghans who have studied in India. The low cost of living, scholarships, familiarity with the country’s culture and language, good relations between governments, easy-to-obtain visas, and the use of English in the classroom are some of the reasons Afghans like to study in India, especially for those who cannot afford to go to Europe and the United States to study. The largest concentrations of Afghan students is in Pune… Some Afghans choose Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkey.

Pakistan and Iran were once top destinations, but that is no longer the case. Visa rules for Iran have become stringent in recent years, while Pakistan has become unpopular among students and the state. Many say people with Pakistani degrees do not find jobs as easily as those with degrees from India. India is a cheap and quality option.

Many young women I meet in Kabul have also studied in India. They tell me that it was the best time of their lives, they felt free and loved being there. Many say it is their second home.

From ‘Rain in the Mountains. Notes from the Himalayas’ by Ruskin Bond

‘I liked Gandhi,’ says Sir E [Edmund Gibson]. ‘He had a sense of humour. No politician today has a sense of humour. ….But not Gandhi. He took his work seriously, but not himself. When I went to see him in prison, I asked him if he was comfortable, and he smiled and said, “Even if I was, I wouldn’t admit it!”’

I reserve the afternoons for doing nothing. ‘Silence and non-action are the root of all things,’ says Tao. Especially on a drowsy afternoon.

‘I don’t mind being dead, but I shall miss being alive.’

Looking up old books, I was surprised to learn that the potato wasn’t known in India before the nineteenth century, and now its an essential part of our diet in most parts of the country.

‘Will it last?’ asks Kailash. ‘This feeling of love between us?’

‘This wont last. Not in this way. But if something like it lasts, we should be happy.’

In the evening, I find Prem teaching his wife the alphabet, using the kitchen door as a blackboard. It is covered with chalk marks. Love is teaching your wife to read and write!

There is a protective atmosphere about an English public school; an atmosphere which, although it protects one from the outside world, often exposes one to the hazards within the system.

A Quiet Mind

Lord, give me a quiet mind,

That I might listen;

A gentle tone of voice,

That I might comfort others;

A sound and healthy body,

That I might share

In the joy of walking

And leaping and running;

And a good sense of direction

So I might know just where I’m going!

They cut down last spring

With swift efficient tools,

The sap was rising still.

The trees bled,

Slaughtered

To make furniture for fools.

….deodar ….from the Sanskrit deva-daru (divine tree). It is a sacred tree in the Himalayas; not worshipped, nor protected in the way that a peepul is in the plains, but sacred in that its timber has always been used in temples, for doors, windows, walls and even tools. Quite frankly, I would just as soon worship the deodar as worship anything, for in the beauty and majesty it represents Creation in its most noble aspect.

No one who has lived amongst deodar would deny that it is the most godlike of Himalayan trees. It stands erect, dignified …..Where one deodar grows, there will be others. Isolate a young tree and it will often pine away.

‘We are all worms.’ Declared Winston Churchill in 1906. ‘But I do believe that I am a glow-warm.’

‘We shall not spoil what we have by desiring what we have not, but remember that what we have too was the gift of fortune’
(Epicurus)

‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’
(Soren Kierkegaard)

…..I passed beneath a canopy of oak leaves. I felt that I was a part of the forest. I put out my hand and touched the bark of an old tree, and as I turned away, its leaves brushed against my face, as if to acknowledge me.

One day, I thought, if we trouble these great creatures too much, and hack away at them and destroy their young they will simply uproot themselves and march away – whole forests on the move – over the next range and the next, far from the haunts of man. I have seen many forests and green places dwindle and disappear.

‘Who goes to the Hills, goes to his Mother.’ So wrote Kipling, and he seldom wrote truer words. For, living in the hills was like living in the bosom of a strong, sometimes proud, but always comforting mother.

When you have received love from people, and the freedom that only the mountains can give, then you have come very near the borders of heaven.

The Fern

The slender maidenhair fern grows firm on a rock

While all around her the water swirls and chatters

And then disappears in a rush

Down to the bottom of the hill.

When I’m surrounded by troubled waters, Lord,

Let me find within a rock to cling to,

And give me the quiet patience of the maidenhair

Who has learned to live with the rock.

At a rough calculation, I must have read over 15,000 books in my lifetime

From ‘Destination India. From London overland and to India’ by Lloyd L Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph

….Police still as nice as all the Austrian police we met.

…impressions of Macedonia: this is a wild, avid, hilly land. The scrub on the hillsides barely seems to survive..

…impressions of Yugoslavia: this is a poor country …It is still predominantly rural and unmechanized ….The rural people seemed cheerful, particularly in Serbia. In Croatia, they looked more sullen, waved less. But these are rather swift, visceral reaction. Much of the country is very pretty – the bottomlands along the Autoput with their luscious swamp growth and water birds, the green farmland of Serbia, and even the dry hills of Macedonia where only sunflowers grow in large fields. We were sorry we missed the coast which is said to be the most beautiful. …Shoes are expensive and quite without style. Very, very few people look neat and well dressed in a middle class sense, although the rural people dress neatly and appropriately. We didn’t become aware of how poorly the white collar types looked until we arrived in Greece and saw the men in the cities and some in the villages in their clean, white, freshly pressed open-collar shirts and freshly whitened shoes. (India too, when we arrived there, displayed a more respectable looking petty bourgeoisie than Yugoslavia.) Though we saw exceptions, the overall impression in Yugoslavia was that ironing boards and pure colors didn’t exist – everyone in the cities had a drab, unironed look. This applied to the army as well. The officers often looked snappy, but the quality of enlisted uniforms – of pale green, poor quality cotton – and the way they were maintained was rather amateurish. We saw the army everywhere – every town had an installation of some sort

….we returned to the old technique of boiling laundry to get it white.

People along the road on the Turkish side didn’t look confidence-inspiring, but rather shifty and cheerless.

The ladies on the streets of Istanbul include an extraordinary number of slim, full-bosomed, well-built women, many of them beautiful and quietly sultry.

…impressions of Turkey: these fierce looking little people are very hospitable, much more so than their unshaven faces would indicate, and incredibly curious …we loved the country and found it very beautiful….

The Persians are considerably taller than the Turks, with more open faces and a more refined appearance.

Relations among men from Turkey on seemed much warmer than in the west. There is a great deal of unselfconscious display of physical tenderness between them – holding hands and embracing are common. Perhaps the fact that women are not usually companions here, but keepers of the home and bearers of children who have no knowledge of the outside world makes companionship of men more intense.

The Afghans alone of all the people we met in the Middle East and South Asia, were totally unapologetic about their lack of knowledge of western manners and ways. (Kabul may be an exception.) Elsewhere we had found people apologizing if they couldn’t speak English. Here there was some surprise that we couldn’t speak Pharsee or Pushtoo. An Indian acquaintance who spent time in jail as a nationalist has told us that he is often unintentionally resentful of westerners because “I forget that we are free.” The Afghans have no such colonial memory, and none of the inferiority feelings associated with such a memory. If they are hostile to a westerner, they are hostile because westerners are infidels with doubtful customs and ways of life, not because the recollection of dominion makes westerners both admirable and hateful. The Afghan does not (yet) suffer from the love-hate conflict that seems to bother the peoples of former colonial areas in their relations with the west. His pride is undamaged.