incoherent, but the best i could do...
diu--> palitana--> amdbd (i promise the vowels are only an english affectation)
amdbd (ahmedabad) is... well, whatever it is, there's a LOT of it. after the delicious desolation of the rest of gujarat this has been a slap awake. no more dreamy, sky-eyed wanderings because i would die. literally, i would die. in this place, i am completely convinced, no longer vaguely suspicious as in other parts of india, that people have NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON. i asked directions and the response was a circular wave. "o, so you want me trace the circumference of my asshole (to quote jarrad in oregon)?" yes. yes they do. i crossed the same intersection from every direction (of which there were six) and eventually got back to where i started and got on a bus. and don't take this as an idle complaint- every stage was at the risk of becoming a splatterly natterly. i don't know how people can live like this. but they do, and most of them are pretty friendly and happy. how?
a) indians are incredibly good-natured
b) indians are very good at ignoring things that might upset them
c) indians are insane
d) all of the above
e) none of the above
so. this is the land of the great soul? i spent most of the day at gandhi's sabarmati ashram and i didn't know what to think. i don't contest that gandhi was a great man, a compassionate man, a wise man... but i can't help but wonder if he was too much of an idealist. driving past the huge, nasty salt refineries in the desert i often wondered if gandhi could have anticipated that when he picked up his handful of salt in dandi. looking out from gandhi's prayer ground on the new bridges and factories lining the river i wondered what he would think of this india.
marco polo wrote of india that he had never seen a nation so proud of its own filth. 500 years later and i can't say that he was wrong. as i said in my last post, indians are who they are and i don't think anything can change that. maybe not even a mahatma. what can you do when the majority of the people are happy to say, "that's the way it is, so why fight it?" and indeed, if people are happy why do you need someone to come along and point out to them that they shouldn't be? and despite everything that i find abhorrent here i can't tell people that they shouldn't love their country because somehow i love it too.
people worship gandhi like a god, and maybe that's what troubles me. many people have told me they are hoping for a new gandhi to lead them in the 21st century. what good is so much sitting around hoping when you could be doing something for yourself? that's what gandhi taught, after all.
on the other side of my dilemma is young india, who seem to be rejecting gandhi entirely: abandoning spirituality for materialism and rejecting their own identity for their ideal of the west. why be a second rate united states instead of being a first rate india? i'm not arguing for india to remain "undeveloped" or culturally stagnant, i just wish that the country would have the guts to stand up and do things on its own terms. so many young people i meet seem to think that "the west is the best", but then i have to ask them, "if the west is so great, why are so many of us coming here?"
this has been a bit of a long rant, and as i'm sure you can tell, i'm not sure where i'm going with any of this... i guess my main point was that gandhi was a great man, but instead of worshipping his memory i think people need to think of ways to make his teachings relevant to the current age. independence is no longer the fight- dealing with interdependence is the new challenge. the world is getting smaller and smaller and "east" and "west" are getting more and more blurred. anyone who is west of one thing is east of another, anyone who is east of one thing is west of something else. people from the west are turning to eastern spirituality in droves as we start to feel that maybe we are more than just our bodies. people from the east are turning to western economics and business in droves as they start to feel that maybe they are nore than just their souls. will we be like to rivers flowing into the same ocean or will we simply muddy each other and disturb the other's banks?
posted by natalie at 7:15 AM
2 Comments:
it's interesting how people like to wait for other people to be their saviors, rather than acknowledging that they could just as easily be that person as the next. that seems to be a universal thing.
a girl in my class yesterday went on a rant about how we shouldn't expect the average person to make changes in the world, that's the job of the activist groups and lobbyists. but what good is an activist group without public support? what good is a gandhi without millions of people who are also passionate about his cause? what is a gandhi, a greenpeace, but an individual or group of people who care? be the change you want to see in the world, said great old gandhi. so how come we're all so content to let somebody else be the change we want to see, and we'll think about it later?
As for indian culture:
there was an interesting programme on the cbc about how vegetarianism is on the decline in india, and how young people want to be modern which is equated with eating meat and junk food. there is a huge backlash, with people burning non-veg restaurants that open in traditionally veg areas, and with a gap widening between young and old.
and diabetes and chronic health problems are coming along for the ride. scary stuff. who wants a culture like ours anyways, where we overeat ourselves to death and kill the world along with ourselves?
i guess really no culture is perfect; if only globalization meant we were all taking the best of each culture rather than the worst, as seems to be happening. why isn't india taking our more egalitarian stance on gender and class rather than our fast-food? why aren't we taking india's sense of community and connection rather than its quack gurus? perhaps because these things can't be bought - those things that don't have a price tag don't get to travel or survive in today's world.
oh so cynical.
but they do travel, in small numbers, through us, we're the carriers of those small things, remember what those travellers at the lodge in kodaikanal shared, what those women you filmed dancing at holi shared (where is that video by the way?)...we're the carriers though, the only media capable of carrying such fragile 'data'.
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