India is a mix pot of contradictions and extremes; the colours against often stark brown land and crumbling buildings. Try to imagine an India without all the colourful clothing and headscarves and it’d paint a depressing picture.
The poverty, slums backing onto multi million dollar houses. The most expensive house is the world is in Mumbai yet this same city is also home to the largest and most heavily populated slum.
This is India.
Fight her and you will end up frustrated. Don’t fight her and you’ll still end up exhausted by day’s end. But you’ll be happy with a belly fully of curry and dhal and if you’re lucky, a Kingfisher beer (although the ‘drinking outlet’ we in the Western world know is non-existent in India).
The slums run along the railway line on the way out of Delhi. Here children play on the empty tracks, throwing pieces of brick in a marble-style game. They laugh. They want for nothing, because they have nothing. They are really happy, this is all they know!
The social media meme of the African children springs to mind:
Our impact as a heavy consumer of the 21st century is also in your face here - because waste is heaped in deep piles on the side of every road, everywhere you may look. The street cows sift their wet noses through this junk for small pieces of food and, failing that, bits of paper and cardboard. As do the people that live on the streets. They make the rubbish their home, finding ways to remake into nifty eco-products. Street children get paid one rupee (a few cents) per plastic bottle submitted.
So amongst this chaos, this noise, this silence, the holiness and the poverty on top of the 1.2 billion heavy population - India makes sense. The pollution is awful, yet is a lifeline for many humans and animals (but not the environment, there’s no denying she is suffering severely under this massive overpopulation and this is heartbreaking).
Yet, from a systems point of view, India somehow works. Is it the love of chai, or cricket, or car horns, that act as the glue to hold it all together? Organised chaos or disorganised order perfectly demonstrate this. India is a walking oxymoron with a beating heart.
For a country steeped in spirituality and religion, it is sometimes hard to understand how these people can believe in a God, or in the case of Hinduism, a number of Gods. They are born into a certain caste, a 1,500 year old class system that supposedly helps maintain social harmony, which further dictates their long-standing position in society. And even then, this is all they know, and can having a learned faith in something that hints at a better life, or at least a better after-life, be such a bad thing? It is free to believe, after all, so what is the harm? Or is this spoken like a true atheist? In the case of all the Hindu deities, perhaps it is this colourful and busy spiritual structure that people warm to and are drawn to. A fortunate elephant, an attractive and alluring snake-charming lady, an all-seeing wise man. All playfully splashed into each tiny corner of the country (and this is said with the utmost respect). Who isn’t into that?
Many who tread the steps of India will say she is charming, yet challenging and perhaps this charm stems from the way she pushes one to their limits many a time and therefore promotes the change many who come look for. You can have a love hate relationship with her, she will churn out the faint hearted, the weak stomached, the impatient, and nurture those who move with her.
So let India take you. You will find you can talk forever of the history, the art, the pollution, the food, religion, musical instruments, mountains, the trinkets, whatever it is you’re looking for, chances are it’ll be hiding in the depths of her bell-jingling womb.
All your thoughts and feelings are energy, and energy is vibration. Learn to raise those vibrations and watch your life change dramatically. 1. Find something beautiful and appreciate it. Beauty is all around us, from the morning dew to the evening stars and everything in between. Most go
Water carves gorgeous, surprising patterns into our landscape and shapes our culture, food and traditions. Photographer Edward Burtynsky shows how we use and misuse this vital natural resource in the stunning photos above.
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