Leaving soon...

This is my last full day in India. Tomorrow I leave on a long trek back home. Although at times this trip seemed so painstakingly long, at the same time I feel that time flew by.
I have to admit that I’ve had a tumultuous love affair with India. It certainly started with a volatile courtship. Perhaps it’s because our first date was in Mumbai, one of the most crowded and polluted cities in the world, and one where the disparities of class and status are blatantly obvious.

It’s when I left Mumbai that I began to see the country and its people for what and who they are. It’s difficult to explain what it’s like in India. There is so much diversity; both in the landscape and in its cultures. It is large crowded cities with high-tech enterprises and new wave architecture – but at the same time it’s deserts, jungles, and oceans. Each state has a dialect and a culture within its own. There are longstanding traditions and customs, intermixed with the influences of colonialization and globalization.
I found an excerpt in the Times of India the other day from a man called Ramachandra Guha who attempted to explain the Indian experience. I cut it out. It stuck with me.
“India is the most daring, not to say most reckless, political experiment in human history. Never before has a territory so disparate and diverse constructed as a single nation. Never before was a population so poor and illiterate given the vote. Given India’s size, its poverty and its colonial past, the history of this experiment can certainly be illuminating for other countries. Given the staggering diversity of religions, languages and cultures that this experiment contains, Western nations now coping with mass immigration can learn from it too.”

Throughout the day today I’m going think of my lessons learned here in India. I need to be able to share those with my family when I get back. That was the point of this after all wasn’t it?
Perhaps I’ll have to do all of this thinking lounging by the pool today.
Come on, it’s my last day before I go back to my hectic chaotic life that I love so much.

I will bask in these last moments of solitude.

On that note, I leave you with this picture that I took yesterday evening at dinner in Vagator, Goa. It was our view from our table.