Just Back From India

It is a defining moment of the Indian experience. For a moment, before or if you adjust, your senses are overwhelmed by the exotic fragrance of the sub-continent. From here, depending on your appetite for this concoction, you are either drawn in like a besotted lover by the magic and mysteries of this unique land or repelled by the complexities and contradictions found only here and nowhere else.

To the untrained eye India is chaos, a festival of colour and noise and dust and crowds. It seems the whole place is zig- zagging to avoid collision, disaster and death. Traffic, in a furious panic, clogs the roads to the ceaseless accompaniment of blaring horns. After a while you only notice the noise in the rare moment when there is none. Endless processions of people make a living theatre of the streets. Bejeweled ladies in a rainbow of sari’s jostle for space with imploring merchants and pleading beggars. Steaming footstalls emitting their intoxicating perfume into the dense air spill on to the roads teasing the senses.

Scratch the surface though and you find that beneath the chaos order of the most administered kind shepherds and shape these billion souls into some kind of serene purpose. Years of English rule have created a piece of paperwork, a queue and a reason for every meaningful and meaningless activity. Perhaps it is necessary though to keep the whole place from sliding into madness. Like the heads of its inhabitants, India may wobble, but it never falls.

India is a tapestry of religions, creeds and languages that, somehow in these sour times, co-exist for the most part in harmony and respect. In fact, religion along with cricket and bureaucracy is what defines and gives form to the Indian character.

Everywhere you go you will be asked what religion you are and met with a smile longer and broader than the Ganges if it happens to be the same as that of the questioner. If, in the same exchange, you are able to enrich the conversation with your views on Sachin Tendulkar’s recent form slump and express your disgust at the latest government corruption scandal you are no longer just a visitor but a newly born son or daughter of the nation.

South India . Hotter, more humid and more laid back than it’s northern counterpart. Beaches stretch along the coastline like a cooling balm, magnificent and surprising temples nestle amongst palm fringed countryside holding their mysteries deep inside their colourfull walls. Cows wander contentedly in the streets, safe in the knowledge that in the mainly vegetarian south their sacred status is assured.

From the serene backwaters of Kerala, where a quieter, more reflective India lays bare her gifts like rubies along the river banks, to the splendid magnificence of temple towns like Madurai in Tamil Nadu or the sixties hangover that refuse to fade in Goa.

If South India is defined by its calmness North India’s presiding characteristic is its intensity. North India is the quintessential Indian experience; Louder, more persistent, more confronting, more startling. Stereotypical images play out against a backdrop of breathtaking beauty.

In Varanasi life is indistinct from the holy water of the Ganges. Life’s journey from birth to death begins and ends in its sacramental waters. To drift on its surface at dawn is to know that life is a mystery governed by a source beyond our comprehension. You can only marvel and offer thanks for your brief but blessed existence.

The heart of the north is, of course, the Taj Mahal. If someone tells you they love you, have a look at the Taj Mahal, and ask them if they really mean it. For the Taj Mahal is the most pure and exquisite expression of love ever declared. Built by Shah Jehan as declaration of love to his wife Arjuman Banu Begum once you have seen it you will forever know what love is, everything that came before was just infatuation.

Like the Taj Mahal North India is wondrous in its beauty, its treasures stretch out like an endless sea of gold. To read about it is not enough; you must go there.

You don’t leave India; you are prised from it like a newborn child taken from its mother, bereaved that this new relationship is over so soon. As the plane climbs higher into the air the patchwork of colours below you form in the mind like a magic carpet that will you fly upon forever in your memory or until your inevitable return.