Being Different Matters Embracing the BizarRe
Sunrise on the Ganges
Being in India changes you. I can honestly say that we all departed Dehli in an altered state. Three weeks in North and central India was at once an eternity and a blink. When you are there--in the heat and chaos and rubble and stench--it it is both unverving and invigorating. It pushes you to the brink of any comfort zone and stretches it beyond recovery. I will never be the same.
The reason we travel is to go somewhere different. As our guide Shivraj Singh exclaimed, "If it weren't different from where you came from, what would be the point." And as my friend and fellow travel fiend Andy Trache reminded me, it's the unplanned and unexpected, often unwelcome, moments of a trip that make the most indelible memories.
"I hope it never changes," said Jacob. And for the most part, I totally agree. What makes travelling in India so unique is that India is soooo unique. I can never do it justice, but I'll share some of our more memorable moments to give you a snapshot of our time here. As we were told at the outset of our adventure...
"be prepared to Embrace the Bizarre!"
Prior to our arrival in Mumbai, Mason and I took a cooking class in Yangshao, China. It was there we met a couple from Texas; they had been to India because he was invited to be a guest lecturer at a University there. She gave us the best description of India yet:
"everywhere you look, y'all will see something unimaginable."
I'm so glad we met her; she could not have said it better. Each day we came to dinner with our "what was the most unimaginable thing you saw today" stories...
"Did you see the man cutting his toenails in the market with a massive pair of shears," or "the woman in a silk Sari carrying a load of bricks on her head," or my personal favourite, "the 6 legged cow?"
There was an elephant in the Dehli traffic circle, a guy texting on a donkey and two monkeys chasing a motorcycle out of our hotel!
I CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP!
"Our tuk tuk driver hit a guy and a car on the way to the restaurant" - Jacob
"A monkey jumped on my back while a white cow nuzzled my belly." - Mason
"I woke up with a strange man sitting on my feet" - Dean
"There's a family of three in my bunk!" - friend Lucy
"A cow's horn got stuck under my shirt." - Me
Only in India can you step flip flop deep in a steaming pile of cow poop on the way into a Hindu temple. Only in India can you pack 14 people into 1 square meter of floor space on a train car, and have 1 toilet per 1400 people in the slum. But only in India will you get a glimpse of humanity in all its glory and grime and grit. It was bizarre. It was real. We loved it.
The raw reality of it hit me the morning we woke before the sun and rowed out on the holy river Ganga (The Ganges).
Just hours earlier we had spent the evening watching thousands of Hindu believers cram their boats and bodies together along the shore in order to ceremoniously pray and send their offerings afloat at sunset. The water and sand rendered invisible under the chanters, prayers, dancers, and observers. It was exciting, like a party.
But in the light of dawn the utility of the holy water was displayed. The pilgrims dipped 7 times for sanctification, the people washed, the dhobis laundered heaps of clothes, the children played, and the dead were offered immediate ascension into heaven-cremation at the Ganges gives Hindus a lift out of the cycle of castes and suffering.
We sat in silent reverie and watched as the bodies of the dead were set alight under stacks of acacia wood. We watched as the mourners were shaved bald. We watched as the skull of a partially creamated loved one was broken open to release his spirit into the afterlife, and we watched as heaps of ashes were eventually shoved into the current just upstream from where throngs of kids were jumping into the river off the ghat.
I never wanted to leave. Watching death and life co-mingle so naturally made me feel at once connected and utterly disconnected from the natural order of things. We saw more dead people in a day than I had seen in my lifetime. Everything about this place was uncomfortable and overwhelming, but it felt more real than the insulated, sanitized life I am accustomed to. Every moment offered a new challenge to experience the unimaginable; challenge accepted.
When we left India and landed in Istanbul we all felt a little off. It's hard to describe the feeling, but I think we caught a little India fever (and I'm not just talking about the ever present Dehli belly, we all caught that too!) It is the colour and chaos and kindness that was contagious. There is an infectious spirit that radiates from the people. When you are in the thick of it, it's discombobulating. But when it's suddenly gone, everything seems too...sterile or dull, maybe just too normal.
We went there because it is different; we left different. Being different matters. The more places we go, the more people we meet, and the more bizzare we embrace, what we really see is that people are people all over the world. We laugh, cry, bleed, hurt, dance and play. We work and sleep under the same sky, breathe the same air, watch the same sun rise and set every single day. It is our different colours, clothes, cultures and customs that add unimaginable beauty and reveal the full glory of creation.
Therefore accept EacH other (especially those who are different from you) just as Christ accepted yoU to bring on the full glory of God (Romans 15:7)
