Ash and Lil do India - Blog 11 - So, How Was India?

Upon my return from India, people asked me excitedly, “How was India?” as experiences in the world, far from our isolated islands, oxygenate those of us who haven’t had the good fortune to venture forth.

Well, India was like catching a glimpse of a most beautifully coloured butterfly flapping its glorious wings, but no matter how hard it flapped, it could not rise above the dust.

When I first stepped foot into New Delhi, India pretty much lived up to how I had pictured it: a swarming mass of people driven by a life force giving them beating hearts and breath, but little else. Here is a country with one of the five largest economies in the world, where most of the people are still living in poverty, with lives unchanged for thousands of years.

India’s massive economic growth is certainly not benefiting the people who live in her cities. These city folk still live in that state of neglect which drove our ancestors from Britain to New Zealand in search of a better life 200 years ago, and which today drives the people of India from their own country in search of a place that, at the very least, offers them hope.

Jack London captured the plight of the poor in the East End of London in his book The People of the Abyss (1902), and the people I saw in Delhi are exactly how he describes the poor in London before the welfare state. They are a people living without hope.

“A new race has sprung up — a street people. They pass their lives at work and in the streets. They have dens and lairs into which they crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all. One cannot travesty the word by calling such dens and lairs ‘homes.’ The pavement folk are noisy, voluble, highly strung, excitable — when they are yet young.

“As they grow older, they become steeped and stupefied in beer. When they have nothing else to do, they ruminate as a cow ruminates. They are to be met with everywhere, standing on curbs and corners and staring into vacancy. Watch one of them. He will stand there motionless for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still staring into vacancy. It is most absorbing. He has no money for beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so what else remains for him to do? He has already solved the mysteries of girls’ love, and wife’s love and child’s love, and found them delusions and shams, vain and fleeting as dewdrops, quickly vanishing before the ferocious facts of life.”

I was so saddened by the people in New Delhi that when I arrived in Rishikesh, the rural town in the north of India where Lil and I were going to meditate, I cried on the phone to Gigi. I asked her, “Do these poor souls in Delhi, whose spiritual heritage the West is now stealing, meditate? Do they, in the long and lonely hours of desperate poverty, rise above their plight by gazing into themselves for twenty minutes, twice a day, to escape their urban jungle just for a moment and find inner peace?”

For most of them, they could in reality meditate every moment they’re not scrounging for food, as there is simply nothing else for them to do.

Gigi told me to ask my guru, Thom, but I never had the chance — or the courage — and I think I know the answer.

Meditation is, in reality, the latest hedonistic pursuit of the West, although it disguises itself as an intellectual exercise rather than a sensual delight, and a spiritual practice rather than a religion — for our parents decided, after nearly 2,000 years, that religion had no place in a progressive world.

Now the West has adopted meditation; it is big business. The townsfolk of Delhi would not make the $1,000 it costs for an initiation course in their lifetime. So one can only hope that, somewhere along the line, the wisdom of meditation has been passed down by ancestors — and sometimes I believe it has, especially in small villages like Rishikesh, where the people seem reasonably content with their lot and have an acceptance of life which we envy. We are always wanting more to be content; they know they will never have more.

Eighty per cent of the population of India still live in rural areas. The OECD measures economic development by degree of urbanisation, so India seems to have a unique model of economic development which allows its population to live as they have for three thousand years while boasting one of the world’s greatest economies — building 100-storey buildings, developing nuclear weapons, and educating most of the world’s doctors.

The government of India seems to show a benign indifference to its rural dwellers, who have not been forced into the cities like their counterparts in China, where a communist government is interested in the welfare of its people, but only as productive economic units to be wrenched from their village communities and housed in towering battery farms to toil, making a few rich while they themselves remain forever poor.

If I had been asked about India based solely on my experience in Delhi, I would have been as critical of a society that allows its people to live like savages as Jack London was of the East End of London before the welfare state. But I had the good fortune to spend ten days in rural India in a quaint little town called Rishikesh. Here, the villagers have not been forced out of their homes to labour in the cities, but are living modest, communal lives where the cows, the dogs, the monkeys, and the people all cohabit in a mutually respectful way.

Would I be a dog in Delhi? No. But in Rishikesh — yes.

The dogs are all known and tagged. Some have homes to return to at night, and those that don’t are provided with little beds sheltered under shop awnings. They all hang out together during the day and are courteous enough to do their business out of the town centre. I only saw one old beggar woman. I did see some children running through a dusty patch of a derelict building site, with plastic bags over their shoulders and covered in dust, and for a moment we looked at each other — but they didn’t have that desperate look in their eyes that I saw in Delhi. I was assured the people of the village look after their own, and I believe it.

One of the best things I’ve found on my return is that I have a common bond with all the Indians in my life because I have experienced their world and can talk about it with them. All the Hindus become very passionate about religion, wanting me to understand that everyone is entitled to interpret God as they wish, for we can never truly know who gave us this wonderful gift of life.

Spending a couple of days with two of the local lads, Ravi Singh Chandel and Mohan Singh Parihar, was the icing on the cake of this memorable journey.

The four of us charmed each other and developed a friendship that transcended race, religion, gender and age. I hope that one day Lil and I will go back to see our friends, who wrapped India up for us in a parcel with a bow and gave it to us.

This is for you three, from me.