I would like to say some more about India - you all know I often refer to my experiences there, and my love of the culture and the philosophical religions of India.
I first came to India, with no knowledge of the place or culture whatsoever. I was brought up to basically ignore the existence of Asia - yes I studied it at school a bit, but really the idea that I should travel through Asia was a thought from the blue. Given to me by someone in a youth hostel in London, when all I had left for money was a plane ticket home to Australia.
I cashed in the ticket, and on less than a shoe string, I travelled overland to India, then down the Malayan peninsular to Darwin, where I arrived as sick as a dead dog with hepatitis.
I still recall the moment I crossed from Pakistan into India. I know they are almost the same land and people, but the fact of the emotional feeling of liberation and 'coming home' I felt as I walked down the wide avenue at the boarder crossing, on the Indian side - all cool and old Sikh military men with those fabulous beards and moustaches; made me aware it was more than the land - it was the people, the culture, that I fell into like a bee into honey.
I loved it from the very first. Everything was different, and i will enjoy to describe some of those cultural differences. But the thing that caught me most, was the feeling of being back in the timeless bosom of humanity as it existed for thousands of years.
I used to travel to India, like travelling to another planet - it was so far away from my 'Western' world, from what I came to see as a tiny bubble on the stream of the human species - a bubble of order and clean streets and houses, of rationality and 'rights'. India had none of those, but when I went there, and I would travel off into the sub-continent with no purpose or agenda, no direction or plan, I would discover the experience of my western self falling off me like slabs of cake, or rather slabs of cement.
Eventually I would gravitate to a position of endlessness - timelessness, and almost complete acceptance of everything. i say almost because i still needed to survive, but i discovered that to survive in India was totally different to survival in Europe of Australia.
Survival in India meant relaxing, and allowing - just flowing with the current. As soon as you struggled for anything, you would surely come a cropper. This meant living very close to the bare minimum - I would sleep in temples, or dormitories, eat the most basic of foods, and just wander, day after day, looking - feasting my eyes and ears on the most extraordinary sights and sounds I had never believed existed. Truly this was another world.
My home country was so far - so far - so far away. eventually my travels there led to a fatal climax.
I listen to other people speak of their problems with India and Indians. Hardly anyone escapes without many traumatic inner and outer crises. I reached a point where I hated Indians. I hated their egotistic and snobbish, hypocritical and filthy arrogance or snivelling obsequious and fulsome deviousness and cruelty.
then as i walked out in the rural setting of what was then just a country town of Pune, I saw a man and his schoolboy son, walking home together. Don't ask me what the connection was, but right there i simply dropped all my antagonism - I laughed and saw the Indians for what they are. This insight is why so many westerners can't understand Indian Bollywood films. They see them as corny or silly or over obvious in emotion. they don't understand the Indian's naivety and love of some quality, that I just can't find words for.
We are so sophisticated in the West, so much into reality and secret self-importance. Indians are into obvious and comic self-importance. I learned to just relax and accept them, to laugh and live among them, as children in the world - children of god.
That does not mean they still don't infuriate me, but that infuriation is now only a game inside me. I do it like they do. It's all in the style, and the flavour of who you are.
