Karma Chameleon

So I’ve met up with two Danes who I had previously bumped into in Udaipur. They took a different route around Rajesthan to me, but we’ve met back up again in Jaipur. We’ve been walking around the pink city for the past few days and are leaving Jaipur (and Rajesthan) tomorrow morning.

We’ve been musing a lot about what it is that makes India so special and how it really seems to rub people up the wrong way. It’s a bizarre country. People frequently say that India requires submission… that the visitor doesn’t try to work against it, to fight it, or even to understand it, but rather that they submit themselves to it and ‘go with the flow’.

Jaipur, seen from a certain perspective, is an absolute hell-hole… it’s dirty, it’s hot and it’s loud, so loud that you can’t hear yourself think… there are people everywhere… you can’t walk two feet without being bugged to shit by rickshaw wallahs or chai wallahs or sari wallahs or people trying to sell you maps, pens, souvenirs, sight-seeing tours… there’s beggars at every street corners… people with polio with their legs wrapped up around their heads, hideously misshapen extremities, women with crying babies, dirty children who have been told to that perseverance is the key to getting that ‘ten rupees’… Then there are the people who don’t want anything from you, except to say “Hello… how are you… what country… what’s your good name?”… shake your hand and then run off giggling with their friends… which is all very nice, but becomes a bit daunting when it happens every five seconds.

At first experience all this is absolutely overwhelming and I think that it really gets to people. I think that the secret is to let it all bounce off you. Keep your smile, stay happy, make funny faces, laugh and be silly… don’t worry about anyone or anything… go where you want to go… or if you just want to stand and stay, then stand and stay… engage with people if you want, ignore them if you want… don’t worry and be happy!

Now that all sounds very nice and pleasant but it ain’t always that easy: I find myself, at intervals, getting extremely agitated… sometimes to the point where some unlucky little Injun will take the brunt of my wrath when he offers me a rickshaw ride and I break out into hysterics shouting at him in English that “I never fucking asked for a fucking rickshaw ride… I’m just walking down the fucking street and you’re bugging the fucking shit out of me… If you don’t fuck off now, I’m gonna punch you in the face you little scrawny piece of shit ”. Luckily, that doesn’t happen very often anymore. I’ve learned that when I get extremely agitated, I stand up straight, pull back my shoulders, close my eyes, breath in through my nose deep into my lungs, and breathe all my agitation out again… that may not have me singing Kumbaya, but it does take me down a notch or two.

But Jaipur is a lovely city… life happens on the streets here, as in the rest of India, and if you can learn to chill out and brush off the mobs, then you can open your eyes and see the cauldron of humanity that you find yourself in: the women haggling with the fruit seller, the kids chasing each other in and around sauntering cows, old men sitting around nipping chai from small glasses… it’s all good here!

Paradoxically, the mobs seem to recognize this state in people and actually the more relaxed you are, the more they’ll leave you alone and the more you become used to dealing with them.

So when people say that India requires submission, I think it shouldn’t be taken as a need to be subservient, but rather that one should give in to things, to offer oneself up to things, without preconditions… without imposing your version of normality onto things, without projecting your standards onto the world… I think it requires a paradigm shift, an ability to change the focus of the lens through which you look at the world … and to be open to the world.

Tomorrow morning I’m up at half five for a train to Agra… a few snapshots of the Taj Mahal later, and I’ll be jumping on a train to Delhi to arrive there tomorrow evening. Lets see if my relaxed attitude to things can survive Delhi… it’s been known to break a few hardened travelers.

Signing off for ur man in Nirvana…