Christian Stefansen, July 10, 2006
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time (T.S. Eliot)
As I arrived in Hyderabad at rainy midnight, I was struck by an uneasy feeling that Eliot’s words would be profoundly appropriate for what was to come – and for what I would feel one month later when leaving India through the same set of doors, that now in a brief second led me from the comfort of international airport no-man’s land to a bustling Indian night.
The exploration of India is not only that of the country itself, but that of the human race, our communal history. How did some countries become rich, while others remain poor? What is the nature of conflict and progress? How do cultures interact? What drives people and how do they live their lives? What is the essence of human existence, of happiness? Such questions are the object of lifetimes of study for scholars everywhere, but, alas, we must confine ourselves to libraries, annals, books, references, and photos. We are left to conjure up – if we can – vague images ourselves.
Here the essence of such reflections seemed to lurk immediately under a damp and dirty surface. As we drove through the city in the silence of an auditorium before the show, it seemed that the entire history of mankind had erected itself before my eyes. A grand theatre, live for me to grasp and explore, a place where all time periods live side by side in a cacophony of interactions and contradictions.
Peddlers sold sugared drinks from a mill, posters announced open positions at IBM, children from mud huts implored me to give them money, ads urged me to get a Hutch plan on my cell phone, while rickshaws with hand-painted joy-luck symbols seized every opportunity to gain a few feet in the chaotic traffic. (In India marginals count!)
Curly calligraphy decorated makeshift placards, dilapidated family-owned shops boasted international brands, Sari-clad women moved like pieces of art, and English seemed the language of lost prepositions – “Car go university, sir!” – more than the lingua franca that would propel India’s economy into its rightful place among wealthy nations.
Everything from history books, films, and folklore had been promoted to physical objects for me to marvel at. If I wanted to explore and understand my own history, surely a library would be only a meagre substitute for this!
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If you tell the people that their nation is great, they will be arrogant. If you tell the people that their nation can be great, they will do everything to prove you right. Such were my politically pointed thoughts after the first encounters with the locals. Courtesy, returned smiles, and absence of arrogance wherever I went.
And then an abhorrently broken logic: “you must not give to beggars for this will only encourage them to continue” and “do not waste money on street beggars, for what is needed is a coordinated solution to the problem”. Sometimes conventional wisdom appears at first sight not to be wisdom at all. But when in India, do as Indians do. Reluctantly, I did.
Other inconvenient questions presented themselves. A lecture note read “well-meaning modernization by volunteers won’t work”. Hmm. Had I not come for exactly that? Was my excuse not that I would become part of the coordinated approach? To put some karma back in the system? Suddenly, it was very difficult to see where to start.
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We arrive in scholarly order, ideals intact, theory perfected, and practice still but a theory. I came here knowing very little about practice and now know less still, and realities have become a relentless iconoclast of my remaining preconceptions. I am only at the beginning of my exploring.
India is a living encyclopedia of history. And India is where my exploration starts.