Reflections from India If I had to pick one word to describe my experience of what India is like, it would be “relentless.” Think of a meal at a fine Indian restaurant: the smells are complex and unfamiliar, the flavors are rich and intense, the spiciness is on the hot side (and my body reacts by sweating whenever I eat spicy food). Then imagine having that fine Indian meal 3 times a day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner – day in, day out. That’s what our experience of India was like. I don’t think you’ve really lived in India until you’ve had curried peppers and spicy samosas—for breakfast! And of course it wasn’t just the food. The stimulation of all of our senses was relentless, from the fragrant aromas of spices and incense as we walked down the street alternating with the tropical mustiness and the stench of the overworked sanitation systems,

to the din and jostling of the never-ending sea of humanity buying and selling from morning til long after dark, with endless rows of stalls piled high with colorful fabrics or jewelry, or tiny storefronts selling hardware appliances or a sidewalk shave.

Then there was the incessant honking of horns and the driving beat of the Bollywood soundtracks we seemed to hear everywhere.

Riding in a car was perhaps the most intense experience, as the crush of traffic on foot and bicycle and motor-scooter competed for every inch of the road with every other kind of vehicle, from huge dented buses to smallish SUV’s and cars and the ever-present swarms of green and yellow rickshas,

with the occasional bullock cart or cow wandering through. I’ve sometimes thought the difference between the pace of life (or at least traffic) in a small town in the US and the pace in a big city like Chicago is like the difference between a “full stop” at a small town intersection and a “rolling stop” at one in Chicago. In India, it was more like “what stop?” as our driver barreled into crowded roundabout intersections, heedless of whatever traffic light may or may not have been there. What would be considered harrowing

near-misses on the roads here were a commonplace occurrence literally every few seconds there. Traffic in India reminded me of a video game where things pop out at you out of nowhere every few seconds.

When we talked about the traffic with our daughter’s host parents, who have been to the US and Chicago many times, they joked about how “monotonous” driving in America is to them (though I don’t think they’ve been here in winter…). Then there are the relentless extremes of wealth and poverty, which certainly exist here in the US and elsewhere, but which are more in your face in India—from the children risking their lives dancing or selling to collect a few rupees in the middle of traffic and the families living under blue tarps along rail lines and even just blocks away from our daughter’s house, to the gleaming indoor shopping malls sprouting up everywhere and the Mumbai skyline – bigger and more architecturally impressive than Chicago’s or NY’s, including a 27-story single-family residence tower with 600 servants for a family of five.

Every night the accumulation of fumes from diesel exhaust and coal-burning fires became almost suffocating for me, and I don’t really want to think about how many beds without sheets I slept in or how many toilets without toilet paper I used… Relentless is the word that kept coming back to me again and again. And if I had spent the whole time trying to resist the relentlessness of life in India, I would have ended up hating it. Because as Gregory David Roberts points out in his amazing semi-autobiographical novel Shantaram, the only way to love India – and perhaps the only way to let India love you—is to give in to it. We started out trying to find our way on foot around Mumbai the first day, and we did pretty well – until we couldn’t find the market we were looking for and started getting frustrated. A man on the street saw me looking around and checking my map and asked me, “Crawford Market?” When I said yes, he pointed to a decrepit-looking building across the street, touched my the arm, and started wading into the snarled sea of traffic like Moses heading into the Red Sea. We quickly had to decide whether to trust him– not only with our itinerary, but in some sense with our lives, as he led us directly in front of vehicles which were mostly but not entirely stopped. But follow him we did, and when we got to the Market he showed us his badge proving he was a legitimate market ambassador. He led us around to various stalls where we saw the caged animals and touched the ripe fruit and smelled the powerful spices and felt the smooth silk scarves. It was wonderful, and we would have missed it if we hadn’t let down our guard just a bit and given in to India.

The next day we decided to take our chances with a taxi driver named Mahindra who offered to drive us around Mumbai. When we did, he took us to some wonderful places of respite from the relentlessness of it all. First we had to let ourselves drink the chai he offered in small glasses from a hole-in-the-wall tea stand, and again I had to let him gently take my arm or my hand and lead us around. But when we did, he led us to places like Baganga Tank – this big, ancient, sacred pool in the middle of Mumbai, created, according to legend, by Rama’s brother Lakshmana shooting an arrow into the earth and bringing holy water from the Ganges River 2000 kilometers away for people to bathe in.

We got to wander around the narrow streets of the dense but quiet neighborhood around it, and take our shoes off as we visited a couple of the dozens of nearby temples.

Most meaningful to me, we got to visit Mani Bhavan, Gandhi’s Mumbai headquarters, on a quiet residential street on what is now tony Malabar Hill, and see his simple room, with nothing but a thin mattress and a spinning wheel, from which he plotted strategy to bring down the British Empire in India and bring about swaraj – self-determination – for 300 million Indians. There’s also a letter on display in which he wrote to Adolf Hitler in 1939:

“It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a

war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an

object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of

one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable

success? Any way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.

Your sincere friend, M.K. Gandhi.”

People have looked at that letter as a sign of Gandhi’s naiveté, and even of the futility of nonviolence in the face of radical evil. Gandhi himself was apparently somewhat torn about how to deal with Hitler, but his letter was perfectly consistent with his approach, which psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi argues was rooted in a form of insanity. The title of Ghaemi’s book about Gandhi and other great leaders is A First-Rate Madness—the kind of madness which is the source of genius. Specifically he’s talking about the mental illness of manic-depressiveness which, he argues, can increase four specific qualities of genius: 1) realism – suffering through the negative experiences of depression can burst the illusions that most of us live in and give one a more accurate picture of reality; 2) resilience – going those negative experiences and coming out on the other side can give one a sense of resiliency; 3) creativity – which is often the result of manic, divergent, out of the box thinking; and above all 4) empathy – the kind of radical empathy which is at the heart of nonviolence, because depressive people don’t just know about suffering as an abstraction, they’ve lived it. Gandhi displays this radical empathy when he writes:

“…it is contrary to my nature to distrust a single human being or to believe that any nation on earth is incapable of redemption… By a long course of prayerful discipline I have ceased for over forty years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim… I can and do hate evil wherever it exists. I hate the system of government the British people have set up in India.

I hate the domineering manner of Englishmen as a class in India… But I do not hate the domineering Englishmen as I refuse to hate the domineering Hindus. I seek to reform them in all the loving ways that are open to me. My non-cooperation has its root not in hatred, but in love.”

Elsewhere he writes:

“Three-fourths of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint. We [may not always agree with them when our ideals are] radically different. But we may be charitable to them and believe they actually mean what they say… Our business, therefore, is to show them that they are in the wrong, and we should do so by our suffering. I have found that mere appeal to reason does not answer where prejudices are age-long and based on supposed religious authority. Reason has to be strengthened by suffering, [because] suffering opens the eyes of understanding.” [emphasis added]

The madness of Gandhi’s genius may have been politically naïve at times, though surely no more naïve or mad than the politics of war and violence are at times. And he was by no means perfect; he was sometimes far less kind to his wife Kasturbai than he was to Hitler. He was at his worst when he lost the balance of being both principled and loving, but he was at his best when he found that balance and kept his sense of humor rather than taking himself and his principles too seriously—which is probably true for most of us… Gandhi’s nonviolence wasn’t the only kind of genius we saw in India, and spicy food and traffic weren’t the only things that were relentless on our trip. We did an unfortunately too-low-budget tour of the Golden Triangle – Delhi, Agra, Jaipur – and the succession of incredible palaces and mosques and tombs and forts was relentless in its own way, and exemplified more of the genius of India in its art and architecture. For example, the

Qu’ranic script inscribed around the arches of the Taj Mahal is smaller at the bottom and larger at the top, perfectly proportioned so that it all looks exactly the same size when viewed from ground level. The four pillars surrounding it are tilted four degrees to the outside so that in case of an earthquake, they will fall away from the Taj and not destroy it. The external vaults of Akbar’s tomb at Sikhandra are so acoustically perfect that you can hear a whisper from one corner to the other, while the internal vault can carry an echo for 14 seconds.

Then there’s the evolution of religious and political genius evident in the architectural history. First there was the brute force of the giant pillar at Qutub Minar, where 1000 years ago the invading conqueror Mohammed Ghori destroyed 27 Hindu and Jain temples and built a mosque with the broken pieces; you

can see remnants of cows and other figures from those temples in the columns of the mosque. I thought about the discussions we had in seminary about how Unitarians sometimes take bits and pieces from other religions and misappropriate them into our own religious schemas…

But then 500 years later in Indian history, there came a more enlightened approach. The conquerors realized they either couldn’t or didn’t have to defeat their religious opponents, so they did the politically expedient thing and married into each other’s families. This political and religious union is reflected in the wonderful Indo-Islamic architecture of so many Indian palaces, where perfectly geometric Islamic designs and arches blend harmoniously with the Hindu lotus flowers above.

Then at Laxmi Vilas Palace in Vadodara – the relatively small town of 1½ million where our daughter is living – there's a blend of Indian and Italian architecture, with classical Indian arches and ornate marble carvings blended with bronze sculptures and ceiling frescos in a huge pillar-less ballroom reminiscent of the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

What struck me there was a pair of sculptures – one of a warrior, the other of a saint. It reminded me of the eagle in the US national emblem, clutching a quiver of arrows in one claw and an olive branch in the other, though I’m not sure we have the same depth of spirituality in this country, or a comparable history of honoring prophetic voices (not that they’re always honored in India either). Perhaps you can correct me, but I can’t think of a widely revered prophetic spiritual figure from the time of the American Revolution who was willing to speak out forcefully against, say, slavery and white racism in the way that Gandhi spoke out against untouchability and Hindu-Muslim violence in the drive for Indian Independence. There’s something profound about a country revering a prophetic spiritual figure like Gandhi, not just as a latter-day visionary, but as part of the very founding history and mythology of the nation… Gandhi was from Gujarat, the state where my daughter lives and where we spent most of our time, and Gujarat is in many ways better off economically than the rest of the country. The roads are in great shape – there’s a four-lane superhighway through Gujarat as good as any interstate. The buildings are in great shape, and construction is booming. And the captains of industry all credit the business-friendly BJP state government with making Gujarat prosperous. I got a chance to meet some of these captains of industry at a party hosted by my daughter’s host father, who is a prominent entrepreneur in Gujarat, and it was sort of surreal playing musical chairs (literally) on New Year’s Eve with the CEOS’s of various large Indian manufacturing and agricultural firms on the lawn of the new resort my daughter’s host father is building…

But I have to admit, I was most excited to read the news about the new aam aadmi party or AAP, which is just over a year old and which has just come to power in the national capital region of Delhi. Aam aadmi means “common man,” so the AAP is sort of the party of the 99%, and they’ve had a meteoric rise over the last year. They did fascinating things just in the two weeks we were there. For example, they were deciding whether or not to form a coalition government with another party, and so they conducted thousands of neighborhood caucuses for people to have their say.

When they did form a government, they immediately fulfilled their promises of free water and reduced electrical bills for the poor, publicly declaring their willingness to lose power if that’s what it takes to bring change. Newly-elected AAP officials have refused to live in government mansions or accept government security, saying “the people are our security.” Rather than riding in government limos, they travelled to their own swearing-in ceremony on the new Delhi Metro subway system. The party symbol is a broom for sweeping out corruption, and they’ve set up a toll-free number for people to call and report bribe-taking – no small deal in India – and invited whistleblowers who’ve lost their jobs for challenging corruption to apply to work in the new government. They’re setting up regular channels for people to voice their concerns AND suggest solutions. They’re not pretending they have all the answers, but they’re inviting regular people to participate in creating their own solutions and rebuilding their own neighborhoods. They’ve been gaining tens of thousands of new supporters every day since coming to power in December, and they’re suddenly a contender in the national elections coming up in May, so I’ll be keeping an eye on the news from India this spring. I’m wondering if perhaps we’re seeing a reincarnation of Gandhi’s ideals of democracy, of which he wrote:

“My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest… No country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak. Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism. True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.”

People often ask about the poverty, and yes, there is poverty in India – just as there is poverty here in the US. But there is also wealth, culturally and otherwise, and there are signs of hope, just as there were and are signs of genius. For example, the major political parties certainly don’t see eye to eye, but they’re all talking about both economic growth AND social justice for the poor. While it took two hours for our taxi to navigate the traffic jam from Mumbai airport into the city, they’re already at work building a Metro there that will slash that to a fraction of the time, one of more than a dozen Metro systems being planned and built across the

country. There are 75,000 taxis in Mumbai (a city of 21 million people), but they’re all being required to convert to compressed natural gas to cut pollution.

The Indian railway system is one of the most extensive in world, and they’re investing hundreds of billions of dollars in upgrading it. And Indian Railways has the largest computerized scheduling system in world (bigger than healthcare.gov), and it works! I should have trusted it when it said the trains to and from the Golden Triangle were full, but instead I listened to the Western guidebooks which told me not to worry – we’d be able to get tickets. We ended up having to use our host’s VIP privileges to get tickets to Delhi, and buying last-minute plane tickets to avoid being stranded 700 km from daughter’s home on our return. Of course, we were able to do that – we had the privilege. And as one of our host’s friends (an Indian businessman who lives in Philadelphia) said, it’s all too easy for people in the US to get hung up on little things going wrong—or even big things going wrong—when our expectation is that everything will always go as we want and plan. He pointed to the example of an Indian child who has to share a bike with her brother and her sister and the rest of her family. She’s not complaining, he said, because as long as her family has a bike, she has a bike. As long as there’s a computer in the house, she has a computer. Even our daughter has adopted this attitude; we were amazed at her ambivalence about our bringing her her own laptop. Sometimes it’s easier to enjoy life when you let go of the need to have a bike or a computer or a plan of your own, when you let go of need to have control. As for the relentlessness of it: it’s amazing what you can learn to live with, especially when you start to learn how it works. By the end of our two weeks we were crossing that busy traffic fairly confidently; what had seemed like utter chaos started to make sense as an orderly system where the larger, faster vehicles have right-of-way over smaller, slower ones. What had seemed like vendors just trying to cheat you by charging too much started to look more like a relational system of buying and selling, where each side gets to feel better about the final price because each side has gotten the other to give a little. I got to the point where I could eat curries and masalas meal after meal without even noticing how much I was sweating from the spiciness. And we even found ourselves enjoying the new Bollywood blockbuster Dhoom 3 (filmed in Chicago) even if the dialog was almost all in Hindi. Because you don’t always need words to follow a story line, and wild action sequences, flashy dance numbers, pulsing music and clever humor can cross cultural and linguistic boundaries—especially when you’re sitting in a crowded theater with thousands of other human beings just like yourself all enjoying the same thing. Even if they are sitting there eating curried rice and masala snacks instead of plain, monotonous old popcorn… On our final day we visited Gandhi’s ashram at Sabarmati, the place from which he started the famous Salt March to the sea to break the British monopoly on salt. I learned that Gandhi’s vision for this religious community was

to develop a group of people with the discipline and the commitment to lead the profound social changes that needed to take place both within their own society and in relation to the oppressive powers of the day. And I thought, isn’t that what a church could to be: a community of people developing their capacity to play a leadership role in society’s transformation? More about that some other time…