India

The much quoted line from Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist goes something like "when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." A nice flowery saying, but sometimes these sort of serendipitous things do indeed happened. It's a story of how I got to India. Within weeks after returning from my Africa/USA/Europe trip, a family friend inquired whether I would be interested in joining his small company. I only would have to re-locate to a tiny place in southern India and then to a tiny place in Sri-Lanka. Hmm... let me think? Yeah! Sign me up. India. What a unique place. I cannot think of any other country in the world that resembles it in any way. If the European Union were one country, it might come close. I've been living in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where people speak Tamil (not Hindu). Go one state north and you come to Karnataka, where people speak Kannada, which is nothing like Tamil, or Hindu. Go even further to places like Punjab, or Bihar and not only they don't speak the same languages they don't even look like people from Tamil Nadu.

This is a place of one of the world's oldest civilizations. And my quick blurbs here won't do justice to the enormity of the history and the colorful complexity of this society. All I can offer are some photographs and some personal stories. I thought I would cheat a bit and post an excerpt from a recent email I sent to a friend:

I just moved to Sri Lanka, after 3 months in southern India. It's been a pretty fascinating experience so far. As you may expect, it's a different world here, especially in a small town, traditionally conservative state of Tamil Nadu where I was living. There are more Hindu temples than grocery stores here and even in my office there were weekly religious processions. It's really cool to be in the midst of it all, taking part in it, getting a genuine experience. Even eating is a whole new ball-game. The concept of utensils is non-existing here, everywhere -- from private homes to big restaurants -- people use their right hand to eat. I had some practice with this in Ethiopia, so got right into it. It's fun, even if a little messy. Many would tell me that food actually tastes better when eaten with hands. :-) And I no longer remember what not spicy tastes like. Roads is another adventure here. It's survival of the fittest. No rules. No traffic lights. Seeing a car overtaking another car which is overtaking a bus, is a common occurrence. Sometimes reckless doesn't describe this sort of driving. And people love honking! It's an incessant cacophony of the roads. In fact, all trucks have a sign at the back that says: "Please Honk!". Crazy. :-) Luckily I only have about 5 minutes of this madness, then I get off the main road and it's peaceful greens and peacocks flying over your head (that really happened once!)