Down Under!

It's been a week and a half since I left India, and as I spend easy, relaxing days with family in Sydney and Brisbane I try to relive my days in India. I don't want to forget the impressions and the thoughts evoked by what I saw as I journeyed around. A strong, pervasive impression is the warmth of the people in Tamil Nadu. As I traveled from city to city in this state I was constantly struck by how wonderful the people were. In buses, on trains, at stores, restaurants, on the streets I'd be greeted by smiles and in the faces of the locals I saw acceptance and a desire to be helpful, I often felt like the people of Tamil Nadu behaved as if they were a large, extended family, and I was just automatically accepted as a member of that family. It was weird to feel as if you were one of them, yet at the same time they were so utterly foreign to you. It drove home to me how displaced us foreign born Indians are, especially those of us who go back a few generations. No wonder we are so conflicted about our identities. In the west we feel we don't really belong because, well, we're Indian. But in India we realize how much of our Indianness we've lost. In the end we have to accept that we are eternal foreigners.

In South India, and especially Tamil Nadu, I felt safe, secure wherever I was because I knew I could count on the locals to help me if I needed it. I remember when I first saw people wobble their heads from side to side I found it comical. But within a couple of days when I understood the warmth expressed by this head movement I found it exremely touching. On my last day in India, as I was being driven to the airport, my heart felt heavy. How could you not feel sad to leave behind the most beautiful people you have ever met?

Yesterday I explored Brisbane. It's a modern city with sleek skyscrapers and a wide river which has pretty parks and restaurants and towering apartment buildings alongside it. After India I couldn't get excited about the clean, ordinary, wealthy, white character of the city. I kept thinking back to what a typical Indian street scene would be like. Now in India the streets were so full of entertainment. I can just see it when I close my eyes - the carts full of different varieties of bananas, the coconut man beside a mound of coconuts, ready with his machete to get you a coconut drink, the yellow and black three wheel autorickshaws running up and down the streets, groups of people sipping chai in front of the chai stand, somebody frying puris on a roadside burner, the sari shops, the small, dark cafes, the inevitable Saravana Bhava vegetarian restaurants, little 'convenience' shops where you buy things over a counter, fresh juice vendors, and people, people engaged in all manner of activities, and the noise, and, ..... oh, what can I say. India is one of those places that leaves a deep, deep impression. It's a country that intrigues and frustrates at the same time. Every experience seems to come with a pair of contradictions. Never before has travel in a foreign country evoked so many emotions and thoughts in me.
Stay tuned for more of my musings!