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There's been a lot of hype recently about India with the book "Eat Pray Love" becoming a best-seller. To top things off, they've recently released a film rendition which stars, Julie Roberts, as the author Elizabeth Gilbert. Having read the book, begrudgingly, after many months of avoidance, I wasn't particularly surprised that I was left with a feeling of
meh... Logistically, the plot had all the ingredients of something I would love (exoticism, food, travel, love), but for some reason, I found myself getting bored midway through India and found Indonesia painfully predictable and totally hypocritical to what I expected the novel to be about.
SPOIL ALERT!
The novel starts by introducing us to the author and narrator, Gilbert herself. It's supposed to be a biographical retelling of her divorce and how she decided to take a year off life to get to know herself. She would travel to 3 countries, beginning with the letter "I" (ironically) for 4 months each. Sounds great to me! But then, out of the blue in Indonesia, this love story blooms, and the rest sort of unraveled from there. I later learned that the man she meets in Indonesia, she ends up marrying (going against another one of her decisions; to never get married again). I started going back over the entire novel in my head and I couldn't help but just feel annoyed, and betrayed by the author.
I read the book two months after I had returned from India and felt that the descriptions were somewhat overly-dramatized and not an accurate description of Indian culture and life. Gilbert, walks the reader through her firsthand experience in an Indian ashram just outside of Mumbai. In her telling, India is a mix of beautiful colours, smells, peace and calm. Having spent nearly a month travelling all over Northern India, the India she describes is not the India that one experiences when first stepping off the plane.
India for me was an experience like no other. A mad mess of movement, sounds, smells and smoke. In a country of over a billion people, there is an almost choreographed movement that you can only truly understand once you have witnessed it. Everything had an extremeness to it. This extremeness extended to the people we met in that the poor were extremely impoverished; and those who showed us kindness, expressed an almost overwhelming kindness. Subtlety is not a word I would use to describe India.
The word
ashram in Sanskrit means a spiritual hermitage. Gilbert never really leaves the walls of the ashram during her time in India, giving her only part of the whole picture. Part of the ashram experience is to participate in the Indian rituals and practice, such as meditation, yoga, etc., however, it is also to participate in the cultural heritage of the land. India is more than just rice fields and
Om, it is a country rich in heritage, history and creativity. For me, this aspect was missing from Gilbert's novel and rather, was replaced by a drawn out "spiritual search" that felt contrived and self-indulgent (maybe that's the point?).
That being said, Gilbert's experience has inspired a movement in North American with a dramatic increase of individuals seeking India as a destination for their spiritual retreat. Am I one of them? Probably. Having only traveled in the North where the majority of tourist attractions, and therefore, the richer density of people are, I think it would be nice to take a glimpse at the "softer" side of India. Hopefully it will be more "spiritual" than my experience in the spiritual capital of Varanasi!
City of Death, Varanasi...
Now i only call this the city of death as it has become famous for the religious cremations which, to this day, take place on the banks of the Ganges River... it was also the place where i felt deaths toll knocking on my door...
"The Ganga" or Mother Earth is where Hindu people believe life begins and ends... every morning hundreds of people come to the shores to bath in the (rather filthy looking) waters which just down the river, will be the cremation site for another.. these cremations take place throughout the day and people travel from all over India to have their loved ones cremated here.. bodies are wrapped in cloth and placed on a pier of wood... the kind of wood used is indicative of the wealth of the individual... there, the bodies are burned and the remains are washed back into the land where they once came...
it's hard for us to understand wanting to bathe in what is so obviously unhygienic water, but it only speaks to the strength of the religion of some...
i had heard a lot about Varanasi and the Ganges before coming to India, so you can imagine my disappointment in being relatively ill for this portion of our trip... unfortunately, my illness was not the only disappointment as with the interests of foreign tourists have grown over the years, the once sacred Varanasi has become a quite commercialized locale... the once peaceful boat rides available along the shore have become more of a novelty tourist trap where your boatman does double duty as a salesman... and wandering holy men are nearly indistinguishable from common beggars.. evening rituals have armed security and friendly conversations have turned into forced donations on skeptical charities...
so much for my spiritual awakening...
14 January 2010
