How I Love and Hate India
I have struggled constantly on how to describe my feelings about India after staying there for a month and a half in 2007. I have found someone else to describe it to perfection.
How I Love and Hate India I read about the emotional puzzle of India before I arrived. I knew it would be a challenging country. Some say, "I loved India - leaving it, that is... the rest of the time, I hated it." Others can't wait to go back. "India is a special place," they declare with the kind of smile reserved for members of a secret club.
I've fiddled with the memory of that first morning, trying to understand the love-hate conflict known as India. When I was there, I couldn't wait to escape. Now that I'm gone, I long to go back. But memories are magical; the good ones temper the bad… distance becomes a filter. Experiences become fragmented. This is how India lives in my mind, a kaleidoscope of shifting scenes and emotions: beauty and blight, happiness and despair, loathing and love, admiration and pity... all of the things that make you feel alive; and all of these struggle to live together, a schizophrenic monster held captive in my heart and in my head. But it's fitting that I should struggle with such incongruities. India is a place that defines the word struggle. And here, struggle goes beyond the edge: the struggle becomes internal - a battle between the best and the worst within yourself.
I became a person I did not recognize: callous, coldhearted, suspicious. I built a shield against the louts, the touts, the beggars, and the chaos. I’d once been a person of immense trust, but in India I became skeptical. I'd once been a person of compassion, but in India I became heartless, ignoring the outstretched hands of lepers and the pleas of desperate mothers and the tears of wretched street urchins. I turned a deaf ear to children begging, "Auntie, please, no mama - no papa - no food," and turned a blind eye to old men sitting on the curb, palms outstretched, begging for a banknote which they had no fingers to grasp. I paid no heed to calls of greeting from the roadside; I sneered, I jeered, I scowled.
But it was essential to survive... to make my way down a street without being mobbed upon the glint of a coin; to maintain the sanity that comes with a restful mind; to avoid unmerciful swindlers and scheming merchants and aggressive touts and fraudulent friendliness and the perverse catcalls of macho men. I hated myself for it and I hated India for making me that way. At night, in the safety of my hotel room, I beat my fists into my pillow and cursed India and all her people and I asked my reflection in the mirror, "What is there to love about this fucking place?"
But now that I'm gone from there, now that I've had my time out and counted to 10, I can see the beauty of India. For all of its challenges and tragedy, there is magic in the chaos and clamor. And it is foreign - outlandish, exotic, and thrilling... It's the reason I travel in the first place - to find myself straddling unease and excitement - walking, wide-eyed, through the unknown. Traveling to India, you feel like you've gone someplace. Finally I can see clearly the things, the reasons, to love this riotous and idiosyncratic and mystical place.
Similarly... "Had a long talk with Ian about what India does to you. I don't like it that it makes me pitiless sometimes. I had to have that attitude to "survive" sometimes, but I want to be compassionate. This country is too much sometimes. I HATE INDIA, I LOVE INDIA. I know I want to come back again."
And searching "love hate India" brings up more results of the same.
How I Love and Hate India I read about the emotional puzzle of India before I arrived. I knew it would be a challenging country. Some say, "I loved India - leaving it, that is... the rest of the time, I hated it." Others can't wait to go back. "India is a special place," they declare with the kind of smile reserved for members of a secret club.
I've fiddled with the memory of that first morning, trying to understand the love-hate conflict known as India. When I was there, I couldn't wait to escape. Now that I'm gone, I long to go back. But memories are magical; the good ones temper the bad… distance becomes a filter. Experiences become fragmented. This is how India lives in my mind, a kaleidoscope of shifting scenes and emotions: beauty and blight, happiness and despair, loathing and love, admiration and pity... all of the things that make you feel alive; and all of these struggle to live together, a schizophrenic monster held captive in my heart and in my head. But it's fitting that I should struggle with such incongruities. India is a place that defines the word struggle. And here, struggle goes beyond the edge: the struggle becomes internal - a battle between the best and the worst within yourself.
I became a person I did not recognize: callous, coldhearted, suspicious. I built a shield against the louts, the touts, the beggars, and the chaos. I’d once been a person of immense trust, but in India I became skeptical. I'd once been a person of compassion, but in India I became heartless, ignoring the outstretched hands of lepers and the pleas of desperate mothers and the tears of wretched street urchins. I turned a deaf ear to children begging, "Auntie, please, no mama - no papa - no food," and turned a blind eye to old men sitting on the curb, palms outstretched, begging for a banknote which they had no fingers to grasp. I paid no heed to calls of greeting from the roadside; I sneered, I jeered, I scowled.
But it was essential to survive... to make my way down a street without being mobbed upon the glint of a coin; to maintain the sanity that comes with a restful mind; to avoid unmerciful swindlers and scheming merchants and aggressive touts and fraudulent friendliness and the perverse catcalls of macho men. I hated myself for it and I hated India for making me that way. At night, in the safety of my hotel room, I beat my fists into my pillow and cursed India and all her people and I asked my reflection in the mirror, "What is there to love about this fucking place?"
But now that I'm gone from there, now that I've had my time out and counted to 10, I can see the beauty of India. For all of its challenges and tragedy, there is magic in the chaos and clamor. And it is foreign - outlandish, exotic, and thrilling... It's the reason I travel in the first place - to find myself straddling unease and excitement - walking, wide-eyed, through the unknown. Traveling to India, you feel like you've gone someplace. Finally I can see clearly the things, the reasons, to love this riotous and idiosyncratic and mystical place.
Similarly... "Had a long talk with Ian about what India does to you. I don't like it that it makes me pitiless sometimes. I had to have that attitude to "survive" sometimes, but I want to be compassionate. This country is too much sometimes. I HATE INDIA, I LOVE INDIA. I know I want to come back again."
And searching "love hate India" brings up more results of the same.