I am just back from my first ever trip to India. It was a quick business trip to Mumbai and Chennai, and it all went very fast. It was a bit of a fishbowl experience : from airport to hotel to office and so on, gliding through the reality out there in the comfort of my company car, eating at nice restaurants and been looked after.
For someone who experienced India like I did it is quite hard to go past the chaos, the poverty, the traffic, the open air landfills, the divide between the rich and the poor, the tragedies unfolding in front of your eyes out of the window, out of the fishbowl. It is hard not to look the other way, and to some extent I did.
However, below the surface I sensed the charms of India that so many travelers talk about. I tried to understand what was that charm, where did it come from.
Was it the intoxicating mixture of colors, spices, chaos, untold history that I know so little about lingering underneath the surface? Was it that 'matter of fact' attitude about life that has gone lost in many other places? Or was it just being confronted with being closer to the core of humanity that attracts one so much - a glimpse into what being human really means and the realization to what extent sometimes we go to dissociate ourselves from that mess that somehow seems to always work out at the end.
