I’m kicking this off with a passage from Satyajit Mehta’s bestseller “Spice of Life” for a reason. I’m hoping its portrait of urban life strikes a chord; that it sounds unnervingly familiar one minute, bafflingly different the next. That is India, a spicy masala of a million rumbling voices, dazzling colors, overwhelming smells and outlandish tastes; boasting no less than seven major religions, fifteen major languages and hundreds of dialects.
Despite self-imposed isolation, India hasn’t stood still in time, but rather has embraced the powers-that-be of the Sixth World; there cultural mores and cutthroat agen- das inexorably assimilated and melded with a bewildering kaleidoscope of local beliefs and realities. The implausible and contradictory are taken in stride in a land where ascetic saddhus (renunciant holy men) chant sutras in praise of the Divine Host of Thousands, a street from where a labor union rally shouts neo-communist slogans denouncing corpo- rate oppression. A land of great promise and tolerant ideals, where the economic and reli- gious tensions of centuries flare all too often and appalling squalor still haunts the reborn sprawls. My generation is caught between the two great cogs of conservative millennial culture and relentless feudal capitalism, railing against the blinders imposed by both and ready to make our voices heard.
CHAOS RESPLENDENT
To begin to understand India, you really have to grasp that it boasts close to a billion inhabitants. Scale factors into every- thing; the faster you adjust your sense of propor- tion, the easier it will be to come to terms with life here. A good trick is to walk out to the shanty towns on the edge of Calcutta or New Delhi where the people living in abject poverty number millions rather than thou- sands. Go to a political rally, any political rally, and you will find thou- sands upon thou- sands of people rather than hun- dreds.
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This isn’t really news: back at the turn of the century India had popula- tion densities that dwarfed Western megaplexes.>
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Scale trickles into everything in India like it does in China. An offbeat cult in Denver numbers a few hundred members, but in Benares it could number many thousands—several actually do. Popular artists and politicians hold sway over tens of millions of people. That’s why elections are so turbulent: when tensions flare, thou- sands of people can get drawn into street battles.>
Socio PatNext you have to realize that a significant portion of those billion—about 80 percent in fact—are Hindus. Islam claims about 10 percent of the population and other beliefs make up the remainder. Though Buddhism was born in India and flour-
ished for more than a thousand years, it’s no longer a signifi- cant force in Indian life. Consequently understanding India has a lot to do with understanding Hinduism.
To put contemporary Hinduism in context, it’s important to understand that even though Hindus believe the final days of the Kali Yuga are still far off, the knowledge that we have many lives yet to live was of little consolation before the sheer magnitude of the VITAS Plagues, the most devastating events in Indian history. Almost half a billion succumbed before the epidemics ran their course, and the destruction didn’t stop there. Massive funeral pyres raged out of control, devastating vast tracts of sprawls. India burned, generations were lost and Kali danced on the ashes. Today, we can barely comprehend that loss and grief. Hindu and Muslim alike took it as the ulti- mate test of faith, a sign of the gods’ displeasure.
Both faiths came out strengthened, particularly Hinduism, which flourished as people looked to spirituality for explana- tions and cathartic release. Not many realize how deep the fes- tering wounds of those tragic years run. The revival of the castes is just the obvious sign; others include the rampant nationalism that led to the Kashmir exchange and internation- al isolationism that is just beginning to fade.
For the Hindu a spark of braman (the omnipresent god- seed, mana) is present and awake in everything, from the high gods on down to the ubiquitous banyan trees and lowly rats. The divine is not abstract; separation between the secu- lar and the celestial is nonsensical. Monotheistic, pantheistic and polytheistic all at once, Hinduism stubbornly refuses to conform to Western conceptions of religion. Tolerant and transcendent in philosophy, it remains eminently practical and worldly.