Food for thought!

It is hard to capture the huge variety of feelings India awakens inside. Suddenly you understand how close love and hate can be related, how pure happiness can suddenly switch to pure frustration and how endless gratefulness can turn into disappointment. It is hard to find words to describe these many experiences, so bare with me. We left off in Goa heading North going through Maharastra and Madhya Pradesh to reach Rajasthan, a state of desserts, burning sunshine and unbelievable cold. On the way a few simple words, meant well and trying to help me, confronted me with another world: “Don’t talk to other men!” Easy to say, but hard to live by if they all talk to you. Some simple words opening up a whole different world, a world of which we easily forget its existence, a world in which women and men live a totally different life and a world where women certainly don’t ride motorcycles. Women ride scooties or sit on the back, obviously. A world that doesn’t fully make sense to me. On the one hand men should not talk to a lady to be respectful, but on the other hand they follow her around trying to take pictures. The contrasts of India. On the one hand India stands for spirituality and peace, on the other hand it promotes crazy driving and distrust. While trying to eliminate inequality by banning the cast system it promotes what I would call racism. Simply looking at the colour of the skin the prices increase. Imagine such situations happening in Belgium or another European country. You are not from Belgium, well, then you should pay 20€ instead of 2€ for the museum, no problem. Why? Oh well, that is just how I think it should be, that’s all. I am sure it would not take long before such practices would end up in the news. In India, the tourist price is something normal. We visited some beautiful, ancient cave temples and yet again the tourist price was more than ten times the local price (15inr local price compared to 200inr for foreigners). When I commented on it and got a little annoyed about it (read: rather something like very annoyed) the guy behind the counter suddenly lost the ability to speak English. Problem solved! If I would know my money is spent well I would not complain as much, but at the same time the buildings are being ruined due to a lack of care, people carving into the walls and rubbish lying around nearly everywhere. The unfairness goes further than this. In many hotels you are rejected simply for being a foreigner, prices more than double and even when buying food you need to know exactly what the price is for each item or they try to charge you an extra tourist tax. Strangely, this especially seems to happen in places where they aren’t used to seeing tourists. For example in Banswara, a town quite close to Udaipur, we had to go to 10 hotels to find a place to stay. Eight hotels simple told us: “No foreigners”, “Not allowed” or “Not possible”. The other 2 places just highly increased their price, so you simply end up with the choice to pay too much or have no place to sleep. For me this is truly shameful behaviour for such an amazing country and casts a dark shade over all the magnificence this country has to offer with for a major part the government to blame.

In contrast, we are often treated to the most beautiful smiles, offered a helping hand out of nowhere and receive free chai in exchange for a bunch of selfies. Just a few days ago we stopped at a small place along the way to have a chai. We only wanted one, but the owner insisted we took a second one and didn’t let us pay a penny. Probably he is poorer than many we have met during this journey and yet he shows so much kindness having only little and sharing all he has. We all have much to learn from such people! I strongly believe that being kind will come back to you in one way or another, maybe not today or tomorrow, but some day life will smile back.

India, different worlds coming together trying to be one. A beautiful, kind, caring world hiding away so much corruption, frustration, pain and dishonesty. A country with so many layers of hope, despair and pain. So many young faces dreaming of a big future while suffocating in the smog covering the cities, so many wonderful women hardly ever leaving the house and so many men bearing the responsibility of taking care of whole families while never being certain of an income the next day.