This December will be the ten-year anniversary of my two-month trip to India. I was recently looking up a town that I visited and discovered that all the names of the towns and cities have been changed since I was there. They were starting it when I was there - Bombay was already Mumbai and Madras was already Chennai - but all the names of the little towns (I visited over twenty) have been changed. When I returned to the U.S. I remember someone asking me if I would go back. I think my answer then was that there were so many other places I wanted to go, I couldn't see myself going back to a place I'd already been. But despite the wear and tear on my body from eating the food, the minute the plane left the ground, tears streamed down my cheeks and I cried "I miss my India!"
Ten years later, I still don't miss an opportunity to talk about my travels and many memories are as fresh as the day they happened. There's something about the country, the culture, the people, that get in you. I left India but it never left me and when I read or hear things about it, it's like hearing about a place I used to live or a person I used to love. There has been a lot about India in the news lately. There was a slew of polls in Time magazine and one said that people in India were two-three times more optimistic about their future than Americans. The commentary was that people are happier in a society that's in the process of improving than in one where things are already good. The author surmised that it was a feeling if things are good, they can only get worse.
But progress always has its price and a while back I saw an article about the giant boulders in India - across the Deccan plateau - that are being blown up with dynamite to make way for new construction. Yes, they're that big. One of my favorite places there was a town called Hampi (it's not on the map anymore, they changed the name!), just a little ways from Bangalore - then called the Silicon Valley of India. I can't help but wonder now if there are more Indians in the tech industry in the U.S. than in India. I read that the software industry is so booming in India that engineers from the U.S. can go home to India and take their jobs with them. But I digress, the article was about a society formed to "save the boulders!" of Hyderabad. It even describes one guy who built his house around a boulder, something that should have a been the subject of a Dr. Suess story. I don't usually post professionally published photos but this was just too beautiful and I don't have any of my India photos scanned (they were taken pre-digital!)
I spent time in Hyderabad and I don't remember the giant boulders there, but I do remember them in Hampi. Out in the middle of a huge plain, along a river, hundreds of giant boulders are stacked and sitting in piles, miles away from the nearest mountains. The first question you ask is where did they come from? The second is why are they here? When you focus your eyes you notice the buildings that have been carved out of stone by a civilization thousands of years ago and realize that the "buildings" are the size of a thimble compared to an orange. The boulders are way bigger than they look initially.
Protest is now part of the familiar modern tale of development vs. nature, but nature is starting to be more valuable I think. I also heard on NPR that Indians are protesting the arrival of WalMart that is threatening to replace the "mom and pop shop" with jobs, robbing Indians of their independence and freedom sell what they want, and only benefitting a few. We're starting to realize, as the article says, that once certain things are destroyed, they can't be brought back. Which is why, ten years later, I find myself thinking about India and wanting to go back to that which someday will be no longer.
No comments:
Post a Comment