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The weekend after I returned from my three-week
trip to India, I went with some friends to a Japanese
restaurant. There I encountered a green sauce that was
reportedly "extremely hot." When I tried a
tiny amount of this sauce on my sushi, I couldn't taste
it. When I placed a teaspoonful in my mouth, I barely
felt a thing. After India, very little tasted hot to
me.
India changes your definitions. Hot is a small example;
poor is a big one. In terms of material wealth, I saw
more poverty every day in India than I've seen in my
entire life in America. And it was poverty of all varieties.
In the city we saw tarp lean-tos lining every main street,
stump-bandaged lepers squatting in the subway entrances,
and ragged children dodging traffic to beg at tour-bus
windows. In the rural areas old women and cripples line
temple entrances, thin old men pedal tourists in bicycle
rickshaws, and families in mud huts eek out a living
on rice farms. Constant in both the city and rural areas
were people begging and selling.
Don't get me wrong. There are well-off Indians-just
as there are poor Americans. But poverty in the two
countries differs by degree, visibility, and sheer numbers.
Simply put: in India more people are poorer, and they're
out en masse. There aren't ten or fifteen sidewalk vendors
trying to squeeze a living from passers-by-there are
thirty or forty. There aren't five or ten homeless people
asking for change on the street-there are fifty or sixty.
It was extremely difficult to say no to the beggars but we had to, lest
we be mobbed by a crowd after giving change to one. Instead, we tried to
give them something else: compassion. We tried to smile at them, acknowledge
their humanity, give them a friendly word. Although these gestures wouldn't
fill their stomachs, we hoped they would stay with the beggars after we
left.
Many times, though, we were the ones left with an indelible impression.
Among the beggars, and among the general populace of India, wealth, too,
is redefined. Poverty and prosperity are not a simple matter of possessions.
Although people in India with an abundance of material goods are relatively
few and far between, people with a richness of spirit are found everywhere
you look. How can the poor be so rich in spirit-and even so often happy?
They can be happy for the same reason well-off westerners can be unhappy.
Though everyone needs food, clothing, and shelter, material possessions
beyond the basics do not guarantee joy in life: attitude does. It is no
doubt because real problems are so visible in India that anything not life- |
