We’ve been in Agra the past two days. On most streets the air is constantly thick. The attacking smells covers off pretty much anything that exudes an odour. Think animals, excrement, vehicles, spices, frying, incense, flowers, dough, sweat and every other aroma you can dream up. And they swirl and mix, like a recipe. Even something horribly putrid can linger before a surprise, sweet ending.
^ No surprise pleasant ending here. This was behind a couple of street vendors opposite the Red Fort in Agra
Add to that the inescapable humidity and the streets contain a constant, thick, sultry barrage.
^ More pleasant aromas
I was eight when I arrived in Kerala and had my ninth birthday soon after (you can read about that here). When I left I was fourteen. My formative years were in India.
At fourteen turning fifteen I was unexpectedly whisked off to a leafy Adelaide suburb with all its pristine protectedness.
In 1985 our Australian lifestyle was sanitised. These days it’s been scrubbed clean within an inch of its life.
Let’s ponder that for a minute. If I created a thought train of words that seem to be guiding our Australian commercial progress and cultural evolution, I would start here:
Comfort, cleanliness, perfection, security, efficiency, customer, shop, entitlement, assurance, control, risk-averse, disposable, temp-glam, fake, hyper-real, glossy, shiny, ultra, slick. Oh and famous.
So much of our lives are sanitised. It’s a global glossy disease and it is spreading.
This isn’t a comment on people. It’s the values we buy into. I’m not even sure we’re actually buying into the values. We embrace habits and our values are formed as an after-thought.
So where’s the link to my adolescence? I’m still trying to figure that out. It’s something to do with emergent awareness of the messiness of life, and what I was experiencing around me as a kid.
Frankie Schaeffer recounted from his upbringing as a child in the Swiss commune L’Abri that he was never given the birds and the bees chat; growing up with farm animals all around, the talk wasn’t needed.
The older you get, the more you realise – life is messy, just like India. That’s the connection. To look at, experience and smell, India on face value looks like real life. It’s never ending and always confronting. And in the middle of that there are people thriving everywhere. Adolescence is the beginning of that journey, I think that’s what I am trying to grapple with.
^ Apparently this is security camera wiring. Ramakant, pictured below, tried the “I’m in charge” thing. I laughed, we talked, he told me his name and I took a pic.
My brother in law and I were joking tonight about where you’d start in India if you wanted to make a difference with the infrastructure. We thought that creating a government department called The Ministry of Not Taking a Dump in Public might be a good first move!
I’m not presenting India as the pin up poster country. I would never want to make light of the enormous challenges that exist here. They are on a scale that seems insurmountable.
^ Old and new
^ Simon Cowell… he’s everywhere!
We should ask ourselves what are we, including the new India, marching towards? The uncomfortable, smells, texture, wrinkles, depth and scars of life are replaced with imagery of the mostly unattainable, devices to swipe select and judge, all delivered by bright glossy decal at the local mall, and apparently that’s progress.
My friend Ranjit who lives in Delhi messaged this to me:
Western culture is very much the part and parcel of the life of a middle class city kid.. all the exposure and all the bad that it brings with it.
Enough said.
Life is messy, and you first embark on the path of slowly experiencing its messiness as an adolescent.
In Australia we expertly hide our messiness away and pretend it’s not there. It’s a poor way of living and creates its own set of problems.
Here, you can build the most modern shopping complex in the world and a cow will come along and sit at the entrance and do cow things.
India is always on display in all its messy glory – I completely love it.
