Catch Me While you can.....

It's New Year's Eve and so much has happened since my last post. A crazy packed few days in Mumbai, seeing the sites in the company of four Kashmiris, Maha Lakshmi Temple, the Haj, homes of Bollywood stars.... attending a wedding and generally dodging the life threatening traffic. Overnight trains, buses, dusty rickshaw rides, Ellora and Ajunta... magnificent sculptures and sunsets, bullock carts and bazaars, gold and vermillion, scarlet, fushia and marigolds... sweet incense and burning dung.
Now here in Varkala beach, Kerala, I will try to catch up with some of the stories and draw the elephant outside my window.

Mumbai Round Midnight

The Arrival .... Asia again at last! I would know with my eyes closed... that dank and mouldy familiar airport smell,rising damp -- monsoon rains sunk deep into the foundations. Quiet corridors, sleeping people, sari-clad women curled up on the linoleum, dozing mustache-iode men, children drapped over their laps, mouths open in slumber.
Finally outside, throngs of jostling people, tin-can taxi cabs, yellow and black. The charred air, warm, heavy,moist. Rattling through the streets, crammed in our tattered taxi, knees touching my chin. The midnight air, waves of aromatic memory, the smokey burnt smell yielding to pungeant fishy aromas, waves of sweet incence mixed with open sewars and rotting fruit. Sleeping people, everywhere --- in the doorways, on the sidewalks, in thier food carts, under parked buses, at the edge of flyovers, in the middle of roundabouts and through the shantitowns, rows of people sleeping on sackcloth by the roadside.On and on through the slums of Mumbai, men huddled on corners, smoking 'bidis', chatting, hustling, homeless.
Finally the streets widen, shacks give way to crumbling colonial buildings, palm, pepul and the dangling roots of the Banyan trees. Frangipani and purple bourganvillia growing wildly round dilapidated colonnades and overhanging balconies. Stray cats and skinny dogs curled up on walls and guarding gateways. Bentley's hotel at last, rest after 20 hours of travel, too late for tea! so lulled to sleep by the whirring ceiling fan and Bombay dreaming.

Lending a Hand..

On Tuesday night I watched Lage Raho Munnabhai (Carry on Munnabhai) with Raj and Sunanda from 'Lend-A-Hand-India'. Lots of laughs, as Munna and his bro Circuit race round Mumbai on their scooter. (I don't remember Bombay having that juicy fruity techno glow to it, must have happened when it changed it's name!) After Munna becomes best pals with Bapu (Gandhi) he starts dispensing 'Gandhigiri' over the radio talk show... people learn the power of giving flowers, being truthful, and of peaceful resistance. Is it all hype? or could it be that this light hearted comedy really is influencing people?
I am so grateful that Lend-a-Hand-India have agreed to collaborate with me on this project.Please take the time to check their website (top left corner) They are doing some great work educating rural children with work and life skills, and are based right here in New York.
Towards the end of my trip I will be spending a week in the Mumbai area to visit one of thier projects and make a report for them and at the same time interview some of the different groups of young people they work with about 'Gandhigiri'

Satyagraha

'Satyagraha' a name he had coined from his native Gujarati and which, I suspected, meant much more at least in the Hindu consciousness, than civil disobedience, passive resistance, non-cooperation and non-violence, though it encompassed all of these. It seemed to me .... that it had to do also with something more subtle - and fundamental: the search for truth, for the essence of the spirit, for some way of decency in human intercourse, and - all in all - offering to man something very new, something that so far had eluded him, a moral and indeed a practical alternative to oppression, violence, war."
William L. Shirer "Gandhi, a Memoir"

Is there a place for 'Satyagraha' in today's world? How could it work? As India itself moves towards a more prominent role in the global economic markets could it be the torchbearer for this message of non-violence and respect for humanity... a message so aredently preached by the father of their nation that has long been overlooked in our violently divided world.
As the crisis in the Middle East grows more desperate, can we learn from the example of the Mahatma Gandhi? Can his teachings be relevant in today's world? Could they inspire a movement towards more peaceful methods of conflict resolution?

Bombay now and then.

The Gate of India, Mumbai.On my arrival in Bombay in 1982 I remember watching the waves come crashing over the Gate of India in awe. The torrential monsoon-like rain led me to the dry and safe haven of the cinema where I saw the film 'Gandhi' and first became aware of his non-violent tactics, or 'Satyagraha' in his struggle towards Indian independance. With his Civil Disobedience the Mahatma Gandhi wrenched the freedom of his nation from the might of British Colonialism. But it came at a terrible cost, the partition of India, which he so vehemently opposed. It was a price he never wished to pay, a tragedy that haunted him until the end of his days and ultimately cost him his life. He died in 1948 aged 78, at the hands of an assasin, one of his own people. His last words were 'He Ram!', 'Oh God!'