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There is no easy way to describe India. It's a country of contrasts, a place where the beautiful and the sublime easily coexist with the miserable and wretched. The aromas of jasmine, sandalwood, and fruit are mixed liberally in the heady street smells of dust, diesel, and refuse. Spices and colours, exquisite crafts and jewelry, poverty and need, the kindness of strangers and the harassment of touts, the solemnity of temples and the crowds of bazaars, the endless variety of it all. As the great epic, the Mahabharata, proclaims itself to be, so is the land it was born in: that which can be found elsewhere can be found here too, and that which cannot be found here cannot be found anywhere else. Though made up of fragments and multiplicities, it is a totality, an organic whole. This is the paradox of India.
And as it is impossible to encompass a totality that includes oneself, unless perhaps by revelation, these are just some memories of my most recent trip to India, this time to Chennai and Pondicherry. These are memories of a season, hot and humid, inundated with rain. These are glimpses of the quiet life in Pondi; reminders of the floods of late November and early December in Madras; of a short break in dry Mumbai... These are footnotes to a longer story to be told, perhaps, some other time.
