You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 6th, 2008.
Having visually absorbed a facet of South India, the following are pieces of everyday work in progress as well as hints of the bigger picture.
Day 1 – Bengaluru
Our first meet up with the drivers. I had hallucinations of Shyam saying: “If you guys misbehave, I’m gonna give you a Batista-bomb.” The drivers did anyway, I wished I was the one to administer that devastating move.
i’ve been reading and re-reading the posts here and one thing most of us have been raving about here is how nice and friendly everyone in india is. like everyone else, i was taken aback by their kind hospitality, warm smiles and genuine hearts. but it also goes to show evidently how disgustingly selfish and self-centred the society we are living in is like, in order for us to have made such comparisons.
sad to say, i am part of that selfish society as well – sigh.
the lines between nice and not nice become increasingly blurred as our society progresses forward. i need to learn and unlearn many things.
ahh i am so thankful for GO-FAR.
Writing now, days after our adventure in Karnataka represents a new difficulty for me. Besides my overzealous stomach, I’m already finding it hard to place people and events, faces blur and words escape themselves. Perhaps Shyam was right, your memory does get overwritten with passing time.
Yet as i look back on the photos and blog entries of my peers, I’m reminded of the warmth and hospitality of the people. Like many of my friends, I was overwhelmed by their generosity and spirit; or as Mr Areca ‘Nut’ puts it: “If they had 5kg of rice in their homes, they’d serve you 4 and a half.”
I remember spending a most fulfilling day with Azad, exploring the hills and fields of his farm, listening to his stories and views on life. I was taken aback by his maturity but is reminded of his age as we watched him playfully hurl rocks with his slingshot.
The people we encountered along the way, from humble farmers working the fields to stall vendors in the marketplaces we visited and even the auto rickshaw drivers who ferried us around. The kindness of a particular fisherman who first beckoned us to join him on top of his boat and then brought us around an ice-processing factory. Their smiles and our hand gestures more than made up for our lack of a common language.
The noisy marketplace and the vibrant villages, the crazy traffic and a soundscape of car horns blaring tunes, beeps and whistles. The vast patches of fields after fields, school children on bicycles, locals on packed buses, cows lazing on roadsides. The sights and sounds of which I’m sure remain vivid in some of our minds.
But as i come to David’s post, I am reminded of the cruelty of life. Like him and many others, I wonder how much of a difference can we make to the lives of those we have met. But what i do know is that we have to do justice to these stories; write them to the best of our abilities and hope for the best.
So maybe Shyam was right again, as I looked through pictures and read posts, my own memory floods itself with recollections of Karnataka, perhaps when I go through my 11 tapes of footages tomorrow, more will come back to me.
