India
"Incredible India" - that's how India tries to canvass tourists. Who ever came up with that slogan did a really good job in hitting the nail on the head. India is truly incredible. There is no country in the world quite alike and not many that are in every thinkable way simply incredible.
Incredible is a a very precise
term 'cause it describes the breathtaking, stunningly beautiful moments that you’ll have on an India journey as well as the horrifying, traumatizing things that you’ll see and
encounter.
India is a country of extremes. Name something and you’ll surely find the exact two opposite both
in one country. Starting with the super rich upper class Indian families that are spending for a wedding ceremony as much as a poor pariah family would need to survive for the next ten
years. Going on with India being known for a place to concentrate on oneself in remote ashrams and on the other hand having the hustle and bustle of a megalopolis like Mumbai or Delhi. In India
you can find caring, loving people like Gandhi and mother Theresa as well as people with complete ignorance for those who suffer. A train conductor has the name of each and every passenger
of his train whereas nobody exactly knows who or even how many people live in the slums of Mumbai.
The countryside knows all the
extremes as well. You have snow-covered mountains in the Himalaya, sand dunes at the Thar desert, lush flora in the Kerala backwaters, caribbean feelings on the Andaman islands, dense jungle
in the north of the country and so on and so forth.
But what makes India truly
incredible is it’s rich Hindu culture whose complexity sometimes even the Hindus themselves don’t understand fully. With thousands and thousands of gods and even more ways to worship them you can
breathe spirituality while traveling through the country. The people no matter if an IT specialist, a fruit vendor or a beggar along the street are so strong in their beliefs and their order
of the world that they’re not questioning their situation as we do it from outside. They know it’s meant to be like that. They try to be a better person in their own way to gain a better a
better future in the next life. And behind a next life is certainly no question mark. I think that strong belief is what makes the country despite all chaotic and miserable situations work
and make the people survive. It’s the pure trust on a world order that we western people can’t even come close to understand.
And there we are with an
extreme again - the extreme that you as a western visitor are compared to India.
Traveling trough India, you
really need to erase everything you’re used to, everything you learned back home and start with a blank page. There is nothing familiar about the culture, about the habits, about how the cities
or the landscapes look like, about how to talk to people or not even about buying a train ticket. You need to play it by ear. And that is exactly what I love about a travel - starting
from scratch and truly learn how a country works.
India has fascinated me since I
was a little child. It took a little while until I felt ready for that adventure but now that I’ve been there (twice) I feel that it was worth the waiting. The travels through India had a deep
impact on me that I couldn’t have imagined before. It’s of course the things I’ve seen and the people I’ve met but it’s also the feeling of „I did it. On my own.“. I dealt with every
unknown situation and filled up my blank page India.
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