Travel Note: India Reflections and Daily Habits
Spirituality, craft and aliveness through music.
I just spent two weeks in India. While there for a wedding, I went from New Delhi to Agra, Jaipur (my fav), and passed through Ranthambore.
India is incredibly large and complex, so I have barely scratched the surface. It was a dipping of the toe. And even so, it was the most culturally unique experience of any travel experience I’ve had.
I’m always looking for new ways of being, experiencing, and living. I believe that by its very nature, what we do habitually is only a small fraction of what is possible for ourselves.
You can read to expand your mind, but travel gives you experience that is impossible to pick up in a book.
Coming back is when I started to process and integrate what I noticed and learned there. While people everywhere are similar, here are some cultural learnings that, in experiencing them, felt different from how we live here in the West.
Daily Spirituality
With up to 80% of the population identifying as Hindu, many people make prayer a daily part of their lives. I went one morning to a Hindu temple at the time of prayer. I walked into chanting and singing while the worshippers were waiting for a curtain to open for the blessings to begin. I took what I believed was a form of “communion” by eating a small piece of basil.
Then, someone came around to give us a fingerprint of a tumeric substance on our “Third Eye” which is said to be helpful at opening up the sense for a spiritual connection.
The temple is open multiple times a day and temples are everywhere in the city. People stop by before work, and I see why. The ceremony itself is upbeat and fun, with singing and chanting. It gives you a boost of energy and community in a short 15-20 minutes.
I contrast this to LA traffic of so many isolated people heading to work by themselves. The West feels very atomized in comparison.
Spirituality in India also embodies care for others. I saw people feeding cows, rats, monkeys, and other street animals. I also stopped by a Sikh temple to see where people volunteer daily to cook free meals for locals. Some temples can feed up to 15,000 people daily.
Service to others is a form of Karma, and a recognition of the experience of others being the potential experience of ourselves.
Craft Culture and Focus
So much is still done by hand in India, from textile sewing to block printing and painting. Craft culture is passed on from generation to generation and their work is of the upmost quality.
I visited a block printing shop that creates garment products for large brands like Zara. Many of the things we assume in the West are done by machines are done by hand. Those prints, those buttons, those seams… an individual was responsible for their production. With the turnover of products within fashion, it’s a shame that we don’t covet these items more.
Concentration and focus don’t seem to be a problem for the craftspeople who are able to paint for 8 hours a day for a month to create an art piece. I should have asked them about ADD.
Natural Timing
One thing I observed was that things happen in their own time in India. It’s not that clocks aren’t used, but rather that I always had the sense that there was more of a collective “time” being kept by groups of people. People gave you more time than was scheduled, as a sense of understanding and wanting to provide experience.
At the wedding I attended, for example, it wasn’t a formal announcement that moved along precessions but rather some form of timing that seemed to spread on its own.
This is also reflected in traffic which is almost orchestral, with people weaving, stopping, and turning all in a maze without strict structures.
How do you know when it’s time to do something, start something, stop something? In the West we use the clock, in India it felt like an intuition about where the group was at and you would extend or cut short based on that sense.
How can you pick up intuitively on timing, rather than allowing the clock to dictate your actions?
Commerce and Hustle
Spice markets, flower markets, and farmers’ markets were all completely full of activity and commerce. Long supply chains are touching many people in the process; for example, I saw local dairy delivery motorcycles that were picking up fresh milk from delivery vehicles that had just been to the farm and would be delivered right to the door of the buyers.
In the farmer's markets, women carried massive baskets and were paid per trip, freelance, to move products for the vendors. Many shops seemed to have multiple attendants.
Commerce there felt very collective there. Our work is a piece of a larger puzzle and collectively we take for granted how much we all rely on each other for our functioning economy.
Dance & Music.
One of the most enjoyable parts of India is the music. Uber drivers would play us rap music. Shuttles between cities would have classic radio tunes. At the wedding, you’d hear a mashup of current selections of music alongside drumming. Indian music is complex, rhythmically different, and then also simple and fun.
Dance appeared to be much more common as a form of exercise and fun in that people would often join in the live performances.
New studies are showing that dance is as effective as anti-depressants. I think it would be good for us to experience more of this.
Returning to Asia + India
Next on my list is Japan, which I’m very much looking forward to. Returning to India I’d like to see both the south and the north of the country which I have heard or totally different. There is also a lot of unique history and spirituality there which I would find interesting to explore deeper.
Travel is the ultimate disruptor of your worldview and naturally expands how you think.
As always, let me know how I can help.
xx David
PS, here’s a fun video of driving through Ranthambore.
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