English-Vinglish

If you happen to live in an unheard of city like Pardubice where Indians are as many in population as a small fraction of the lions in the forest of Gir then you would have the experience of a lifetime figuring out how it is that non-Indians go about in the world. Fortunate that I am, owing to the fact that I barely have any Indian friends here, that is exactly what I have been witnessing for the last 15 months and I have learnt and seen things that have opened my mind to things that I thought I would never be able to comprehend. But it can get daunting after a while and you begin missing familiar attitudes that you have been accustomed to all your life. It was at the high point of such a phase that I happened to spend some time in London this October. 

London, ah London! The very thought of the city puts a smile on my face. Ever since early this year when I was told that I should go to the city and spend time in the British Library, I had been looking forward to this trip. Despite months of planning, it did not occur to me that I was actually going to step on its soil until I saw it from the top before landing. Why was I so awed by the idea of going to London you may ask. For so many reasons I would say. Firstly, it was London (duh!), secondly, it was the seat of THE British colonialism that we are so familiar with. Thirdly, we hear so much about British accent and the snootiness of the Brits that I wanted to see for myself what it was all about and most importantly, I wanted to see what this paradise called The British Library was. What I was about to see and feel in over the next four weeks were to make me one very happy person.

The British Library far exceeded my expectations of it. I had heard stories of my European friends and teachers taking many extra jobs for several months only to save up for a two-week stay in London and access the library. After going around the place and seeing the collections it had, it made sense why they did so. Among the many things that I miss about London is the routine that got established with me going to the library everyday. Tube traveling from where I stayed to the library took as long as it takes to travel between Borivali and Churchgate by a slow train, so an hour may be? It was while traveling back from the library that I generally caught up on my sleep and thanks to how well Bombay trained me for it, I could nap even while I was standing in a crowded train. Not to mention the lovely soup and sandwich lunch I had everyday from Pret-a-Manger, okay now I am really sad. Also I just realized that I had been pronouncing the name of the store wrong all this time.

Being in London was very much like being in Bombay. I would say that Bombay is to India what probably London is to Europe. Time is of the essence here and there is none of it to be wasted. Every glimpse of the city would show you people of at least five different nationalities just like in Bombay you would find people from all parts of the country. Traveling by crowded trains, being able to walk and walk for a long time through populated lanes, having streets lined with small shops similar to the ones we see on Colaba Causeway and so much more, London seems to be the most comfortable place for an Indian to live outside India, except of course the money factor because everything is bloody expensive there. Besides all that, I was amazed by the kind of things you could find in the numerous Indian shops. I was most thrilled when I saw frozen puttu and kozhukatta which could be made ready to eat in just 3 minutes. The Malayalee in me had a ball of a time there because I also had my fill of Dosa-sambar and beef roast.

Outside library activities, London is where I have enjoyed being the most in all of Europe. Because of my host, who probably has a lot of experience showing guests around, I got to squeeze in as much sightseeing as I could into three weekends. A Saturday in Brighton also made me imagine that I was part of some world that was mentioned in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. There is a lot to see here if you are a literature buff or an unfortunate student of English Literature. Since I am the latter, there were many things that kept me busy. Need I mention the Harry Potter store in King’s Cross near Platform 9¾ where I managed to go at least twice a week on the way back home? Yes, I own the Elder Wand now.

All the fun apart, being in London taught me many things that probably people learn at some point of time in their lives. In the four weeks I stayed there I managed to meet quite a number of friends from school and college. Meeting them after many years made me realise how easy it can be to slip into being the diffident college girl or the impulsive young teenager you used to be around these people. Only when encountered with such experiences, which are sometimes uncomfortable, do you realise how fragile most of the images you have created about yourself are and you are left hoping that what you are now, probably the best version that you have known of yourself so far, would be pale and poor in comparison to what you will be someday. And the prospect of going through that growth is worth the wait and the unfamiliar experiences that you may have to go through. Also, although I loved my time In London I still cannot help thinking that I was fortunate to move to Czech Republic and live in a place like Pardubice where there is no way Indians can form ghettos and not interact with other people because they are so few in number. I saw many Indians In London who had formed little worlds of their own. Besides London in my eyes hardly remains a place where you can experience Britain in its English glory. Had I lived there I would have never gotten to understand Europe the way I am able to here and learnt what cultural difference is, which is what I came to Europe for in the first place. 

The time I spent in London was beautiful to say the least. I do not know if it had to do with being in a city which pulsated with the kind of energy I am used to or with being with those who knew things that I had quite forgotten about myself or going for those movies in the evenings or having those conversations that ran late into the night or looking at the London Eye almost everyday and making plans to go on it despite being told how lame it is or those weekly jaunts to the street markets. AlI I know is that I hope to be there again. Soon.

Now please excuse me while I go play with my wand. 




Future Past Present

In order to destroy the past of a people, all you need to do is give them history. What is called 'history' today is a secularisation of the Christian religion.

-Balu

It has been more than a year since I came to the Czech Republic. Before coming here one of the things that I had thought I would do is travel a lot. I had imagined that I would fill my weekends with small trips to the countryside or figure out how hitchhiking is done and such. I guess my estimation of my nature was not very accurate as I soon discovered that I preferred staying put in the city on weekends and maybe go out for a dinner or drinks with friends in the evening. It is not that I do not want to go out of the city but I simply find it convenient to stay in. As a result of this I have a long list of trips I planned to go on and cancelled at the last minute to my credit (or discredit). However there was this trip, a wine festival at Mikulov, that our International Office had been planning for a long time for which, as usual, I put my name in and because the people who had signed up for it belonged to my circle of friends here, I was pretty positive that I would go for it. As the day for the trip came closer the weather worsened forcing some people to opt out of it. At the start of the trip we were left with just a group of ten people ready to brave sleeping in wet tents for two nights.

The wine festival was bigger than I had expected and it attracted quite a lot of tourists as well. How the local sellers interacted with them was very different from how I am used to seeing Indian sellers interact with tourists. India has great salespeople. You might have heard the expression “selling snow to an Eskimo”. Well we are the kinds who are experts at doing that. But unfortunately when it comes to tourists, our selling technique is aggressive and to a large extend greedy. We sell things at double the price to tourists. It’s not just India. Most parts of Asia and the Middle East are known for it. Probably it is because we think that the foreigners can easily afford anything (which they can, something you would know if you check the exchange rates and see that for them these doubled local prices are still a bargain). Here however, the case was totally different. They insisted that we take little things for free. Nothing major, simple things like a lighter or a small beaded bracelet. Oh, and aggressive selling is a strict no-no for them (probably because it comes in the way of letting a person use his/her “freedom to choose” :P)

At the festival they organised lovely programs where first children and then adults sang, played instruments and danced in their medieval attire. Every thing that I saw on stage had something to do with their history. It was at this point that a friend, an Indian, marvelled at the way they maintained their history and appreciated the West for doing that. While the idea of preserving history sounds sweet, there is so much more to understanding why the West does it so well in comparison to us who have, for centuries, been ridiculed for poor maintenance of our history.

When I was in school I loved History as a subject. Somehow I always managed to remember dates and pour out essays and essays on the world wars, revolutions and freedom struggles on paper. But it is also a subject very commonly hated in schools across India. So if you like studying history and manage to know more about it than your peers you tend to start thinking of yourself as a historian of some sort and sometimes even develop careerist ambitions for it. My friend who came to Czech Republic last year from India told me this after being here for just two weeks “I thought I was a historian till I came here”. At that point I wondered what it could possibly mean. Did it mean that Indians could not make good historians? Through her many explanations, readings on it that followed and my own experiences here many things became clear.

One of the first things I noticed when I went to Amsterdam is the sheer number of museums there. They had a museum for everything possible like chocolate, beer and plenty of other things that Amsterdam is associated with. You would think that such is the case because Amsterdam happens to be a big city but no! Go to any small village around and you will find a small museum with artefacts that bear witness to the history of that village. Outside those museums, depending on how big they are, you would find souvenir shops selling merchandise as silly as T-shirts or mugs with prints of the picture of some or the thing displayed in the museum. They are highly priced but people buy them. I asked a German once why he did that and he answered “Because I want to take a part of this history with me”. The reply sounded absolutely absurd to me if not ridiculous. It would have made sense if he were talking about taking back home a part of the actual artefact but coffee mugs and key chains, really? It all made sense now. There is this place called Jew Town in Fort Kochi in my hometown. It probably attracts the most number of tourists per annum in Kerala. I have walked the lanes of Jew Town a million times and I have seen many shops that sell postcards and other souvenirs of this historical place. Not once have I seen an Indian or even an Asian buy from any of them. It is always the westerners who patronise these stores. Long time ago while standing outside one of these shops (where you also get lemonade) I happened to ask the shopkeeper how business is going. He said that it was off-season for tourism and was managing somehow by selling lemonade. He laughed and said that only white people buy these things. Back then I assumed that it was because we Indians would rather not spend money on buying nonsense like this but now I can see that for the westerners it is not about the money they spend on it but about keeping a part of history with them.

We cultured Indians have always wondered why the non-cultured Indians mark our monuments with the proof of their love. Mahesh loves Sundari, Nadia loves Farhaan and other similar messages are things we very often see scribbled across the walls of important monuments of our country. There are two reasons why you would see this only in India. One, we have no respect for our monuments. It is not a bad thing at all. In fact it only shows how little of importance our history is to us. Two, like in the West, going to visit a monument is not something we do. Yes, the idea has been popularised by schools that take students to museums and monuments for their annual picnic but seriously, how many of us can say that our parents proposed going to the museum as an idea for a family weekend or even ever raised the issue of it as something that needed to be done? Well, it is something that they do here. History and historical monuments ‘need’ to be known and visited. So, as far as I have seen, in India, the people who go to visit monuments or other historical places are young lovers who bunk college and know that people can be hardly found there and that this would be the best place for them to spend some quality time alone. Therefore the love signs everywhere.

Sometimes I feel that the West goes quite overboard with the preservation of its history. My short Euro-trip that began in Amsterdam ended with a one-day tour of Auschwitz, in Poland. Seeing the Nazi extermination camp, reading the several literatures available on the Holocaust and seeing YouTube videos of piles and piles of skinny dead bodies being taken for cremation made me lose my sleep over the next couple of months. In many of the accounts of Holocaust survivors it was often mentioned how it is important to repeat these stories and let people know its truth so that we do not forget what happened and learn from it so that such things are not repeated again in history. It is true that what happened was heinous and atrocious but repeating it over and over again, selling the story, even making an industry out of it and still playing the blame game keeps alive and even strengthens a trauma that people need to get over. A few years ago there were several blasts in the local trains of Mumbai. Almost every single person living in Mumbai uses local trains everyday and to see it get attacked on such a large scale was something that sent us citizens into shock and fear. That did not stop the huge population of Mumbai from going to work using the same local trains and getting back to the normal functioning of their lives the very next day. Did it make us more cautious? In some ways yes but did we dwell on it for much long after that? No. The western media even criticised us for moving on too quickly and not doing everything necessary to keep the trains safe. Compare this with the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. So many things changed in the US after that. The trauma caused by that is still evident and you would know it when you talk to a person from there. I am not saying that Indians are unfettered by anything while westerners nurse trauma. Both have their minus points. While the West is keeping the memory of its sad past alive, we in many ways have just gotten over the issue of personal security thanks to the many terrorist attacks that happened in the past decade and making close to no demands for upping the security systems in our local transport, something we get enthusiastic about after every attack.

So getting back to what I had started off with, what have I understood so far? We Indians do not relate to history like the West does. It does not mean that we are not good chroniclers of events that happened, in let’s say, the last hundred years or so but history runs in the blood of westerners unlike us (Read this to understand better). Long story short, their affinity to history has a lot to do with their Christian roots and the quest for knowing the ‘real’ events that went into the making of their ‘true’ past. For them unless something really happened it is not true. In comparison, we Indians have a completely different way of dealing with our past. Our past can contain stories from our puranas or even the ones our grandparents told us while we spent time with them.  The demand of the western culture for us to ‘prove’ that our past is ‘true’ (read: real) has lead to a lot of problems over the last few centuries which we are not equipped to become aware of easily. In the battle between history and past, the past has obviously, to a large extent, lost ground but sadly how much we have lost culturally as a result of it is something that surely we would be sad to know.

Lets get back to more pleasant things, shall we? As I might have given the impression so far, I am not contemptuous of the idea of people being obsessed with their history. In everyday life here, it often shows forth through very funny and sometimes cute instances. For example, we ended the wine festival weekend by visiting a beautiful Castle with an estate that is one of the largest artificial landscapes of Europe. This place was almost an hour from where the festival was taking place. While we happily hopped into our cars to reach there, some people from the Transport department of the university who were in the group decided to take a vintage train to the Castle, which has been in use since the 50’s. The whole experience of it is literally called ‘Nostalgia’ and its pamphlets are loaded with the historical details of the train. Europe might sell anything in the name of history but seeing how passionate people are about it adds colour and entertainment in the life of an Indian here :)

Green

There is something nice about being invited to a Czech household during the weekend. Because it is a weekend you can be sure that you will be going to their home town which is generally not in a city. Being in a small town or village here is a beautiful experience and one you must not miss if you get to spend time in Europe. Almost untouched by modernity these small towns pretty much present the picture you imagined while reading a Jane Austen novel. There is the town centre which, as the name suggests, is literally in the centre of the town with plenty of shops around it. And I´m not talking about the Zaras or the Vero Modas but bakeries, cheese and wine shops that are run and have been in families for decades or even centuries. If the town happens to be on a higher ground level then you get to see the entire country side from the fringes of the town. 

Enough talk about the beauty of a small town. On to the families and their houses. Like you would expect, people here are way more friendly and involved in each others lives. For example, my first memory of going to a village here involves friendly neighbours of my hosts poking out their heads from their doors and windows, expecting to be introduced to the strange creature with dark skin and black eyes. My favorite part about being here is going through their gardens. In their backyard they grow a lot of stuff that are pretty looking to the Indian eyes. We are used to trees in our backyards. The mango trees, the guava trees. And didn´t we love playing around and on them while growing up? For many of us these memories form a big part of the summers we spent with our grandparents. The gardens here are full of apple trees. They also have beds of strawberries, lavender, aromatic herbs, potato, garlic and what not! People here are way more enterprising than we ordinary people of India as far as garden farming is concerned. And it is an activity that the entire family is involved in. For the kids it´s like a chore that must be done. My impression is that as much as they are reluctant to do it, these common gardening moments become a part of their memories when they grow older. You would find them talking very fondly of these memories. Pretty much like we talk about ours, the only difference being, for us these memories are part of play while for them they are as much of a routine as doing homework is. And I appreciate that. Among the many good things that I am going to take back from Europe, someday if I have a family of my own, this is something I would try to emulate.

Last morning I woke up with a sad news and found myself unable to do anything for the first half of the day. I had lost my grandfather. It was a strange feeling. I was not deeply sad probably because I was unable to bring back memories of him. It was like my mind had frozen. Around this time my friend invited me to her hometown and mentioned that she is going to need some help with gardening. Not wanting to sit at home fretting while my family gathered in my native place for the funeral rites I accepted the invitation. It was a good decision. While tilling the soil the memories finally started flowing in. Memories of how I used to do the same with my grandfather, whom we call Daddy, flooded my thoughts. Spending time with him was mostly about cocoa or nutmeg picking or putting out coconut, pepper or a variety of other things out for drying, all this if we were not trying to squeeze out money from him for various things. So after several hours of working with soil (something that would have highly pleased him), I was ready to say goodbye. There would be no more Daddy to give those Melody or Lacto King chocolates or to complain to my mother "Marymma, your daughter does not say her prayers properly" but there is a time for everything. 

Coming back to the point, those in India who do not live in big cities and thereby are not deprived of land space could do well by investing a little bit of their time and energy into home gardening. The Malayalam movie How Old Are You? which was recently made taxfree sets a good example for the benefits of doing such a thing. Knowing from experience I think that it is better for our future generations to have memories of planting trees and feel rewarded by their produce than have memories of them playing GTA, Max Payne or whatever youngsters play these days and gloat among their peers about the level they have reached. What say?

Five Hundred Twenty Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes

(In) Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure the life of a woman or a man?

In truths that she learned
Or in times that he cried
In bridges he burned or the way that she died

It's time now, to sing out
Though the story never ends
Let's celebrate
Remember a year in the life of friends

- Jonathan Larson (Seasons of Love-RENT)

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes make a year. And that’s exactly how long ago I set foot in Czech Republic. Walking through the streets of Pardubice today I was reminded of the thoughts that went through my mind when I first saw these buildings and so many white people at once. While the thoughts have become vague I clearly remember the expectations I came to Europe with. I was convinced that I was here to learn. Not just about the things I had come here to study but about people, cultural difference and how to go about in the world. Looking back, I can say that had his year not happened I would not have known what a roller-coaster ride really means.

Time really flew. When I went to Bombay this time, at first it felt like I had not left at all. Everything seemed to be the same but before time I started noticing the little changes that had crept in owing to either my short stay abroad or the kind of insights you gain when you realize that you are not the young lady who you used to be before.

I had thought that other than the cultural difference that I would encounter in Europe, living here would be a piece of cake. Like many women of my generation I have lived away from family for over a decade now. And unlike many of them I have absolutely loved it from the very beginning and never felt homesick. I would not call what I experienced in Europe a rude shock but it is a shock nevertheless. You see, when you set out living alone anywhere in India, the kind of relationship you build with even the girl who sits at the reception desk of your college/ workplace speaks a lot about the land we come from. The tight bonds that we form do not let us feel lonely even on the loneliest of days. I am not saying that Europeans are incapable of forming such bonds but you would see them making that place only for their partners or spouses. They have close friendships too but you need to see in person and study them for a while to understand that the depth of those friendships come no where close to the kind of bond they share with their partners or the ones that we share with almost every person in our smaller circles.

Certain things finally began to make sense. I always wondered why Indians living abroad formed social groups and barely ventured out of them or why Indian friends living abroad put up pictures on Facebook only featuring them with other Indians/ Asians. We naturally gravitate towards people who have experienced and are capable of providing the same kind of closeness that we are accustomed to. It is not that Europeans are not warm towards us. It is just that they have drawn so many walls around themselves and educated us on how it is not proper to percolate those walls unless they give us the permission to. Their set rules apply not just to foreigners but to people of their land as well. Even the parents and siblings! Because right to freedom and the concept of personal space actually mean something here. And the sorry part is that we urban Indians see this as something desirable. We are like the Communists of Kerala who think no end of Communism and have no clue about the disasters that it can manifest. To them the people of the previously Communist Czech lands can say “you know no shit”.

Well, on the upside, there are so many things we need to learn from these people. Let me give you the example of a friend, who almost a decade ago decided she needed to gain some experience of independent living. So she applied for a job at Subway in Canada and lived there for a few months. Now a lot of my Indian friends have worked at Mc Donalds too but it was only to earn money to fund their tuitions. I cannot imagine any person of my age in India waking up one day saying lets go see what’s in the world out there and make plans to go live and work in Norway for a while.  We study, get degrees, jobs, slog and slog and hoard savings for a rainy day that in most cases never comes. The saying “live life like there is no tomorrow” is something we understand only because Shahrukh Khan immortalized it when he said Kal Ho Na Ho. Yes, blowing up all your savings is not a good idea but investing a part of it in things that would add to making your life memorable is worth it, no?

Let us learn the many things that they can teach us and add our Indian touch to it. Let us not condemn them for using toilet paper. Instead, learn to use them as well, only after the washing part though. It is necessary to keep it clean. But equally helpful if we keep it dry J

When East meets West

Easter season seems to be full of pagan rituals in this part of the world. I am not sure if some of them came into vogue only in the recent decades but the people here love and participate in them enthusiastically. I admit they are fun and give these people the feeling that they are engaging in traditional activities (the Czech folk consider themselves a traditional lot) but keeping in mind the colonial writings on India I feel like (for fun) engaging in an activity that we Indians (and some Czech people) at the Department of Religious Studies like to do every now and then in Pardubice.

To a non-academic, the very phrase ‘colonial writing’ may sound boring but trust me some of them are really funny and as Indians we would find even the non-funny accounts very entertaining. Even before we were colonised travellers from all over wrote about India. The ones from Europe in particular draw my interest.  For example, Ludovico de Varthema, one of the first traveller/writers to describe India wrote many things that were instrumental in forming the basis of the European understanding of India. Among some other things he seemed to have been scandalised by the sexual practices of India (they were extremely preoccupied in criticising everything sexual in India or so you would think considering the number of accounts written on it).  In this excerpt he describes what he thinks is yet another (probably common) feature of Indian sexual practices of the place he is in, which is Calicut (Kozhikode) in Kerala. He is talking about wife-swapping.

The Pagan gentlemen and merchants have this custom amongst them. There will sometimes be two merchants who will be great friends, and each will have a wife; and one merchant will say to the other in this wise:“Langal perganal monaton ondo?” that is, “So-and-So, have we been a long time friends?” The other will answer: “Hognam perga manaton ondo;” that is, “Yes, I have for a long time been your friend.” The other says: “Nipatanga ciolli?” that is, “Do you speak the truth that you are my friend?” The other will answer, and say: “Ho;” that is, “Yes.” Says the other one: “Tamarani?” that is, “By God?” The other replies: “Tamarani!” that is, “By God!” One says: “In penna tonda gnan penna cortu;” that is, “Let us exchange wives, give me your wife and I will give you mine.” The other answers: “Ni pantagocciolli?” that is, “Do you speak from your heart?” The other says: “Tamarani!” that is, “Yes, by God!” His compan- ion answers, and says: “Biti Banno;” that is “Come to my house.” And when he has arrived at his house he calls his wife and says to her: “Penna, ingaba idocon dopoi;” that is “Wife, come here, go with this man, for he is your husband.” The wife answers: “E indi?” that is, “Wherefore? Dost thou speak the truth, by God,Tamarani?”The Husband replies: “Ho gran patangociolli;” that is, “I speak the truth.” Says the wife: “Perga manno;” that is, “It pleases me.” “Gnan poi;” that is, “I go.” And so she goes away with his companion to his house. The friend then tells his wife to go with the other, and in this manner they exchange their wives...

This particular excerpt was read out in class in M.A. from the book The Heathen in his Blindness...": Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion, which is the only handbook on cultural difference available in the current market and it was my first encounter with a European account of India. When we heard it we weren’t sure whether to laugh (which we did) or to feel really annoyed. The question was not whether the account was true but the nonsensical and (to us the seemingly) callous way in which it was written. While we were surprised, irritated and amused by what we read, we had our first insight into the kind of framework these writers came from in order to be able to write something, which, for no fault of theirs appears to be a factual description but to us seems to be preposterous. We were amused because their understanding of the world was so different from ours. We were enraged because their understanding became the basis for the general understanding of India and it’s culture. Over the next few centuries their attitude towards this beautiful culture remained unchanged and became so prevalent that we began to think of our culture the same way they do. How many people have you met who say “I am ashamed that I am from such a backward culture”?

Anyway, I’ll come back to my fun exercise. What I’m going to do is talk about random things that happen here and describe them through an Indian pair of eyes (because I cannot possibly see it through a Chinese or a Russian pair). Also, because I am an ‘empowered, educated and modern woman’ who ate and drank Feminism during her days of Bachelor studies, has high ‘morals’ and was taught modernism, egalitarianism, functionalism, Orientalism, postmodernism and many other isms that the western world gave us, which is now taught in the Masters degree in Literature (that I did) and all social sciences, and because I am inspired by the powerful moral convictions with which article upon article are being written on the state of elections, psychological analysis of electoral candidates and other events that are currently happening in India, I am going to adopt the same tone and hurl the same kind of accusations at the things I see here. I do this armed with the weapons that two years of doing Literature filled my brain with, namely, all these isms (whether I really understood them or not is out of question) and the training I received to use big words and produce ludicrous ideas.

Certain things may sound exaggerated but whatever I mention will definitely have some factual truth in it. Why am I doing this? Well, honestly, at least a hundred different customs are followed in my own little Changampuzha Nagar in Kochi and neither have they interrupted my life nor have I cared to question the reason behind their existence but reading what the Europeans painstakingly wrote about our customs centuries ago and the way the West continues to look at us I cannot help being frustrated. Probably this is going to be an inconsequential exercise but perhaps it may help to look at things from a different perspective.

This is an account of how an Indian girl sees the world she lives in-

In this country of the Czechs where people only make up half the population of Mumbai and call their land religion-less it is strange that they take no less effort to celebrate Christmas and Easter. While like many westerners they give the excuse that these two days were actually important on the Pagan calendar, which is why they are important even if you take Christianity out of the equation, at which point they will assert that their country got Christianised only by as late as the 8^th century, I suspect that such is not the case. While one cannot deny the influence of Paganism in their rituals I have strong reasons to believe that every action of theirs and every value they live by are guided by Christian morals. This can also be seen in the way a section of them who call themselves proud Neo-Pagans talk about themselves, nature and their world-view. While they refuse to accept the biblical God, their devotion towards ‘the Invisible Power’, ‘Magic’, ‘Esotericism’ and a range of other things bear identical resemblance to the devotion of a Czech Christian towards the biblical God.

Pardubice, one of the big cities of Czech Republic is where I live. It has 7% more land area than Andheri and the inhabitants constitute less than 6% of the population of Andheri. While a good place to live in, some of the features of this city include scanty traffic and walking paths almost devoid of people. Intriguingly some of its people find life in this city very fast and flee to their cottages in the mountains or other places in the countryside during holidays. Their idea of a comfortable and normal-paced life seems to be deluded and it would be interesting to see how they would survive in Mumbai. The city goes to sleep after 6 pm and looks almost vacant during the weekends.

The workforce here has many peculiar properties. The sales people lack the skill of selling and sometimes due to this you are forced to not buy things that you want. They mean business when they call it a weekend. A weekend is a weekend and you dare not think of even as much as sending them a text message on those two days. As my Indian friend put it, perhaps they don’t even make love on weekends.

It is a pity to see how Europe is now coping with the loss of ‘God’ that it created in the first place by replacing it with anything that gives it a sense of The Divine. Some say “Science is my religion” while some others say “Yoga is my religion”. How or why Science and Yoga would be considered as religions is beyond my understanding. They seem to be attached to nature (mountains, rivers, etc.) or at least the idea of ‘being in the nature’ as they call it. The nature of this attachment seems strange and unlike anything we feel towards even the trees that grow in our backyard in India. A source says that this attachment was one of the reasons Paganism was revived in Europe. Some Neo-Pagans can be found doing rituals in the forests- beating drums, dancing under the influence of some herbal substances and doing things that they call mental exercises.

They have many queer customs here. One of them is celebrated on the occasion of Easter. During this season I was surprised to find wooden sticks with colourful ribbons attached on one end being sold on the streets and shops. On asking, the locals told me that on Easter Monday young men and boys go from door to door beating girls with the sticks. It is their tradition. In order to escape the beatings or sometimes after the beatings have been meted, the girls give them Easter eggs. They explain that the eggs symbolise fertility. If such practices were conducted in India the Feminists would have said that these are regressive practices and must be done away with. They would have said that even today women are deemed important only for their reproducing capabilities and that the people who engage in such activities are young and impressionable therefore it is evident that such attitudes are instilled in them at a very tender age.  The presence of such practices in Europe is not only not questioned but also celebrated.  One wonders if this is the same continent where women first raised their voice against patriarchy and feminism was born.

Witch hunting was something that regularly featured in the societal purification drive of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe in the Middle Ages. While many Europeans today would say that the killing of scores of thousands of men and women suspected of having engaged with witchcraft was a very bad thing to happen they would still celebrate it by making festivals out of it. So on some special days a particular place would be chosen, a structure of wood made which is to be burnt later and there would be plenty of stalls selling witching artefacts and costumes. How absurd is that! On one hand you are condemning witchcraft and on the other you are making business out of witching merchandise? The burning would bring to one’s mind the burning of Ravan’s effigy on Dussehra or Holika on the night before Holi. But the burning of Holika is a good thing compared to the yearly reenactment of the burning of these women which was brutal (as agreed now). This is completely strange.

I can go on and on. The point is Europe has had as many or more bizarre rituals as it may have encountered in India. Some of them might have got integrated into religion, some discontinued and some probably revived but because they thought that the rituals in India surely had something to do with our many deities (as may be the case) and nothing to do with The True God (the very idea of which is almost incomprehensible to us) they saw these rituals as immoral. And therefore western writings are teeming with descriptions of immoral practices of Indians who are heathens and worshippers of Devil. Today, only the words of the descriptions are different but the attitude towards our culture remains the same.

P.S. It is not my intention to ridicule Czech practices or offend my Czech friends. All descriptions were made in the spirit of the exercise.