La vie Boheme

It is funny how most things I end up liking are related to food or anything that goes into my mouth. Yet again, I have found something that I really like and would recommend to people coming to this side of the world at this particular time. Burčák (pronounced बुर्चाक) . It is something that is in the process of becoming wine. I doubt there are many like me who prefer their drinks to be sweet but if by some accident of fate you do belong to this category you will simply love the sweetness yet the stinging sourness of the drink. The interesting thing is, it is a very healthy drink and as the locals say, over this period of when it is produced and sold you should have as many litres of burčák as the number of litres of blood in your body! So there, I am- one down and four to go :D

Autumn is supposed to have arrived early this year. For a Mumbaikar living here, it is really cold, you know. But I cannot begin to describe how much I am loving this weather- my favorite part is being able to wear fancy coats and knee-high boots which a majority of us Indians have only seen in movies. Probably I like this weather more because this is exactly (or a little bit colder) than Mumbai winters and don’t we just love our Mumbai winters? Yes, I keep going back to my Mumbai memories all the time. There is something about that city. Or probably it is that I am trying to hold on to or rather find something that I am familiar and comfortable with. And I found one such thing here that at the end of last week. Something strange, the Holy Spirit if you may want to believe, led me to a Catholic Church on Friday evening. I felt I needed to do some field work here considering I am studying Indian Christianity- therefore needed insights on European Christianity. The Mass was in Czech so I got several minutes to plan many many mundane things that I wanted to do in the forthcoming week. As my eyes wandered all over the place one image caught and arrested my attention. It was an image of Mother Mary. The first I saw in my stay here so far.

 It has been more than a month since I came to Pardubice. There are plenty of new things I have learnt about myself after coming here. Of course that is helped by my roommate/ friend who picks on every thought or word that I utter and makes me think about it. Yeah, it leads to bickering of all sorts at every possible moment but the exploration of these thoughts, needless to say is very useful. So that evening I was inspired to think why this  religious image was inducing in me a non-religious feeling of being comforted at the mere sight of it. It was definitely not some holy and pious sentiment that made me feel so. I waited for mass to get over so that I could follow people into doing what I assumed they did in Church in India after mass which is go to all these small alters and kiss the feet or touch the feet of the statue or the photo. Nothing of that sort happened. People slowly walked out while some remained. I waited for the Church to get empty so that I could do it in peace and solitude and not get stared at for being a heathen Christian who had come from a god forsaken part of the world doing ungodly things in Church.

You see, for me and many of my family and friends, going to Church is seen as a thing you do- not out of religious sentiment (of course that is involved too) but simply because it is something you have always done and will keep doing. So where non-religious sentiments are involved, how could I refrain from doing one simple thing that I had practiced ever since I was a little girl whether or not I cared about God? How could I walk out of Church without kissing the altar of Mother Mary? Anyway, I did precisely that and walked out of Church with the feeling that I did what I was supposed to do.

The whole situation made me think of what we Indian Christians had made out of Christianity. Are we the children of what the colonials once called Heathens? Yes. Are we Christians? Yes. Do we have the faith? Yes. Is our understanding of our faith anything close to what a missionary in the seventeenth century would have wanted it to be? No. Will a twenty first century European be able to make sense of our faith? No. These questions do not make any collective sense, do they?

Calling going to Church that Friday evening “fieldwork” was meant to be a joke when I initially thought of it. For months I had been studying Indian Christianity theoretically and seeing its practical applications in the Indian context. But that one evening in Church is where I had my first brush with the world of difference between what Christianity is and what I as an Indian see and practice Christianity.