A new Passage to India: Why Should I Go To India?

After all these negative article and remarks, warnings and advice about India, a positive article is definitely important now. I try to answer the question: why should I go to India?

Tolerance and Happiness in Total Chaos

India is a very tolerant country. People are always friendly and in a good mood. Chaos always rules everywhere but in the end everything, somehow, works. We need plan and a daily structure. India does not have any of that. For us, this is a lesson to let things loose, be relaxed and to wait and see what’s happening in the end. It is not possible to control everything, rather the opposite. You feel that very strongly in India.

Land of Opposites

India is a land of opposites: poor vs. rich (also very poor vs. very rich), different religions (Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jain, Parsi and Sikhs), different identities (different languages in every federal state) and different lifestyles. India’s ad campaign is called “united in diversity”. You can only imagine what that really means after spending some time in India. There is a, largely, peaceful togetherness of entirely different lifestyles and concepts of life.

Humbleness and Modesty

India makes everyone humble and you learn many lessons for your own life. I became aware of the fact how decadent we partly life. In India, people are happy about running water, we consider a cold shower a catastrophe. Indians are often more happy than we are, even though they have less. Material things are not as important to be happy.

Colonialisation as One of the Biggest Crimes in Human History

We get to see what colonialisation, the biggest crime of the West to the rest of the world, has done. Indians were forced to speak a new language (English), they were told what is right and what is wrong. The only right thing is of course, whatever the West decides, everything else is wrong. Yet, India has its own ways of doing things, we can learn something there. Not everything is better in the west and worse in the East, it’s quite often the other way.

Poverty

A theoretical construct that is clear: the West is only rich because others are not. This more theoretical understanding become more alive and vivid here: there are extremely rich Indians but also poverty and beggars both to certain extend that we don’t know in Europe. Germans have forgotten what poverty, real poverty is and means. India helps to learn that.

How To Handle Emotions

In Germany, there is only one way to handle emotions: swallow them and don’t show them at all. If, in work life, you responded emotionally, for example crying in public, no one ever takes you seriously again. We channel emotions at sports (mostly football), most commonly in the audience or during big public parties (things like Oktoberfest), not any other time. There are no more socially accepted ways to show emotions. Emotional is a negative word for us.

Efficiency and Slowness

“Discovering Slowness”: Things in India are slower, in general but also in particular. Germans are made for Efficiency, being fast and having “no time”. Slow is bad, inefficient is annoying. India is a chance to think about that, to try and live a different life.

The country runs slower, even literally: everyone walks slower on the sidewalk. If you try to walk in “German pace” it becomes exhausting, unnecessarily annoying and does not lead anywhere. Better do things slowly, act in the same pace as the rest of the country. It’s not bad when things take longer and are done much slower. It even becomes convenient to have more time, less hectic and not be under time pressure all the time. You need to lose a big load of impatience for that!

Joy of Life and Patience

There is a lifestyle outside western norms and ideas. This lifestyle can teach us a lot, for example high spirits and vitality but also being satisfied and patient. We have almost lost these abilities in the West.

India has a joy of life that is unbelievable. This becomes most obvious during dancing. In India, there are no Non-Dancers. Everyone storms to the dance floor, no one is thinking about whether it looks embarrassing and everyone just dances however it feels right. In a club, I did hear some singing louder than the music from the speakers. This is not possible in Germany. Everyone always waits until the dance floor opens . That’s

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