Traveling and meeting new people

Traveling and meeting new people

As my time in India draws to an end I wanted to start to reflect on one of the answers I first gave to the question “why do we travel”. The specific answer I am referring to is: “To meet other travelers”. Thus I have decided that this post will be a tribute to the different people I have gotten to know beyond a 10 minute banal conversation. The fellow adventure seekers I have met have also spent an extended period of time in Benaras/Varanasi (right away you can discern a seasoned India traveler if they refer to Varanasi as ‘Benaras’-its name in Hindi). These travelers  present an interesting range of personalities from hippy to hedonist and from researcher to convert.

I met my first comrade due to our shared love for Mac computers (side note: 90% of the people in the internet cafes here have a Mac computer—do people who travel to India buy Macs or are Mac owners the type of people who travel to India?). Anyways ‘Eric’ and I often bumped into each other at one of the two cafes that offer free wireless service as long as you consume their menu items. Soon enough after we became familiar with each others faces we started engaging in random social banter. Eric like many people had come to India to escape. He had bought himself a ten year visa to India and by renting out his house in California he could live like a king. For the past six months he had been traveling from Ashram to Ashram, meditating, practicing yoga, and learning the Indian flute.

 I have no idea what he looked like in his ‘previous’ life but now there was no mistaking him as a seasoned India traveler. A single glance at his physical features would immediately cause you to place him in the category of hippy/alternative/Eastern Religion convert. His arms, legs, and torso are extremely thin presumably from hours upon hours of dedicated yoga practice. His limberness was frequently demonstrated while we chatted as he would always sit, spine straight, precariously balanced on the small café chair in lotus position. When speaking his soft slow California drawl would animate his small intelligent eyes causing them to sparkle and dance under what he jokingly called his ‘jesus hair’. Taking care of and grooming his dirty blond/light brown greasy shoulder length locks had obviously come second to reading about eastern religion and meditation. He loved explaining his theories on enlightenment and would always do so with a soft mystical far-off gaze and goofy smile framed by a patchy excuse for a beard. However it struck me as odd that such a young person who was only a few years from thirty had already had enough of ‘life’ and had come to India to run away from the real world. Yet, Eric’s quest for ‘real happiness’ came from what he described as ‘a time of darkness’. This ‘dark time’ was the five years he had spent in England at the University of Suffix completing a PhD in Neroscience and Nano-technology. He claimed to have had enough of the physical world and no longer wanted to spend his days staring at a computer. He believed spirituality was the only true happiness. When I pressed him about this fact he explained that, “the frontal cortex is responsible for thinking and consciousness thus by engaging the rest of the brain we can unleash the sub-consciousness and make the most use of our brain”. Additionally he constantly linked Nero-scientific explanations into eastern philosophy in order to ‘prove’ why it was ‘valid’. In fact, the deeper in conversation I went the more I felt he had turned spirituality into a article right out of Scientific American. After each subsequent conversation I would usually leave chuckling to myself thinking, oh yes he’s really leaving ‘the west’ behind ha!  Moreover for someone who was attempting to escape a life behind a computer screen the majority of the time I would bump into him he would be transfixed by his iphone. One day, curiosity overtook me and I asked him what he was working on. He promptly explained that he was writing program for an iPhone application that would help people master meditation. The phone would vibrate at random intervals and if you were ‘aware’ of these vibrations and ‘let them go’ you knew you were in the correct mental state. I’m sure this is not exactly what the monks in the mountains had in mind when teaching meditation but I'm pretty sure the monks teachings doesn’t include iPones. What Eric has taught me is our past will forever shape us. The new is hard to embrace and the old even harder to escape.

Another very interesting person I’ve come to know relatively well I met during my first 7am yoga class. The girl sitting next to me looked about my age and soon enough we began the usual investigational interrogation into where and what brought us to India. Based on her physical features I would have guessed she was from Ireland given her auburn hair and pale freckled complexion. Yet after she dropped a few “eh’s” it was more than apparent she hailed from my home country’s neighbor to the north, ‘Canada’. She has kind grey eyes, which rested above her petite upturned nose. Although she has small lips they carry a big north American voice that ‘is totally, like, the bomb, like you know!?’. I enjoyed speaking with her because it was nice to be reminded of the characteristic North American enthusiastic speech pattern. North Americans’ and especially North American females’ dialect is usually filled with enthusiasm, smiles, and optimism. We are easily excited and constantly breaking into loud laughter. I found speaking with her very comfortable and enjoyed the familiarity from my youth.

This familiarity also probably had to do with our similar age range and experiences. Bronwyn is twenty years old and had just made the decision to drop out of University. Yet the ‘University’ she had been attending was not to learn literary theory or scientific laws. She had been going to ‘Circus School’ in Quebec and had been involved with the circus for most of her life as an acrobat. However after years of rigorous commitment she had lost the love of performing and felt it was more of a job than joy. Thus she had given up the circus, which had been very difficult because it was such a crucial part of her ‘identity’. For her whole life she had been an acrobat, now what was she? Who was she? Speaking with her reminded me of when I had quit running and was asking the same questions. In order to answer these questions, she had chosen to return to India to volunteer at a poor local school in Nagwa. She originally fell in love with India last year when the troop she was involved with had done a series of traveling workshops through the country teaching circus performance to rural areas in India. So leaving everything behind she came here by herself at the hottest time of the year. Bronwyn is the only volunteer at a school where no one speaks English, there is no set ‘volunteer program’, and she is responsible for entertaining and controlling sixty unruly ten year olds.

I am truly impressed by her spirit. She has chosen to live with an Indian family and I rarely see her at the popular ‘foreigner hangouts’. I bump into her every now and over a chai or coffee where she continually amazes me with her stories of how she has adopted to Indian life. She dresses in traditional clothing and has begun to master Hindi (although the irony of seeing this pale red head perfectly execute the Indian head ‘wobble’ meaning yes does always bring a smile to my face). I am not sure if it is a front, but she is one of the happiest people I have met here. Unlike the dread-locked hashish abusers who find happiness through hits and highs, Bronwyn really seems to be truly happy through having ‘re-made’ herself. When I ask her about the things that personally exhaust and frustrate me to the point where I’m ready to lock myself in my room at night and escape to the fantasy world of a novel she merely shrugs. She claims to have just ‘gotten used to’ the gender bias, the cat-calls, and the stares. I find this hard to believe but perhaps the new sense of purpose and identity offered by India overrides the negative aspects. After throwing away what she has known as ‘life’ for so long it seems to me that essentially ‘becoming Indian’ has replaced the circus. She has found contentment in culture and remade herself from her period uncertainty. When I ask her how long she will stay she replied, “In all honesty I never want to leave”. Sure some people might say that she is distracting herself from her loss of identity and pretending to be something she is not. Yet, who is to say what is ‘right and wrong’ when it comes to identity fabrication. Bronwyn has shown me that there are many ways to cope with personality crisis and I think participating in social work and Indian culture is a bit more constructive than drugs or alcohol and ironically is being used for the same purpose.

These are just two examples among many characters I have crossed paths with. Some other interesting people with incredible stories are Emily, a girl from a small ranch in Wyoming who came here on a three month culture program and ended up marrying an Indian man and now plans to spend the rest of her life in Varanasi as an Indian wife. From her I have learned love has no boundaries and can cause people to adopt in ways I would have never imagined. There’s Ron a forty year old ex-psychiatric nurse who has relocated to India because he finds the chaos ‘peaceful’ after his previous life which includes leaving home at 15 and joining a Vancouver gang. Only later after having a life wakeup call when his now teenage son was born caused him to ‘go straight’ and venture back to school and study nursing. However now he has chosen to spend his time in India because it reminds him of the craziness of his earlier days. From Ron I have learned that place and life experience have an uncanny relationship. Adrenaline is a drug and luckily there are safe ways to re-live dangerous memories. Then there’s Seth, a Harvard bound research student who speaks perfect Hindi, and spends his time joking and playing music with the locals. The jolly, incredibly intelligent twenty something year old discovered Hinduism at thirteen and has been fascinated ever since. He loves discovering, embracing, and living the connection between art, religion, and music and thus is writing a small research project on this passion. In a few days he will be leaving for a solo motorcycle adventure across India. From Seth I have shared many wonderful thought provoking conversations and learned how important it is to follow your passion as well being reminded of how important it is to have sense of adventure.

Thus although all of these people are not ‘Indian’ I still have gained strong cultural ‘insights’ and learned important lessons about people, life, and myself. I have of corse also met ‘Erika’ a girl who enjoys meeting knew people, writing and reflecting on her experiences, and most of all trying to figure out what it means to be human