Illuminate and ruminate

Farmer's thatch - roofed shed in Rajasthan

Congenial garlic seller at Sardarshahar Rajasthan market

It’s been five months since I arrived in India. Today I realized that my surroundings have begun to shape me; I will never be the same. That is nothing new. I believe the idea of the static entity is a practical construct and our identities a culmination of experience and the resulting attitudes and preferences we feel and express. Our corporal material is ephemeral and even our blood routes through different veins as it circulates in our arching, aching, mutating, flexing, shedding, aging bodies in the span between birth and death. Internal changes are elusive to me and difficult to track, but sometimes, in a moment of clarity, when the inner and the outer worlds align, the interplay of light and shadow illuminate and contrast the present and the past such that for an instant the shift is explicit.

To me this doesn’t diminish the concept of individual identity but puts it in terms that make sense to me. It recognizes the permeability of the skin and the mind barriers and allows ideas, opinions and perceptions to be in development, even as I rely on them to understand who I am and how I relate to all that I perceive to be other, be it minds, bodies or environments.

Blue knobs control the anti gravity

Yet, the problem remains how to describe the change that I feel? Perhaps it's sense for the weather or the geography or the growing clarity of words in speech. The familiarity of grinding freight truck wheels and cheerful air horn blasts an arm's length away. Or it's the recognition of the aspirations and desires I assumed to be contained within myself and not bound to any locality which I can observe from this distance, not suddenly false and yet in a different light revealing other features.

To put it more succinctly, today I ordered the veg thali that has become my Saturday ritual at Teri Rajput Sweet Shop near Lane 1 in Koregaon Park and as I was, as usual, alone, I shared a table. He asked me if I liked Indian food and I said I did, and specifically I liked the veg thali here at Teri Rajput, which has become the standard to which I compare veg thalis.

Why ride in obscurity when you can ride like a Raja?

Perhaps dehydration following a long run in the morning sun is responsible for the above introspection.