My Abiding Love Affair With India

Irecently returned from a month in India. It was exhilarating, transformative, illuminating and sublime. It was exhausting, maddening, stressful and debilitating.

As is now something of a cliché, India is a land of contradictions and extremes.

This was my seventh visit of at least three weeks since 2001, and the fourth time I’ve led a tour since 2016. These repeated visits are all part of my attraction to India that began in the 1960s at the movies. As a college student discovering foreign cinema in the art houses of New York City, I viewed with wonder and delight the revelatory films of François Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini and others. Then, in one memorable three-day span, my mind was blown (as we said back then) by Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy.

The Magic of India

Every element of the trio of films—the exquisite black-and-white images of village and city life, the main character’s arc from childhood to middle-age, the tension between tradition and modernity—was gripping and intriguing. But it was the scenes in Benares (now Varanasi) that captivated me. I knew nothing about the ancient city, and the Ganges was just the name of a river to me, not a sacred entity. But something about the way Ray depicted, framed, and revealed the city penetrated me deeply. I knew that one day I had to go there.

Almost as enchanting as what I saw on screen was what I heard. The trilogy’s score, subtle, unobtrusive, and utterly enthralling, featured string and percussion instruments I’d never heard before. Words like sitar and tabla were not yet in my vocabulary. But a short while later, when Ravi Shankar was befriended by George Harrison and emerged as an unlikely superstar, the sitar became part of the 1960s soundtrack. That’s when I learned that Maestro Shankar had composed the music for the three-part tale of Apu’s life.

By then, India to me was more than an exotic tourist destination, and more than a surprising source of world-class art. It was the homeland of timeless wisdom that was reformulating how I saw the world and reshaping the contours of my life.

I was young and restless, angry and scared. My discontent had led to a diligent search for answers to the Big Questions: Who am I? How can I find peace and fulfillment? What’s my place in the universe? Conventional wisdom seemed wrong at every turn, and the standard American lifestyle seemed, to quote William Shakespeare, “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” As I drifted to what was called the counterculture, books came my way, and in the works of authors I admired—Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Herman Hesse, J.D. Salinger—I found admiration for India’s spiritual heritage. That led me to Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and works by modern swamis, yogis, and Buddhist masters. I took up meditation and supplementary practices, and I never looked back; my life had changed irrevocably.

I’ve been grateful to India ever since for birthing the universal wisdom of Vedanta and Yoga, and for somehow maintaining it through centuries of colonization.

The Discovery of India

I planned to go to India for the first time in 1970, to be trained as a Transcendental Meditation teacher in the Rishikesh ashram made famous by the Beatles. To my great disappointment, the program was held in America instead, and I spent three months in the Rockies, not the Himalayas. For the next thirty years, every time I hatched a plan to go to India, circumstances intervened; basically, I either had the money and not the time or the time and not the money.

Finally, in 2001, I was introduced at long last to my spiritual homeland. I spent about a week each in Delhi, Rishikesh, Varanasi, and, along with 30 million other pilgrims, the Kumbha Mela in Allahabad (now Prayagraj), plus a day or two in Khajuraho, Vrindavan, and Agra for an obligatory—and unexpectedly sublime—viewing of the Taj Mahal.

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