A Passage to India

Inexplicably yet inexorably, my attention has recently been drawn towards India in general and Indians in particular. It feels almost like some weird gravitational pull drawing me to the orbit of India’s rising star... My original, and still the deepest connection to India has to do with my interest in Tibetan buddhism, since it is the country where not just His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but also many other teachers and masters have settled following their escape form occupied Tibet.

However, my recent Indian encounters have been of a rather different kind. First I met Anurag - a good-humoured software-developer from a city of Pune near Bombay who came to stay at Anne-Marie's bed-and-breakfast.

A few years ago, he started a small software business and managed to find a long-term client in a Belgian turbine producer... This year though, Anurag not only came to Belgium himself, but also sent one of his talented junior employees, Varun, to come to stay for a month to further the cooperation with the Belgian client company. I’ve been lucky to come to know them, and by now consider them not just outstanding personalities in their own right, but also good friends. All they told me about India, coupled with their generous and repeated invitaions, made the idea of revisiting India physically seem rather more realistic... Before departing back home, Varun kindly left me his own copy of Suketu Mehta’s monumental book on Bombay called Maximum City, which Anurag had recommended to me several weeks before... The book is immensely readable, delightful and disturbing at the same time, and I feel it might influence my life in unforseen ways. In fact, it had started influencing it already, since it inspired me to choose a Kashmiri restaurant as a venue for a meeting with a friend, and that in turn developped into an idea of discovering other Indian restaurants in Brussels... What might follow I dare not predict...

Comments

[Stéphanie]

Hi Adam,
As I've been through your pictures, I can see lots of nice places I already know here in Bruxelles, also in Prague.
Nice touch, continue this way !

[Anurag]

Hey, my photo on the web, finally! Thanks Adam, for praising me publicly. Now I feel more compelled to return your money. :)

No, seriously, you are more than welcome to come stay in Pune. I hope you are enjoying reading Maximum City. It is a very engrossing book. Also, as you rightly pointed out, it is attractive and disturbing at the same time.

Ciao.
Anurag