The Meaning of Life in Dharamsala
Let me begin by describing what it’s like to spend twelve hours on an overcrowded Indian night train. Not easy to begin with, considering I had to remain alert in order to quickly disembark enroute, around 3am Indian time (i.e., any time between 10pm and noon the following day). The second-class sleeper was overcrowded because of a festival, and I felt lucky to have scored the top bunk, above most of the chaos. Too many people were standing in the aisles, over too many people sleeping on the floor. Somehow, a guy carrying a hot flagon would walk through every ten minutes and scream “CHAAAAAIIII!” at the top of his lungs. Despite my efforts, I dozed off and awoke to discover that two guys had scaled my upper bunk and somehow positioned themselves between my open-scissor legs. When a third tried to join them, I put my foot down, literally, on his head. I realized that I was slap-bang-and-smell in one of those nightmare Indian transits, and with this realization out the way, I started to enjoy it. After all, you haven’t lived until you’ve played “Avoid-the-Head”, carefully tip-toeing over bodies to a crowded, stinky train latrine. Auspiciously, my new bunkmates were also getting off at my destination of Chakkebank, and without their help, I would have missed the stop altogether and would probably (hopefully) be writing to you from the ruins of the Kashmir/Pakistani border, where the train was headed. The morning was dark and chilly, the coldest I’ve felt since leaving Bolivia in March. Streets were empty and quiet, at least until my smooth-talking rickshaw driver decided to crank Hindi-pop on his enormous speakers in the back. We whizzed through Chakkebank and I was surprised nobody shot at him, considering I could have strangled him myself, and I needed this idiot to get me to the station. Suddenly, he cut the engine and turned around to face me.
“My heart, it is very heavy,” he said.
“That’s unfortunate,” I replied, “like say, if I were to miss my bus.”
“I am in love,” he confessed.
“I am in shit,” I thought to myself.
He proceeded to tell me, in detail, his feelings for an Israeli girl, who came this way several days previously. He was convinced that Shiva had sent her to be with him, even though they had only known each other for the thirteen minutes it took to get from the train to the bus station.
“Do you think, if I find her in Dharamsala, she will marry me?” he wondered.
“It’s not the size of your speakers, it’s how you use them,” I answered, sincerely.
I realized, then, that Cupid had probably got hammered with his buddies at Mount Olympus Bar and Grill, and decided it would be fun to take potshots at young Indian auto-rickshaw drivers. This guy was seriously in love, and I was seriously going nowhere. I called over a nearby sleepy security guard and he pointed the way to the station. So I grabbed my pack, and left the heartbroken rickshaw driver - an Indian Romeo in love with a daughter of Israel. Two hours later, the old bus arrived to take me to Dharamsala on a rough, bumpy journey that would shake the world.
It is an unfortunate human trait that natural disasters mean more to us the closer they are. Every year there are earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes and floods, but did anyone in the West really care until they started to hit home, sweeping away tourists in Thailand or drowning the city of New Orleans? When flooding kills 100,000 in Bangladesh, it’s usually one of those stories featured in the news-in-brief sections on page two, disappearing as quickly as a victim’s hopes and dreams. I happened to be in Northern India when the latest calamity, an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter Scale, tore apart large sections of Pakistan and uh oh, Northern India. I sat on a bus, an old, rickety knee-bruiser that shook and bounced all over the road when tremors rocked the region. As a result, I didn’t feel a thing, and only found out about it hours after my arrival in Dharamsala. At last count, over 1500 Indian and over 20,000 Pakistanis lives have been lost. Without seeing any television footage, I could only assess the horror of the quake through online news reports and the concerned emails I received from friends as far away as Peru, Turkey, and of course, Canada. Even though I am just a couple hundred miles from some of the worst damage (and a crack inches thick has appeared above my hotel bed) it still feels like a disaster that happened somewhere “over there” and not “over here”. Is it just me, or is the planet starting to act like a scorned lover, maliciously reacting to the obvious breakdown of our relationship? At what point, I wonder, will big business and politics realize that the success of any relationship is based on communication and respect? The earth is talking to us. Judging by the United State’s recent decision to relax dozens of environmental laws (including mercury levels in the sea and carbon monoxide emission limits), it’s clear that those in power don’t know how to listen.
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