India – A Land of Contrasts
Why India? Well, I believe there is not a short answer to this question, all have their own and very personal reasons for visiting India, an interest in the culture, the people, the beaches, a spiritual search, an escape, the nightlife, the nature, the list is endless. India is beautiful, rich and poor, diverse beyond belief, a total and often overwhelming assault on the senses. This is how my brother came to his home in India.
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To cut a very long and interesting story short, while my brother David was at Oxford in 1972, he found himself becoming more and more interested in Eastern spiritual traditions. Then, one day he took home a copy of Arthur Osborne’s The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in his Own Words. Reading Ramana’s words for the first time completely silenced him. His mind stopped asking questions, and it abandoned its search for spiritual information. It somehow knew that it had found what it was looking for.
In 1975, he decided to take a quick trip to India and Ramanasraman and with £200 from our Grandmother he left for India, expecting to stay for six weeks, and, apart from a few short visits to the West has been there ever since.
Thus, in the early nineties, with the sole intention of reaching India and visiting my brother, I managed to wheedle myself a job guiding a trek in Ladakh Northern India, the first of many exciting forays to the Indian Himalayas including Sikkim. After Ladakh, I travelled south to visit my brother for the first time.
So started my own love affair with this beautifully diverse, scenically stunning and culturally rich sub-continent. Above all I return to India, especially my brother’s home in Tiruvannamalai to experience a spiritual quietness that I have not found elsewhere in my travels. In my brother’s words,
“It’s my spiritual centre of gravity. I can make an effort to be somewhere else if I feel I would spiritually benefit from it, but when I stop making that effort, the natural pull of Arunachala brings me back here again. It’s the only place in the world that I feel truly at home.For me, this is the world’s great power spot. Arunachala has brought about the liberation of several advanced seekers in the past few centuries, and its radiant power remains even today as a beacon for those who want to find out who they really are.”
The holy temple of Tiruvannamalai at the foot of Arunachala
This is my brother’s story, others may go to experience the awesome splendour of the Himalayan giants, sit quietly in the shade of a Banyan tree watching the world go by, haggle for souvenirs in the local markets, watch the sun set over the Bay of Bengal and become immersed in a culture that will amaze, astound, delight and at at times shock to the very core of the soul.
India for some could well prove quite simply too much, whilst for others it may well be the start of a journey that will be repeated endlessly. It is unlikely that India will leave you unmoved!
