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By Dan Godden.

I had never been to a real overseas country. I’ve been to New Zealand but that doesn’t really count. What I mean is that I have never been somewhere where you can’t just take your own money and pass it off as local currency. In January of this year though, I went to India with my Father-in-law. He likes to think of himself as a middle-aged Indiana Jones, trekking the nations in search of new experiences and cultures. He wanted to show me a part of the world that I had never been to before so off we went to India. There are lots of benefits to travelling to another part of the world. One of them is the insight and perspective that it gives you into your own culture. Another is the way that it helps you to put a face to that place on the World around us and Getaway. A third benefit is the way that it gives you a greater sense of what it means to be human. It gives you a glimpse of global humanity in a way that you may not have had otherwise. India is a place filled with People, who live in overwhelming Poverty, who are obsessed with Religion.

So when I was asked to write a J-walk article about India, I thought I would look particularly at these three areas: People in India, Poverty in India; and Religion in India.

People

Before I went to India I thought that it would be all jungles, sweat and talking bears, like in the Jungle Book. Turns out I was wrong. The first thing that I was struck by when I landed in Delhi was PEOPLE. People were everywhere. There were taxi drivers climbing over each other to give us a ride to Delhi; All the way along the highway from the airport to the city in the middle of the night, people were walking; Even in Delhi the streets would be filled with people standing around right through the night. Presumably they can’t lie down to sleep because if everyone in India did that at once they would cover the country plus half of Pakistan. It is a place of people.

And the romantic notions of jungles, tigers and young man-cubs?

A myth.

Most of the scenery where I went resembled western NSW. It was like going on a trip to Dubbo with a billion Indians. Although let me say, if I were going to go on a trip to Dubbo with a billion members of a people group, you can be sure that I would choose Indians! India is a nation that has eight different races of people living in it. These people all speak different languages and follow a variety of religions. Yet, they all seem to get along like a house on fire. Everyone is generally polite and hospitable. Even the guys who try and rip you off do it in such a way that makes them seem lovable and kind. Everyone is keen to stop for a chat. I had a three hour conversation with a guy on a train about politics, family and Jesus. I met a bunch of guys from the Kashmir who were running a dodgy travel business and then sending all their earnings to terrorist cells back home. I met a taxi driver who goes home to see his wife one weekend a month. I went to a church that had about 40 people in it and they had no supper but people stayed around and chatted for an hour or so. Everyone loves to talk.

Everyone has a story as well. Most of them end with… ‘So, can I have some money?’ We ran into a boy who tried desperately to convince us that he was doing a school project where he needed to get some money from Australians. Another guy told us he would take us to an ‘incense competition’. We ended up at his sister’s place buying aromatherapy oils.

I miss the people of India. When I landed in Australia there was a woman who bumped into another woman in the airport with her bag. The lady who was bumped turned and snarled ‘Hey. Watch it.’ I was not proud of my country then. Indians respect one another in a way that Westerners do not. They value community while we love to isolate ourselves. They live in each others lives while we try to get out of each other’s way. In India ‘church’ truly means family. As I turned up at this small fellowship in Bangalore, I was welcomed as a brother. It shames me to think of how we would welcome an Indian into our church.

All of this is a generalisation and Indians hate the same way that we hate. There is a social system in India called the caste system that has bred hate and contentment for thousands of years and is only just now starting to be healed.  I’ll pick up much more of this next issue where I’ll tackle poverty and religion in India…