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Village Scenes

Traveling around France for a couple of weeks proved to be an educational experience as all travel is. Seeing history preserved painstakingly always makes me sad for India - we had so much more that any European country and yet now much we have destroyed and allowed to fall into disregard and disrepair. History in India is like a thin skin and in Europe the fabric that is live is woven into. We too could have layered our thousands of years of history into our current way of life. 

Watching Mont Blanc form afar in the conditions we did so, made me for instance remember my childhood visit to Darjeeling and living in Tiger Hill to catch a glimpse of the fabled sunrise over Kanchenjunga and Mt, Everest. It is an experience I remember vividly to this day and one of the most glorious sunrises of my life. This is not meant to be jingoistic but objectively Mt. Blanc does not hold a candle to to even minor mountains in the Himalayas. But we fail to fulfill our potential at every step of the way in India. 

A trip to Grenoble or Chamonix does not compare to that to Tiger Hill in terms of ease, availability of services and level of comfort. Those deficiencies will end up marring the experience of seeing the most spectacular mountain in the world a great deal. That is true about every nook and cranny of India where there is so much history and culture to unpack and yet we fail to deliver on an encompassing and memorable experience. I say this as someone who was born and raised there - a foreigner might feel much worse. I don't know more than a dozen words and phrases in French and yet was able to travel through the country traversing remote villages without being impeded too much. The culture of food was easy to access and enjoy as was the history that is very well preserved. 

Beautiful products from India are being elevated to a different level in villages and cities around France and being sold as haute art. I have always stopped to see what caught the foreign eye - and at every stop I have felt sorry that we don't elevate artisans in India to the level where they are in control of their own destiny - much like artists in French villages working and selling their work directly from their ateliers. 

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