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The most important thing about India, the thing to be gone into and understood and not seen from the outside, was the people.
It was as though, in these small, crowded spaces, no one really felt at home. Everyone felt that the other man, the other group, was laughing; everyone lived with the feeling of siege.
The emptiness of the yard was an aspect of its cleanliness. The emptiness of the space was live luxury.
Gandhianism was almost a mass hysteria in India, but of a healthy kind. It was the good old values, but packaged in a modern-looking way, very mass-based.
As in old Rome, so in modern Bangalore: the more important the man, the greater the crowd at his door.
Where there is no want, there is no god.
The very idea of the latrine was a non-brahmin idea: to enter such a polluted place was itself pollution. No old-time brahmin would have even contemplated the idea. Good brahmins, traditional brahmins, used open-air sites, a fresh one each time.
In the palace where the brahmin had served there had been splendor and extravagance beyond human need, almost as though in the Hindu scheme one of the functions of great wealth was to remind men of the vanity of the senses.
In Christian thinking the eternal opposites are the forces of good and evil. In Hindu or brahmin thought the opposites are worldliness and the life of the spirit. One can retreat from one to the other. When the world fails one, one can sink into the spirit, the idea of the world as the play of illusion.
Bad architecture in a poor tropical city is more than an aesthetic matter. It spoils people's day to day lives; it wears down their nerves; it generates rages that can flow into many different channels.
That station lets you into the very worst of the Bengali small-town atmosphere - ugly, noisy, crowded, full of the kind of deprivation I see in the style of urbanization in our country, the deprivation of mind, of basic needs.
I've been practicing yoga for about 15 years now and it's helped me tremendously to arrive at this mental state in which I could take an enormous amount of chaos and confusion around me, for a while, without losing my own peace of mind.
Formally, I'm an atheist, but I've reached a state where I separate spirituality from theism and religion. To me the Upanishads represent man's effort to understand the universe and himself at the very highest level of spirituality.
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