“India is magical. You must leave your need for personal space behind, for at any given moment, whether enclosed in a taxicab or exposed on the street, you will be surrounded by men, women, children, auto-rickshaws, taxis, exhaust fumes, carts, scooters, goats, cows, and the smells of samosas, jasmine, spices, manure, and trash warmed by the blazing sun. It will fill and enhance your senses. It is a portrait of life at work with apparent beauty and glaring tragedy, and it asks you to look on it all...
It will show your strands of pearls in Hyderabad, pink stone in Jaipur, beautiful white sand beaches in Goa. It will introduce you to basmati rice and curries that have been simmering for hours, pistachio ice cream, and fried doughnuts floating in sweet syrup, and it will teach you how to eat with the fingers of your right hand. It will show you how to slap dough into chapatis. It will fold its hands to say namaste as you pass by the elderly woman on the side of the road. It will impress you with its propensity for academic excellence in technology, engineering, and medicine. It taps on your window, the beautiful face of a little girl with round dark eyes and black eyelashes, clasping her fingers together and drawing them to her mouth to tell you she needs food...
You will feel special, amazed, full, stirred, naive, helpless, enraged, awakened - and all in the first day. India is magical.”
-The Scent of Water, Naomi Zacharias
“The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future.”
- Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
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| sunset on the street in Goa |
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| just a small example of the colors that pervade India |
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| sunset in Kundapur |
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