I was traveling solo in Kerala when the whole sordid Badaun rape and murder case came to light. I had glanced at the newspaper briefly in the morning, and was still in a state of shock at the sheer brutality of the crime and the apathy and arrogance with which the UP cops had dealt with it. I was supposed to go on a full day bamboo rafting trip on the Periyaar lake that day. It is a long trek of five km through the jungle to get to the raft. When I reached the start point, I met a group of Spanish girls who had booked for the same rafting trip. They were young - in their mid-twenties and had been traveling across India for the last three weeks. Their itinerary was extensive. Kolkata - Varanasi - Delhi - Agra - Chennai - Kochi - Thekkady - Goa - Mumbai. We were all women on this trip, accompanied by three men from the Kerala Forest Department, an armed guard with a rifle and two forest scouts. As we walked towards the landing station, sounds of human activity ceased completely. The forest was alive with animal sounds, bird calls, little reptiles scurrying through the undergrowth, the ‘whoop whoop whoop’ of the Nilgiri Langur. A feeling of overwhelming peace descended over us, and yet, I was torn inside by what happened in Badayun. Here we were, four women walking deep into the jungle with three able-bodied men, one of them armed, and yet, we were walking completely fearlessly, while those two girls were not safe even in their own village, in the vicinity of their own house! I was an Indian woman, and so were those two girls from Badayun, and yet, we lived in two completely parallel universes! The lottery of birth had provided me with the feeling of security, - illusory it might have been, as the Jyoti Kumari Pandey case showed in Delhi - while my sisters in Badayun lacked even the most basic amenities! The Spanish girls and I got talking. I asked them ‘so, what do you think of India’? ‘Que pregunto!’, exclaimed Maria, ‘What a question’! The girls went silent, as they struggled with their thoughts. I could see that they were overwhelmed with the sheer scale of India, of the diversity, of the sensory overload, of all that they had seen and experienced over the last three weeks. ‘Es el viaje de nuestra vida’, Sarah said contemplatively, ‘It is the voyage of a lifetime’! And then the opinions started pouring out. ‘See, India is so vast, and everything changes from place to place. It is difficult to say what we feel about India in two-three sentences. We loved Kolkata, despite its visible squalor, which jolted us a bit, because that was our first experience of India. But the people were really nice and helpful and we felt very safe in the streets’. ‘Varanasi was a very spiritual journey. The temples, the ghats, the way people prayed, the river. Everything was so moving’ ‘We did not like Agra and Delhi much, because there was too much ‘machismo’ and we kept getting stared at and got the feeling that we were being constantly hustled’ ‘Chennai and Kerala are very nice. Very business-like and professional when it comes to travellers, and tomorrow we go to Goa’, Maria said. Then Heidi said something that resonated with me. It is what you go through personally, that makes you like or dislike a place. Newspaper reports and guide books are irrelevant after you have experienced a place for yourself’. It is true. It is your own experience that colours your memories of a place. I have been traveling solo in India since I was 17. I have lived and worked in four major Indian cities, Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Ahmedabad and have travelled across 15 Indian states on my own. Have travelled using public transport, explored small towns and stayed at home stays, temple guest houses and small hotels, and the experiences have been wildly dissimilar from place to place. But I have to say one thing, nowhere else in the world have I seen the kind of hospitality and warm welcome that I have experienced in rural India! Sure, there have been curious stares. A lot of them, and a few propositions, but there has also been a warm acceptance and concern. Unknown women have welcomed me into their hearts and homes across all corners of the nation, providing access to toilets and home-cooked food. Sure there were a few unpleasant experiences, but the good that I was fortunate to see and share, far outweighed the bad! Which is why it troubles me when global media paints the whole nation in one sweeping stroke, every time, there is a rape case in India. India is NOT the nation of rapists. Yes, there are rapes, yes, there is violence against women and yes, the crimes are heinous. But India is a vast nation and it has plenty of good as well. I agree that the reality is vastly different for the urban, educated Indian woman than it is for a girl from an UP village fractured with caste identities. There is much that is wrong with us as a nation, but there is much more that is right. As one of the Spanish girls put it, ‘India overwhelms you. It is too big, too diverse for you to slot her into a convenient mental box’! © Shefali Vaidya
Posted on: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 04:21:28 +0000
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