India

“janagana mangala dayak jaya hay Bharat bhagya vidhata……”

Belonging is a much maligned concept due to its dualistic nature. It is fragmented and cursed by the pain of ambiguity and often the lack of credibility to its universal need in human existence. An utterance of the statement “I belong” - encompasses not just a phrasal acceptance of identity within a sect, idea or geographical entity: it goes a step beyond by giving its beholder the license to assimilate into this belonging. But why these questions of recognition and volitional poignancy? For me they arrive from a very ancient seat of belief which science relegates to the realm of extra-genetic information, but which most days I want to believe transcends the boundaries of inductive constructs of logic or phenomenally derived reason.

I left India in 2002 and that was the year I began to assimilate into it. The reality of a hallowed situational civilization began to overpower my very understanding of what it was to be alive within a social construct. My immersion was by no means extreme or devoid of subjective undertones, which drove me to probe even further past the myriad of maya – placed in subtle layers. Just like Arjuna I was unable to grasp reality, confined within a rationale which sprang from a lifetime of Christian educated ethical structures and to perceive an awe inspiring philosophical tradition which had evolved to become too sophisticated for a linear western evaluation.

Yet the journey had begun from “the dreary desert of dead habitat” to a neo realization of what it entailed to be a cosmic being within a mortal society and the infinite possibilities that began and ended at the same point of value. What does that mean ? How can creation and destruction emanate from or gift similar emotional and spiritual colors to a environment so deeply prejudiced against an event which leaves them less secure than before ? Life questions which I don’t have the slightest clue about. However crushed under the feet of the dancing nataraj, the spirit of the universe , sways to a mystic rhythm almost unheard of in the annals of western ancient and modern religious or philosophical enquiry. And I being a part of that fathomless pit of regeneration and understanding always become a different conceptual idea within a very real paradigm of universal truth.

I am proud today as I have been on countless other occasions of belonging to a culture that was able to transcend the normal human condition , or rather they were able to transcend into the most normal human condition , that of dynamic balance. A value based action suspended in planes of spirituality, emotional intelligence, phenomenal learning and biological progression.

If knowledge is extra-genetic than I believe faith will never surface within a society that chooses to alienate its young from the very creation, yet being such an alien and yet searching out the fundamental nature of my being I prove this theory wrong everyday.

I dedicate this life and the millions of others I might spend, suspended from the edge of the universe where time and space shatter Cartesian and even relative co-ordinates to disappear into a mass of probability, to the incredible idea that gave birth to me: India.

I belong to you.