"Men have always formed gods in their own image…in India you just believe in the more picturesque."

That’s what the guy had told me in the train. I was ‘doing’ Berlin, crisscrossing the city with my day pass on the S-Bahn, Berlin’s very own local train network. Which Berliners insist is far better than the famed London Underground albeit less glamorous.

I alighted at Alexander Platz, once downtown Berlin, part of the erstwhile Red East, but now transformed into one of the ‘new city centers’. The train was surprisingly empty for a Sunday evening; a guy across me was busy on his cell phone, trying to figure out which station he should be getting off at, all this in fluent German. He didn’t look and sound like a tourist, but definitely behaved like one.

He was soon done with his cell phone bit and bent forward, hands folded in an elaborate namaste. It transpired that this guy had apparently spent four odd years in Western India working with a NGO. An architect by profession, he had joined a NGO in his early twenties, which had shipped him out to India with a backpack, a small budget and big dreams. Somewhere on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border his NGO had adopted a village. Over the next half decade they undertook rural development projects, aiding small entrepreneurial ventures, irrigation projects and other welfare schemes. The man turned out to be quite a polyglot; he spoke a smattering of Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati and Kannada!

His Indian sojourn though, was in the 1980’s, after which he took up employment in Portugal, where he is now an established Landscape Architect. He has bought a house there and lives happily with his wife and kids. His extended family still lives in Germany, whom he visits once every few years. So that explained the whole looks like a Berliner-behaves like a tourist paradox.

Since the 1980’s he has visited India once, in 1998, the liberalization triggered mini economic boom hit him instantly in the face. The 90’s saw India emerge as a potential economic talking point, so the 80’s and 90’s are quite stark ‘Before’ and ‘After’ pictures.

We spoke about economics, politics and religion. The schism between the Occident and the Orient, where upon he said "Men have always formed gods in their own image…in India you just believe in the more picturesque." It brought a smile to my face, firstly it was true. Secondly, because it’s approximately what Somerset Maugham said in ‘Of Human Bondage’, when the American scholar Weeks, in his acerbic tongue in cheek way derides Philips friend, for his fascination for all things Catholic as opposed to the more understated ways of the Church of England.
"Men have always formed gods in their own image," said Weeks… "He believes in the picturesque."

We talked about this and that, about how economic power, not race, not location, not history, not politics, was the only delta in the modern world’s social calculus.

It was a wonderful experience, a train hurtling through suburban Berlin and a white man recounting his years spent in a nondescript Indian village. The whole juxtaposition of time, space and culture, would have seemed ironic at most times. But oddly it gave me a feeling of the ‘great wide open’.

A self confessed Indophile, he could never reconnect with Western Europe after returning from India. The East has energy he says, the west has decadence. He is planning a trip back to India this winter taking with him for the first time his wife and kids. “They like the sun, like me they will love India …”

Its vaguely ironic, I suddenly had this mental image of blonde haired toddlers walking of a Lufthansa flight and immediately falling head over heals in love with India, like their father expected them to do.

Westerners have always come to the East, wanting something, Vasco Da Gama wanted spices, the hippies wanted Nirvana, I don’t know what he wants but I hope gets it...

Bon voyage!

Labels: Fiction