Thursday, October 20th, 2011

The Now and What Could Be

Mumbai, India.

Because it's India when you walk along and because people respect the saffron cloth they will put palms together and wish you a good day. Because it’s India you might find a well-crafted sand sculpture of massive Ganesh set in the sand of Juhu beach(which I reverently circumambulated). Because it’s India you may bump into a young Brahmin by the name of Shastri who is also walking at an early hour, memorizing verses from Gita.

This and more is what make me melt in my heart being in the place of Dharma and a culture of its own kind. It’s sad that much of the deep values become buried under the influence of Kali-Yuga of darkness.

Traces of piety still linger but with the fast approaching I-centered lifestyle you wonder how long it takes before India loses a total grip on order, sometimes referred to as dharma. At lunch a few of us around age 60 were talking about the more innocent times of the fifties when we grew up in the North America. One devotee, Tamohara, from Florida, remarked how people find it puzzling that he’s been happily married for forty plus years. Being an expert in family counseling and having some facts down he said that particularly in ’72 stats show that in North America the divorce rates escalated.

In any event, our discussion entailed the co-relation between degradation and the disintegration of the family. Tamohara added another comment saying that stats confirmed that with industrialization when women entered the work-force, that was also the time of less inter-dependency. “Just in our life-time we’ve seen so much decline”, he said.

There are plenty of dark signs out there that are symptomatic of various forms of deterioration. Much damage is done. What to do?

We need to look to a regeneration of things and insert into our own individual lives a spiritual rejuvenation. Band aid mundane methods have failed society. May India take the lead in a spiritual resurgence and if not, perhaps its diaspora may.

8KM