What Oprah did not see in India…India 'Unscene'

My parents saw what Oprah did not see in India!!! A real ‘Cameo of Life’!!!

My parents were on a whirl wind tour of Rajastahn and were in the last leg of their tour. On that day, they were travelling by road from Jaipur to Ajmer and had a stop for quick snack at a hamlet near city of Bandar Sindri.  What they saw took the wind out of their sails....

They saw a half clad man, aged around 30-35 years accompanied by his mother on a road opposite to Birla International School. What is astonishing in this. Hold your horses folks!! The man was carrying his blind mother in one basket of Kavad, whereas travel paraphernalia balanced the basket at other end (I tried to search an appropriate English word for Kavad, without much success. Well Kavad is a bamboo lath (stick) provided with slings at each end; for the conveyance across the shoulder of pitchers, baskets etc)

Man carrying his mother in Kavad

A Closer look

The onlookers, my parents included, were very stunned and very curious to know what he was doing and thus started to ask a few questions to this new age Shravan, like what is his name, where he is going etc. But the man of few words that he was, he did not answer any question. He only said that “I am just fulfilling my mother’s wish and I am on pilgrimage, having completed tours of Badrinath and Kedarnath I am travelling to Rameswaram, as mother would like to ‘see’ (remember his mother was blind) and offer her prayers at the temple”.  My parents and other onlookers offered him some small money as a token; however he clearly denied that money and hurriedly started his long walk towards Rameswaram, which is only about 2,539 km from Ajmer!!!!

Living in India and not revering your parents would be blasphemy. Even by the Indian standards, this unbelievable sight of a man carrying his blind mother on his shoulder to fulfill her wish of pilgrimage by traveling distances as far as he had traveled, was stretching this axiom of caring your parents a bit too far.

In today’s world which is increasingly becoming insular and even in India joint family (which  was essentially the back bone of Indian society) is fast losing its existence to nuclear family, such ‘cameos of life’ talk volumes about the great Indian culture.  

Oprah talked about sense of karma, calmness in India. Indians believe that the almighty has planned happiness for each one of them at the right time and it’s only that he has not shared his calendar with us. Thus they do not go chasing happiness for they staunchly know that happiness is just around the corner; people just find ‘joie de vivre’ in whatever they have.

Had Oprah Winfrey seen this, she would have been dazed, bamboozled, flabbergasted, surprised, shocked, awed all together. After seeing this ‘real heck of a scene’ Oprah would have experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would have changed the way she viewed India.

What say Oprah?