Midpoint in Ayurvedic immersion in Kerala. Hardships? I can’t say my ample tummy has reduced so far as to be pressing against my spine. Ascetic is rather a word that conjours up excess for me, and a practice for the few. Whereas hardships come to us all sooner or later in life regardless of our practice.
Still it is worth the question : How do we withdraw the energy we habitually invest in the world and our dependence on the external? Put another way is what stops us our greater fear (greater than the fear of death even) to reveal ourselves as we truly are?
Next week we head north for India’s two great cities of the dead and dying: Varanasi and Calcutta. Cutting through old illusions of Calcutta as a ‘city of culture’ with the writer Amit Chaudhuri (‘…ery’ I misspelt it). He returned to the city which he calls dead in 1999, to write, and his book Calcutta is the perfect guide:
– where the CPI Marxist party ran the city and state of Bengal continously from 1977 to 2012
– and where regardless the old villas and palaces of the once wealthy but now absentee are being torn down and cleared for new shoping malls and apartment blocks by out of city developers
– and where the old absentees (parents of Amit Chaudhuri generation) have returned to live their last years and then to die.
There is a cosmopolitan shape and an idea of underlying form “I could be anywhere” he writes) in the writer’s mind, the lost illusions of the past and the dead facsimile’s of the present. Nevertheless in 1999 he chose Calcutta rather than Oxford (he still lectures periodically at Norwich Uni) to live in.Why?
P 98: “I remember thinking that, though Calcutta was now to all purposes dead, it possessed some secrets, and that there were discoveries for me to chance on here amidst the deceptive nullity – which, for whatever reason I could no longer in England”