Outside of the Hindu Temple in Belur
Outside of the Hindu Temple in Belur, sitting
on top of the wide stairs in the afternoon sun, observing the crowd in the
small village. Everyone is doing his or her respective business: kids in school
uniforms are walking in groups back from school, women and men negotiating in
the small shops around the temple or carrying their groceries home. Some
sellers are following the Europeans who arrived some time back with a rented
bus to convince them to buy another gift item for their families back home.
Some men are sitting on cheap plastic chairs or simply on the floor in front of
their shops enjoying the sun - like me.
I am contemplating about the daily life of all these people I see - and about the life of their relatives I don‘t see but who must be somewhere inside the houses, shops and huts, doing additional business. All of them are bound to their village and the local traditions - some of them might have been a couple of times in the closest bigger city and only a few might have experienced Bangalore, which is located some 250 km away. However many of them are carrying mobiles or smartphones, there are definitively electronic gadgets and TVs in many households, so in the evening they can watch a world they probably never had experienced in their whole life so far.
Miracles, treasures and unbelievable things seem to be available right on their fingertip or by a wipe of their hands. The funnily dressed, big Europeans will soon disappear with their bus, tomorrow another group of Englishmen or Americans might arrive - the people around Belur marketplace will stay, doing the same business they did yesterday and the day before. But in the evening they might sit together with family and friends in a bigger room, looking at flashing, loud advertisements of goods they never have seen in reality, watching movies telling stories about love marriage of Indian couples at wonderful places (once the nasty mother-in-law had finally given her blessing all actors will out of the sudden form a dancing line and perform a dance mixed of traditional and modern elements). Maybe they will watch even movies about Europeans walking in dark streets covered with some white stuff called „snow“. The people in the room in Belur cannot even imagine how cold snow is and how it feels to walk on it - and the ones who might have experienced it somewhere abroad are telling stories about cold and wet feet, frozen ears and how it feels wearing dozens of different clothes at once.
All this has nothing to do with the daily life of people in Belur, with the business they do, their traditions, rites and beliefs. Some of them might hope for their kids to have a more comfortable and wealthy life. If they only learned and studied hard enough they could afford these miracles or even travel to these foreign places abroad.
Me, the long haired, grey-bearded, strange looking guy sitting on top of the stairs observing the scene, I am thinking how it might feel to be surrounded by traditions and formed by thousands of years of history on the one hand side and being drawn into a very hectic, modern life with a lot of superficial relationships on the other hand. Life is completely changing within only one generation. Then the bus driver is honking and I need to go down the stairs, leave the sunny hot place with excellent overview and enter the acclimatized vehicle, just one step from an ancient but disrupted life back to my usual modern lifestyle, leaving the whole scenery behind and taking away only biased memories from that day.
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