Color-man, 4 July, northern India
We're back on our bus after a ten minute break. The bus driver held up ten fingers and said through a gold-toothed grin, "Tea and toilet." So for 24 rupees, Drew and I bought two cokes, and for 25 rupees, a plate of gepato (flat bread) and two bowls of spicy sauce. One sauce was thin, one thick. A crowd of ten or fifteen watched intently from the first dip of gepato to the last sip of coke.
Most of you Americans, I suppose, are warming up for parades and barbeques and fireworks for the 4th of July. Truly, America is worthy of great praise and celebration. I am looking expectantly for some sign of the Himalayan Mountains, some dark outline at least. Seeing all the idle men on the roadside makes me think of Queequeg in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. He is a cannibal from a Pacific island, who tells his friend Ishamael about kings and chiefs in his own country who fatten lazy men of the "lower order" for ottomans and chairs. To furnish a house, they only had to "buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them around in the piers and alcoves."
Looking out the window, I wonder if the British cut through the jungle and layed this road from Delhi to Nepal. On the plane from Jordan to India, we met a professor from Calcutta, who boldly denounced British colonialism in India. They came under the pretence of giving to the people of India, he said, but came with ulterior motives. Britain bled the veins of India by taking laborers and material and giving little in return. National healthcare and education during Britain's rule, he noted, were appalling. When I was asked about British colonialism in West Africa, I began to answer by saying, "Well, Africa was primitive and the British . . ." but he interrupted me, saying, "Who defines primitive?" He also said the Africans were only becoming Christians for the soup kitchens and free food.
Gandhi admired Jesus and upheld much of Jesus' teachings, but he never received him as Lord. He couldn't separate Christ from the blood-shedding "Christian" British and their "fat steaks and big beers." After the atomic bombs in Japan, Gandhi decided that the West had completely forfeited their responsibility to lead the world. "Now we must look to the East," Gandhi said, because at every point, he decided, Hinduism was better than Christianity. But what I don't want is people to judge Jesus Christ the Son of God by hyocrites that take his name--not the British, not the American church, not me.
Sam
Most of you Americans, I suppose, are warming up for parades and barbeques and fireworks for the 4th of July. Truly, America is worthy of great praise and celebration. I am looking expectantly for some sign of the Himalayan Mountains, some dark outline at least. Seeing all the idle men on the roadside makes me think of Queequeg in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. He is a cannibal from a Pacific island, who tells his friend Ishamael about kings and chiefs in his own country who fatten lazy men of the "lower order" for ottomans and chairs. To furnish a house, they only had to "buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them around in the piers and alcoves."
Looking out the window, I wonder if the British cut through the jungle and layed this road from Delhi to Nepal. On the plane from Jordan to India, we met a professor from Calcutta, who boldly denounced British colonialism in India. They came under the pretence of giving to the people of India, he said, but came with ulterior motives. Britain bled the veins of India by taking laborers and material and giving little in return. National healthcare and education during Britain's rule, he noted, were appalling. When I was asked about British colonialism in West Africa, I began to answer by saying, "Well, Africa was primitive and the British . . ." but he interrupted me, saying, "Who defines primitive?" He also said the Africans were only becoming Christians for the soup kitchens and free food.
Gandhi admired Jesus and upheld much of Jesus' teachings, but he never received him as Lord. He couldn't separate Christ from the blood-shedding "Christian" British and their "fat steaks and big beers." After the atomic bombs in Japan, Gandhi decided that the West had completely forfeited their responsibility to lead the world. "Now we must look to the East," Gandhi said, because at every point, he decided, Hinduism was better than Christianity. But what I don't want is people to judge Jesus Christ the Son of God by hyocrites that take his name--not the British, not the American church, not me.
Sam
posted by Unknown at 5:00 AM
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