Wilderness

“In India we are fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it’s gone. Every person that’s walking down the street is a walking bar code….Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in its place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists—the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings. It’s threatened, but we’re fighting to retain it. We don’t have to re-conjure it. It’s there. It’s with us….I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. There is just a space for the unpredictable here, which is life as it should be. It’s not always that the unpredictable is wonderful—most of the time it isn’t. Most of the time it’s brutal and it’s terrible.”--Arundhati Roy, The Shape of the Beast

Although I don’t agree with a lot of Arundhati Roy’s opinions on development and globalization, I think she hits this description of India right on the mark. Daily life in India is that much closer to life, but also that much closer to death. Every morning it’s equally likely that I will see two calves suckling its mother by the side of the road, or a goat, body rigor mortis, tucked into the medium (but never a cow, never never a cow).