Holy Cow, a best-seller by Sarah MacDonald

[Guest guest]

Holy Cow, a best-seller by Sarah MacDonald

 

(Sarah a journalist and girl friend of the ABC's South Asia

correspondent deals with her experiences in India. These extracts

are from the concluding pages of the book where she summarises her

experience.)

 

The ABC has found a new correspondent and now it is time to leave for

Australia and let the tide of a billion lives ebb and flow without

us.....

 

In Sydney I rediscover my relationship with nature. The ocean

becomes my temple and my Ganges......I walk through the pristine

quite of the suburban bush of my childhood as fluorescent orange

streaks across the sky...Gleaming cars zoom fast on empty, wide and

clean roads. A couple bent double laughs with hysterical abandon at

a cafe table. I delight to see such open joy and such easy lives,

yet at times the luxury and space sit uneasily. My country and I

want it all - to be part of a war and not to face its consequences,

to be part of the global community but not a port for its refugees.

The city rants religiously of real estate and fashion.......The

worship of land ownership, the body beautiful, self-help and self

obsession for beings blinded by option over load is strangely

unfamiliar.

 

I went to India for love and that country tested that love to a large

degree....We now both have a new view of our so lucky lives, yet our

innocent optimism has been sucked from our hearts.The overall

feeling about our adventure is positive though. Jonathan's career

has taken off and I have gained much in my karma chameleon journey.

I am reborn as a better person, less reliant on others for my

happiness and full of a desire to replace anger with love. Plus I

have gained another home. For, I have two spiritual homes now - the

quite empty lands of my birth and the cataclysmic crowded land of my

rebirth. When I remember India, I think of its ability to find

beauty in small things - the tattoo of circles on a camel's rump, a

bright silk Saree in a dark slum, a peacock feather in a plastic

jar, a delicate earring glinting by a worn face and a lotus painted

on a truck. I miss the sheer exuberance of a billion individuals

and their pantomime of festivals............

 

India is the land of the profound and the profane: a place where

spirituality and sanctimoniousness sit miles apart. I have learnt

much from the land of many gods and many ways to worship. From

Buddhism the power to begin to manage my mind, from Jainism the

desire to make peace in all aspects of life while Islam taught me to

desire goodness and to let go of that which cannot be controlled. I

thank Judaism for teaching me the power of transcendence in rituals

and the Sufis for affirming my ability to find answers within and

reconnecting me to the power of music. Here is to the Parsis for

teaching me that nature must be touched lightly and the Sikhs for

the importance of spiritual strength. I thank the gurus for trying

to pierce my ego armour and my girlfriends for making me laugh. And

most of all I thank Hinduism for showing me that there are millions

of paths to the divine......

 

Yet, I have brought back something even more important than sacred

knowledge. A baby is growing inside me. A baby conceived during our

last weekend in the country. This child will forever remind me of

the land I lived in and what it took and what it gave. And this baby

made in India, will always remind me that India to some extent made

me.

 

Holy Cow, a best-seller by Sarah MacDonald