India and its Afterglow: Reflecting on my Travels

Our days were full of paradox and mystery. One does not return from perhaps the most spiritual and sensuous place on earth having “made sense of India.”

In sifting and percolating my impressions, I am reminded of a continuing theme in one of the books we read, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, awarded the best Booker Prize winner of all time. An event from a person’s past gains meaning for that person’s present only when it is filtered through memory and incorporated into the overall story of that person’s life.

“I told you the truth,” [Saleem to Padma] I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”