Yoga, ganja, meditation, samosas or more?

I have met couple of people who want to experience the “Indian lifestyle” if they could. I never thought about that statement very deeply ever. But then another friend of mine told me the iceberg analogy of culture very recently, and I started thinking about the “Indian lifestyle”. For people who are not familiar with this analogy it says just like the tip of the iceberg does not actually give an impression of the extent of the real thing, the exposed and ever changing “tip” of any culture is its clothes, food, music and art which assimilates from everything around. Now if I take away the food and the colourful clothes and the music and the great art of India away, I wonder if any of my foreign friends will have any clue what Indian culture is actually about! It is even hard for me to think what exactly this “Indian lifestyle” then will be. But for sure we do not wake up and take an elephant or camel ride to the bathroom where we shower with exotic spices and then wear gold threaded clothes and once again ride a very compassionate Royal Bengal Tiger and go to a yoga class and meditate the whole day only taking break to smoke ganja! On the other hand, I personally had no experience waking up in a slum with my twenty siblings and shitting in open air and then going out for begging the whole day at the traffic lights. So it comes down to the fact that I have no exotic lifestyle to share with anyone. My mornings used to be pretty much the same in Indian as it is here in North America, sans the heat and humidity. So now that I know my cultural heritage is not entirely the food that I eat, or the music that I listen to, the question becomes what the hell this cultural heritage is!!

To answer that I will go point by point and try to explain how through simple words and gestures I realized that I come from a different culture. The other day one of my good friends planned to come over around noon with her little kid to help me with cooking for a big event that evening. It was not until two hours before she was going to be there that I realised that I never told her to have lunch with me!! My cultural heritage just assumed that she knew that a lunch time meeting at someone’s place meant having food together! I did text her immediately but alas! It was already too late and she had her lunch. When I told her about my whole assumption she thanked me and told me she will never want to impose on me. And there we stood two cultures, both right at their own points, one very individualistic and the other very communal. And I realized its not the food that makes us different, but it’s the value around the food that makes a big difference.

Then the second is my extreme discomfort with the phrase “you are very kind” even for the slightest thing that I do for my friends, like thinking about them when they are sad or something. Though I can sense what do they mean by “kind” but to me kindness is something much more profound. Somehow the word kind to me personally brings the image of the soft gaze of Buddha the Avalokiteshwara.  To be kind I have to do something extreme, like give blood knowing may be my body will not be able to replenish it. This might be a too extreme example but kindness in my culture is something for which we sacrifice a big part of us.

Now that I have used the key word from an Indian cultural perspective, sacrifice, I should elaborate on that. The whole upbringing of an Individual in India they hear how important is it to live for all and not for your own self, life is about sharing, about giving and not expecting in return. It’s all about finding joy in discovering your own self in everyone and everything, to feel that we are at the core connected. And that is the Indian culture to me, to move from I to we, from my to our and from individual to collective. And in our practice in sharing food, making garments, celebrating festivals, getting married, mourning a loss and even fighting it is all about finding bliss in us.