MAGICAL INDIA (part2)

Kadamba Kanana Swami

The gundas or the criminals are praying, the priests are playing everyone believes in God that is the amazing thing. And that was exactly what my experience was the first time I came to India almost thirty years ago. So thirty years ago it was a lot different than now and I had jumped on a bus from Amsterdam called the magic bus, it wasn't that magic, I can tell you that! But anyway! It was cheap! It was a long bumpy ride three weeks, day and night you know, oh boy!

And in the middle of Turkey the asphalt on the road was finished, it was dirt roads and going over mountains without any roads or anything and looking down, oh my God! It was an adventure! We went through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and there it was.....India. Actually we had to get down from the bus because it was between India and Pakistan. A bit of no-mans land where no one could pass through. We had to carry our luggage across the no-mans land. And on the Pakistan side you would see people with blue shirts, carrying all the luggage on their heads from the trucks and then on the Indian side people in red shirts came and took the load and then took it into India!

So this was the first, and you saw this stream of blue shirts and this stream of red shirts meeting each other somewhere, at the edge of the no-mans land! So it was, interesting, to see all this, I was
quite amazed. Then I got more amazed as I walked into India, the customs officer was not sitting in the usual office you know like where there's a little glass house and some guy with a thing over the road: stop, passport. Something like that, no! There was no such office. Nothing like that, there was a man sitting with a big turban and a huge moustache you know with, many curls in it like that, under a tree. And this man was sitting with a desk under the tree. So I was quite impressed 'Wow! A desk under the tree? That's really far out, right?' And he said “All right, Welcome to India!”

He said “Welcome Welcome.”
He said 'Why have you come? Why have you come?'
So I said 'Well, I have heard so many nice things about India and I was curious to see. I heard that there are many spiritual things in India and I'm interested in those things.'

And he said 'Ahhhh, ahhhh very nice! 'Ahhh.... where will you go in India?'
and I said 'Well, I don't know yet!”........... (contd in part3)

(Kadamba Kanana Swami, Oslo, Norway 06/06/1999)