Delhi, last stop in India – a perfect mixture of what India has been for me. On the one side, experience of peacefulness, and quiet, and beauty – with one of the most beautiful parks I saw in a city, the Nehru Park, full of flowers, and bees, and freshness, and with large boulevards bordered by trees, and smaller parks, and embassy houses. And on the other side, a dusty metropolis, always full of voices and screaming horns, full of people, and people selling, and asking things from you, and noise, and dust, and heat, and everything all together, until it gets too much and too tiresome to take it all in.
As I was about to start my journey here, I was asking myself whether India was going to be for me a “love” or a “hate” experience. And now, as I am leaving it – this country that one cannot tell you about it, not even show it to you, but that you have to experience for your own – now, I look inside myself and I find both: both the love and the hate, both the falling in love and falling in peace, and the anxiousness, and the tiredness, and never-ending restlessness.
Maybe India is just a big, oversized picture of Life itself, full of flavors, and colors, and relentlessness, and all sorts of experiences; and good and bad, and life and death, and here and there… And all you have to do, in the mists of all this craziness around, is to be yourself.
The Light Journal by Ioana Iftode 