Sometime in September 2002 I returned from my Europe tour and came back to Vrindavan. Just like every year, I wanted to be there for Radhashtami, the birthday of the goddess Radha, the birthday of my late grandfather and the day when I had entered the cave, five years before. Just like every year, we had a big celebration on that day with many people coming to the Ashram.
That was of course a special day and much was going on but usually, on a normal day, I would spend quite some time at the computer and online, exploring the internet, chatting with different people around the world and improving my English.
Some friends came by, who had got to know that I was back. After travelling for several months in Europe, making all those experiences and collecting many different impressions, it was very nice to be back home and to share everything I saw and did with friends and family. I told them what I had done, what I had wondered about and what others had explained me.
What my friends heard on such days and what I told them was hard to believe. For them it was stories from another world, a place different from what they knew. I enjoyed seeing their reactions and hearing their comments and I had really lots to tell.
Their imagination of the west was based on what they had read in newspapers and seen in movies or on TV. I knew that and having been there myself, I had noticed that it was quite different of what people thought. Indians are in general very proud of their country and their culture and they tend to have a negative image of the western world. So when I told them about the time that I had spent there, I corrected their picture in many ways.
I told them about the punctuality that I had experienced everywhere, about the respect that people have for each other and which feels very nice, especially as a foreigner being there for the first time. I explained the work attitude which is so different from what we know in India, as I have seen many westerners very devoted to their work. They take their own responsibility and act accordingly and you feel that they are very honest and clear when they say something. In order to illustrate this point, I told my friends of an incident:
One day I was in Hamburg, sitting on a bench at the road, waiting for a bus. It was a busy street, many people were coming and going and passing by. I had my camera lying next to me on the bench and was watching people walking by. Then a bus came and in my effort to figure out whether this would be the right bus for me to get in, I forgot my camera on the bench. I noticed my loss when I was sitting in the bus, already moving. I was shocked and sure that I had just lost my camera forever. I nevertheless got off the bus at the next station and walked back the whole way, just to check the bench. And there it was! It was still standing there, at the side of the bench, in the middle of the busy pathway with people all around! I had been sure that in all the time that it took me to get there, someone would have taken it. But the people around were so honest that they would not take what was not theirs.
This was one of those unbelievable stories for my friends in India. One of them told me to write down my impressions of the west, as I had obviously met so many people and had explored their behavior, their culture and traditions. He thought it would even be impressive enough for a small book. Unfortunately I was not into writing in that time and never even made notes of my experiences. Today however I am writing, in this online blog, and think that it was a very good piece of advice that he gave me. You can imagine that a lot has faded out of my memory since then but now I started recollecting and write for you whatever I still find.
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I love talking to people – friends or not – who have spent longer periods of time in different countries. It is a very enriching experience because they can usually offer a fully different point of view from what I know. And often their experiences are very different from what we know in our culture. Different but mostly great!