goggles off.

Here's what I've decided:

The things that make India beautiful are not the locations. You can visit a temple or palace, spend days in an ashram meditating or climb the boulders in Hampi to view the sunset. These things are beautiful, yes, but they are not the reasons why this country is breathtaking.

India's beauty is in the briefest of moments. In these quick snippets of time, when the dust and the dirt and the garbage, the horns honking and touts screaming, the smells of urine and sewage all fade away, and Incredible India appears.

Minutes before sitting down to this computer screen, I stood outside waiting to cross the street. To my right, a brown cow grazed on discarded coconut shells in front of a yellow and black rickshaw, the owner in tattered rags sleeping on the back seat as he awaited potential customers. In front of me rickshaws and motorbikes competed with rainbow-clad women and barefoot children for space on the dirt path they called a road.

A waft of sandalwood incense, a smell native to this colonial town, drifted over me, followed immediately after by the sticky sweet scent of mid-afternoon heat in Mysore.

A hundred pairs of big black eyes peered at me from the faces of India: cinnamon browns, chocolate, licorice black and golden yellows glowing in the sun.

Beauty amidst chaos. It makes you smile.

And then, just as quickly as the magic appeared, it was gone again.

"Your country? Yes hello, bananas? You from? What your name? Miss, one school pen? Yes yes try one watch please. Yes hello one rickshaw for you." Calls and stares and aggression infiltrated once more.



The trick in India, it seems like, is to notice those minutes of magic, and hold on to them for dear life. Because this country is exhausting, it's everything that Canada is not (in all the best and the worst of ways), it wears you down and you can't help but think "Why, oh why, did I ever feel the need to come here?"

...so even though sometimes all you want to do is close your eyes and run away from it all, you have to keep those suckers wiiiiide open at all times.

cause otherwise you might miss those seconds of beauty.

otherwise you might miss India.