Is Living Hard In India? Is Living Life Meant To Be Difficult?

There’s been a conversation going on around me and also on the internet about how living in India can be a bittersweet, intense and sometimes contradicting experience (Thanks Kat Kozell for those words). I’ve always wanted to visit India because of the great diversity that this country offers, from culture, language, agriculture, food and economics from all the regions north, south, east and west. India had me fascinated and curious from afar which brought me on this pilgrimage here.

In my first day upon arriving I experienced the culture shock that I was made aware of only through conversations and reading. Staying at a really nice hotel in Delhi on a 12-hour layover and seeing how the workers lived nearby was a culture shock in itself.  (I don’t even like to use that term “culture shock” because it’s only a difference of a way of life, why does it have to be “shocking”?) Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi does a great job making itself look westernized and modernized and just next door you find people living in the conditions depicted in this photo. Do people think what their living conditions look like is what makes life hard?

Arriving to Varanasi, India the following morning I continued to see and experience the vast differences in cultures. The 90-minute car ride from Lal Bahadur Shastri Airport to my home-stay in Varanasi there was a ton of new data to input into my brain. How store signage looked, the dress of the locals, the smog, the garbage in the streets, the beautiful colors of the saris on the women… and the things that stood out the most for me were watching the funeral procession in the street, the public defection, and the poverty. Is this what I should believe makes life hard in India?

I have stayed in over a dozen different hotels, home-stays, Air-BnB, retreat centers and ashrams in the two months since I have been in India. Each place having a different standard and idea of what “cleanliness” is. I have seen rats in kitchens, cockroaches in bathrooms, mice in restaurant dining rooms and I have also experienced good cleanliness as well.  I have vacated some of these places because of the lack of sanitary conditions in search of something cleaner and I have also compromised my standards and stayed in places that I found “satisfactory” for one night. Is this one of the things that makes life hard in India?

Here are some of India’s statistics… India is one of the most densely populated countries in the world with almost 1.4 billion people with nearly 20% of the world’s population and only 2.7% of the worlds land mass. India is the second most populated countries in the world with about 33% of its population living in urban areas. On paper it’s hard to conceive what that might look like and when you get here you can see how densely populated the place is. I have witnessed some of the trade-offs when a country is so populated like this. Pollution is so evident, all the groundwater is contaminated and cannot be consumed without boiling or filtering and I’ve seen the air quality be deemed “Unhealthy” in Delhi. There aren’t resources here for the police department to monitor everything so the way people drive on the streets is loud, on the wrong side of the street, speeding and most of all pretty crazy. There is lots of corruption and I’ve been told you can buy your way out or in of mostly everything. Trying to find quality products and craftsmanship can be a challenge. There is a division in economic classes and a lot of people look down at the lower classes as being “less than”. The saying “everything is negotiable” is so true here. Are these even more of the things that make life hard in India?

One of the take-a ways from my two months in India is how accepting people are of “what is” in their life. Meaning, they don’t have a judgment of things being bad or good, just as it is. Sure, if someone wants to make something happen for themselves, they can make the moves to make things happen. And generally speaking, people are particularly content with what their lives are no matter what the economic class they are in. In the USA, things are a bit different. The competition to be the best… to get good jobs, to make more money to consume more things are pretty common. I’ve witnessed people in India generally happier and accepting of their lives.

Who even comes up with these judgments? What is clean or dirty, abundant or lacking, less or more, better or best, good or bad, polluted or sterile? Our mind can generate some really wild and crazy stories. There is so much going on in our world outside of ourselves and we can think about it all we want, and things will keep on happening regardless of our thoughts about it. The only effect our thoughts have on is on ourselves. Our thoughts have far less impact on life than we would like to think they do. Our thoughts are only making us feel better or worse about the things that are going on now, events that happened in the past or what might happen in the future.

Most of life will unfold in accordance with forces (The Laws of Nature, Law of Change, Low of Impermanence, etc., to only name a few) that are far outside of our control regardless of what our mind has to say about our life, what we think about our life or what judgments we have about our life. Eventually, hopefully, we will see that the cause of problems isn’t life itself, it’s the stories the mind makes about life that really cause our misery. What stories have you created that aren’t serving your joyful ways of being in this life?

Do you really think that you have to have everything figured out in order to be happy?