The Venerable Bede
672 - 735
Probably the first person to Blog
in the English language.
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Indian Stations of the Cross
by 
nathanielkidd on 1239791706|%B %e
This year's Good Friday liturgics emanating from the Vatican featured meditations for the Stations of the Cross written by Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil of Gwahati (India). Besides being a very nice contemporary presentation of the Stations, the wisdom and experience of the Indian Church is beautifully interwoven throughout the text.
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| Jesus before Pilate — in Bangalore |
The Vatican has the whole thing up on their website, accompanied by beautiful icons by a nun from Bangalore.
On a related note, Sunday morning, Sarah and I turned on the TV. Whoever had last watched it had us tuned to a Hindi entertainment channel—and, to our surprise, the first image that popped onto the screen was a man dragging a cross, a look of agony on his beardless face.
"Woah!" we thought, "Some kinda contextual Jesus in an Indian passion play!" — as the man was clearly Indian in his dress and appearance. We were confused a few moments later when a woman ran across the field behind him, tripped, hurt her ankle, and suddenly became the center of attention.
No, it turned out that the guy was actually pulling a plow. Just another Indian soap opera. Way to get our hopes up, Zee TV.
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Pakistan and Other News
by nathanielkidd on 1239022778|%B %e
Sarah and I have had a very busy couple of weeks! As the six-month mark of our journey approached, hotel clerks began to ask us about it. (Our visa lasts for ten years, but tourists are only permitted to stay for six months at a time.) So we had to make plans to leave the country.
Discussing this odd stipulation on our visa with my parents got the gears turning in my mother’s head. My mom is of Presbyterian missionary stock, born and raised in Pakistan. After my parents got married, she came back with my dad for a month-long visit, but otherwise has not had an opportunity to come back, despite her desire to share this with us kids.
“Wouldn’t this be the perfect excuse and opportunity,” my mom pondered, “to share Pakistan with my eldest son and daughter-in-law?” So she eked out a little vacation time, and we started weaving plans for a whirlwind Pakistan visit.
Of course, Pakistan’s been in the news a lot lately, and not for the best of reasons. Even in neighboring India, Pakistan did not seem like a particularly safe place to vacation, with reports giving the impression that every other person was walking around with a bomb under their clothing. So we weren’t sure how much we should talk about it. We didn’t want to jinx our journey, nor did we want to cause unnecessary concern amongst our friends.
From the time we started planning right up till when my mother landed in Delhi on 20 March, our plans seemed uncertain. The Taliban were gaining strength in the northwest, the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked, and unrest and turmoil over the deposed Chief Justice grew more and more intense. My uncle, a seasoned international traveler, began to question the wisdom of visiting Pakistan at such a time, and my dad asked if I had any quotable last words, just in case. But then the political storm clouds suddenly cleared. Pakistan is still probably not the safest place in the world, but the immediate danger of chaotic collapse dissipated.
Our week of travel in Pakistan was fantastic. We were lavishly hosted by the Presbyterian Education Board, an organization that runs several private Christian schools in Pakistan. They made all sorts of wonderful arrangements for us. We got to see all of the important sites from my mother’s growing up years, and see some of the tourist sites. We had a chance to get acquainted with the work of the PEB, and the lovely people associated with it. We got to observe mission and challenges of the church in Pakistan, and explore the complex missionary legacy in which my family plays a small part.
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| A warm welcome from the Christian Boy's High School in Martinpur. |
I felt very at home in Pakistan during our visit. Perhaps it was the warm hospitality of the PEB staff, and the graciousness of all the people we met. Perhaps it was connecting the dots from stories that my mother and grandparents told me when I was growing up. Perhaps it was seeing so much evidence of my grandparent’s work—the people they influenced, the institutions they participated in, the little memorial plaques on the walls of schools and churches. Perhaps it was all of these strings coming together. But this is not something I have felt in India.
Indeed, we enjoyed our time in Pakistan so much that we immediately started planning to go back. We had the foresight to purchase a double-entry visa, and there were still plenty of days left on it. So, within a week of dropping my mother off at the airport, we were on our way back to the Wagah border. We have arranged to work on a couple of short term projects with the PEB, and we are hoping to spend more time with some of the pastors we met, learning more about the life of the church in Pakistan and building connections for the future.
This will be our last subcontinent venture in this leg of our pilgrimage. In May we will be heading back to the States, for the dual purpose of attending graduations and avoiding the summer heat. This summer we will continue in the spirit of our pilgrimage by renouncing many of the material things we have accumulated through life that we have until now avoided thinking about or throwing away by storing them in our parents attics and garages.
I don’t think that we will ever travel quite the same way that we have traveled in India for the past several months. It has been an extraordinarily valuable and broadening experience, but it has also been quite challenging to have so few connections, so little structure, and so little to contribute. I do believe, however, that what we have learned will remain with us, and form us; that our life together will continue to be fed by streams from around the world, and that we will always be “multi-local” people.
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Rickshaw-Wallahs
by nathanielkidd on 1236236479|%B %e
The autorickshaw-wallah is a minor lord of the Indian underworld. His travels and his mobility make him well-networked, and well-known amongst those who do things unseen by the law. He is accountable to no law but his own, for rarely does the law check his behavior. He feels no remorse lying plainly to the face of his customer if it will make him an extra fifty rupees. He is greedy, and he grows fat on commissions from a whole litany of shady deals.
His auto is his chariot, his home, his weapon. He glides along the roads, most often with his meter turned off and his customer paying more than what it would read were it on. He feels no remorse at bullying those weaker than he is, be they beggars and the uneducated, who lack economic and educational power to confront him, or tourists, who lack the cultural knowledge and experience to take him on. And because he is the chief provider of transportation within Indian cities, almost no one is free from having to interact with him. He is a bully, and should be treated as a bully. He should be responded to aggressively and forcefully, and by upstanding citizens, he should be given nothing more than the fare he is entitled to.
That’s one way to look at it.
He is also a man struggling to make a living, to feed his family, to chisel out a place for himself and his descendants in the overburdened and underfunded mess of Indian society. He is oppressed by laws that set his fares only slightly higher than what it costs to operate to his vehicle, and demand that he does not do this thing or that thing with his time and with his transports.
He does things that are shady and manipulative, but he must just to survive. He does things that are immoral and illegal, but that is because the System has been built with no regard to his rights and his dignity, and he has found shelter and community amongst those whom a cruel, emerging economy has left behind. He is not a bully, he is a victim; and if he abuses his customers, it is only because he has first been abused by the System.
That’s another way to look at it.
The autorickshaw-wallah is an astute amateur economist, carefully gauging the laws of supply and demand to calibrate his maximum advantage. When extracting extra rupees from his passengers, or manipulating them into jumping through the commission circus, he carefully factors in the risk involved; the fact his customer might complain and bring upon him a five hundred rupee fine that would more than erase his minor gains.
When his customer is ignorant, he exploits that. When he is knowledgeable and confident, he respects that. But in all cases he is always on the look out for any cracks through which he can make an extra ten or twenty rupees, and eagerly grasps at them like any good ascendant businessman.
So there is a third way to look at it.
Above all, the rickshaw-wallah is a human being; complex and multi-faceted creature, whose behavior is not always the best and not always consistent with his values. But he is a creature created in the image of God, for whom Christ died, as in need of repentance and redemption as the rest of us (although it is often easier to see his faults than our own.)
I’ve been wondering, recently, how Jesus would look at it, and how he would handle his autorickshaw-wallah. It occurs to me, first of all, that there would not be the sort of economic discontinuity between Jesus and his rickshawist as exists between us and our rickshaws. Jesus was the kind of guy who would walk, and when it was too far to walk, crowd on to public busses. Economically, he was less endowed the rickshaw-wallah; even if he did possess an unmeasured unseen richness.
It seems to me that the rickshaw-wallah occupies approximately the same space in contemporary Indian society that the tax-collector occupied in Jesus’ Galilee. He is ubiquitous, obnoxious, and a bit slimy.
This has only begun to help me understand how to interact with them appropriately and compassionately, and I’m sure I still make lots of mistakes. But, at the very least, my interactions with them are now are not merely frustrating or challenging: it is a sort of Bible study in living color.
Thank God for autorickshaws. Not only do they make it possible to get from Main Bazaar to Shanti Path, but they have shown me something about the love and the character of Jesus.
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Amazing Picture
by nathanielkidd on 1236076240|%B %e
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Some of them are worth even more. This picture encapsulates our time in India with effortless humor.
The ancient building. The goofy tourist pose. The beggar child, who looks like she was photoshoped from an "authentic" picture of the "real" India from National Geographic. I look at it, and I laugh.
India. What an impossible bundle of contradictions!
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