Reflexive Contradictions

Yesterday I spoke vaguely of the many contradictions I've observed in India. Today I hiked up to Pothamedu; since it was Sunday I was able to hike through a tea and cardamom plantation. I stopped near the top at a tea station and spent some time talking with folks. On my way back I reflected on the contradictions inherent in my own being here.



I am traveling through places considered by Western standards to be quite underdeveloped, but I am in many ways sponsored on this trip by a system based on the continual economic and militaristic exploitation of such lands and peoples to ensure its own comfort,
by a system that spends only enough on humanitarian efforts as is necessary to quell a vanishing and insecure middle class, to keep them as a buffer between the filthy rich and severely impoverished.



I am welcomed with great warmth by almost every passerby, but precisely because I am foreign and exist outside the dizzying manifold of internal conflicts. For some, I represent Western wealth that may secured in exchange for a simple rushed tour, in order to feed an extended family for a week. For many others, I represent an opportunity to share excess energy, to extend one's culture and life in the attempt to reach across an abyss, an abyss that exists probably only for those in empire.