India is so many things to so many people. To try and describe her in entirety is impossible, so let me introduce you to my India: a place where pinks and reds and blues and greens are expected to mingle, and color in the markets and the clothes enlivens the landscape; where the smell of spices and flower garlands permeate the winding, dark alleys and busy, potholed streets; where the noises of animals and cars pelt your ears and the pushing and shoving of throngs of humanity force you to expand your own boundaries of personal space.

This is my India too: village women with skins darkened from the sun and weathered by winds, bent over gracefully in the lush green rice paddies, coconut-oiled hair gleaming in the sunlight; children, barefooted and bedraggled, delighting in the ordinary days and surroundings because they do not know to depend on other things; old men and women encircled by generations of family who understand that some wisdom comes only with age and that familial relationship — for better or worse — is forever.

Grace, Poverty, Injustice
And, finally, the last of my Indias: excruciatingly unfair, despairingly ramshackle, unflinchingly confronting. Poverty, discrimination and injustice are laid at your feet, impossible to escape. No issue is clear; all are shaded by the complexities of circumstance and the need for solutions that topple long-standing social hierarchies and perspectives.

Injustice toward India's girls and women is no different: They carry families and communities in their strong, capable hands and seem to receive so little in return. Yet, they are the ones who have told me laughingly that they would never exchange their lives in the village for mine in America, a life they see as fast and impersonal, devoid of connection to others and to the earth.

Every morning, in villages across India, women spend hours creating beautiful drawings outside the doors of their homes, drawings of chalk and colored sand, of gathered flower petals and grains. These drawings are a reminder of the existence of grace, of possibility and of transience. Each day, the drawings are washed or blown away — this must happen for something new to be created again the next day. The women who create them delight in the beauty of the present and the possibility of the future. They create joy in simple ways that nurture them through hardship.

From the Gut
The difference between Indians and Americans, I once said to a friend, is that Indians die thinking they should and Americans die thinking they shouldn't. Later, the words kept coming back to me and I realized that they neatly captured much of the essence of the two societies.

The notion that we are supposed to die recognizes both our limitedness and limitlessness as human beings. It accepts, not questions, that the world extends beyond us and that we are merely transient creatures on this planet — beliefs that permeate everything in India from the mundane questions of when the bus will come to the soul-searching questions of why our lot is what it is. It allows for the existence of spirituality — so paramount in Indian life — as well as community.

In India, time exists to facilitate human interaction rather than simply to measure the achievement of tasks. Community — which we try so hard to create in the West — emerges organically in India. Women come together to cook around a sooty open fire, to carry buckets of water from the village well, to talk about babies and husbands, about the price of rice and the vagaries of weather, about the joy of an upcoming marriage or the pain of losing the village's children to the city. Indians exist in relationship with each other and with the earth, constantly searching for answers to a physical and emotional landscape that offers little clarity about why we are here and what is possible.

India makes me speak from my belly instead of my head, from the places where I feel and live and love and die.
In the end, this capacity to evoke emotion is India's greatest gift.