Oh, India...

A passage from my new project: Shantaram (finishing the 935 page novel before I leave India...that's about 120 pages a week....I CAN do it!)

'India is about six times the size of France,' he went on, as the glass of alcohol and bowl of curried snacks arrived at our table. 'But it has almost twenty times the popluation. Twenty times! Believe me, if there were a billion Frenchmen living in such a crowded space, there would be rivers of blood. Rivers of blood! And, as everyone knows, we French are the most civilised people in Europe. Indeed, in the whole world. No, no, without love, India would be impossible.'

page 85

I liked this because it rang so true with me. I sometimes wonder how India even exists with all its craziness and people and wealth and poverty, and damn TRAFFIC!...but it has its own fluidity to it. It's own way of exisiting and surviving that wouldn't work anywhere else in the world but here. And for all its corruption (and I have seen and heard how much there is,) India really does exist on a whole lotta love. Love for its own people, and country. Interesting and frustrating....but who am I to even try and understand it?