More reflections from Bihar.

Fri Aug 10, 2007. Another train in India.

We had an interesting conversation yesterday about how people learn to cope with living in Indian society. When you are surrounded by such extremes of suffering and misery around you, day in and day out, how do you not either get completely desensitized, or get completely overwhelmed and driven to despair?

This last year in NY I’ve felt I became pretty insulated and desensitized to suffering, caught up in this bubble of wealth and glamour and so distanced from the reality of the suffering that the majority of the world lives in. I found myself longing to escape to some village or slum in a developing country, imagining that the mere fact of living in a place like India forces you out of your bubble and shocks you into confronting people’s misery, impelling you into compassionate action. Yet after returning here, I’m finding it’s as easy to get desensitized when you’re living here as in NY. The human brain has an incredible capacity to acclimatize itself to almost any conditions. Even in India – or especially in India – it’s almost easier to get used to the misery, to begin to see it as a natural part of life, and to learn to live with it, block it out, to become immune to any pressure to change.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter where you are – wherever you are, you can become desensitized to suffering and live a self-centered existence, unless you choose to keep your heart compassionate and other-centered, choose to let yourself be affected by others’ suffering. Ultimately we prefer to harden ourselves to it, because then we don’t have to deal with the inconvenience of feeling personally responsible to do something about the suffering.

Also, perhaps it’s not where you live, but the very act of traveling and encountering difference that shocks us out of our complacency, and brings us to face the reality of what others have acclimatized themselves to. It’s the foreigners or NRIs who travel to India who are most deeply struck by the poverty here – just as it’s the foreigners who travel to the US that are most shocked by the materialism and consumerism and wastage and wealth that Americans are immersed in and desensitized to.

For example, In the US, people lose sight of the value of money and become OK with just throwing it around, spending thousands on meaningless objects, electronic gadgets, jewelry, a night of entertainment – money that could have gone to save so many lives. They lose the value of money because there is just so much of it; whereas in India this resource is so scarce and a little can go so far that people are always aware of the value of every single rupee – this is what makes Indians economical to the point of sometimes being regarded as cheap. On the other hand, the resource that is most abundant in India is human lives. Sadly, there are simply so many people in this country that one life more or less doesn’t really matter so much. Hundreds, thousands of people die in a day, and life simply goes on. I just learned that in the Mumbai local trains alone, about 10 people/day lose their lives in the morning rush – that’s about 4000 casualties a year simply in the morning commute, and it’s completely normal – that’s more people than were lost in 9/11! Yet people are no longer shocked by these statistics here – there are simply so many lives here that their value is depreciated. Perhaps it is only the act of traveling between both worlds, that keeps us mindful of both the importance of each individual human life, and the value of money and the difference it can make in preserving even one life.

It does have to be a conscious choice you make to prevent yourself from getting desensitized on one hand, and to prevent yourself from getting overwhelmed on the other. It involves an intentional decision to step out of the bubble of wealth and experience life as the majority of the world lives it – whether this means traveling in the local trains, building relationships with the poor, living lifestyles of simplicity, choosing to travel by donkey as Jesus did, or consciously adopting a policy of not wanting anything that millions cannot have, as Gandhi challenged us to. It requires a sincere conviction that I am not any better or more deserving than the driver driving my rickshaw, that I am not inherently entitled to any preferential treatment or to any material comforts that they aren’t. It requires me being able to look at a beggar on the street and honestly believe that she is every bit as important as I am in God’s eyes, and deserves as much attention and love and opportunities as I feel my own daughter would deserve.