Enlightenment, don’t know what it is . – Van Morrison

He was a vision in orange. His robes hung from his lean frame in flowing billows. Around his neck he wore a collection of sacred threads and clackering beads. His sandaled feet glided across the polished linoleum floor of the Nagpur Railway Station’s booking office. A crocheted bag of many colours hung from his tattooed shoulder. His wooden stick tapped on the tiles.

“I heff missed my train,” he said, pushing to the head of the queue, Indian fashion. “Vot vill I must do now?”

The woman behind the scratched and grimy perspex counter-guard eyed him with the long-practised scorn that Indian railway staff, used to dealing with an endless barrage of queue-jumpers, have perfected over the years.

“Counter three,” she said and returned to the business of organising my ticket to Allahabad. The German psuedo-Hindu groaned and moved away. The ticket clerk glanced up at me but I was silent. Karma is a bitch, I thought. No need to aggravate it by adding my opinion.

India is full of Westerners pretending to to be Indians. You see them on the ghats at Varanasi and in the Buddhist temple at Nagpur. They think they blend in, with their ethnic clothes, orange robes, matted hair and beads. But they are just as obvious as the elderly tourists in expensive clothes and improper footwear you see in the same places: shepherded around by touts and guides, shell-shocked and horrified, through the chamber of horrors that is Varanasi or the indecipherable chaos of the temples at Ellora.

You see them bathing in the Ganges, sitting cross-legged on the Raj Ghat, meditating in the temples, and wearing blue robes at the Buddhist shrines. They believe every word their handlers tell them. They wear their sacred threads. They stretch their limbs in the ashrams. They seek enlightenment. They collect their monthly remittances from trust funds back home. 

India, to them, is a fully-immersive theme park. And they can go home any time they like.

But Westerners visiting India seeking enlightenment are going to be disappointed. At the very least, they are only going to delude themselves into thinking that they have found enlightenment. India is, in fact, frightening. There is no enlightenment to be found here. India is crowded, chaotic, fascinating, brutal, and relentlessly, overwhelmingly filthy. The erratic, stupid and plain dangerous behaviour of its drivers defies comprehension. The noise is constant and intense.

India is incomprehensible and unknowable. But perhaps that is it’s greatest attraction. India is impossible to understand; so it is best not to try and understand it. You just dive in, go with the flow and take from the experience anything you like. There is no enlightenment here. But you will find out things you didn’t know: mostly about yourself.

Besides, who needs enlightenment? Your orange robes won’t stop the train from leaving without you.  Van Morrison said it best: “Enlightenment, don’t know what it is.”