25~ Download of Information.

January 6

I like being here, I like this city, and being able to say that after almost a month of being in India, questioning daily what the hell I was doing here, was a lot.

Little by little, I was tuning in more and feeling India closer to me.Not even a month had passed—the time they told me it would take for the "tempering," the adjustment to such a different culture—but one starts to grow impatient.India is a challenge, still a unique place in the world, and at the very least, it requires time.

In my case, the problem was not just the real and practical difficulties that came with the cultural shock—on top of that, I had to add my imaginary and emotional struggles: the panic and uncertainty about the future, how to deal with the ghosts that inhabited me, and the feeling of not wanting to be here. Everything would have been easier if I had truly wanted to come to India, but that wasn’t the case.Given those coordinates, things weren’t so bad.

On the third day, I went for a walk and befriended a hindu clothing vendor who loved Argentinians. He invited me for chai and welcomed me into his shop. Socializing in India happens effortlessly. We started talking about everything: about me, what I was doing in Varanasi, how I had arrived, and of course, whether I was married—one of the star questions.

—Some people arrive and leave immediately; they can’t stand this place. They can’t glimpse the magic hidden here. Many love it, others abhor it. Benares is not for everyone.

After talking for a while about spirituality, he asked for my permission to cleanse my aura, which from the outside looked somewhat like Reiki. Still skeptical of frauds and cautious of the smoke-sellers that abound in India, I agreed. What did I have to lose? "Fear and money—I never had either," as an Argentinian would say.

—You’re very emotional,—he told me— Go to Bodh Gaya, meditate, do Vipassana. That will help you control your emotions. Emotions are like bacteria, they grow. If you need to cry… cry, let it out, and meditate so your emotions don’t control you or overwhelm you.

I wanted to tell him that I did cry, that I had been crying every night or every other day for months, almost nonstop, but I just kept my mouth shut and listened.

—Every time you don’t know what to do, stop!… Ask your inner self. Right now, you have a lot of confusion, I can see it. Right now, it’s not possible to understand, but little by little, you will be able to see more clearly. Your inner self knows the answer,—he paused— Don’t get distracted, capture the magic of this place. Every breath is a chance to do something new in life.

« Ask your inner self… it has the answers » « Your inner self knows what to do, listen to it »

At that moment, they just sounded like cheap spirituality phrases I had heard to exhaustion—ones that infuriated me and pushed me toward confrontation. How I hated those answers until I started to understand.

If my inner self had the answers, I wouldn’t be here like a desperate mystic lunatic trying to decipher the signs in everything that crossed my path… Or maybe I would be—maybe that was exactly what my inner self was showing me, and I just didn’t know it.

Either way, even if they irritated me a little, hearing those words felt like a breath of faith, a life raft for a castaway, and they could at least slightly ease the anxiety I was feeling.

Hearing them so much, they started to seep in through my pores and seemed more believable. In the end, the air you breathe in India invades you whether you like it or not, and you end up believing—even if you still don’t fully understand how it works.

« Truths and answers appeared to Buddha. They descended upon him while he meditated.» I heard it many times, from different people, all using the same term: "Descend."

"Descend?" How do they descend?! For God's sake! I need to understand!Is it in the form of messages, sounds, deliberate effort, analysis?Where do they descend from? Do they just appear out of nowhere? Should I seek them? Do they emerge spontaneously...?Questions thrown into the trash...

When one starts to believe, curiosity about the practical and methodological aspects grows, craving a bit more precision in the answers—and that, at first, creates a bit of a void.

The simplicity and calmness of those who spoke about it were almost directly proportional to my face of uncertainty. Their words gave me faith, but they also unsettled me. Of course, I understood what they were saying, but I needed more concrete mechanisms to carry it out. Instructions, results, and why not—some kind of proof. The mind again, wanting to take control and understand. —"Here I am! Did you think I had disappeared?"

It wasn’t until several months later that I began to feel that "inner self," that "intuition" they spoke of. That Knowledge that doesn’t just appear but is built or enabled when one creates the space for it to emerge, to speak, to be heard—and most importantly, the self-trust for it to exist. Thinking about it, I believe what is actually built is the possibility of deconstructing. Deconstructing the figure that blocks it, the word that invalidates it—and has invalidated it for so long, from childhood into adulthood.

The interesting thing is that, in reality, that knowledge was always there, we just never gave it the courage or the opportunity to raise its voice and be heard. So, what we need to build is not the knowledge itself but the way we look at it. The observer’s point of view.

—"Your face has changed," he told me.I looked in the mirror. It was true. I had a different energy, I felt lighter.And so, almost floating, I walked through the streets of Varanasi.

I walked through chaos as if it were made of cotton.

I arrived at one of the main ghats. In a corner on the ground, surrounded by children, I found Milena—a friend I had made in Rishikesh.She had arrived in Varanasi a few days earlier. Mile is a blonde girl with long hair, from Argentina, with a huge smile from ear to ear. She had saved money while living in Brazil, teaching yoga, to come to India. Her plan was to go to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries in Calcutta, but Varanasi had kidnapped her too, and she had given up that part of her trip to stay here.

"If it's meant to be, it will be. If not, then maybe next time..."

She had come from far away, from a distant continent, after thousands of hours of flights—and she gave it up just like that. To my old way of thinking, it was hard to understand. I loved her ability to let herself flow and detach, even though that had been one of the main purposes of her stay in India. She amazed me, I admired her, and I allowed my mind to learn. At the very least, she made me realize that other ways of living were possible.

Milena had befriended the Aarti children, those kids who are dressed as Shiva and painted blue to collect money, though no one really knows for whom. We don’t know, but we suspect: the mafias that, all over the world, use children as shields and as financiers of their misery. India, one of the poorest places on Earth, is no exception to this rule or to the oldest forms of exploitation. The insensible fibers of humanity, that which separates us from animals and turns us into human wretchedness.

I found her sitting on the steps, surrounded by children drawing, tugging at her clothes from all sides.

"I brought them a few things I had in my bag, some clothes, notebooks to draw. I've spent all these days with them. From the first time I sat with them, they’ve spotted me from a distance and come running to ask for something to draw. I couldn’t leave… how could I? I don’t have much, but this is what I can offer them—my time, my smile, sharing."

(…) "Something felt strange the other day," she told me. "One of the girls told me her name was Alisha, but then when I said ‘Madhu,’ one of her little friends said, ‘Oh, she has the same name as her,’ and pointed at the so-called Alisha, who quickly hushed her with a ‘Shhh!’ under her breath.I asked her, ‘But didn’t you say your name was Alisha?’‘Yes, yes,’ she answered, quickly changing the subject... It all felt a little strange.She tells me they all live with their parents, but I’m sure she doesn’t live with her parents.Something doesn’t add up… They can’t all be siblings. All nine of them...? Where do these children live? What do we do with all of this?"

I would have loved to give her an answer, but I had none. We were in a foreign country, with no idea how the police worked here—let alone the fact that no one would listen to us. First, because we were women. Second, because we were tourists. Third, because we were meddling with a mafia that is naturally legalized.

How do you eliminate injustice in the world? How does karma and religion play into all of this?

India, like so many other places, confronts us with brutal realities. Many of which we don’t know how to handle—not entirely. These are questions that are inherently deep and complex, involving us as ethical beings and as people of action. Questions that become even more complicated in a country where society is divided into castes that dictate how each person must live—and where that is completely unquestionable. Almost like a natural law, like an extreme and justified fatalism.

A place where a legalized form of machismo silences even the most basic arguments and behaviors—ones that, elsewhere in the world, we would challenge and condemn without hesitation.But here, idealized by spirituality, karma, and religion, we tolerate them a little more—as if that made them any less abhorrent.

Things are very different in India, and unfortunately, you become somewhat conformist. Sometimes, you have no choice but to accept it as part of the culture just to get through the day. To endure the misery, the lack of protection, the widespread neglect, things that sometimes make us laugh and, other times, weigh so heavily on our souls that we wish we could disappear from the face of the Earth.

Here, the justifications are different. We try to rationalize it through the lens of karma, personal growth, life as a school, and spiritual arguments—which, sure, are probably true and hopeful.But that doesn’t make them hurt any less. It doesn’t make them hurt any less for those who live through them. And it doesn’t make them hurt any less for those of us who allow them.

What are our actions according to our karma?

When you see a child on the street who hasn’t bathed in so long that his hair has changed shape…When you see a person lying on the side of a highway, sleeping in the dust and despair of a merciless street…When you see the bones of an old man protruding through the thin layer of skin that barely covers them…All of that human suffering, which sometimes becomes so normal that it just fades into the background.

How do you find a middle ground—between anguish and invisibility?

"Money is not the solution, nor can we help everyone," we tell ourselves when reflecting on these everyday situations."That won’t get them out of the situation they’re in, and misused money can also be a weapon if it continues to contribute to their state—it’s like helping them further along the path of death. If there’s one thing I don’t want," a friend once told me, "it’s for my money to serve their self-destruction. I don’t want to contribute to that in any way. I never offer money; I always think of other ways..."

What are those other ways? What do we do then? And a parallel, perhaps deeper reflection: Who are we to judge, through our own lens, the right way to use it?

Each of us will likely respond and act according to our own karma in these situations.

Sometimes, we give them our time, and I believe that today, that is the most valuable and committed thing we have to offer. A conversation, a smile, maybe food, an apology, a glance. Sometimes, we do something, a community effort, activism, some form of retribution to this unjust society, trying to balance the scales just a little. Sometimes, we write, we bring visibility to the issue, we reflect in whatever way we can, we try to expand our awareness in order to take action—no matter how small, intentional, and powerful it may be—in the right direction. And sometimes, we do nothing and that is the most dangerous thing of all.

"These situations," a Buddhist monk once told me, "are opportunities for us to practice our generosity and compassion. And from that perspective, we should thank them for allowing us to exercise detachment, love, and inner nobility. We can also turn it into an exercise of personal openness and bless them with all the love that comes from within us."

When I left India for a few months to live in a Buddhist country and then returned, everything felt harsher. I felt the fatalism more intensely, the abandonment, the lack of care, the neglect, the helplessness. It hurt me twice as much as the first time.

Bodies sleeping amidst the dust, the noise, and the trash. Bare feet brushing against the rough asphalt. Sad eyes, tangled hair, desperate gazes.

How can we focus on our own spiritual development while ignoring all of this? How can we take care of ourselves as temples when we witness so much suffering in the streets? How can we seek any kind of purity under these circumstances?

That question returned to my mind, just as it had on my very first day in India.And perhaps hidden within it was one of the most important lessons to go through—Or do we need to live in an unrealistic bubble of calm and perfection in order to cultivate ourselves and stay centered?

Could it be more about assimilating all of this in the wisest way possible and asking ourselves how it challenges each of us, according to our own karma? For me, this was one of the hardest lessons.

Do they see it the same way? Do they perceive it as suffering? How do they experience their own reality?

Do we have the right to theorize from our privilege and our perspective of what is right and wrong?

Where do the limits of that lie?

And once again, the spiritual questions that are the hardest to face: Who are we to judge how one should live?

The situation regarding women is changing, slowly, but it is.

The ruthless, deeply rooted machismo has been altered in many places due to cultural blending, the fight in big cities, and the new Constitution promoted by Gandhi in the 1950s. But of course, remnants remain. There are still remote villages, lost in the vastness of India, where modern ideas have yet to arrive, and the law of the strongest still prevails, with people absorbed in their own traditionalist beliefs. And the thing is, India is so, so immense that you wouldn’t fully understand it until you get here. You’d be surprised to see what life is like in the hidden corners of this country. Like a journey through time...

Among the youth and in the cities, many women are breaking free from this, yet there are still thousands—both locals and tourists—who must, and have had to, bow their heads countless times and endure the masculine energy of India, the inequality, and the countless implicit violences that arise.

I won’t attempt to analyze all of this in depth because it’s far too complex, and I don’t believe I have the tools to do so. But one thing is certain: religion as an institution—its dogmas and the social control it exerts—plays a fundamental role in sustaining India as it is today.

And once again, in all honesty, I must say that its ancient wisdom and spirituality leave us so in awe that we often overlook the vast number of injustices that happen on this land. Almost always in the name of karma and religion, just as they do.

And here is where we must be awake enough to distinguish between religion and spirituality, because, as you know, they are not the same and to recognize how the former often stifles the latter.