Travel Day 888 – Kolkata, INDIA
Today was a transitional day. On the one hand my one month with my Tabla Guru was over, but on the other my girlfriend was arriving today which meant that I would officially have a wife in India for the next one month to come…
Awaiting the Arrival of the Guru in Kolkata
In all my writings so far I had been talking about my Tabla teacher because I found the term Guru too preoccupied. Visiting a Guru in India seemed a bit cliché and really what Guru means, is nothing but a teacher anyway I thought. While it was obviously correct to assume that a Guru was a teacher, the function of a Guru turned out to be far more reached than what I expected and I had to think about this while trying to digest the last couple of weeks…
It was funny, but when I came to Kolkata I expected to have a lot of Tabla lessons from my Guru, but in the end it seemed that I didn’t even learn so much about Tabla and I rather learned a lot of other things. The least of my time was actually spent in a classroom and instead I had the unique opportunity to join my Guru during all his activities over the past month. What I was most surprised about was the realization of how engaged he actually was within the local community…
It seemed a Guru in India was not only a respected personality and teacher who perfectly mastered a skill or an art like in this case Tabla, but a Guru also seemed to be the go-to person for all sorts of problems or much-needed advice. During all my time with my Guru, I mostly had the opportunity to observe, especially because the majority of the conversations between people were all held in Bengali and all I could do was watch and listen to the few words in English to guess the context of the entire conversation…
But what was more interesting than understanding every single word within a conversation was to see how respectful my Guru was treated by everyone. From the respectful greeting with bowing and touching the feet, over the careful listening without questioning the answers that were given to using the appropriate name, it was all a really interesting sight. At times it felt that all these grown up men with moustache, belly and dress shirt behaved like little children and my Guru represented the school teacher on a class trip. As soon as he got up or said anything, all the conversations died down and everyone just listened carefully while nodding with the head…
Awaiting the Arrival of the Wife in Kolkata
Obviously the whole bowing down and blind faith attitude while not questioning anything stood in stark contrast to what I knew from my own country and culture. Being raised in a country that is known for its terrible dictator of the recent past, all I have ever learned while growing up was to question everything and to never have blind faith in any sort of leadership or leading character. So even if for cultural reasons the whole Guru thing appeared not to be my cup of chai, I still enjoyed the privilege of being around a real Guru for a month quite a lot and for that experience I was very thankful…
The only question that arose now was how the next month in India would turn out while travelling around the country with a wife… : )
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