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India is a big country. It is a whole subcontinent bigger than Europe, with double its inhabitants and countless number of languages. That’s why it is hardly surprising that there is more than one India. Actually, there are almost as many “Indias” as people visiting the country, because it is one of the few places that leaves a different mark on every person. Some of these “Indias” are form the past, others from a future that will never come, some are the delusion of simple tourists like us, and others perhaps never existed. India is all of them and none of them at the same time.

Each and every one of us has a different and preconceived idea that matches one of those “Indias”, or maybe the combination of all of them. What the traveler doesn’t know is that, on his way home, he will leave this unusual place with one image above all. India is a place that impregnates everything, making its own way through our noses in such a brutal way that it will be never forgotten. It is the scent of India, halfway between the smell of flowers and spices, and the stench of garbage and shit. This is such a special smell that some people love it whilst for other people is very disgusting. But there is only one way to find out if you belong to the first or the second group: crossing the border and discovering  which one of its thousand faces it will show.

For Kipling and Salgari’s lovers, their India is Kim’s Jungle and the Bengal tigers, the one with its Maharajas riding elephants or princesses with their colorful saris. It took us many hours driving and some others under the heat, but finally we found that India walking the streets of Udaipur, and visiting the palaces of Jaipur. Those are city-states that occupy the region of Rajastan- land of kings- and, like the Nabataeans of Petra, made their fortune as lookouts of the Silk Route and their camel caravans. Hundreds of stories and fables fill this India. The most atonishing of all of them, the women who committed sati, they killed themselves after their husbands died. Then, using their hands and their own blood, they put a mark on their palace’s doors, so that everybody knew that was the home of a woman who loved her man so much, that didn’t want to continue living without him.

Nevertheless, the most beautiful part of India, is not its past, but its present, with the monarchy showing its best side. Maharajas, once destitute of any kind of power, instead of turning themselves into the stars of gossip magazines (like Europeans), they bent over backwards for their people, investing their own money to help them to develop. People, whose languages they know, even though they have been raised and educated in the English language. Could you imagine the European princes speaking the other languages used in their countries? Or, instead of spending 2 million of pounds or euros -who cares- of public money in a nice flat in the city centre, they would fork out their own money to build a hospital? Fictional politics. But not all of them are honest people. We can also find the ones who abandoned their people to their fate and live in London like a rajah, thinking about their ancestors only to use their glamorous titles and their saris. You can always find wicked people, either in golden cradles, or muddy ponds.

Very close to this India, but very far, at the same time, there is the “spiritual India”. The one about Buddhism, and gurus of truth. It is the introspective India, the authentic for the ones who are in love with her. Even though there are not as many as it seems. Without a doubt, it is the most hidden India, so much, that we could not find it. Perhaps in Nepal or Tibet, we will run into it, but I am afraid that you have to search in your heart, not in the travel guides.  Many people mistake this India with the New Age related India, the one with the sanctimonious dressed like clowns, orange tunics and incense scent.  The one of the tantrum music, the Karma-Cola, and many Europeans in pseudo-hippy disguises. That is the tambourine India, the one whose Mecca is Bollywood, and whose joky-style set the trend. The India with the “hari-hari” dances, vain Indians with greasy toupees, and tuk-tuk sets with little mirrors and flowers. It is a fun, innocent India, that, even  though, it doesn’t hurt anybody, does not help many, either.

Between these two Indias, not everything is spiritual vacuum. On the contrary, Indian people seem to have a special sensitivity to reflect on cosmology. It is not by chance that in this place, more religions emerged than in any other. We discovered this side of India in a Jain temple in the middle of the jungle. An oasis of deafening silence in the middle of all the emotional noise that surrounded us until now. As real precursors of Gaia, the Jains are Indian people that respect the smallest form of life, because they believe that God is in all of them, insects and bacteria included. It was an open temple where, everybody (people) and everything (animals and plants), come and go, grow and die, without anybody preventing you to do so. This is a temple designed, not to scare people, but to make them feel good about themselves, and from them, about everybody else. The best of Buddha’s teachings was the one when, at the end of his life, he told his disciples: “when I am not here, I don’t want you to either follow or adore me. Every man must only be followed by himself.”

On the other side of this India, we have the monumental. A more formal India. The one built with brick and stones. The Hindus never felt the need to build great monuments. Since they believe in the soul’s reincarnation, it makes no sense to try to perpetuate themselves through material objects. This is why all the buildings in India are not theirs, but their invaders’, first the Mongols, and then the English. The Pax Britannica left a series of civil and functional buildings and some other remains of magnificence of an Empire that was starting to become cheesy. They are nothing special if we compare them to the buildings that the ancient Turkish descendents built, undoubtedly, the most beautiful in India. Among them, we have one of the Wonders of the World, the Taj-Mahal. Built with white marble, the Emperor Shah Vahan kept the promise made to his wife, on her deathbed: to build the most beautiful grave ever seen. Dethroned by one of his own sons years later, he did not have time to finish his masterpiece: to erect, on the other side of the river, a twin mausoleum, this time in black marble. If one Taj-Mahal left us speechless, we cannot imagine what it would have been like contemplating the twin temples, one next to the other, as if they were two rooks facing each other in a gigantic game of chess.

Behind all these Indias, “the other Indias” show the more humane Indias, which are, because of that, the ones that feel more alive: the Poor India and the Rich India. Although they walk hand by hand, one is turning its back on the other one. The first one has half of its population under poverty line. The other one is sending rockets to the outer space and developing nuclear technology. The first one, with millions of children working to be able to eat, and the second one, proud to provide the world with millions of computer programmers. The first one, rotting in the New Delhi’s Metropolitan area and the second one, getting an education in the best schools in the world. The first one, untouchable and locked in a caste system, that not even the Ghandi or Nerhu generation was able to abolish, and the second one, fleeing to other countries without looking back or living in ghettoes without looking outside them. The first one, main destination of hundreds of non-profitable organizations, and the second one, lost in the contradiction of the western values and their own. The first one real, the second one fake. The first one hurts, the second one vanishes.

Varanasi, spiritual capital of India