Help Me!

India is firmly in control.  I am totally not in control and I say this as a very skilled and accomplished control freak of long standing.  I am not a slouch when it comes to controlling things, trying to control things, and being pissed off at not being in control.  That being said: I am no match for this place.

I feel like my head is being held under water until I think my lungs are going to burst and then I'm free for a moment and I take in long, shuddering, grateful gulps of air and I gain a little composure,  and then the invisible hand takes me down again.  

There's a great scene from "Apocalypse Now" where a military officer played by Robert DuVall walks around, upright, out in the open and exposed, in the middle of a hot battlefield.  People are ducking for cover as bombs explode and bullets zing by.  The narrator thinks he's one of those people who are invincible, a guy who lives in a protected zone.

This was our guide, Shakeel, in Varanasi.  Traffic is boiling around us with no rhyme or reason - motorcycles, tuk-tuks, cars, bicycles, horse and camel drawn carts, mobs of pedestrians - nobody paying attention to any rules or niceties, near misses the rule of the day.  It seemed like a video game and not real life.  I have no words to explain the sensation.  A tall dude with an Amsterdam jacket on walked by and said, laughing: "If you can survive this you can survive anything."

Shakeel had this nice, measured, meditative walk.  He'd hold his hand up and motorcycles would stop.  He didn't dawdle but he didn't rush.  We made it across absolute manic streams of motion with not a nick or wound.

I'm on the Shakeel Team today.