The languages tell a lot about their people, their habits and even about their personality. For instance, German doesn’t have a wide usage of future tense that gives its speakers a feeling that they don’t perceive the future as so far in the future. It feels like it is very close. This is the motivation behind the German saving (sparen) attitude.
Far away from Germany, India and its colorfully dressed and smiling people have a different attitude to time. In Hindi, there are six different types of past tense. It wouldn’t surprise anybody who already heard about karma. Your past determines your future in India, not in Germany or maybe in your own mother language too.
What makes Hindu quite unique is its doubtful tense which is used to indicate an action may or may not occur in the present or future. To be unsure about the future is clear, however it is not easy to understand being doubtful about the past or present actions for a Westerner, to look from the eyes of a Indian.
I saw her in a documentary. I can’t erase her face and her smile from my memory. Sumati, who is a middle aged nice woman, lives with her son in a small city in southern India. She doesn’t have good memories of her alcoholic husband who passed away some years ago. After her daughter left the house by getting married, she dedicates her life to her son, Balaji.
In her red sari, she looks very pretty & proud and happy. She is thankful to the Gods she believes in for the things they gave her which is not a lot by the way. Her only dream is to have her own little house where she bought a little piece of land. She needs to build the house with her own hands. She believes that her Gods will help her to start and complete the home for her and her son.
Balaji loves his mother’s hair. He finds her very beautiful with her long and strong hair which comes until her back. She takes good care of her hair by applying the mixture she prepares by mixing oils and natural ingredients herself. The hair is kind of honor of Indian women and one of the most valuable thing they sacrifice for their Gods.
Tonsure in Hindu culture is to show one’s love for the Gods by washing away one’s past and starting a new one because a Hindu feels giving hair to her Gods is more
important than giving money or other things. It is done during the pilgrim by women as well as by men.
After 10 years of growing her hair, Sumati presents her hair to her Gods at Palani Temple. The documentary shows each and every step of what happens to her hair. Is it really hair for the gods? Or hair for capitalism? The temples sell the hair to trader companies in order to earn money to finance the basic expenditures like food etc. for the visiting pilgrims.
The tons of collected hair is washed and dried and colored whenever necessary before they are sold to American and European companies every day. It is a big business and not difficult to guess who earns what percentage of the value of Sumati’s hair until it reaches the end user. No surprise in the capitalist world.
What would you like a home or a house? A new temple for India or a storage for its ghosts? It is the country which is full of the ghosts of 250.000 farmers who committed suicide because of their debts. The bigger part of the picture is unfortunately dark where the population is 1.2 billion.
The rich gets richer, the poor gets even poorer… The 100 richest people of India own 25% of the GDP of whole country. The giants like RIL, Tata, Jindal, Vedanta, Mittal, Infosys, Essar, ADAG get stronger and stronger by buying the politicians, judges, bureaucrats and media… Does money buy everything where there is a huge group of people who are trying to survive with less than 50 cents per day? If yes, for who?
Arundhati Roy writes the India she sees and lives with a pure and hurtful realism. It is not as romantic as it is shown in Bollywood movies, or delicious like the food in luxury Indian Restaurant in your city or relaxing like the sandalwood incense sticks in your yoga class, the reality is where the poor is trying to alleviate her hunger with her prayers.
The hair of Sumati is perhaps on the head of a German woman in Berlin who can afford to pay more than 1.000 Euro to own it just for 6 months. In the end, who has the money gets what she wants, the temple gets just enough money for the food, Sumati receives the blessings from her Gods and the capitalism gets it all, in a simple transaction of exchanging blessings with hair, it makes 999 Euros! It continues like in Roy’s books… poor gets poorer, rich richer…
