Day 3 - Yoga Studies Tour 2014

Waiting outside the hotel this morning for the group to gather so we could walk to the yoga centre, at about 9.20, I was observing the traffic and a stray dog (there are hundreds of them here) crossed the road.

The traffic was busy but it was moving quite quickly and I held my breath as he headed for the roundabout containing a small fountain. He didn't stop there - he was heading for the third exit, on very weak looking legs. As he stopped and started, waiting for the tuk tuks and the mopeds to go by, I tried to send some Reiki to offer any small protection it might provide.

He crossed safely and the thought struck me that within my vision, there were maybe hundreds of people who could probably do with some healing and compassion but it was the dog that got all the attention. I was just starting to offer some generalised compassion out to the inhabitants of Chennai out and about outside the hotel that morning when I was interrupted again and they never did receive anything!

A small, thin elderly man tentatively crossed the road - well, I say elderly but he may well have been younger than me. He had long, shaggy and unkempt grey hair and a long grey beard down to his waist. He was wearing a short, dirty sleeved orange coloured shirt and half a sack folded into a nappy shape on his lower half. 

After successfully negotiating the route to the roundabout he looked around him several times - either he didn't notice me or he didn't care - I was only about 25 metres away - then he dropped the sack to reveal his naked buttocks. He climbed over the railing revealing the rest of his nether regions and washed himself discreetly in the water from the fountain, ducking down so people in buses might not see him. After a couple of minutes he climbed out, picked up his sack and walked off, folding it in front of him as he walked, no-one else on the street turning a hair. After another couple of minutes he was dressed again and he strode back in the direction he came from.

It struck me that this tiny episode encapsulated much of the duality and contradiction present in India - just when you think you have learned a tradition or a cultural trait, someone will do something that turns everything on its head again. It really looked like this man was trying to wash himself discreetly so as not to cause offense in a country where shorts are frowned upon as they reveal too much flesh. Unfortunately he was naked from the waist down at the time, and he had chosen a busy roundabout near the city centre - go figure, as my American friends say!