From Ahimsa to Aloha
Reflections on a Visit to India
By Dawn Morais Webster 02/04/10
My husband and I recently attended a conference in Gurgaon, the high growth, relatively high income satellite city outside Delhi where many multinationals have located their call centers and regional headquarters. We then flew south to Kerala to visit my birthplace and ancestral homeland in Thiruvananthapuram or Trivandrum, the name by which it was known until recent times. After ten days in the frenetic, foggy northern environs of Delhi and three days of brilliant, blue skies seen through the gorgeous, uncastrated coconut palms of Trivandrum and Kovalam in the south, we felt some intimation of the famed duality that runs through all of India. One expression of that duality is the omnipresent trash that wounds an otherwise heartbreakingly beautiful, intellectually and culturally rich country. And it wounds no one more than it does the poor who suffer from having to live in its midst. The rich and powerful, visiting or native, have splendid hotels and walled-in residences behind which they can retreat and shut out the sight of the trash. But for the poor, it is everywhere. It represents a kind of himsa (violence) against life that can be addressed with the right leadership. The example of leaders demonstrating that they see the trash and do not think it beneath them to pick it up could inspire the kind of citizenship at the grassroots level that would literally make the trash disappear.
Centuries of contempt attached to menial work and a cynicism towards government do not motivate good neighborliness: the kind of good neighborliness that would inspire people to stop treating public places like a landfill for their refuse. How sad to see miles of trash on the drive to internationally-renowned Kovalam, to one of the most beautiful beaches we have ever seen: as breathtaking as the beach in Kailua or Yokohama here in Hawaii. How sad to enter the spotless splendor of The Leela where the moneyed dine and sunbathe and enjoy the privilege of a view of Kerala beauty unmarred by the blight of trash. That unmarred beauty should be and could be accessible to all, rich or poor.
It appears to be customary, judging from what we saw in the papers in India, to place ads congratulating ministers and senior officials on their birthdays. I wonder what would happen if, on these special occasions, these leaders declined the congratulatory ads but instead invited the community to join them in a volunteer group effort to pick up trash? Might that shake up traditional expectations about each person’s place and role in society? Leaders willing to do that would be modeling good citizenship in a way that transcends old prejudices; in a way that everyone could emulate and will perhaps want to emulate because it yields a tangible result from which the whole community benefits. It also begins to undo the intangible but insidious resistance to taking personal ownership for “dirty work” that does such violence to our psyches and the environment. It would be a form of ahimsa (non-violence) worth striving for, and would put a justly honored Indian philosophy to practical service in addressing our contemporary anxiety about the state of our planet. And it would be so natural then to move from ahimsa to aloha, the essence of good neighborliness, the willingness to share the breath of life. The culture could flow both ways: for someone living in the land of aloha, it is easy to recognize ahimsa as a natural other dimension of Hawaii’s famed culture.
