The Swiss part (I)

Mechtilde asked me this morning how it was for me, coming from India to find myself in a country like Switzerland, with such a different culture. Mechtilde is Adrian`s wife and is spending this week in a little town on a lake whose name I have already forgotten, about 3 hours from where they live, in Hünningen. She, along with a couple of others is looking after a group of mentally handicapped young people on holiday ( I refuse to call them mentally “challenged” the same way I refuse to call myself physically “challenged”. As if indulging in euphemisms is going to change society`s attitudes towards anybody!)


I told her that strangely, landing in Europe I didn`t get the feeling I was far from home. Everything seemed, at times, distressingly familiar. One reason of course is the fact that I have been visiting Europe now for so many years that I am pretty much used to the way life works here. But I think the other more important reason is a kind of standardisation that is beginning to set in everywhere that is beginning to dull the differences. In any case I am not here to sightsee or visit museums and castles and all the rest, this visit is more to visit friends and …yes, to be able to walk again, on pavements that are not filled with potholes or other impediments and almost level with the road rather than being eight feet off it.

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Back to the Swiss mountains today after what seems like a long time (tho it is not more than two years or so ago, that I was last here). Adrian and I took a very scenic route to get to where Mechtilde was. The mountains are awesome. Giant craggy walls rising almost perpendicular in some places, just a few meters away from the road or at least that is what it feels like. Some of them are just bare rock, some covered with mostly coniferous trees, others still with bushes which make them look like a huge cosmic bunch of Brussels sprouts. And in between very pretty lakes, big and small in all hues of blue and green from cobalt blue to emerald green. Reminded me of the time Christoph and I used to go around in his caravan, parking ourselves somewhere in a field surrounded by mountains, cooking steak on his little portable grill and sitting in the open air on his camp chairs, chatting and admiring the view. Christoph? Chrissie?!He is obviously not listening. Away in Bermuda on vacation – or was it Spain? I am so bad at remembering details about other people`s vacations.


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The garden here is very green and Adrian who loves it, is nurturing a number of potted plants including a small olive tree, dill and parsley, lemon grass, a pot of colourful flowers. Right now (its after dinner) he and son Stephan are going around watering the plants. The weather is currently hot and it has become quite dry. You need to drink gallons of water.


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As usual we have been talking. Sat up last night till past midnight, looking at the age old questions about individual will and “cosmic will”. How to dovetail one into the other so as to be able to serve “the whole” (eg all of society, or the group one lives with). Why it does not happen and why we end up just serving our own petty little goals and then complaining endlessly about life and the ills of society. Mechitlde also asked me how I felt about the poor people in India. How it felt to be in the midst of a rich society, knowing there were people back home who didn’t have enough to eat. Well. I told her that I feel increasingly unhappy about it but does it help to put all our energy, only into action oriented plans?

It is definitely important to be doing things and to be contributing in a concrete manner to society but on the other hand, without an attempt to change the mindset, the attitudes of people, without bringing more awareness in our lives, all that is not worth much.

Somehow, I said to her, it seems a pity that people who do a lot of social work and who help the poor sections have so little time for any kind of inner reflection – let alone to do this jointly so that we really begin to change our power structures. Not just in the superficial political sense but within ourselves as well. The trouble is that not all the “good work” has changed the way human beings – including social workers – behave towards each other. You come across the same old greed, the same old power struggles, the same old fear and virulence towards each other. Society will surely change, only when we see all of that in ourselves and dissolve the age old blocks in our minds first. Trying to do things the other way round never seems to work.