Meanings

The Tantrik worldview

I have only travelled to India once. The trip was for work but I had the weekends and other breaks in the schedule to explore. I was lucky to be travelling with someone who knew India well. As a result I got to experience some things that your typical travelling professional might not have.

This included markets - markets for flowers, textiles, and street food. The thing that struck me most about them was not the poverty of the vendors, which is what many first-time visitors to India remember. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Africa, or maybe it was because I was expecting it. But the poverty was not what was shocking to me.

It was the abundance, the density of every experience. The outdoor flower market was densely packed with every colour imaginable, on every available square centimetre. The patterns on the textiles were intricately woven, hundreds of metres of densely hand-stitched cloth. The food stalls, seemingly thousands of them, dense with exquisite flavours.

It was only after th…