We do not know what we have in life. Thirty-eight hears ago, when I was 25, I travelled to India to teach the Untouchables of Andhra Pradesh about their rights. The Indian Constitution, based on ours, balances liberty and equality for happiness. Article 14, like our 5th and 14th Amendment, assures equal protection.
Travelling from Bombay (now Mumbai) by train through Bhopal, on to Hyderabad (in central India’s Andhra Pradesh), then north to New Delhi, my young American eyes grew wide, sometimes watered.
More than a billion people called India home, now 1.4 billion. In cities, meridians at night were log bridges, humans side by side, no room. In remote villages, elders were rickety as a rickshaw, seemed in their late 90s. They were 40 tops, then died of typhoid, hepatitis, malaria, cholera, something.
Summer of 1985, Bhopal was a ghost town. Six months earlier, it saw the world’s worst industrial disaster, thousands dead, hundreds of thousands injured, many still dying then – accidental release of methyl isocyanate, a deadly pesticide. Cloud of the stuff swept the city, and left a path of mortality.
By the time my young eyes, heart, and brain reached those little, cutoff villages of Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, compliments of an NGO (non-government organization), sleeping on the ground felt good.
But locals would not let me. They were generous by instinct, which lifted me. Via Tamil and Telugu translators, they insisted – after we got to know one another – on plying me with a “rope bed,” two feet high. Why? Beyond cobra reach.
During my stay, you would have thought life was not so bad, despite disease, discomfort, rice and chilies for food, the occasional mango, heat, flies, and reported misuse of the Untouchables (also called Harijans, or “Children of God”) as bonded laborers, intergenerational, inter-cast servitude.
Later, their stories travelled to New Delhi, where legal cases were brought before the Indian Supreme Court, seeking to make equal protection real. More immediately, their attitude struck me.
Here were kids who ran and laughed, adults who worked hard, died young, but thought life was good. Days we travelled, asked questions, ventured down the Godavari River, a doctor giving women iron shots for severe anemia.
Evenings were spent in the community hut, jute and shade – placemats of banana leaves, woven with vines, boiled rice, chiles, hot tea. We talked, they were curious.
They had never heard of America, of course, or skyscrapers, but tried to imagine. They had never heard of Bombay or New Dehi, knew nothing of their own country.
My skin was not their color, which intrigued them. It did not offend or worry them, but got them thinking about the color of animals and birds in my “native place.”
We talked about that, and they wondered other things, why mornings saw me running, why my tea needed extra boiling, what brought me here, my home. They shared stories, sang, laughed, more tea, asked for nothing, shared their beliefs, were interested in mine.
In a strange and welcoming way, they wanted to know what I knew, but also felt responsible for me. They wanted no bad thing to come to me, respectfully doted on the stranger.
As summer progressed and time came for leaving, those travelling with me made clear our gratitude, made sure they knew good would come from this, and it did.
But the most remarkable thing to me was just how little they had, and yet how glad they were for it, not in a comparative sense but in absolute terms, ready to share.
From the world’s poorest came smiles, songs, and generosity, a kind of self-measurement by hospitality, as if a larger presence guided them. And no self-pity.
On return, by jeep to Hyderabad, train to New Delhi, flight to New York, my mind spun – and does now at times, seeing how little many appreciate America’s blessings, and the sacrifices that created them. At JFK, a well-dressed man, headphones, no malnutrition, no flies, no snakes, pushed a cup at me, unhappy.
Despite time’s passage, or refreshed by the modern tendency to think we are all owed something, the contrast still hits me – some grateful for little, others never.
As a new year arrives, my resolution is to be content with less, more grateful, at peace with simple things, living in a land that aspires to liberty and equality, and good memories. We do not know what we have. Look around, and love life.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
