Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński Read Free Book Online Page A

times the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
combined!
    One day at an antiquarian bookshop I found a dog-eared, disintegrating work by Yogi Ramacharaka, published in 1905 and entitled
The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath: A Complete Manual of the Oriental Breathing Philosophy of Physical, Mental, Psychic and Spiritual Development
. Breathing, explains the author, is the most important activity performed by man, because through it we communicate with the world. If we stop breathing, we stop living. Therefore the quality of our breathing determines the quality of our life, and whether we are healthy, strong, and wise. Unfortunately, says Ramacharaka, most people, especially in the West, breathe poorly, and that is why there is so much disease, disability, sickliness, and depression.
    I was especially interested in the exercises for developing the creative powers, because of my own great difficulties with this objective. “Lying flat on the floor or bed,” the yogi recommended, “completely relaxed, with hands resting lightly over the Solar Plexus (over the pit of the stomach, where the ribs begin to separate), breathe rhythmically. After the rhythm is fully established
will
that each inhalation will draw in an increased supply of prana or vital energy from the Universal supply, which will be taken up by the nervous system and stored in the Solar Plexus. At eachexhalation will that the prana or vital energy is being distributed all over the body….”
    I had barely finished reading
The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath
when
Glimpses of Bengal
by Rabindranath Tagore, published in 1923, fell into my hands. Tagore was a writer, a poet, a composer, and a painter. He was compared to Goethe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. When he was a child, little Rabi—as he was called at home—the descendant of a princely family of Bengali Brahmans, distinguished himself, he writes, by his obedience toward his parents, his good grades in school, and his exemplary piety. He recalls that in the morning, while it was still dark, his father woke him to memorize Sanskrit declensions. After a while, he continues, dawn would break, and his father, having said his prayers, would help him finish the morning milk. Finally, with Rabi by his side, his father would turn once more to God and sing the Upanishads.
    I tried to imagine this scene: it is dawning, and the father and small, sleepy Rabi stand facing the rising sun and singing the Upanishads.
    The Upanishads are philosophical songs dating back three thousand years, but still vibrant, still present in India’s spiritual life. When I realized this, and thought about the small boy greeting the morning star with stanzas from the Upanishads, I doubted whether I could ever comprehend a country in which children start the day singing verses of philosophy.
    Rabi Tagore was a child of Calcutta, born in that monstrously huge city in which the following thing happened to me. I was sitting in a hotel room reading Herodotus when through the window I heard the wailing of sirens. I ran outside. Ambulances were screeching by, people were running into doorways to shelter, agroup of policemen burst out from around a corner, thrashing the fleeing pedestrians with long sticks. One could smell the odor of gas and of something burning. I tried to find out what was going on. A man sprinting by with a stone in his hand yelled, “Language war!” and rushed on. Language war! I did not know the details, but had been made aware earlier that linguistic conflicts could assume violent and bloody forms in this country: demonstrations, street clashes, murders, even acts of self-immolation.
    Only in India did I realize that my unfamiliarity with English was meaningless—insofar as only the elite spoke it here. Less than 2 percent of the population! The rest spoke one of the dozens of other languages. In this sense, my not knowing English helped me feel closer, more akin to the ordinary folk in the