Silk or Jute

We seldom see things in a purely objective way. We perceive them as we would like them to be rather than as they are, judging them through the lens of our experience, beliefs, and prejudices.

It helped to possess a diverse assortment of personality traits if you were going to stay on an even keel and be a successful Peace Corps Volunteer. Volunteers were chosen from a large group of aspirants, selected, not only on the basis of job skills and language abilities, but because they were adaptable.

As volunteers we were expected to be self-starters and creative problem solvers and at the same time be able to accept inactivity and isolation, adjust to being bored one moment, industrious and inventive the next. Paradoxically, volunteer trainees were rigorously tested for their social aptitude and ability to function in a group, when much of the time they would be alone and culturally isolated. There was always an overhanging risk that a volunteer drifted into a destructive orbit of introspection. Fortunately the minimalistic, uncluttered life I found in Kolar, far from the background disturbances of the materialistic, modern society I left behind, suited me.

At dusk Kolar slowed down as if it was fueled by the sun. After my day’s work was finished the evening and night usually belonged to my imagination and the book I was reading. I read eclectically, partly by inclination and curiosity and partly by whim. I exchanged books with other volunteers or with travelers passing through.

I became a steady customer at Higginbottom’s, a surprisingly well stocked book store on Mahatma Gandhi Road in Bangalore, and spent part of my monthly living allowance there on topics as divergent as the cross breeding of dairy cattle and the collected works of Thomas Mann and Rabindranath Tagore. Everything seemed interesting and the exposure to a broader set of ideas was changing the way I looked at myself and the world I came from. 

 I was influenced by my reading and by the celestial atmosphere that permeated all of Indian life. My first encounter with the seductively simple insights of Eastern philosophy came when I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the story of Gautama Buddha’s enlightenment.

“The outside is not a very reliable indicator as to what’s inside, he taught, appearances are an illusion. We trust our eyes and see only the apparent.”

I learned a practical lesson in that from Basha, a young apprentice in the workshop, whose cleverness and humor I appreciated. He was a refined practical joker and despite his age and lack of formal schooling realized intuitively that people saw only what they wanted to.

With a mischievous sparkle in his eyes, he illustrated his point for me one day by filling a match box with burnt out matches and putting it in clear sight on the path to the market. It didn’t take long before a barefoot farmer, balancing the vegetable laden basket that he was carrying on his head with one hand, stooped and picked it up out of the dust.

While we watched, he shook it to see if there was anything in it, and then pleased with his find, put it in the pouch-like front pocket of his kurtha. Basha smiled when he imagined the man's disappointment when he opened the box. It was a harmless and understated jest and I appreciated his subtle demonstration of how deceptive expectations and appearances could be.

 At about the same time I was reading and reflecting on the enigmas of the Siddhartha book I went shopping for cloth to have a shirt made. I saw a bolt of raw silk that was spun and hand woven at the cottage cooperative in Kolar. Its thick beige yarn resembled the coarsely twined jute fibers of a grain sack. It wasn’t until you took the fabric between your fingers and felt the suppleness of its texture, or looked at it carefully in the light and saw its sheen change hue, that you realized the difference.

I was making a statement. Who would mistake my shirt (photo below) for the crude sack cloth of a penitent and who would see the elegant silk? It was an elementary test of the eyes and what they related to the brain, an illusion like a magician’s sleight of hand and a small object lesson in prejudices and miscalculations. When Basha saw my shirt for the first time he said in Kannada:

“Bala chenagade - very good. The silk looks like the jute sacks that the farmers fill with grain”.