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June 7, 71

I remember the continual frustration of pens in India. Those fountain pens, constantly stopped up. Shaking (like a thermometer to bring the mercury down) to get some ink to the point, the procedure for filling with the little syringe to transfer the ink, the imitation of America Parker ball point pens that always skip or suddenly gorge out too much ink on your hands. Sometimes it seemed as if all the life there, everything was of a troubled nature unwilling to cooperate.

statistic from Times June 7, 71 on India p.10

"200 million people make only 18 cents a day and 80 percent of the children suffer from malnutrition."

[. . . Until a boy is eight years old, he is like one newly born, marked only by the caste in which he is born. Up to then ceremonies are held "over" him, as it were, but without his comprehension and participation.] p 35 Gandhi Truth by Erik Erikson

Significant moments embedded in a moving sea of unfathomably mulitformity does not life on the street or at home anywhere offer such an overall configurational impression? In fact this is the

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way I have come to feel about India, often not without a trace of sensory and emotional seasickness. For one moves in a space-time so filled with visual and auditory occurrences that it is very difficult to lift an episode out of the flux of events, a fact out of the stream of feelings, a circumscribed relationship out of a fusion of multiple encounters. If, in all of this I should endow one word with a meaning which writes it all, the word is fusion. and I am inclined to indulge in the generalization that Indians want to give and to get by fusing - actively and passively.

- I have never seen so many individuals in a catatonic-like isolation in the middle of a chattering crowd. - p 40-41

Thus many live always dependent, expectant, demanding, sulking, despairing, and yet always seeking the fusion which affirms, confirms, fulfills. - Now every man's inner life is a composite of the modern and the archaic, the logical and