It is surreal. One day I am sitting soaking up the honking of the horns, the shouting of desperate vendors, the stench of urine mixed with the sweet scent of cow dung and the constant noise of the fan at night. The next day I am in the most serene place I have been in a long time. The water plants slowly floating past as if they are looking for greater waters in another sea. While the slow circular ascent of the fish eagles plays with the bellowing clouds above. In front of me a boat bobs in the water waiting for its meaty passengers to enter it and slowly navigate it through the Kerala backwaters with a large bamboo pole. The Venice of India is our home for the next days and I cannot be happier. In between this natural beauty the hospitality of the locals greets me. In the form of sweet cake, local kids singing and playing drums for us and old men with big smiles delighting at the site of me in a Lungi. We are served meals of spiced fish, fried coconut and carrot, idly and daal. In the evenings we paddle with a chaotic sleekness through the canals to the lake where we eat cookies, drink wine, watch the sun go down creating large cloud images whose reflections in the water are broken by us jumping into the lake. We slip through the water past water snakes, giant frogs and fish opening their mouths o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o. Chinese fishing nets dot the shores and are covered in open winged Cormorants drying their wings in the sun. We sit, we read. Doing nothing can be so blissful. The calm before the storm. The lack of duties before the wack of a group paper. Our long weekend was to be one of getting out, letting loose with a group of 14 of us. The largest group I have travelled with in this manner but it was a group that I could not feel better with.
On one day we took a one hour bus trip to Fort Kochin. The bus ride was one of Tamil Rock music pumping through the speakers, the driver chatting to us eagerly while trying to concentrate on the road dogging small motorbikes. Here we were in awe of the stark difference once again. A city of art, grand thrift shops, cafes, churches, beautiful Jewish markets and the smell of the Arabic sea hanging in the streets. The group shopped until they dropped and I sat chatting to a Kashmiri guy about his life, his worries and his philosophy. He had smiled his come-in-naïve-tourist smile. He asked where I was from and I asked him the same. As he said Kashmir I had to be blunt. I asked what he thought the solution was to the conflict. He smiled and invited me in. I walked out with Goosebumps and a new friend, Ali. He used a story I had heard in Palestine to describe the conflict in Kashmir. An analogy I believe also epitomised the studies at Kulturstudier and the doors it opened for us. He said we are all like fingers. Each finger is different and serves a different purpose. We are useless alone but as a hand together we serve a purpose to work together for a solution.
Now the work begins. We are back after a long uneasy bus trip. The group paper looms, lectures continue as we learn the last building blocks to finding solutions to the worst intractable conflicts. There is no one solution there is no one golden rule to fix a hand. But there is the inherent human inside us that can bring us back together. In the end we die naked without our worldly possessions but what we have left behind, what we have done and whom we have impacted whether negative or positive is what stays.
Hauke Ziessler
