India is the epitome of the world in everything. It is a land of all kinds of climates, religions, commerce, arts, peoples, scenery, stages of civilization, languages. Her civilization dates back many thousands of years.
The secret of India’s vitality
The real life and secret of India’s vitality is her spiritual culture, which has made her the motherland of religions since time immemorial. India has been the grand inspirer of human minds and souls, the spiritual model of all religions.
Her greatest and richest legacy to the world has been the scientific techniques for the spiritual advancement of man, discovered and handed down for centuries by her saints and seers.
A land of never-to-be-forgotten mystery
India is a land of mystery, but a mystery that reveals itself to the sympathetic inquirer and seeker. In India there are the ancient caves of meditation where yogis and swamis saw the faggots of ignorance blaze with the wisdom of God. There is the vast Ganges made sacred by centuries of meditation near its banks by many God-realized saints.
India has the grandest and highest mountains in the world—the Himalayas. Darjeeling, in the north, is the Switzerland of India. In India there is the Taj Mahal at Agra, the finest dream of architecture ever materialized in marble to symbolize the ideal of human love, and in Delhi, the unique ruins of ancient castles and vast palaces of princes. There is the blueness of the skies; the bright sunshine; the innumerable varieties of fruits and vegetables; the many types of people; the dark forests and jungles where tigers roam. All these make India different, fascinating, romantic, never-to-be forgotten.
Contrast, surprise, and adventure
India is a land of great contrasts—untold riches and utmost poverty; the highest mental purity and coarse, plain living; Rolls Royces and bullock-carts.
In the north, we find blue-eyed and blond-haired Hindus, and in the hotter south, the dark, sun-kissed skins of the tropics. From start to finish, India is a land of surprises, of contrasts and extremes. Life becomes prosaic with too much business, too many dull certainties. In India one feels that life is a great adventure, a thing of mystery and surprise.
India may not have skyscrapers and all the comforts of modern life. She has her faults, as do all nations. But India shelters many unassuming, Christ-like spiritual “skyscrapers” who could teach their Western brothers and sisters how to get the fullest spiritual joy out of any condition of life.
