THROUGH LITTLE INDIA
IN “GIBRALTAR OF ORIENT”

-text Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
photos Andrei Dorian Gheorghe and Felician Ursache
design Florin-Alexandru Stancu-

“How would it be to have an unofficial country
in other official country,
such us ‘Little India’ in ‘Gibraltar of Orient’?”
asked me my fellow Felician Ursache in November 2012,
when we walked under the sun of Singapore.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to visit India,
an immense country with a great and multi-millenary culture.
But its giant spirit thrilled me in a Singaporean district,
which is a small reproduction of Mother India’s expression.

Yes, Little India
(in which we expected to find strange cosmic symbols)
delighted us with its Indian exoticism:
friendly people, costumes, buildings, statues, drawings and temples
(as a form of Indian tolerance,
we also found out Christian edifices
and Muslim buildings - with the traditional crescent moon and a star),
historical-cultural symbols (Gandhi, Nehru, Shakunthala)…

Certainly,
the main attraction and the most authentic Hindu monument of Little India
is a temple,
Sri Veeramakaliamman,
(built in the 19th century
and dedicated to Kali,
the goddess of changeable time
and the wife of Shiva,
the god of eternal time,
in name of Shakti,
the primordial cosmic energy),
with its supernatural beings and …
a central multicolored star!

Little India is also a place which made me remember
aspects of Indian literature and wisdom,
from Rig-Veda to Rabindranath Tagore
passing through Mahabharata, Ramayana, Pancatantra…
and especially verses of Rig Veda’s
sublime cosmogonic-philosophic Hymn of Creation
or Nasadiya Sukta
(from the 2nd millennium BC),
full of paradoxical questions about the Genesis,
with “Desire” as “the primal seed and germ of Spirit”
when “All was indiscriminated chaos”,
and with a fascinating final:

“He, the first origin of this Creation,
whether he formed it all or did not form it,
whose eye controls this world in highest heaven,
he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.”

(from Ralph TH Griffith’s English version, 1896)

However,
I’m afraid that for the people of the 21st century,
a spread attitude is like this:

All I certainly know is I am alive
Thanks to the primordial Big Bang
And sometimes I feel myself quite fine
Even if it was or not something divine.

THROUGH LITTLE INDIA IN “GIBRALTAR OF ORIENT”

THROUGH LITTLE INDIA
IN “GIBRALTAR OF ORIENT”