A new story

"Why would you ever want to go to India?" friends asked me. This was 14 years ago. At that time, India was not quite the up-and-coming, entrepreneurial outsource it is today. "All that poverty, all that misery," my friends warned.

But why wouldn't I want to experience a country so different from my own? In the previous five years, I had been to Egypt, China and Russia and yearned for more. And here was an opportunity to travel essentially for free, as a member of a Rotary Group Study Exchange team, and my employer had graciously allowed me six weeks off to do it.

The journey I embarked upon in January 1995 with four companions was, physically, a grueling road trip through dusty little towns where no tourist would ever venture. But it was, for me, also a spiritual sojourn to the center of the universe.

I'll share some of that journey with you over the next couple of weeks, beginning Monday.

We'll call this one "Dancing with Shiva."