FOREIGNERS love to write about India as a country where skyscrapers abut jhopdis and where the rural poor squat on either side of railway tracks to do the big job every morning. And yet India never mixes up things. When transported from one place to the other, serpents are carried in proper baskets by snake charmers who cannot be mistaken for conductors. In all this byplay of contrasts, the right distance is always maintained so that no one gets an unnecessary shock of the kind that happened at a German post office at Mechernich the other day. There was panic when a 1.5 metre albino python broke free of its packaging. A 28-year-old woman had sold the snake over the internet and was mailing it to the buyer after labelling the package as glass! BBC News quotes the local police as saying, “the staff put the package in the back of the office. All of a sudden, they noticed it moving around and saw a big snake wriggling out of it. A valiant worker wrestled the snake and put it into a container. It is not illegal to send snakes via mail but the woman will be investigated for mistreating animals.” In India, where everything is perceived as maya, we have through the ages maintained this tradition of not mixing up illusions. The story goes that in the early 8th century AD, Adi Shankaracharya was walking with his disciples and telling them that everything was maya. Just then, a bull ran towards the group and all of them climbed up the nearest tree. “If everything is maya, why are we sitting on this tree to escape the bull?”, a disciple asked. “The tree is also maya,” the Shankaracharya said. Ergo, the maya that was the tree was climbed to let the disciples keep a distance from the illusion that was the bull. Now if only the woman had not mixed up maya by transacting the sale of the python on the internet and mailing it, there would have been no need for panic — real or illusory — in the Mechernich post office!
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