"Living faith in India takes place in living colour: you can attach almost any adjective you like to the subcontinent, but the one word you are seldom apt to use is 'dead.' Everything is moving, pressing together, drifting off again, and yet at some level nothing is ever changing — the way a colour reflects the sun in all its passing movements, becomes different every moment of the day, and yet tomorrow, at dawn, is shown to be very much what it was at dawn this morning.

"It's easy to feel, on first encountering India, that there are so many sacred spaces that they swallow up everything, make every space sanctified in a way. The crowded shops, the garlands hanging from the mirror of an auto-rickshaw, the stone Ganesha by the street, the Virgin peering out from a sea-going vessel: every square inch, it can sometimes seem, is given over to some object of veneration, even if it is nor more exalted than a Hollywood goddess.

"A part of India's magic, I think, is that it draws together so many cultures and centuries: you will find the high blue heavens of Tibet, the madonnas of Europe, the designs of the Arab world and even the shrines of cyberspace wherever you turn in India. Jains, Jews, Syrian Christians, all are practicing their forms of worship, with the result, sometimes, that India seems to teem with gods. And yet, most happily and importantly, they are always in the very midst of mortals."

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