a william dalrymple sulla ricerca del sacro nella moderna India

Dear William Dalrymple.
I d like to explain you by mail what because of my fragility or delicacy I wasn’t able to explain you in Mantua .
The nine lives of your magnificent book subtitled A search of the sacred in modern India. , in their experience of sacred in fact aren’t modern lives of modern persons, because these experiences are ending or going in crisis on contact with the modernity
In my opinion Nine lives is a search in modern India of the traditional sacred, that isn’t the only real sacred , as if didn’t exist a modern sacred.
In my opinion of searcher of God, if the divine reality is, indivisible, all in all the things, ( see Saint Paul or the Vedanta), we cannot reduce the sacred to the religious, according to Dietrich Bonhoffer. who was aiming at a not religious Christianity –, the sacred is the heart of the modernity and of his technology also. Gurgaon also is his ( of the sacred) phenomenal reality, not only Tarapith, not only the realities that are different from the modernity, or that pre-exist or outlive to it, can manifest the sacred . The modernity, for example, can help the believer to dematerialize and spiritualize God, to think God as Energy, out of the space and of the time, by its abstract imagery, or because it ( the modernity) connects in shorter or real time(s) what is far in the world and phenomena of different ages, the modernity can facilitate to cross the “ noche oscura” of the end of the same religious sensibility and imagination, and to worship more and more God in Spirit and Verity ( John, 4, 23-24).
The real mystical experience consequently is to live the fullness and the height of the life, in Kenduli like in the yellow or blue lines of the metro of Delhi .
The following page of Raimon Panikkar, that I tried to translate, can explain you better my point of view about your search of the sacred in modern India .
Raimon Panikkar said:
“ I think that the sacred isn’t in contrast with the secularity. The secular, that is : the secularity, the century, the world, the worldliness, to stay in this world, all the earthly structures of the reality, nothing is different from the sacred. The sacred is different from the profane, “ profanum”, “in front of the temple”, but the secular can be so sacred as anything, and the crucial challenge of our time is to discover the sacred in what until now we thought secular. All is sacred: the marriage, the love, the body, the politics also,- not the Erastianism, the Sacred Roman Empire , obviously - because the sacred is the soul of all the human activities.”
“ India is a secular State”, not lay, but secular, because the Indian State must take care of the things of the world”.
Raffaele Luise Raimon Panikkar, Profeta del dopodomani, Edizioni Paoline 2011, pg.145

P. S.
And according with Panikkar, in my opinion the Nine lives are the other side of us, not the stranger.
Thanks you, again, for everything
And What about Mantua , now? Come back, please, come back for the festivaletteratura at your next book.