South India in July

I'm always amazed, every time I return to India, how much things have changed in a remarkably short time.

since February, the light-rail system in Bangalore (now called Bengaluru, its older name) has made leaps and bounds; track is visibly laid, a trial car was on the line near M.G. Road, much to the delight and astonishment of weekend family visitors to the Brigade Road area. I can't imagine how much work and diligence it takes to create infrastructure so rapidly.

bread and Italian coffee, too, seem to be enjoying an upswing in Bengaluru -- bread shops and bakeries seem to be popping up all over the place. and although my favorite cafe, Barrista, which formerly had about four different outlets around the M.G. and Brigade Road area, seems to have closed all but its main cafe (sad, because they had really great coffee drinks with Italian espresso), we found a new one a few days ago with yummy Italian roast. (Cafe Pascucci, with walls covered in photos of other Pascuccis worldwide: in Milan, in Moscow, etc.)

as the Westernization and infrastructure-building occurs in India, I'm noticing a reverse parallelism (lol!) in America: increasing numbers of Americans interested in Eastern spirituality, in knowledge from ancient India, for whom yoga or meditation has become a daily routine.

with all this exchange between East and West, industry and technology for spiritual depth, meditation and peace of mind, it seems that a real balance is being restored in the world (despite how markedly out of balance and bizarre things seem on the surface).

I think it was the great saint Paramahansa Yogananda who commented that East and West would indeed start to create this balance, as many souls who'd previously been living in India or other Eastern societies began to reincarnate in the US, and vice versa.

it's somehow reassuring to see, over the 11 years that I've been 'commuting' back and forth from California to South India, the pointed changes in both societies as a results of increased acceptance and input from the other.