India as a giant spiritual supermarket! Sarah Macdonald peruses the aisles and samples the product. What type of person sees poverty and is disgusted by it? I guess it's this type of selfishness that also keeps her from giving a face and a personality to her husband in her writings.Įdit: I much more prefer the attitude of the writer in this article concerning India.

Perhaps I have negative feelings about the author's view of India because, when I was in India, all I felt was compassion and sadness for the poor around me. She seems to have a disdain for religion at the same time she seeks out religious celebrities and empty religious experiences. And she spends her free time (while her husband is working in other cities or countries on news stories) traveling around India in search of religion. She sees India as a filthy place full of disgusting people with intolerable cultural habits. I should have peeked a bit inside, though, because the cliched chapter titles would have kept me away: Insane in the Membrane, Birds of a Feather Become Extinct Together, etc.īasically, this is the memoir of a selfish Australian woman's year in India. I have to admit that I decided to read this book because it has a great cover. From spiritual retreats and crumbling nirvanas to war zones and New Delhi nightclubs, it is a journey that only a woman on a mission to save her soul, her love life-and her sanity-can survive. Holy Cow is Macdonald’s often hilarious chronicle of her adventures in a land of chaos and contradiction, of encounters with Hinduism, Islam and Jainism, Sufis, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians and a kaleidoscope of yogis, swamis and Bollywood stars. “Within.” Thus begins her journey of discovery through India in search of the meaning of life and death. “I must find peace in the only place possible in India,” she concludes. Just settled, she falls dangerously ill with double pneumonia, an experience that compels her to face some serious questions about her own fragile mortality and inner spiritual void. For Sarah this seems like the ultimate sacrifice for love, and it almost kills her, literally. When the love of Sarah’s life is posted to India, she quits her dream job to move to the most polluted city on earth, New Delhi.

So when an airport beggar read her palm and told her she would return to India-and for love-she screamed, “Never!” and gave the country, and him, the finger.īut eleven years later, the prophecy comes true. In her twenties, journalist Sarah Macdonald backpacked around India and came away with a lasting impression of heat, pollution and poverty.

Sarah macdonald books