A Reflection on Holy Cow by Sarah Macdonald

Youth is spent on figuring out who we want to be for the rest of our lives. Most people in their twenties feel the sudden urge to travel in order to get a sense of who they really are. Some, more privileged than others, get that chance and fly to meaningful places that will ultimately impact them so much that they’ll return home a changed person. Luckily, Sarah Macdonald had the unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime chance of traveling early in her youth, however this did not mean she enjoyed every bit of it. She traveled to India and got the tourist experience deluxe she didn’t sign up for. Macdonald and a friend spent a year abroad traveling through many different countries until taking a two-month tour of India. I believe they wanted a post card version of India, but instead got the real deal and didn’t want it after all. They had an awful time and could not wait to go back home to Australia. Sarah knew her time spent abroad was an escape from her reality, and escape that had a clear deadline and soon enough she would come back to the normality that was her life. Although her experience was life altering, it was not memorable in the way she had hoped for, to the point where she vowed never to return again. But, as fate would have it, eleven years later she found herself boarding on a plane to India.

Although India would be her new home, upon arriving she felt more of a tourist than a traveler and potential Indian adoptee. She was a tourist in the sense of when one enters a new country where you know little to noting about the culture or the language, and you are genuinely overwhelmed by it all. However as her inner traveler slowly peeks out, Sarah starts to notice everything around her. She takes in the good as well as the bad, noticing the diversity of people and their sometimes eccentric personalities, the beaten, yet traffic-filled roads, the old and run-down houses, the animals in their sickly state, and the overall smog-filled environment she couldn’t get away from fast enough last time around. In her descriptions and experiences, Sarah doesn’t try to glamorize her new life or glorify India in any way, instead she opts for stating the facts. This way of looking at things could be considered as a traveler in a way because she gets to live the real India, not the one sold to you in a package over at the tourist agency. She isn’t living in a vacation bubble, knowing she will come back to the safety of her home and to the comforting feeling of knowing beforehand what to expect. India was her reality so she described it, as it was, smog and all.

Early upon Sarah’s arrival to India, she and Jonathan explored a bit of India: they went to the Ganges River, drank chai tea, got lost, went to the Himalayan footsteps, rang in the New Year, and drank some more chai. She was treated mostly as a tourist because she acted like one, although she was there to stay for quite some time. Just as she started to show a glimmer of actually enjoying herself, Sarah was bed-ridden with pneumonia in one of India’s most contaminated cities. Forced to stay home, she started to engage in a more traveler-like mentality. She developed a relationship with various members of her staff, knew about certain aspects of the city’s inner workings, and learned many new things about the language, culture, tradition and the role of the woman in India. She even got to attend a true Indian wedding in its entire luxurious and culturally rich splendor. She definitely got out of her comfort zone and (reluctantly) accepted to, at least, dip her feet in what India wanted to offer her since the very first trip she made to the country.