would lie. Sure enough, when we reached the
top of this hill his eyes lit up with joy as we saw
the ruined walls of an ancient site. Looking to
the East I saw a massive black sky, appearing
as a mighty thunderstorm headed our way.
When I cautioned the professor of the
impending deluge, he smiled and said,
“Oh no, that’s just Asia.”
A huge, dark, dust cloud was hovering
over Turkey, and little did I know that this
symposium sealed my fate to spend my life in
Asia. Then the professor said to me, “Go there
and you will discover yourself!”
On that day in June 1967 Arnold Toynbee
had turned my hazy information into knowledge:
he had fixed my sights on the destination
of my life! A year later, following Professor
Toynbee’s suggestion, I applied for, and won, a
Fulbright Fellowship to India.
I traveled around the world to India by plane,
visiting Cambodia on the way as the only
American visitor who was not in prison! The
other 14 Americans were air force pilots,
who had been shot down for intruding into
Cambodian airspace. Cambodia and America
had no diplomatic relations. My comrades in
the streets of Nhom Penh were Viet Cong
fighters, on breaks from the war in Vietnam.
Another long adventure occurred in 1971,
traveling overland to India from London to
Mumbai, crossing Europe, Turkey, Iran,
Afghanistan and Pakistan, spending eight weeks
teaching a studio with Balkrishna Doshi in
Ahmedabad, plotting with him to found the
new school of planning, and then moving on to
Mumbai to meet a man named Charles Correa.
It was the exhilaration of this overland
adventure that lured me to India, informing me
that this was my new home. One can travel on
one’s feet, or travel through reading with
one’s eyes. But travel one must! Travel and
adventure are catalysts of imagination and
friendship. They are creators of self-knowledge
and inner awareness.Story Two: The Story of Compassion
Traditional societies strive for the happiness
of the group, while modern societies teach us to
be self-sufficient, to succeed, and to strive
for happiness through individual achievement.
Traditional societies work with compassion as
the driving emotion. Advanced societies work
for the happiness of the individual, with
competition as the driving emotion. Individual
ambition, and the innovations it breeds, are
unique feats of the human brain, driving strong
emotional compulsions, known as greed and
pride. Regrettably, the resulting ‘success
pyramid’ concludes in a counterintuitive
outcome: most people are unhappy, while the
few successful are lonely!
This ‘competition project’ informs us to brush
aside inequality and poverty as obvious human
conclusions: perhaps something the government
might deal with! ‘Winner takes all’ becomes
the closure of the modern human condition. To
make this short, can I say we get trapped into
an endless struggle for success, justifying
inequality: life is a trap.
When I was a child in Florida, we lived in a
segregated society where black people sat
in the back of buses, and their children
attended segregated ‘black schools’. They
lived in shanty towns, and whites lived in
manicured suburbs. This was a form of
institutionaliSed untouchability.
On a visit to Medellin, Colombia in 1965, where
my father was setting up a new school of
business administration, I noted that the
population was divided into a first city for the
rich, and a second city for the poor, whose
unplanned, illegal barrios grew up the mountain
sides, while the bungalows grew through the
valley into distant suburbs along expressways.
My economics professor at Harvard, John
Kenneth Galbraith, described this to us as a
‘dual economy’, with two alien societies
co-existing in the same space, living parasitically
off one another.This page, left: Khyber
Pass, Pakistan, Asia
©Luca Tettoni
Right: View of the
Parthenon,
1978 © Steve Swayne
Opposite page, top: the
Kurukshetra war and
various khands or
stories spun around
the epic ©Ramprasad
Akkisetti
Bottom: Books authored
by Christopher C.
Benninger have been
translated into several
languages
© Ramprasad Akkisetti