Literary departure into Indian life: Richard Lang presents his book about the subcontinent
Created: 01/24/2022, 20:00
Richard Lang from Moosburg has immortalized his adventures and experiences from his time in India in a book.
On Saturday he will read from it in the Vhs auditorium.
©Martin
With "India thinks differently - an intercultural encounter", Moosburg resident Richard Lang has published a book that deals intensively with the subcontinent.
Moosburg
– Richard Lang from Moosburg knows India like no other.
For 33 years he was a lecturer and later institute director at Goethe Institutes worldwide, some time in the Indian capital New Delhi, later in Colombo, the capital of the island nation of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon).
Now he is dedicating an exciting book to the subcontinent.
"India thinks differently - an intercultural encounter" is the name of the 165-page work that he will present next Saturday in the auditorium of the Vhs Moosburg.
A plea for “being different”.
Editor in Bucharest
In 1974, the largest German cultural institute became an important part of Richard Lang's life. Born in 1945 in Schäßburg in Transylvania, he first studied Germanic languages, art history and world literature in the Romanian capital Bucharest. Lang remembers that he earned his first money at the Romanian state broadcaster. From 1963 to 1974 he worked as a radio editor in Bucharest. When, in the course of the legal emigration of Romanian-Germans in the 1970s, lecturers were sought at the Goethe-Institut in Munich, he applied to become a language teacher in the state capital. There were 750 applications for a total of 15 positions. “I was very lucky,” he looks back.
Even then, India was the land of his longing.
But before he was allowed to work on the subcontinent as the representative of the Federal Republic, he was first "sent" to the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires.
And that's exactly where the exciting reading begins, to which Lang wants to take the Moosburgers next Saturday.
When he started his three-month internship at the Goethe-Institut there in October 1985, news of his transfer to India soon trickled in from the Munich headquarters.
Cora Lang painted this collage when she and her husband Richard received the news that they were both going to India.
© Repro: Martin
The first chapter tells how this caused “mixed” reactions in family and friends.
"Many had a firm opinion of India without ever having lived there," says Lang.
"It was a world that my friends had constructed from books." India polarized.
Some shuddered at the caste system, which was unknown to Europeans, some loved it for yoga, spirituality or the exotic, says Lang.
The author describes in an exciting way how he and his wife Cora gradually gained deeper insights into Indian culture.
Arrive in New Delhi
At the inaugural dinner, at which he was introduced to the country's intellectual and social elite as the new director of the institute in New Delhi, he was allowed to open the sumptuous buffet. "At the time, I was initially looking for meat," Lang recalls. However, the "supplements" were the more important thing. He knows that now, he says and smiles. Vegetarianism is deeply rooted in India – also religiously. Mahatma Gandhi's ideas were very present at the time. Hindu tradition is to see all living beings as having a soul. Man is not the master of nature, as is the case in western countries. Among Hindus there is a belief that killing animals reduces the connection to the divine.
Lang also vividly describes his meeting with the German writer Günter Grass.
He experienced his ambivalent relationship to the Indian upper class at first hand.
Also, the reactions of the upper class to the statements made by Grass during his stays in northern Calcutta, where pomp and squalor are closest together.
fabric for schools
The highly interesting reading shows the reader again and again that stable world peace is not possible without successful interculturality.
That is why he is always in favor of including interculturality as a subject in the syllabus of schools and universities, emphasizes the Moosburger.
Mary Martin
Information about the book and the reading
Richard Lang's reading "India thinks differently - an intercultural encounter" begins on Saturday, January 29, at 6 p.m. in the auditorium of the Moosburg adult education center on the town square.
Admission is from 5.30 p.m., admission is five euros.
Registration required at
buero@vhs-moosburg.de
or Tel. (08761) 72250. The book was published by Verlag tredition, ISBN 978-3-347-07596-2.
On request, the author will sign copies, which can be purchased in bookshops or at the reading.
