Early one morning, while mist still hangs over the Parvati Valley, a young Israeli sits on the wooden balcony of a small guesthouse in a mountain village in northern India. His name is not important. He could be any one of the thousands of young Israelis who arrive here after completing military service.
Only a few months earlier, he wore a uniform, carried a weapon, followed a strict timetable, and operated within a system in which instructions were clear and consequences immediate. Now he is wearing loose trousers bought in a local market at a price he remains convinced was excellent, even though the shopkeeper still smiles whenever he sees him.
In his hand is a glass of sweet chai. Mountains rise in front of him. A monkey studies his breakfast with the concentration of a professional negotiator waiting to join the meal without an invitation. The warm scent of sandalwood incense drifts through the air, mixed with the sound of a sitar from a nearby guesthouse and the clear notes of a local folk song from the Kullu region. The mist, music, incense, and mountains create a combination that is almost addictive, and no photograph on a phone can fully capture it.
Nobody asks what his military role was. Nobody expects him to report at a particular hour. Nobody seems entirely certain when the next bus will arrive. In India, he gradually discovers this is not always a malfunction. Sometimes it is simply the way life moves.
His backpack rests in the corner, his phone is silent, and the day ahead is not divided into tasks.
What Am I Supposed to Do Now?
That may be the real question bringing so many young Israelis to India. It is not only the landscapes, low prices, parties, yoga, or food. Nor is it merely the desire to disappear for a while and upload a photograph suggesting spiritual enlightenment, even if five minutes earlier the same traveller was arguing with a rickshaw driver over twenty rupees.
Behind all of this lies a deeper need: to step away, if only temporarily, from an identity formed at unusual speed and to ask who one is when there is no uniform, no institution, and no ready answer to the question of what comes next.
Between Structure and Freedom
For many young Israelis, the long journey after military service is far more than a holiday. It is a space between two lives. Behind them are years of discipline, responsibility, and the sense that every action belongs to a larger system. Ahead lie university, work, relationships, mortgages, and relatives already asking for a five-year plan.
In between stands India. It does not ask for a curriculum vitae, and it is not particularly impressed that back home he knew how to lead a team or function under pressure. Here he must relearn basic tasks: buying a railway ticket, identifying the correct platform, ordering food that is not too spicy, and understanding that the phrase “not spicy” may be an expression of goodwill rather than a legally binding commitment.
The journey gives him permission not to know. He may wake without a plan, change direction, stay another week in a village that never appeared on the itinerary, or discover at noon that the bus he boarded in the morning is travelling north when he intended to go south. After years in which hesitation could be treated as a problem, uncertainty begins to feel like a form of freedom.
Why India?
One can rest on the beaches of Thailand, seek adventure in South America, or work in Australia. India offers something different. It rarely allows the visitor to remain merely an observer.
It enters through noise, colour, smell, music, spices, and constant movement. It enters through a chance conversation on a train, a family invitation to dinner, a guesthouse owner who remembers how he likes his eggs, and a chai seller who can turn a simple glass of tea into a temporary solution to almost any problem.
It also enters at the moment when a cow stands in the middle of the road and all traffic flows around it. The young Israeli, arriving from a country where the car horn sometimes functions as an official language, discovers that there are creatures in the world whom nobody attempts to hurry.
India demands a response. It makes him admire, laugh, struggle, become confused and, above all, learn its rhythm. He does not have to love every detail, but he soon understands that a permanent battle with local reality is exhausting. It is easier to observe, adjust, and continue.
“Nearby” Is a Flexible Concept
One of the traveller’s first lessons in India is that familiar words do not always carry familiar meanings. “Nearby” may mean around the corner, at the edge of the village, or at a distance involving a rickshaw, a bus, and a short forty-minute climb.
“In a little while” is not an exact unit of time, and “there is a bus” does not necessarily mean that anyone knows when it leaves, from which platform, or whether the destination written on the front is also where it will finally arrive.
Yet uncertainty is usually accompanied by flexibility. There is another road, another driver, a side path, a room next door, or a cousin who knows someone. What first appears to be disorder often reveals itself as an impressive ability to adapt reality to circumstance.
India has a well-known word for this: “jugaad.” It is the capacity to improvise, use what is available, and find a workable solution when the original plan fails. For a traveller from a culture in which timetables, prior approval, and definite answers provide reassurance, this approach can be unsettling. He wants to know where, when, and how long. India often replies with one word: we shall see.
There is something disturbing in that answer, but also something comforting. If not everything is final, a mistake does not have to be the end of the road. If the bus is missed, another vehicle will appear. If the room is occupied, someone will know a nearby place. If the road is blocked, a detour will emerge.
At the beginning of the journey, he builds a precise table of destinations, times, and distances. In India, he learns that the table is, at best, an opening suggestion.
Sab Kuch Milega. Everything Is Possible
Perhaps not at the time he planned, not by the route he marked and not through the first option offered to him, but a solution is usually found. There is another bus, another driver, another path, or another room. The planned way is only one possibility among several.
At some point, he stops trying to change India and agrees to be changed slightly himself. This is not indifference and not an abandonment of responsibility. It is the recognition that the need to control every detail is not always useful. He learns to breathe, order another chai and wait.
Shanti is not laziness, and it is not escape. It is calm in the presence of things that cannot be forced to happen differently.
The Freedom of Being Unknown
One of the most liberating things the young traveller finds in India is anonymity. At home he is known as a soldier, a son, a friend, or someone who should already know what he intends to do with his life. In India, he is simply another person among millions.
The passenger beside him on the train knows nothing of his history and has no idea what he went through six months earlier. To that passenger, he is merely a young man with an oversized backpack trying to determine whether the next station is the right one. This anonymity does not diminish him. It releases him from the need to explain himself.
He can begin a conversation with someone he will never meet again, sit for hours in a cafe without justification, learn to cook dal, or join a yoga class and discover that his lotus position contains less lotus and more urgent appeal for assistance. He is allowed to be quiet, confused, and uncertain about the next stage. In a culture where stopping may be seen as wasting time, India teaches him that stopping can also be part of the journey.
A Country That Contains a World
India attracts the young traveller because it cannot be explained in a single sentence. It is spiritual and practical, ancient and innovative, noisy, and filled with vast pockets of silence. In its great cities, the future is being built at remarkable speed. In nearby villages, life may still move according to the seasons, festivals, soil, and local temple.
In the morning, one may meet a man sitting silently beside a river. In the evening, one may meet a young entrepreneur building an application for hundreds of millions of users. On a single street there may be an ancient shrine, a mobile phone shop, a food cart, a cow, and a motorcycle carrying an entire family, with the distinct impression that space could still be found for the grandparents.
These contradictions speak to the traveller because he arrives full of contradictions himself. He is young, yet has already carried heavy responsibility. He is confident, yet he does not know what he will do next year. He wants to be alone, yet is delighted to hear Hebrew after several days of failing to explain how he prefers his eggs. India does not resolve these contradictions. It allows him to live with them.
When Faith Does Not Remain Inside the Temple
India is not a country of one religion. Its society is composed of many communities, traditions, and beliefs. When the traveller encounters Hindu civilisation, he discovers a religious and cultural world that cannot be reduced to an hour of prayer or a weekly visit to a sacred place.
For many Hindus, faith is woven into daily life: home, family, food, the calendar, festivals, rites of passage, the relationship with nature, and the understanding of personal duty. The temple is not a place where life stops. It is part of life itself.
In the Kullu region and the Parvati Valley, local deities are present in village stories, celebrations, processions, and communal identity. Temple bells, flowers, oil lamps, images, incense, and people arriving to seek blessings create a space in which the sacred and the ordinary are not completely separated.
The traveller encounters many divine figures: Ganesha with the elephant head, Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Hanuman, Durga, and Kali. Yet the simple description of “countless gods” misses the complexity. In many Hindu traditions, gods and goddesses are understood as different forms of the divine, expressions of cosmic powers, or varied paths towards an ultimate reality that is difficult to describe in words.
There are the deities, the guru, the ancient story, and the beauty: a temple entrance covered in flowers, a woman placing a small mark on her forehead, a flame burning before an image, the sound of a bell, and sandalwood incense mingling with mountain air.
To the Israeli traveller, this religious world may initially appear foreign, yet something in it also feels familiar. Judaism, especially in its traditional form, is not merely an abstract faith. It includes commandments, times, blessings, festivals, food, and rules that accompany everyday life.
The similarity is not theological. Judaism is monotheistic, while concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and liberation from the cycle of birth and death belong to a very different intellectual universe. The meeting point lies elsewhere: in the idea that spirituality is measured not only by what a person believes but also by how one lives, acts, and carries responsibility.
The Book That Suddenly Makes Sense
At some stage, someone places a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in his hands. It may be another traveller, the guesthouse owner, or a yoga teacher who promises that the book will change his life, despite having failed that morning to change even his waking hour.
The Bhagavad Gita forms part of the Mahabharata. At its centre stands Arjuna, a warrior facing a moral crisis before battle. Krishna, his charioteer and guide, speaks to him about duty, action, self discipline, devotion and the relationship between human effort and the results of one’s actions.
To a young Israeli who has only recently removed his uniform, the scene does not feel entirely distant. Arjuna, too, asks what is right and confronts the tension between duty, emotion, fear, and responsibility. One of the text’s central ideas is that a person must perform the right action without building identity and inner peace on control of the outcome.
Act seriously, but do not imagine that every result can be controlled. Accept responsibility, while understanding that not everything is in one’s hands. After a delayed train, a collapsed itinerary, and a road that changed direction, the idea begins to sound surprisingly practical.
Here, too, he hears a faint echo of Jewish tradition: the importance of duty, action, self-discipline, and moral responsibility. Not the same faith and not the same laws, but a related recognition that a meaningful life is not built only from intentions and feelings. It is built from the manner in which a person acts.
He does not need to become Hindu in order to learn from the book, just as growing a beard and buying white trousers does not turn him into a guru. One useful idea is enough to travel home with him.
The People Behind the Landscape
The real transformation begins when India ceases to be a collection of destinations and becomes a collection of human beings. It may be the guesthouse owner who notices that the young man sitting alone has not eaten all day and quietly places a plate before him. It may be the student on the train who explains where he must get off and later calls to ensure he arrived safely. It may be a family inviting him to a wedding or a shopkeeper arguing over the price for twenty minutes and then offering tea.
In these moments, the traveller realises that India is not merely the place to which he came in order to find himself. It is a place where other people make that search possible. He learns that a conversation can exist even when the shared vocabulary is limited and that a smile, a gesture, and three English words may be enough.
When someone in India says “no problem,” this is not proof that no problem exists. It is mainly an expression of confidence that a solution can still be found.
The Backpacker as an Unofficial Ambassador
These journeys have a significance wider than personal experience. For an ordinary Indian, the young person with the backpack may be the first Israeli he has ever met. For the traveller, the rickshaw driver, restaurant owner, guide, student, or host family may become the first face of the real India.
There is no diplomacy more human than a conversation between two people who were not sent by governments and are not required to deliver official speeches. The relationship between India and Israel is not built only in meetings between leaders, defence agreements or economic conferences. It is also built around a guesthouse table, during a long train journey, at a family meal, or in a chance conversation in a mountain cafe.
The traveller speaks about an Israel beyond the headlines. The Indian host reveals an India beyond the Taj Mahal, Bollywood, and the colourful photographs of travel brochures. Two distant countries become, for a moment, two people drinking chai together. That is often the best possible beginning of friendship.
What Returns Home?
After several months, the same young man returns to Israel. His backpack may weigh less, although it still contains scarves, a small figure of Ganesha, packets of incense, spices nobody at home knows how to use, and loose trousers he remains convinced he will continue wearing.
His beard is longer, his hair less organised, and his phone holds thousands of photographs, none of which can explain the full experience. At home, the old questions about education, work, and the future are waiting. India has not chosen a profession for him, solved every fear, or transformed him into a permanently calm human being. He may become irritated at the airport because his suitcase is eight minutes late.
Yet something has changed. He has learned that not every delay is a crisis, not every day must end with an achievement, and not every broken plan marks the end of the road.
He returns with a different relationship to control: do what can be done, prepare seriously, but accept that not every detail will obey the plan. Occasionally the train will be late, the room will be unavailable, and the bus will leave from another platform. Almost always, another possibility will appear.
India does not provide ready answers to the questions waiting for him at home. It gives him something more practical: the ability to live without a complete answer, without a perfect timetable and without the belief that he must control everything that happens.
Not enlightenment, not a dramatic change of personality and not a promise that life will become simple. Only the understanding that even when events do not unfold at the time, place, or in the manner he intended, there is usually another way. Sab Kuch Milega. In the end, everything is possible.