Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure

After reading the first couple chapters I expected HOLY COW to be filled with constant whining of India's derelict living conditions and complaints based on a Westernized perspective resulting in a mediocre travel narrative. But low and behold, I was soon pleasantly surprised how Sarah slowly evolved and reevaluated the country that she has scorned for so many years. After she started becoming reacquainted in her new home she started looking beyond the mayhem and dirt and began to see the beauty of India. Being a devout atheist when she first moved to New Delhi she slowly awoke and embraced the dynamic religions of Hinduism and Buddhism; she began to appreciate the sounds and surroundings of her new home.

While her husband is busy working Sarah was able to travel throughout India with her new perspectives and begins to enjoy the dichotomies that India offers. My favorite side trip was the Buddhist retreat in the Himalayan footsteps that taught her to meditate by concentrating on her breathing. I cannot imagine undergoing anything close to that endeavor.

Throughout HOLY COW Sarah Macdonald succeeded in digging past a traveler's first impressions of India to highlight the beauty of this varied land. By reading HOLY COW I now understand just a little bit more of India, and that was my initial goal when I first picked up this book.


Honest, irreverent, illuminating memoir and travelogue   April 14, 2005
Marie GG (Portland, OR)
28 out of 32 found this review helpful

I, too, traveled in India in my 20s (in my case, when I was 24). My boyfriend (now husband) and I traveled through Asia for 2-1/2 months after leaving Japan, where we had lived and worked for 3 years. We spent a month in India, focusing our time on Delhi, Agra, and Rajasthan. We traveled on a shoestring with only one notable splurge.

Although I have some fond memories of India--my husband proposed to me at the beautiful Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur--when we left the country, I was extremely ready to leave. I am fascinated with India--its food, its history, its literature, and its culture. However, I have not returned to India since I left 16 years ago, and have no immediate desire to do so. Therefore, I can relate to Sarah Macdonald's first impressions of the country and her new appreciation for it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book because of her irreverent, honest look at Indian culture, customs, and religions. It's interesting to note how many reviewers feel that Macdonald is being disrespectful to Indians in her portrayal of the country, because I feel it's quite the contrary. Although she is critical of individual Indians and was exhausted and angered by the treatment of women (and I can definitely relate to that), she cried when she left the country because of the close relationships she had formed and the fondness she developed for the whole country.

I enjoyed her forays into Indian religions. She was the first to comment that she realized that she didn't have a full picture of these religions. I did not conclude that she was drawing a broad brush on all people following these religions because of her brief samplings into their cultures and beliefs. As a progressive Christian, I'm very interested in other religions and believe there are many paths to God. Macdonald was fascinated to learn about what makes people believe what they do. When she observed that some of the Jews she encountered practiced their religion in an exclusive way, I did not read that to mean that she felt all Jews were that way...just as she herself could not be compared to all Christians or people who grew up with a Christian background.

I particularly appreciated her observations around September 11 and her sadness about violence begetting more violence and a lack of effort to bridge our cultures and move toward a greater level of global and cross-cultural understanding.

If you read it as a factual account of all things Indian, you will find it lacking. I read Holy Cow as a travelogue, memoir, and one western person's perspective on India, and I found it refreshing, fascinating, and fun.


Obnoxious and condescending   May 2, 2004
Rachel Manija Brown (Los Angeles)
21 out of 27 found this review helpful

Macdonald's book deals with a fascinating topic, but her approach to it is shallow, smug, and dull. Her writing style is overwrought and clunky, and her persona is unbearable.

Almost every chapter has the same repetitive structure: Macdonald hears about some aspect of Indian religion or culture and decides to investigate it. At first she thinks it's stupid and pointless. But by the end of the chapter she realizes that though it's not for her, it does have something to offer. If she asked for some blessing, she will have received it by the end of that chapter or the beginning of the next. As you can imagine, this structure gets very old very fast.

The author's attitude toward India and Indians combines the worst of both the old and the new West: patronizing sneers at a culture she doesn't understand mix uneasily with breast-beating over her own pain at seeing poor people and a greed for exotic eastern spirituality to fill her inner shallowness.

(...)


The worst travel book I have ever read   November 9, 2005
Avid Reader (Seattle, WA USA)
20 out of 29 found this review helpful

I picked up this book to kill some time while waiting in a hospital lobby. After a few pages, I wasn't sure if the hospital was more depressing or this book was. By the time I finished, the vote went to the book.

I am from India and was stunned beyond belief to see the less than flattering picture painted in this book and on this book. Ms Macdonald's knowledge of India and Indian culture and traditions is half-baked at best.

She draws conclusions which have no basis in fact(the woman with the half burned face is termed a dowry victim). She has misspelt most of the Indian names(the poet was Firdaus and not Fir Das) or taken a very literal meaning of others(Hari Lal does not mean green-red, it means son of Lord Krishna).

All the Indians are classified as Anglophiles who are obsessed with foreigners and have their fingers in their noses or other parts of their anatomy. Amazingly, during her long stay, she didn't meet a single Indian who could speak english properly. Everybody's face resembles some animal. In all the "meditation camps" that she frequents, the Indians are the only ones who quit before everybody else or they are unable to "grasp the true meaning". She fails to see any good thing in all the places she visits but makes sure that she highlights the crowd and the stink. In all the tourist spots, Indians are the ones spreading the garbage whereas all the others are very careful about the cleanliness. The word 'filthy' is probably the word used most in this book and always in context with India and Indians.

Ms Macdonald whines a lot. This book is very offending for any Indian. Not a single positive thing about the country she claims to love in the end. If you want to read something classier, opt for Mark Tully or William Dalrymple. Stay away from this trash.


Open hearted Story of Life as a Stranger in India   May 11, 2004
Jennifer Smith (California, USA)
14 out of 17 found this review helpful

I did not know what to think about this book - I bought it because the cover jumped out at me and I have never done that before! Ms. MacDonald's storytelling is crisp and she chooses words that create a picture in the mind's eye of exactly what she is seeing, hearing and smelling at any given point. I did not find her characterization of Indians to be condescending and she admits in the book that it is SHE who is the judgmental one. She wants to understand her new home but has trouble with the exotic and strange foods, cultural taboos, accents, weather, etc. I did not feel that she considered the Indians to be anything less than exuberant, interesting, friendly people who make do living in a nation of a billion people. Her love of Bollywood musicals is obvious and she wants to learn to dance like the actors in the films so she will not seem too foreign to her new friends. She also learns a lot of Hindi.
Ms. Macdonald's book is more than a study of the exterior world of India, however. She delves into the spiritual world of the people and comes out a more patient, loving, peaceful person. No stone is left unturned as she visits Parsees (India's Zoroastrians), Jains, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and those who follow particular gurus and make treks to ashrams in search of meaning, transcendence and, in one ashram's case, some hash and sex. Her evolution from cocky Australian atheist to humble Australian theist is touching, as we see her wall of disbelief crumble brick by brick with each new experience. She also sees her western, self-centered relationship with her husband take on a new side when she spends so much time away from him (he is a journalist with the Aust. Broadcasting Co.)as he travels from international crisis to international crisis. She slowly lets go of her self pity and anger when Buddhism and Hinduism teach her about the extinguishing of the ego.
One reviewer said that McDonald's quote about forgiveness after 9/11 irked her as an American. I think McDonald means that there will be no forgiveness when it comes to the Afghanis who had nothing to do with the bombing. She writes candidly about the dark, harsh side of Islam and those who could be filled with enough hate to do what they did, but she contrasts them with the Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan who know only that America is a land of porn and money and alcohol and still would never hurt an American because Islam teaches them not to. One thing I learned from Holy Cow is that there are 10 sides to every religion's stories!