The Soul Of India

India defies every attempt at definition. You'd run out of ink, or paint or videotape before you'd even begun to find her, let alone capture her. Take the landscape. There are jungles straight out of Rudyard Kipling, deserts to make Lawrence of Arabia weep with envy, the highest mountains in the world, tropical beaches, fading colonial hill stations, crowded cities. Indians are as varied as their landscapes. More than one billion people. Thousands of languages. Almost every religion known to man. And somehow all of it mixed into one vast, raucous and unruly democracy. To make his brand new film The Soul Of India, travel filmmaker Rick Ray spent 4 months in India, braving heat, cold, altitude, earthquakes and riots to patch together a unique and personal tapestry of this nearly indescribable country. We will visit familiar sites like the Taj Mahal, the palaces and forts of Rajasthan, the Himalayas and the River Ganges. We will also peer into an India that few visitors see - a land of villages and inner cities, a country in which reside the hopes and dreams of 1/6th of the earth's population. Our tour will take us to India s bustling cities of Bombay, New Delhi and Calcutta. We will also visit quiet and tranquil landscapes in South India and in the Himalayas. We ll explore the majesty of legendary cities like Varanasi, Agra, Udaipur, Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Jaiselmer. The majesty and mystery of South India will come alive with trips to kerala s famous Backwaters, silk factories, Cochin, Madurai and so much more. We will visit maharaja palaces, visit a camel festival, ride on the luxury Palace On Wheels, and see sides of the Taj Mahal that few ever explore. All of India s religions will be explained in depth, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, the Jain faith and the Sikh faith. We ll learn how political events have shaped the landscape and how the influence of the British empire brought ideas and concepts still deeply rooted in the Indian psyche today. We ll explore concepts such as the caste system, democracy, marriage, privacy, life and death and see how they differ from our preconceptions in the West. India is a challenge to the senses, to the mind and to everything we in America take for granted. If you come to terms with her nearly infinite diversity, her stunning vitality and her in-your-face energy, you will learn a great deal about yourself. In the process, you will learn a great deal about the rest of humanity. Once you have glimpsed the kaleidoscope of color, the encyclopedia of experience that is India, you'll probably agree that you have discovered the most colorful and fascinating country on earth.