Drawing together the lesson his father learned in India over seventy years ago and the insight he gained by retracing those steps, Noah Pickus charts an existential journey where spirituality meets the demands of lived reality. Moving across borders, generations, and belief systems, the essay traces how moral conviction is tested in the world rather than apart from it. What emerges is a quiet but insistent argument: that conscience is not a refuge from history, but a responsibility within it.
At the Wagah crossing between Pakistan and India in late 1950, my father, Robert Pickus, stood in line with goat herders and peasants balancing bundles of wheat. His beard was grown out, his clothes plain, and his backpack stood out – a rarity, he wrote, of “a white man carrying his own burden.” A customs guard asked whether he was a saint, another suspected he was a communist, and British pomp played out in a “two-step jig” at the changing of the guard. What he recorded was not just a border but a threshold: between suspicion and welcome, between labels and a life he was struggling to define.
Decades later, I would return with my daughter, Mira, to walk some of the same paths—but first, his search.
Westerners have long gone to India in search of themselves. My father’s journey, undertaken in 1950 before the counterculture’s wave and the tourist circuits of spiritual awakening, was less about retreat than about vocation. He wanted to discover whether a truly creative and revolutionary life demanded monastic withdrawal or principled engagement in the world’s messiness. Books had primed him for the trip—the Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, Tagore’s Sadhana, Gandhi’s Indian Home Rule and Nehru’s The Unity of India, and above all, Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine—but he believed final choices should be made beyond the page.