Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [36]
The station was a seething mass of hurrying, scurrying, hustling bodies; it was physically impossible to move faster than a slow shuffle, and you just got taken in whichever direction the crowd was moving. The noise, and the smell of faeces and sweat, was overpowering. There were no other Westerners as far as I could see.
Little could have prepared me for what I saw on the squalid streets of Calcutta, beyond the main drag and city centre. I had never seen people dying on a street in front of my eyes before. I had never seen legless, blind, ragged bodies, lying in sewers, holding their arms out begging for a few rupees.
I felt overwhelmed, inadequate, powerless and ashamed – all at once.
Watty and I finally found the small hospital and nunnery that was Mother Theresa’s mission. Amongst a city of suffering, we had found a haven of love, cleanliness, calm and care.
We returned there every day we were in Calcutta, we gave the remaining notes we had in rupees into her collection box and I wrote Mother Theresa a folded, hand-written note to say how her work had moved me.
I just wanted to thank her and encourage her.
I never expected any reply.
Knock me down, if two months later I didn’t get a personal letter from her saying thank you. I still have it to this day. Believe me when I say that all we gave were a few pounds in total.
Her response is called grace, and it amazed me.
Her being, and her whole way of life (even though we never even met her), was a living, breathing example of God’s presence on this earth, and it changed how I saw both myself and the world around me, very powerfully. I realized that I had been given privileges beyond those any person could ever hope for, and that we, in turn, have a duty of care towards the world and her people.
But I wasn’t yet sure what this meant for me.
I just know that I left the squalor, dirt and suffering of Calcutta with a sense that, in Mother Theresa’s life, we had experienced a brush with God that was both beautiful and very real.
There is a simple Bible verse, Matthew 23:12, which says: ‘Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.’ This speaks pretty strongly to how I feel about the whole fame issue, and it has coloured so much of what I see in people nowadays.
The more I live, the more aware I become of the greatness of the everyday man (and I don’t mean this in any sycophantic way). I witness tough people doing tough jobs every day, as we travel to the many extremes of the world, filming.
Maybe it’s a lone worker, digging a roadside ditch in the middle of the night in the pouring rain on a small jungle track in a remote part of China; or someone more ‘regular’ (whatever that means), like a coffee vendor in some unsung town in middle America, just doing the daily grind.
Whichever extreme it is, I find myself admiring these people more and more. Unsung. Uncelebrated. Uncomplaining.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. At this stage, I was still a young, wide-eyed pup, with bleached blond, pony-tailed hair, freshly home from a hiking trip to India, with a determination to live life to the max.
CHAPTER 32
The vigour with which I wanted to get on and live life was countered by the slumber-like crawl I adopted to the prospect of returning to ‘higher education’.
I had only scraped a few A levels, gaining the grades ACDC. (I did, though, love the fact that they spelt the name of a cool rock band.)
I also noted the irony of the fact that the only exam for which I had done literally no revision, and for which I had been told the key ingredient was common sense, I had gained an A grade in.
General Studies is a subject where the questions are like: ‘Describe how a sailing boat might be sailed backwards.’ ‘Explain how trees might be shown to “communicate”.’ I was good at those, but bad at swotting and economics.
Anyway, having only just escaped from years of academic learning, I had little motivation to apply to go to university. At the same time, though, I lacked