Somehow I feel this connection with Roma people.
Maybe it’s because they are not afraid of shouting out loud their differences to a society that try to conform every culture, people and country to the same thing.
Maybe it’s their little interest in modernity and any new form of development.
Maybe it’s because they are still rooted in values from generations and generations ago. Take language for example: as today they still speak the same old language from centuries ago. It’s like an old Indian language. Yes, because if you didn’t know they are actually from India.
Another thing that always fascinated me is that they don’t belong anywhere. They don’t have a country. They are still nomads at the heart.
Everywhere they go, can be England as Bulgaria, they adapt to local costume (learning their national language for example) just enough to live in that country, to be able to interact to people. But they don’t forget their way of doing things, which I think is really cool. Why? Because it’s through differences that we keep this world an interesting way to live. If we keep opening McDonald’s in every old town, what will we become?
Differences are the best thing to creative people as well.
To make something brilliant you have to feel free and experiment, but you can’t experiment if only one way of thinking is accepted.
The limit of this is going over the law and by consequence over people’s rights.
That’s why Roma are seen by many as thieves, unfriendly and dirty.
While it’s easy to put many in a single category as thieves, it’s harder to think of people individually (here again: with differences). So we can say for sure that there are many thieves as Roma but not thet alla Roma are thieves.
But why are there so many Roma thieves?
Leaving aside any moral judgment on the practice of stealing (as hard as it can be, I know), I think this attitude comes from their past tradition as nomads (now some still are but most are sedentary).
Being nomads for Roma was more than a lifestyle, it was life itself. While on the road private property assumes funny shapes, I can understand that myself as I did some long distance cycling trips across multiple countries and when you are crossing a land as a traveler that’s just a land, when you are hungry you look for food in the fastest way possible. So for nomads Roma a land with orange trees is just a place where they can get oranges to eat, it’s for everybody, it’s from the land to whoever needs it. I know, if we all think this way our all economy will be ruined in a second (but maybe a little shake like this to our economic system wouldn’t be so bad). Here I’m not trying to make a point on what’s good or bad but just to open our minds to a very very different lifestyle from what our culture drunk from a western world of globalisation and capital market drove our ideas.
