Hello, my name is Thomas Mendel and I’m 27 years old. I was born in a small town in Germany in the late 1940’s. Although I didn’t make any personal experiences with the war, my childhood was marked by the post-war time and the people’s fight to survive also my family’s one. I grew up in a very strict religious home. My parents teached me to be diligent and to work hard. And so I did what I was told to do until I became older and started to scrutinize the sense of my life. I had  worked hard for the whole time, had succeeded in school but now I realised that I had missed something. It seemed like somebody else lived my life but not me. There were so many questions I couldn’t answer. Who was I and what did I really want? … I wanted to find myself and so I decided to escape the routine day of life. In this time I argued a lot with my parents. I rebeled against their conservative way of life and they couldn’t understand my development. But I knew that I needed a change. And so I chucked up school with 17 and travelled along the ‘hippie trail’ to India from one day to another on the search for spirituality. I hadn’t told my parents anything and just left a short letter in which I explained my decision. On my journey I met a lot of young people who searched for the same. When I arrived in Bombay, I was overwhelmed by India’s colours and the vast diversity of religions and cultures and so I devote myself to this spirituality. We took drugs together and just enjoyed life. This time was marked by a feeling of total liberty and freedom. … But the times changed soon. Most of the young people spent only a few months in India. They had made their experiences but life here was just too different and so they returned into their old lifes and left me behind. Without any money to buy some food and no place to sleep I was soon back in reality. I lived on a low budget, begged for surviving but never really got back into normal life. And today I’m a broken man without any hope. India didn’t give me this life of spirituality and freedom I had guessed to achieve here. I don’t know what to do now. The appearances are deceptive. Life here is just a fight to survive…