Episode Thirty: The Interview-Rachel Lopez

This super cool journalist has made her Instagram world famous. Hear, in this longer episode, how the simple act of taking photos of taxi ceilings has changed her life, and how bringing joy to those around her is a miracle.

Transcript

Well,

I was very lucky because I went to a good college.

I went to one of the best colleges in the country.

And I got out of it and I walked into a newspaper office saying,

You just gotta give me a job,

I'll figure it out.

And then they were like,

Oh,

Which journalism school have you been to?

And I'm like,

None.

And like,

Oh,

What kind of editing skills do you bring to the table?

I'm like,

None.

But you know what,

I'm gonna figure it out.

And you're gonna be happy you hired me.

And they were so I mean,

It all worked out.

It was pretty good.

Hi,

I'm Rachel Lopez.

I'm a resident of Mumbai,

India.

I'm a journalist with a major newspaper in India.

I've been a journalist since 2003.

It's the only job I've had.

It's the only thing I know to do.

What I really like about my job is that I can be a different person every week,

I can jump into the story of India's dinosaurs one week,

I can talk about art the other week.

And it's just allowed me to open so many doors into my life that I feel like I'm a very blessed human being for being a journalist.

I'm also someone who photographs the city obsessively.

I live in Mumbai,

I love it.

And there's always something happening.

And just the fact that there's always something happening means it's a good thing.

You're never bored.

You're always distracted and distraction is a good thing.

I sit in black and yellow taxis a lot as I move around the city.

And every time I sit in one,

I noticed that the ceilings of the taxis are colorful.

There's a there's a covering and upholstery that goes on to the taxi ceilings.

And they usually printed in some very bright,

Ridiculous colors.

And I've been taking pictures of them since I think 2017.

I have more than 500 different images.

And I've ended up without realizing I've ended up with without realizing that I have the world's largest gallery of Mumbai taxi ceiling art in India.

I never thought I'd be the best or the largest collector of anything art related.

But here we are.

Yeah,

I don't think it's one of those things that you think you're going to be when you grow up,

You know,

I'm going to be I'm going to photograph taxi ceilings.

No,

I think you just want to be an astronaut like everyone else.

However,

I was on my way to work one day and it occurred to me that my taxi was upholstered the interiors in a ghastly sort of pattern.

It was brown with strawberries of unnatural colors,

You know,

And I was like,

What is going on?

This is disgusting.

And I loved it.

I fell in love with it immediately.

I thought it was so ridiculous and so fantastic at the same time.

I thought I'd take a picture of it.

And it then occurred to me that,

Yeah,

You know,

Everyone has some sort of idea that we live in India with so much decoration.

So everyone has some kind of an idea that there is some decoration.

There's a panel of some kind of print somewhere always happening.

I thought,

Let's see how many pictures I can take,

How many I can collect.

And just as a joke,

I could put it up on the Internet.

And and I did.

But here we are.

It's 2021.

The joke's on me because I haven't seen all the taxis yet and I have 500 images.

I certainly haven't seen all the taxis.

And now it's sort of become something that's larger than myself.

It's kind of in a place where we don't look right as humans.

It's right over our heads.

But it's also really beautiful because it's it's a piece of art.

It's art that is in plain sight that we might completely miss because it's over our heads.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I mean,

You've hit the nail on the head.

So thank you for seeing you're seeing it the way that I do as well.

If you just sort of changed our perspective,

If you change our viewing angle,

It's a different world,

Isn't it?

And sometimes you're just so focused on looking in this direction and thinking,

You know,

The world sucks.

And a little less if you look a little differently.

Sometimes I'm sitting in the back of a very beautiful cabin.

It's got cherry blossoms.

And,

You know,

It's just very it's it's it's really transporting me in such a beautiful way.

And and I'm telling the taxi driver,

You know,

Your taxi is very beautiful.

And the guy goes,

Hmm,

Which is about the only conversation I'm going to get out of him because they don't care.

They just get that the taxi is clean.

They get that they're getting their fare.

And if I'm a single girl in the back of the cab,

They only get that I am going to get married soon,

You know.

So they have a very set sense of right,

Wrong,

Good,

Bad and what conversation should be had.

And it's very,

Very,

Very rare that I can have a conversation about art with the person driving the car.

I mean,

Literally getting into a taxi is like an adventure for you.

Yeah,

It absolutely is.

But we must find our adventures.

They're not going to find us.

So because you're a journalist in India,

There's no dearth of stories.

There's something happening every day.

And India is so big,

So vast,

So complicated,

So crazy and so changing.

There's always a story.

But every once in a while,

You find a story that no one else was sort of looking at for many,

Many,

Many years.

And I'd learned that in the center of India,

There exists a wall and no one knows who built it.

No one knows what they were trying to keep in.

No one knows what they were trying to keep out.

What we knew is that it was at least from the 11th or 12th century.

And over time,

Villages had sort of sprung up around it.

And they all sort of lived with the wall in the back of their minds,

In the back of their backyards,

Literally.

But it seemed to be a huge mystery.

So I went to central India.

Parts of this wall run through a forest,

A government-secured forest.

And so parts of it are difficult to access.

Parts of it are fully built.

You can walk on top of it.

Some bits of it are almost broken down.

Some of the parts look like the stones have been assembled and kept there but never really erected.

So you don't know what was happening.

You know that it was built in bits and pieces,

As most things in the 11th century would be.

And it was really long.

It was some 200 kilometers long.

So I was like,

Okay,

Let's go see it.

And so I went to see this very long wall.

You can see it from Google Maps.

And there was like a little pond.

There seemed to have been something going on that they wanted to protect.

Yeah,

It was fascinating.

Because I was really one of the few people outside of the rural communities that had actually seen the wall.

And there were temples on one side.

There were just abandoned sort of statuary.

And it had just been,

You know,

Lying there with stuff growing out of it for years and years and years.

And no one was really bothering with it.

And it was really fascinating to see.

Yeah,

So it's a mystery.

We don't know who built it.

We don't know why they built it.

There are steps going up one side of the wall.

So you know whose side it was.

There are no steps on the other side.

So you know who they were trying to keep out.

And people were just sort of,

Yeah,

Okay,

There was a wall there.

There were these very weird stories.

In India,

You never shout off a weird story.

They were like,

Oh,

You know,

A king built it in three days and three nights.

Oh,

No,

The gods built it.

Oh,

My God,

It was this guy and that guy.

So it was just really fun trying to figure out and making sense of this mystery in the middle of India.

So it's one of my favorite stories.

So it's like the wall from Game of Thrones with little checkpoints and outposts and things like that.

So,

Yeah,

I don't know,

Maybe they were really waiting for the white workers in middle India.

I did grow up in a religious household in India.

It's really hard to not grow up in a religious household.

You are a religious household by default.

It's just how religious you have to be if you are Christian like I am and Roman Catholic like I am.

A lot of people around the world don't know that India has two percent.

Two percent of India's population is Christian.

And a sizable number of those are Roman Catholic because the Portuguese were in India trading much,

Much before the British came.

So the British sort of,

You know,

Brought their ships and said,

Oh,

Look,

A new land.

And then there were people there who are already praying to the cross and had their churches.

So we trace our ancestry back very,

Very far to the Portuguese.

And my surname is Lopez for the same reason.

I grew up in a very religious household.

My grandmother instilled in us the fear of God and the fear of God makes you study.

The fear of God makes you obey.

The fear of God makes you pick up your socks.

The fear of God makes you not late for school.

The fear of God makes you iron your uniform.

And the fear of God makes you study maths when you hate it.

So it was a very useful tool to keep kids in line,

So to speak.

I was very fascinated by Catholicism as a child.

So I knew all of the Catholicism.

I knew the Memorare.

I knew the litanies.

I could say the rosary.

I was I was in choir at church.

I would do the first reading and the second reading.

And every time the Corinthians were writing letters,

I was there reading them out.

I always wondered,

You know,

The Corinthians never wrote back.

So I was like,

What are these encyclicals?

What are these,

You know,

Letters going out to everyone?

There were lots of questions with the doctrine.

And I went to Sunday school.

And so you had religion as a subject in school.

And because I went to a Christian school,

They taught me they taught me about Christianity and all the non-Christians.

So the kids from the other faiths had moral science.

So they figured this out really well.

And by the time you've come out of school,

You're pretty well ingrained in in the Christian doctrine.

And it was all very fascinating to me.

And I went to a Christian college as well.

The Christians actually have had a very,

Very long legacy of quality education in India,

For which I am very,

Very thankful.

Yeah.

And,

You know,

You grew up with all the saints and someone asked me,

Oh,

When is your birthday?

And I would be like,

Oh,

It's Jan 28th.

And they would say,

Oh,

That's St.

Thomas Aquinas' Saint Day.

And that's such a good saint.

And then you go look up your little lives of saints and you think,

Wow,

You know,

Thomas Aquinas is not a bad one to have because everyone else is kind of healing the sick and sort of,

You know,

Dying for for all kinds of things.

But Thomas Aquinas was right there.

You know,

He was writing books.

He was changing the way we viewed Christianity.

So it was engaging in so many different ways.

And it was really fascinating.

So I was very happy to be Catholic for a large part of my life.

I think based on our conversation prior that you were no longer Roman Catholic.

Is that true?

Yeah,

I think I am Roman Catholic on paper because our records are still with the church,

Though they're still with the state as well.

But I think somewhere as I grew up,

I realized that I liked the pageantry.

I loved how the church looked and I loved the music and I still do.

And I think somewhere I ended up being and I don't want to call myself a lapsed Catholic because that just is so it just sounds like I have fallen.

But I just wanted to say that I am a disconnected Catholic now.

So I don't believe and not so much that I don't believe because there's somebody else,

You know,

I just believe that there's something else out there and I don't I don't consider myself a practicing Catholic at all.

Have you in your life ever felt like you've witnessed a miracle or the magic of the universe or some experience where you've been a witness?

Have you had an experience like that?

This actually is the hardest question I've been asked in a very long time.

When you reached out to me with the question,

I started thinking about it and I was like,

Gosh,

You know,

I'm just going to I'm going to I'm going to figure something out.

When I heard the question,

I was like,

Gosh,

I better find an answer because then I'll be prepared for it.

And the more I thought about it,

The more I thought about it,

The less I had an answer for you.

And then I asked a bunch of friends and they were like,

Gosh,

I don't know,

This is such a personal question.

You should answer it yourself.

Of course,

I wasn't going to take their answers,

But I wanted some help and I didn't get it.

So I've been thinking about it for quite some time.

And it's wonderful to be able to think this hard about a question,

Which I haven't thought for a while.

So thank you for asking it.

The way that I want to answer it is that I don't think that miracles are necessarily single events in one's life.

A lot of people think a miracle is yet to happen to me,

Or I did or I did not witness a miracle or I'm missing out on them.

I also want to think of miracles as a longer experience and a longer understanding of life.

I believe that it may not just be a quick burst rather than a slow burn of something wonderful that's happening to you.

That said,

I consider myself an extremely lucky person.

If you ask me on a scale of one to 10,

How lucky I am,

I'm a nine.

So I won't win.

I won't win bingo very easily.

I'm not the kind of person who's,

You know,

Whose ticket you'll pull out when you're playing the lotto.

I won't win the car.

I'm not going to get five nights and four days in Bangkok for answering,

You know,

A question on the radio.

I'm not that kind of lucky,

But I'm so lucky in so many different ways because I struggle a lot less with a lot of things that I find everyone around me struggling with.

I'm a journalist.

I went to bed on Thursday night thinking,

Oh,

Man,

I have to write my column this week and I didn't have anything for my call.

And on Friday morning,

I'd gone to the bazaar,

I'd gone to the market and I came back with fresh peas because they're in season now.

And I sat shelling them and listening to something on the phone.

And I got my idea right there.

And that's when I knew how I wanted to answer this question as well.

I do think that there's something out there that has my back and has my back more than it has other people's back.

I don't know what I've done to deserve it.

But for me,

That miracle is that I'm always buffered from the really bad stuff.

I'm always buffered from a really bad day.

It's never as bad for me.

And I'm always able to find a silver lining when other people are only looking at dark clouds.

It's probably why I'm so optimistic and so happy all the time.

And you see it on Instagram with all of my posts as well.

And I think it just comes from the fact that I'm in a much happier place because there's something that's putting me in a happier place.

And I think that's my miracle.

I didn't think of myself as a particularly positive person.

You don't see yourself until someone else points it out to you.

And everyone is like,

Gosh,

Rachel,

You're so positive all the time.

And I'm like,

Oh,

No,

Please,

I don't think so.

And I realized that,

Oh,

My God,

Yeah,

You know,

I am positive all the time.

So I'm afflicted with a certain kind of happiness.

And I think that's probably my miracle.

Well,

I think that's beautiful.

And I have a couple of things to say.

One is that we've discussed that you're very joyful.

And through your Instagram feed,

You are bringing joy to lots and lots of people all over the world.

And so I find that when people are tasked with that in this life,

When they are tasked with bringing happiness and spreading joy and lifting up others,

You know,

Their life becomes the miracle.

Yes.

And so you and yourself,

I'm listening to you,

You are the miracle because you are,

Along with millions of other people all over the world,

Lifting others up.

It's a sacred duty,

Right?

Because what you're doing takes a lot of energy and the energy is going out,

Is going out,

It is going out.

So where does your wellspring come from?

And so I would suggest that your miracle is that the wellspring is continually rejuvenated and filled by source.

Yeah,

No,

That's such a beautiful way to put it.

Because if someone had to ask me,

Where does all your joyfulness come from?

I don't know.

I'm not drinking a tonic every morning.

This isn't a little bit of yuckled,

You know?

I don't know.

And I really do think there is something out there that is refilling me in ways that I'm able to refill other people.

I also think that being happy and being joyful and spreading hope and not spreading hate is a conscious decision.

It costs a lot of energy.

I don't mean that I'm sort of weeping tears while I'm keying happy thoughts,

Happy thoughts on my Instagram.

Of course not.

But to be able to see the world differently while everyone thinks it's burning is a special kind of energy.

To sit in a taxi and just go to your destination versus looking up and realizing there's a papaya on your head is a certain kind of energy.

To be able to,

And you mentioned that you went to a church and it was art deco.

For you to notice architecture,

See the beauty in it and appreciate it is a certain kind of energy.

Because there are a lot of people who just don't see how beautiful their world is.

But they're quick to point out everything that's wrong with it.

I will give you another example.

I have a friend who was going through a very bad relationship.

It just seemed like she didn't have any confidence in herself.

All right.

So I asked her,

It was late at night,

We were in a hotel room and I asked her to find 10 things that she likes about herself that no one can take away from her.

And she struggled.

She couldn't get past three.

She couldn't get past three things that she liked about herself.

And she said,

You know,

If you ask me about things that I didn't like about myself,

I go on and on.

And I said,

No,

But that's not what I'm asking.

I'm asking you about things you love about yourself.

I could tell you 10 things that I love about you.

But why can't you find 10 things you love about yourself?

Even if it's as simple as you love the way your hair curls.

She's got beautiful girly hair,

By the way.

And so she said,

Yeah,

I suppose.

And I said,

Suppose I gave you a compliment now and told you that your head is beautiful.

How much would you really believe it?

And she'd be like,

No,

I believe it.

But you could tell from her tone that she was just humoring me.

Sometimes if people are saying lovely things about you,

Just take it.

And sometimes believe those things about yourself before people tell you that.

And when the pandemic hit in March this month for us in India,

The lockdown was really bad because India went into lockdown at some four hours notice.

Yeah,

So overnight,

Everything just shut.

We were not prepared.

So she was really unhappy because she couldn't go to work.

She was at home in her family home.

And I said,

Why don't we figure out something?

We'll we'll every night I'll send you 10 wonderful things that happened in my day or 10 things that I'm thankful about.

And it doesn't have to be what I did at 10 a.

M.

And then 11 a.

M.

Or whatever.

It's just things that you're happy about.

And why don't you share a list of your own as well?

And so she did and she would struggle,

Struggle,

Struggle through,

I think,

April.

But by May,

She was sort of filling in 20 things and 18 things.

And she started to see that she was in a bad situation,

But she was not a bad person.

And I think it taught me that seeing the bright side is a learned skill and that you really need to work on it because it's so easy to be taken away from you.

Sometimes we just don't realize that this is our purpose or sometimes we don't choose our purpose.

It's you know,

It's just something that happens to you.

And like I said,

Up until recently,

When someone said,

Oh,

You're so positive all the time.

Or you're so optimistic or you're you know,

You bring joy.

I'd be like,

What?

What are you talking about?

I just have a good sense of humor and I see the funny side in a lot more things.

But I'm realizing it's all part of the same,

You know,

The same shimmering light.

I mean,

It's always better to laugh,

Isn't it?

I like to think,

You know,

When people talk about the Big Bang or they talk about in the Bible that God created the world in seven days,

I'm like,

God created the world with joy and laughter.

I would love to see that each of those things that happen on each of those seven days was just the result of maybe day one was a chuckle.

Day two was a guffaw.

You know,

Day three was a little snigger.

And so it's like all the different kinds of laughter created our universe.

And to me,

That's just the most beautiful thing because it is such life giving energy.

Absolutely.

And God definitely has a sense of humor.

I mean,

Have you seen the arms on a T-Rex?

Of course he has a sense of humor.

Those guys can't brush their teeth.

They can't hug.

There had to be some kind of little chuckle happening when when the dinosaurs were created as well.

I'm a very organized person,

So if you tell me that my purpose is to spread joy around in my head,

I'm making a to do list.

To do.

Spread joy,

You know,

And it's come this naturally and so beautifully to me all this time.

Without me realizing it,

And it's almost come as a surprise that I am doing it.

So if someone is now saying I'm a miracle,

It feels wonderful,

Right?

It feels like it feels like there's warm soup,

To use one of your terms,

Going all the way through my body and feeling wonderful.

So,

Yes,

I I do on one level believe that I must be a miracle,

But I also believe that we all are.

How could we all not be the grumpy person?

My grumpy boyfriend is a miracle.

My grumpy cat is a miracle.

I do think that we are all miracles and we are meant to sort of fit together and operate peacefully towards something.

The more we try to stand apart,

The less we are reaching towards that goal.

And it's not it's not as blase as civilization.

It's humanity as a whole that needs to be better.

And we're only better together.

I sound like an Australian stamp,

But yeah.

Joy for me,

Channeling joy was not natural for me for a very,

Very long time.

Very,

Very long.

There are ways to inhabit it and channel it,

Even if it's not natural for you.

And I think that's what you're trying to say is that everyone's a miracle.

Everyone has something to contribute.

But sometimes it takes some work,

Some effort,

Some dedication to become that channel.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Sometimes you need the fuel for the light to burn and you need to kind of pour it in yourself.

I also believe that joy isn't always huge,

Big.

It's not a mushroom cloud of joy every day all the time.

But joy isn't really tiny things,

Tinier than you might sometimes imagine.

If you're not looking,

If you're not paying attention,

There's so much missing you by.

And so much of the little things that miss you by are actually so nice that you're really missing out on great stuff.

It's more than just taxi ceilings sometimes.

If you love your city,

If you love where you are.

Mumbai is an incredibly hard city to love,

I have to say.

It's too crowded,

It's too noisy,

It's too expensive,

It's too congested.

There are just too many problems happening all at the same time,

Usually in the path that you have to take.

And you're usually stuck in a traffic jam.

But to be able to in that traffic jam see joy sometimes is incredibly hard.

But you can look up and look at your taxi ceiling and find joy there.

And that's a place that you didn't think to look.

Or you can start a conversation with your taxi driver,

Which I do often.

And after we've gotten past the usual questions of,

How are you not married yet,

Young lady?

And you've answered them saying,

Oh,

Don't worry,

It's just around the corner,

Says my astrologer.

And once you've gotten those out of the way,

You get to know who your taxi driver is and what he's been doing in the city.

And how he wants to educate his daughters.

And his unique way of looking at the world and why he doesn't want to spend money on the stock market because they're all a bunch of fools.

And you found a way to smile for five minutes more that day than you otherwise would have.

So you need to find the energy to find those five minutes.

And I think that's joy as well.

You weren't put on this planet to whine about it.

You were put on this planet to change it.

You weren't put on this planet to grumble about everything.

Or maybe you were because I was put on this planet to balance you.

So it takes all types,

But all of those types have to work together.

I think that's really how we're going to move forward.

It's very interesting.

They've recently discovered with bacteria,

You know,

They're all separate little individuals.

But there are times when a group of bacteria will get together and they'll start vibrating and the vibration will spread across.

And it creates a more unified organism with this vibration.

So it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

And also you can see echoes of that in quantum physics,

Right?

When one particle starts vibrating and others near to it,

They create a quantum resonance and it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

And I think that plays into what you're suggesting.

The more people that bring joy into the world,

The more people that lift others up,

The more people that bring laughter and humility and love to the world.

It's going to create a greater coherence.

Ripple effect.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And if you're going to ripple something,

You ripple the good stuff,

You know,

Let out a part of happiness if you're going to.

So I think it's the only way to live.

And that's a wrap on season three.

Thanks for listening to episode 30 of Bite Size Blessings,

The podcast all about the magic and spirit that surrounds us.

If only we open our eyes to it and whether you choose to listen to our bite sized offerings for that five to 10 minutes of freedom in your day or the longer interviews,

We're grateful you're here.

I need to thank my amazing guest,

Rachel Lopez,

For sharing her story today.

I learned about her in an article in Business Insider.

She's also been featured on PRI International,

Rootsandleisure.

Com and MyModernMet.

Com among many other platforms.

She's a little bit of an internet celebrity,

And she very generously gave up her time and wisdom so that we could create episode 30 of this podcast.

She's also a journalist for the Hindustan Times.

If you'd like to read an archive of her works for that newspaper,

Type in her name,

Rachel Lopez,

As well as Hindustan Times.

Read some of her articles and you'll see just why I am so enchanted with her.

Also find her Instagram account,

Thegreaterbombay.

There you'll find images of the art on the vintage Mumbai taxis that she photographs.

They'll be sure to enchant you as well.

I need to thank the creators of the music for episode 30,

Raphael Crux,

Kevin MacLeod,

Edie P.

Wente,

And Music L.

Files.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite Size Blessings website at bitesizeblessings.

Com.

On the website,

You'll find links to other episodes,

Books,

Change makers,

And music I think will lift and inspire you.

Thank you for listening,

And here's my one request.

Be like Rachel.

Live into the joy and happiness in every moment,

And don't be afraid to create your own.