World Courant
Antwerp, Belgium — The streets of Antwerp’s Diamond Quarter are lined with jewellery shops, pawn retailers and eating places. Balls of gefilte fish glisten invitingly within the window of Hoffy’s, a beloved and long-standing Jewish restaurant. Across the nook is a lunch line for Aahaar, an Indian restaurant catering to Antwerp’s Jain neighborhood, the place I meet Akash Jain for lunch.
“You may get pleasure from good issues in life, however what issues is doing it in a great way and being a mild individual,” says Akash, who sits throughout from me at a desk, tucking right into a plate of curry greens. “It is the distinction between reducing somebody’s hair or nails and slitting their throat. Management your self. Solely take what you want. That’s the Jain philosophy.”
Akash’s easy vegetarian food plan is a mirrored image of his religious religion. The Jain dedication to non-violence is so strongly aligned that monks and nuns sweep the bottom in entrance of them to keep away from stepping on bugs. Each spiritual figures and lay folks – together with Akash – observe a strict vegetarian food plan, catered by eating places like Aahaar. Even root greens are prohibited as a result of harvesting them kills the plant.
Nevertheless, the skilled world by which Akash works, together with most of the 1,500-strong Jain neighborhood in Antwerp, is something however modest.
Jains dominate Antwerp’s diamond trade, essentially the most profitable and influential on this planet, which has slowly changed the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood over the previous sixty years. How, then, did a religion based mostly on moderation and non-attachment to materials issues come to dominate this most glittering and profane of professions?
“Jewellery and diamonds are in my blood,” says Akash with a self-effacing smile. “My dad and mom and grandparents had been concerned within the commerce of treasured metals, gold bullion and pearls in India. The Jain neighborhood is historically very extremely educated; they’re primarily lively in enterprise, administration, finance and accounting. Since historic occasions, Jains have traded in gem stones, diamonds, spices and garments.”