Transcript
Good day, dear listeners, greetings everyone. Here is a little surprise. You were probably expecting this episode, like the others, to begin with the standard intro, that familiar intro song that has accompanied us through more than twenty episodes. However, the reason we are beginning this episode with this voice is that it is special for two reasons.
The first is the content, namely the exceptionally interesting guest we are talking to in today’s episode. The second is that this episode is, in a way, the result of one of today’s listeners reaching out to us directly through our Facebook page. So I would like to take this opportunity to invite everyone who wants to share their life stories with us to get in touch. Based on those messages, we will not only find the content for future episodes and shape what they will look like, but also arrange the date of the call, the recording date, and finally the release of the episode.
I would also like to use this opportunity to ask all listeners who want to share these stories with the people they care about to do so first and foremost by following us on the platforms where the podcast is published, such as YouTube. Of course, YouTube as a platform has its own algorithms, and it can influence whether your friends on social networks, as well as the people who follow you, get direct insight into what is happening on our channel.
So if you would like to do something helpful both for yourselves and for the people close to you, without constantly sending them clips from the Priče iz dijaspore podcast on YouTube or audio files through other platforms where you listen to podcasts, simply follow us on YouTube. That way both you and others will receive direct notifications whenever a new episode is published.
That is all from me for this short announcement. The podcast continues after the well-known intro song. Thank you for listening, and we will hear from each other again very soon. Greetings.
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Good day, dear listeners, greetings everyone. My name is Gavrilo Nikolić, and this is Priče iz dijaspore. Today, the Priče iz dijaspore podcast takes us, for the first time, to India, and before I introduce today’s guest, I will briefly present the path her life has taken so far.
She is an English teacher by profession, and today she is a motivational speaker and therapist devoted to memories of past lives. After the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia, she worked as an interpreter for UNPROFOR in her hometown of Vukovar, and twenty years ago she moved to Barcelona, where she founded the NGO Slav Home. In 2016, she began traveling the world, and she is currently in Jaipur, India.
And before we begin a spiritual journey through India with my guest today, this is the right moment to introduce her by her full name. Meri Ilić, live from India. Meri, welcome to the Priče iz dijaspore podcast.
Thank you, it is lovely to be here.
Meri, before we focus on India and your current activities, as well as your spiritual journey through that ancient land, let’s start from the beginning and go through your life path. What was your childhood like in those happier times of the twentieth century in the former Yugoslavia?
The beginning has to start with the fact that my parents are from Serbia, that I was born in Zagreb, lived in Niš, and in the end found myself in Vukovar after the war, despite everything that happened there and everything I witnessed. From Vukovar I left for Spain with two small children, as a divorced woman. Since I had already divorced in Niš, I arrived in Vukovar to work for UNPROFOR, but with my two small children. So it is a very unusual story.
What was it like living in Vukovar in the 1990s? I belong to a younger generation, so I do not remember those events very well, but what was it like to live and work in Vukovar at the beginning of the nineties? Did the situation change from one day to the next, so that one day everything was normal and the next, as Americans would say, all hell broke loose? Or was there already some tension in the air for quite a while?
It was not easy, because I arrived just after the ceasefire had been signed and I began working for UNPROFOR as an interpreter for humanitarian aid. I was there with two children. Serbs did not trust me because they thought that, since I was born in Zagreb, I was probably working for the Croats. Croats suspected that I was probably working for the Serbs because I had lived in Serbia.
And all the while, we were helping everyone, because everyone was in trouble and everyone needed help. At one point, a group of UNPROFOR members ended up confined somewhere, or an attack was expected. Precisely because they were isolated, I went there every day to ask who needed medicine, who needed special food, who wanted me to call their family abroad.
Then one night the police came to my door, threatened me, and both my life and the lives of my children were in danger. They asked me why I was going to that house when those people were in isolation. I told them first that those people paid me and that I had a moral obligation to check on them if they were isolated. And second, perhaps one day my children would be in a similar situation, helping some other people, and I hoped that someone would help them then.
Exactly. A great deal can already be sensed from that one example alone, and I believe there were many situations like that. Then in the late nineties and early two-thousands, you decided to leave the Balkans and go to Barcelona. Why Barcelona in particular? How did that decision come about?
It was 1995, and perhaps the reason sounds a little funny and naive, but I came to that city through astrology. Every city has its own zodiac sign, and we can always calculate what life there might be like for us. At that moment, it was the only city where I would suffer a little less than in some other place. So it was not the best solution, only the less painful one.
What was it like to move to Spain at that time? We should mention that this was before fast internet, in a time when keeping in touch was much harder. What was it like then, and what was it like getting used to Spain and its culture? I know that our peoples are somewhat similar, and I myself have been to Spain several times, but what is it like to live there and adapt to Spanish everyday life?
Barcelona, as the capital of Catalonia, has a saying in Catalan that says Barcelona is very beautiful if your pockets are full of money. I think that describes Barcelona very well. I was there last year, and I think you can confirm that from personal experience. People in Barcelona really do live differently than in the rest of Spain. My first encounter with Spain was in Madrid around 2014 or 2015, when I went there on a business trip, and everything was exactly how I had imagined Spain: loud, lively, and at the time hardly anyone spoke English, not on the street and not even in hotels.
A few years later I went to Barcelona and was shocked. I remember waking up on my first morning, going to a bakery for breakfast and coffee, and the woman greeted me in English right away. I walked out of the bakery thinking: wait a second, is it really possible that people here speak English? The mentality there is different from the rest of Spain. They seem calmer, less loud, and probably because of Catalan they speak more languages and have a somewhat softer accent.
Yes, the mentality in Barcelona and Catalonia is different from other parts of Spain. But we arrived there as immigrants with very little money, and for three years we were undocumented. In other words, we had no papers. Even so, my lucky stars guided me and kept leading me to very unusual solutions.
In our life, and by our life I mean me and my two children, there was never any normal or logical solution. Without any papers at all, the secret police found me, and as an undocumented person I worked for the Barcelona secret police for two years. That is how we survived.
Truly fascinating. We may not go into details, unless of course you would like to keep those for yourself. But how did things develop after three years of living without legal status? Today a story like that might sound more familiar, but back then it was not common. How did you move from undocumented status to legal residence? And how much did that experience with the secret police help you remain there and later build, we could say, a business life in Barcelona and in Spain more broadly?
They could not help me directly, because that would have revealed that I was working for them. They found me through UNPROFOR, because there is a database shared among such organizations. However, under the law at the time, after three years of undocumented residence, if you could prove that you had been there and had not broken the law, you were allowed to move into legal status. That is how we obtained our papers.
A very interesting beginning, and from there we can already draw a parallel with what happened later. You obtained legal residence together with your family, became independent in Barcelona, and life was finally able to move forward. How did the idea of founding Slav Home come about, and how did you decide to enter the world of entrepreneurship instead of dedicating yourself to work in large companies or other kinds of jobs?
The idea of business had existed in me for a long time, even when I was still in Niš. I used to run a beauty salon and a passive gymnastics salon, back in the time before the war. Then the war brought everything to a stop.
And the Slavic Home, or Slav Home, was born out of pain. Out of pain, out of a loss of identity, out of suffering. During the first year, I denied my Slavic roots and hated Yugoslavia, thinking it was to blame for the situation we had ended up in. The next year I hated Spain and the Spanish because they did not accept us. I found myself in no-man’s-land: I no longer belonged to Yugoslavia, which no longer existed, but I was not part of Spain either, because Spain had not accepted me.
Out of that pain came the idea of creating an association that would help all those who did not know where they belonged. At first it was organized mainly for people from Slavic countries, but very soon people also started coming from countries that did not have their own associations, such as Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia. Suddenly we became ambassadors of culture, and everyone who was not from big, powerful countries started coming to the association.
What kind of response did you get at the beginning? Was there any hesitation among the people who came, any suspicion toward the idea itself, and how quickly did the idea spread? When did you realize that it was becoming something truly big?
It became big all of a sudden. We organized ourselves in July 2007, and for the Orthodox New Year we organized a celebration. We wanted it to be something different. The doorman of the building where we were located told us that we had to be careful because the people there were not used to noise or social gatherings beyond the usual hello in front of the elevator.
I went around to all the neighbors and invited them to the celebration. I told them that it was another New Year, that we Slavs celebrate both one and the other because we respect all holidays, and that I would love for them to come. About thirty people knew that Slav Home existed. But when the celebration started, everyone brought something, as that had been the arrangement.
From those thirty people, one hundred and fifty showed up, and almost all the neighbors came too, except one woman who was bedridden. The building had five floors with four apartments on each one, and someone came from almost every apartment. It was a huge breakthrough. An even bigger surprise came when, just before midnight, people from TV Barcelona knocked on the door to do a live segment about a celebration of cultures.
Everyone saw us as an embassy of cultures. From then on, everything moved forward at incredible speed. It did not flourish financially right away, but it did in terms of activities: bringing people together, creating international festivals, exhibitions, connecting cultures, and helping people obtain documents. In that sense, we remained active until 2016, when I left Barcelona.
I would just like to bring you back for a moment before we move on to 2016, which is clearly crucial for your later professional and personal development. At that point, from 2007 onward, Slav Home was steadily growing. What kinds of projects were you involved in through Slav Home, together with the members of the association? Which project would you single out as especially important or interesting, perhaps also for people today who want to start something similar in their own communities where there are not many people from our region?
We offered free advice on how to obtain papers. We also had a Catalan lawyer who gave our members a thirty percent discount to help them sort out their documents.
After that, we also worked a lot on helping people find jobs and apartments. We could not help everyone, but at the very least we created a network of contacts, and people started helping one another.
Many activities were also tied to cultural events. Rejecting another culture often comes from not knowing it. Rejecting immigrants comes from fear of what those immigrants might bring. But when you get to know their culture, their customs, and their food, you begin to accept those people too. That is why we organized many cultural events, from folklore festivals to concerts, gatherings, and discussions on different topics. The range of activities was truly broad.
Then 2016 arrived. As we said, that was the year when you began traveling the world. How did that click happen, and how did you move toward the work you do today, especially your work related to past lives?
I had wanted to travel for a very long time. When I was six years old and people asked me what I wanted to do, I said only this: I will teach people to be happy all around the world. But I did not understand at all what that meant.
In the meantime, I trained to become an English teacher, I qualified as a life and professional coach, I took many psychology courses, and I was involved in many social activities. I never understood where all of that was leading. It all seemed so different, like a fan spread open into many parts, and it was not clear to me that one day they would all become parts of the same thing.
When we started with Slav Home, we were in a huge apartment that we were renovating. I had already had, so to speak, encounters that were not from this dimension, but I kept denying them. One day my older son came in and said: Mom, do you know why this apartment had been empty for twenty years?
It was an abandoned apartment in ruins, huge, around 360 square meters, which we got at a very low price to renovate. We could not understand why no one had taken it for twenty years. I asked my son: I do not know, did you find out? He told me that a neighbor had said there were spirits in the apartment and that a murder had taken place there twenty years earlier, but that ever since we had moved in, those spirits had been going to her place, because whenever I entered the house, they would leave it.
I found that funny. I asked: Fine, but how would she know that? He said the owner had asked someone to confirm why he could not rent the apartment out, and he was told it was because of the spirits, but also that if he lowered the price, someone would come who was not from Spain, a woman who had the ability to communicate with them.
I still found it funny, but I began feeling their presence more and more and receiving thoughts. At one point I realized that the killing had happened by accident, that nobody had intended to kill anyone, but that it had happened that way nonetheless. After a month the spirits were gone, they were no longer present, but the idea remained in me that I needed to learn more about all of it and begin studying past lives.
That is how I began, with Brian Weiss, and from there it kept glowing inside me and becoming stronger and stronger. At first it was more like something I explored casually with friends. Then in 2015 my younger son, who was in Hamburg because of his career, said: Mom, I no longer want to live just in order to work. I want to work enough to live and to travel.
So we set off. The first trip around the world was with him. There was an idea inside me that three circles around the world were needed. I never understood why, but later it was explained to me that they were three karmic circles. I did the second one alone, and on the third I was physically alone, but in my heart I was already in love with a man I had met in India.
India was the first country on that third circle. When I finished the third one, it was logical either that we would separate or that he would find me where I was and we would decide what to do next. The agreement was that I would return to India. And that is how I have been here since January, after four years of travel.
Truly interesting. You traveled through many countries around the world. We will not focus too much on the others, just to leave room for other members of our diaspora to talk about them, but let us now turn to India. India really is a magical country, full of cultures and so much more. What is it like to work and live in India? How much time have you had to travel through India? Let us focus primarily on the period before the lockdown, though you can also mention what it is like living through such restrictions together with so many other people.
Before the isolation, it was much easier. In fact, before the isolation it was possible to travel, and now it is not. I visited Goa, Delhi, and the Taj Mahal. I also visited Rajasthan, that desert part of India, and many old cities, places that feel like India as it once was. And that is the most beautiful part.
The plan is to register a travel agency. At first it would be for domestic tourism, and later also for foreign tourists, because sooner or later all of this has to end. As people say, both good and bad things pass eventually.
How you experience isolation depends on how you cope with it. If you decide only to suffer and think about the fact that you are confined, then it is hard. But if you decide to use the time to think, to plan, to learn something new, to work on yourself and your health, then the days pass quickly.
I chose the second path. I have to be ready for the moment when the borders reopen and when we can step out of our apartments. Not only the borders of the country, but even the borders of our own streets. I need to be ready.
I have not stopped working, because I do a lot of work online. People contact me, and what I do is essentially an exchange of energy, so I do everything through WhatsApp calls.
Exactly. Thanks to the internet, many jobs can now be done online, including yours. Do you have any contact with our community in India? How many of our people are there in India in general?
There are very few of us. I managed to establish contact with the embassy, but what I understood was that the ambassador was already near the end of his term, so they could not do very much. In Jaipur I do not know anyone; it seems there is no one here except me. There are more of our people in Delhi and Mumbai. So I am waiting for the isolation to end so I can reconnect with people. At the moment I am the only ambassador of our region here in Jaipur.
Exactly. Meri, we are slowly approaching the end of the episode. We have explored a truly fascinating life story that you have shared with us. Now let us look at the causes and consequences of your decisions, starting with the first standard question we ask all our guests: why did you leave Serbia, and what was your key motivation for leaving?
The key motivation was work, what I saw in Vukovar, the realization that there would be no quick solution, and the desire to give my children different possibilities. I could not control what they would choose from those possibilities, but it is a parent’s duty to give children opportunities. That was the basic reason that set me in motion.
Exactly. And now let us take a look into the future. You are currently in India, but how do you see yourself in the future? Do you see yourself in our region, and in what way?
When you live in so many countries, and I was not a tourist, because in each country I lived anywhere from a week to five months, and I lived the way local people live. I always go where they eat, I use their local transport. I never behave like a tourist, but rather like a traveler. I always used to say that: I am a traveler, not a tourist.
Then you realize that all countries are in some way your countries, that all cultures are your cultures, and that what matters is not where you live but how you live and what kind of communication you have with people. At the moment India is my country, and at the moment my heart is in India, but my heart is large enough that all the countries that once made up Yugoslavia are still inside it.
Even today I cannot say that I am only from Serbia or only from Croatia. I remember that in Barcelona, when people from all parts of the former Yugoslavia came to the Slavic Home, they said to me: Sister, we are brothers and sisters, it does not matter that Yugoslavia no longer exists. So I do see myself in those countries of ours as well, though not necessarily as someone who will live there again and drop anchor there.
I will keep coming back, I am in contact with many people, I work with many people, and I hope I will be able to present the book I am writing about this journey, as well as my workshops. Our countries will never be outside my heart. And whether India will be forever, or whether some other country will appear later, we shall see. Life writes novels.
Exactly. We will leave your contact details in the show notes below once the podcast is published, so that people can reach out to you, even if only to exchange ideas and thoughts with you. And when the book is published, why not, we will promote it on the Facebook page as well, so that people can order it and get to know the beauty of India more directly, and not just through this short conversation gain some insight into how people live and work there.
Yes, India is magical, I can tell you that. One year I was alone after an emotional breakup in Barcelona, and that night, or rather that day, I was at the Taj Mahal, looking at the mausoleum, feeling the energy of love, and reflecting on how love is much stronger than life and how it exists even after death, but that in truth we should live love while we are alive.
That mausoleum is only something people come to see, but love should have been lived while the two of them were still alive. Then I came from the Taj Mahal to Jaipur, got off at the railway station, and met a young man whose energy gave me peace and security, and I have now been with him for a year and a half.
Truly, the way life creates moments and the way those moments teach us to value life again, that is something special.
Exactly.
For the very end, Meri, thank you very much for appearing on the Priče iz dijaspore podcast. I hope people were truly able to gain some insight into what it is like to live and work not only in India but in the rest of the world as well, and how certain events, which may not seem crucial to some, still shape our lives and give us the opportunity to better understand the meaning of life and get to know ourselves.
Yes, self-knowledge is always the most important thing.
Exactly. Meri, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it as well and that listeners will draw important lessons from this, and that they will have the chance to get to know your work more directly, perhaps through direct contact with you or later through your book and your stories straight from India and the rest of the world.
Thank you for the invitation. It was truly a pleasure to take part.
Thank you very much, and goodbye everyone. Greetings from Meri and Gavrilo.
Goodbye.