Bodh Gaya to Varanasi
...road stop on the Grand Trunk Road. Drivers and travelers having their lunches in a small food court. A Thai monk gets his meal in fifteen minutes before his noon fasting deadline. A rather well-to-do Tibetan teacher comes in with a western student. A couple of other Westerners sit with their guide, and behind them, a quartet of Burmese aunties, tell-tale due to the style of their sarongs, and the shape of their faces and eyes...
...So many photos taken, so many more missed. Rushing through the landscape in the frenetic roadshow that is eternal India...
Varanasi
...Varanasi at dawn. Silhouettes of dogs and cows against the housefronts, backlit by strands of Diwali lights. Shadow against the wall of a tonga and its sleeping driver...
... music and chanting at Asi Ghat, small groups of women sitting waiting to board a boat. They are taking part in a Chhath Puja where they fast and ritually bathe as prayers for the long life of their husbands and the overall. All through our journey, we've run into these women, dipping into the Ganges wherever we met the river, from the Himalaya to Calcutta...
...an elderly father is being led gingerly over the broken cobblestones on the way to the bathing ghat.. Women bathe discreetly between boats. Young boys splash and dance around naked...
...benches overturned for no other reason than sheer vandalism. Shiva at work...
......looking forward to a beer after a dry week, only to find a sign in my room telling me that alcohol is prohibited in town. Sigh. Life is suffering...
...people sometimes touch cows as they pass, presumably for luck...
...near the sati stone at Dandi Ghat is graffiti brushed in 1995, to emphasize awareness about missing and murdered women...
...at the nighttime puja of Ganga Aarti, young people clap on each of the four beats, while the old timers clap every other, on the one and three. Foreigners too busy to clap at all, their hands busy photographing with their phones...
...the strange silence during a dawn walk along the ghats and the river...
...drifting slowly down the river, as Tania lays her husband's ashes to rest, fulfilling a decades old promise...
...the timelessness of approaching the Manikarnika funeral ghats by boat in the dark...
...on TV at the airport, a Bollywood film that has kung-fu type action. During the actual fight, a message scrolls across the bottom of the screen, showing a telephone number to call to complain about content, meaning here perhaps, the violence...
...and I leave India with a controversial confusion. Over a decade as a yoga teacher, I was immersed in elements of Hinduism, which naturally inspired me. Admittedly this inspiration was second hand, as I feel one has to be born into Hinduism (a sentiment I would extend to Shinto, which John Dougill calls the "religion of being Japanese"). But what inspired me wasn't really Hinduism so much as what came before it. I always found that ancient spirituality as a beacon of sorts, and looked not directly into the light's glare but outward at what that light illuminated. Yet after this long hard look at the country, I wonder now if spirituality still exists in India. Certainly religion does, absolutely, for religion is everywhere in India. But what I didn't find was morality. Religion as practiced seemed to be defined by the usual problems that religion causes: caste prejudice, misogyny, religious violence. Nowhere did I see the beauty and benefit that a rich spiritual life can bring. No love, merely division. Again, these thoughts aren't meant to be offensive, but are simply a longing to understand...
On the turntable: Genesis, "Seconds Out"
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