The City of Lights March 5, Varanassi, Uttar Pradesh The intensity of India is remarkable — depending on the day’s events, travelers are consistently either cursing or loving this colorful menagerie of ancient human civilization. There is no in between, you’re either retching or savoring; while reeling through its mystical layers of celebration and suffering. How you view the country depends on whether bizarre current cultural jolts move your spirit or turn your stomach. The Hindus are far more accepting of the extremes in life; living and dying are set on a course beyond man’s control. Among the deeply religious, little effort is made to affect the future. Although the major cities are thought of as the real India, Varanassi instantly lives up to its legend as the best and the worst. On the western banks of the hideously polluted Ganges River lies this fabled City of Lights, the most sacred of sites for Hindu pilgrims. On the massive granite steps of holy ghats along the riverbanks, the devoted come to bathe away sin or sip the magic waters. To expire in Varanassi is believed to free the soul; cremation on the riverbank is the ultimate burial rite. Aged cripples and the incurably sick arriving to die are housed in riverside ashrams, waiting to transcend. By the time melted snow from the shoulders of the northern Himalayas reaches Varanassi, this murky soup has become an oxygen-free sludge of poisonous bacteria and dangerous microbes. Upriver cities, with their 15 million people, pump untreated raw sewage and chemical waste directly downstream towards the highest concentration of humans in Uttar Pradesh. Those further south are even less fortunate. From bank side sunset religious ceremonies to cremating the dead, life along the Ganges rocks the senses of wandering Westerners here to bend their minds. From the water’s edge, centuries-old red brick temples hum with mesmerizing songs and harmonious chanting, while bells and gongs permeate the soggy stench of muggy evening air. While the thumping beats of American rock ’n’ roll will urge you to move your body, repetitious Indian chords tug at your mind, changing directions just at the moment you seem to identify one. Repeating taps of tabla drums lull the consciousness so it’s slow enough for softly plucked strings of twanging sitars to sweetly penetrate your mind. Gently guiding listeners inward, in unfamiliar keys, soothing voices moan of myths and legends millenniums old. Varanassi becomes an irresistible spiritual seduction. The Indian experience is tough to describe — tourists and travelers seldom agree on what draws them back. Still, a lure overshadows the exasperation, and no one visits India just once. Everyone returns. Is it the twisting of our souls in painful reminders of how simple life should be? Or is it the realization of the insignificance of all that surrounds us, including ourselves? From cheap hash to meditation and yoga, whatever entices you to India is sure to change your life and revolutionize your perspective. Emaciated foreigners in local costume, some sincerely converted and others just striving to be cool, saunter about in stately poses speaking only to each other. Everything is real, yet nothing is as it seems. And in the steady spinning of your thoughts, you never know what’s next to twist whatever you once thought to be true.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 05:03:30 +0000
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