India is not a fun place. It’s just not. Not when you’re sober at least.
But it’s interesting, yes, it sucks you up in its experience, you cannot hide from its strong reality.
India will rub itself in your face, you won’t have to do anything. It will come to you and twist your mind inside out, awaken the madness in you.
The country is not really describable, yet it’s fun to try. But there’s no actual way of grasping all this madness into the right words. One would need a library, rather than a book even.
Even though I’m here for like, a day or ten, I’m overwhelmed, have gone through some crazy emotions and thoughts, and have longed to escape this place for many times. About 10 days in India, one could probably spit out more stories than from a month in the average country.
I already mentioned my arrival in the country in the previous writing, and it was a nice warmup dip in the water before the ocean that India is before me.
The train from Gorakhpur to holy city Varanasi , was rather comfortable. A 6 hour escape from the heat in the AC wagon allowed me to get a bit of heavily desired sleep. And it was way more clean in this train than in the hotel.
The train however, left 20 minutes too late and magically arrived in Varanasi almost 3 hours too late.
So it was night, I didn’t have a place booked, and didn’t have that much choice but going with the hassling tuk tuk driver who spoke some English. At least I got the price of the ride down to one third of his proposal, and he did bring me to a nice, clean room, just within my budget.
So, I’m in Varanasi… The next day I went to the Ganga river to check what the hype was all about, and I must say it was quite impressive.
The river was just huge, and there was a very nice view on the magnitude of Varanasi City.
You could nicely walk on the stairs on the west bank of the river, which would have been flooded if the mousson wasn’t delayed like it was.
The river had some sort of rest on it, a calmness. However, the sides of it, as well as every piece of ground surface in the city, was filled or soon to be filled with trash.
The filth
The filth in this city, as well as in India in general, was literally breathlessly disgusting.
Not only did garbage bins seem to be exclusively placed at 2 or 3 carefully chosen buildings in the whole hundreds of thousands of people city, they were even then unused. Some poor low caste people once in a while went to collect city trash and move it to somewhere else. To no avail of course. The most effective way is occasionally burning all that trash and plastic, easy…
Aside from the trash, the holy cows obviously lay holy shits everywhere, and since the most comfortable footwear for a multitude of reasons are flip flop slippers, you’d better mind your step and lower your care.
They barely smoke, Indian people. Not that cigarette buds on the floor would matter at this stage, something one could call camouflage, but they have these small packages of tobacco of some sort -I think that’s what it is- and rub it over the gum in their mouth.
The times that I’ve been disgusted by the mouthful of black stuff all over their teeth, my questions being ignored because they are sucking on that stuff, my persistence followed by ununderstandable rambling, is just uncountable.
They also have a similar, but different thing called ‘paan’, some white goo in a green leaf that you put in your mouth for a while so that you can only look disgusting and rude for the next couple of minutes, and degrade yourself to making your black teeth visible while trying to ramble some vowels instead of speaking. But that appears to be just the way of their language.
Everyone chews this stuff and spits it on the floor after use. All of this has disgusted me more than the cow poo everywhere.
In Varanasi there was of course the holy burning of the dead, where they performed a tremendously long list of the weirdest of rituals, from shaving the son’s head and body, to having to buy certain ingredients for specific reasons, to running this number of circles around the dead body, having it burn for this long, etc, the list goes on.
And the weirdest of all to me, is that they were burning them in the midst of these trash fields… just normal and fine.
I jokingly talked to a traveler about how people from India ‘auto-photoshop’ all the trash out of their visual perception, and just are immune to being surrounded by it. Well, it’s actually quite sad.
The next step of filth describing will be the next sensory field: smell.
It’s disgusting. I never thought that only having severe and overwhelming poo smells at railway stations and near festival toilet zones was a privilege. It is.
I long badly to a place where it does not smell like feces or urine every 2 to 3 minutes. They’re not fooling me that all the incense is for religious purposes.
The people
The people are strange. And there are way too many of them, cramped into this place. I’m done with constantly being bumped into with no pardon, hearing the spit and throat slime uplifting noises all around, seeing people urinate everywhere -in the midst of a mass of people-, seeing those black, rotting teeth, being hassled and followed, dodging spit, being shouted in my ear, listening to their incoherent randomly shouted English words, having noise everywhere around all the time, listening to the unstoppable honking, almost dying in traffic every day, fearing getting robbed and so being mindful of my stuff all the time, getting ‘hey, friend’ shouted at me, and much more.
Aside of the ‘people’ topic, I’m a bit done with it now. This first travel has been going on for a while, I can’t seem to get a decent rest, am tired, frustrated, longing for home.
I’m getting cynical.
The great of India, sure I’ll talk about it, but later. It surely is there, most definitely.
But right now I feel drained from this traveling and India in general. It’s been exhaustingly intense.
And so I’m now really longing to home, and will try to book a flight ticket. I’ll probably stop by my friend who I’ve spent the first month in Nepal with.
Yeah, I’m so tired and drained. I long to be able to walk around with a smile and being naturally friendly to people. Here, it’s a punishment of being hassled, ripped off, slowed down, annoyed, questioned, suggested and bothered all the time.
I long for clean streets, which don’t smell so awful, and a good night of rest.
It’s been nice though. Although I feel really cynical and slightly frustrated right now, and more as the time goes on, this was an unforgettable, crazy, intense, mind shifting experience.
I’ll stop this writing on the train right now, will continue later.
…
The good I found
Of course, there are many things good about India.
After all, the country exists and keeps going since probably the earliest of man kind.
Even though now I’m getting cynical, frustrated, tired and am very low on energy, I have loved the trip here nonetheless. It has been an amazing experience, one I shall not forget.
Even though today I booked my ticket home for in a few days, which means my Indian experience will only have lasted for just over 20 days, it might just as well have been 20 weeks. The things I’ve seen, experienced, thought, and felt here, are just massive.
At one point, I was sitting at the Ganga river in Varanasi, and miraculously I did not get hassled, I didn’t hear ‘Boat? You want boat? Boat, sir? Hey friend, boat? Boat? Cheap price, boat?’ in a 360 degree angle around me, I didn’t get people with handicraft following me, come sitting next to me, etc.
I was just sitting at the river, and miraculously was left alone. And that’s when I did think, that the river had ‘something’ special.
There was a strange kind of emptiness in the air, that became a part of me.
As I sat, the silence became bigger, and the waves that joyously reflected the sunlight individually but harmoniously together, the sounds of drips that worked together into a concerto of water floating by wind, all added up to that silence. Yes, a silent, empty sound.
It might sound kind of silly, but the ‘holy river’ might have something to it, at least I had a nice experience there.
It was a shame that it was so hard to just silently sit there. Even though it was low tourist season, the Indian culture is so that if you interest them the slightest bit, they will come to you and start talking. And sometimes it’s really hard to make it clear that you want to be left alone.
A similar experience I felt, visiting the Taj Mahal.
I’m all not sure how much is imagination or hype from my own mind, but this building really was special. First, the greatness of it, the hugeness. It’s seriously overwhelming.
And then there’s a weird thing hanging in the air again, something that seemed to emit from this place.
Again, it was hard to be left alone and silently sit.
The night before visiting the Taj Mahal, I got awakened by the feeling of water in my ear. After being a bit weirded out, dizzy from being interrupted in my sleep, I shaked my head a bit, and massaged around my ear. The ‘water’ didn’t really seem to come out. I kept shaking and rubbing and suddenly a huge, monstrous insect, with wings and claws and antenna, fell out of my ear… This more than 2cm long and half a cm thick insect, had crawled into the depths of my left ear, in the midst of my sleep.
I was shouting and freaking out and panicking, all the stuff, obviously. It’s creepy movie material. I didn’t dare to go back to sleep, but did so after unfolding the mosquito net and wrapping my head in a t-shirt, even though it was so hot that night.
So after I did manage to fall asleep, I just woke up a few hours later at 3am again.. And decided to stay awake. I went for a walk, found some tea a hour and a half later, and made my way to the Taj.
There, it appeared I had to weight for this ticket counter system to open up at 5.30am, after which I could collect a bottle of water and shoe covers, included in the furious and merciless price of 750 rupees. It was 20 rupees for Indian people. I could not care less to receive my shoe covers, but the gates were not open, ever after I could receive my ticket.
The huge walls surrounding the place made me unable to see anything of the Taj at this point.
My beautiful sunrise plan started falling apart, as I saw the fireball coming up above the walls, after waiting for 3 hours at that place, and the gates started opening. But first, they had to do ‘something’ and we (already more people started arriving) had to wait a bit more. Then, I had to go through a metal detector like on the airport, and get my bags through this see-through device or whatever it is. One of the ladies in the security team still had to open it, and look through it, and she got distracted by some other event, which made me needlessly waiting even more.
I got quite agitated there, as this is just how India works…
But I could, after what seemed to be like a tv-show like eternal annoyance test, enter the place, and go have a look at the Taj Mahal. Not alone anymore, obviously, crowds of people were present already. Well a small croud, but a croud nonetheless.
As I closed in on the building, this same sort of silence overcame me. Together with the overwhelming magnitude, my being shook in awe of this beautiful building, silently gazed at the magnificence of it. The intentions and greatness, the respect and love that made this building happen, were clearly visible, and sensible even.
So India might be a special place after all.. If you’re open to it, I guess.
Still I have regretted to see the same emptiness in rituals as in Christianity earlier in my life. Repeating processes from someone else with no understanding or purpose, no actual benefit or even knowledge of why, repeating them every day…
Also the train system is pretty impressive. That on a side note.
So for me now, it’s been enough, it’s been nice.
All the experiences and mind confrontations, all the things I’ve seen and now carry within me. All the changes I’ve gone through, subtly and slowly, sometimes more sharply. This perspective of the world is one that will stay. This perspective of myself and my home country is one that will stay.
Although the world keeps changing, and every human being is the same in the ground, this continent is so different. Extremities exist next to each other and make the whole complete. One is not without another..
The only problem is, that people don’t see their similarity, that all the differences are just on the surface. That even though we look to be completely different, and so alienated from each other, the lifestyles, the nature around us, the houses we live in, the personalities we have, the cultural different ways, the awareness on all different levels, the education we have available, the richness or poverty present, the way we see the world, are all so extremely different, it is just the surface. And it is sad that the same source where it all comes from is denied and misunderstood.
This travel was quite the education, straight from reality, passive education at its best. I did nothing special, and gained so much deep rooted knowledge. Seeing.
So although it’s not finished, in my head things are rounding out. This chapter of my life is nearing completion.
Things keep flowing and life never stops being, so gone through this, it is only a question what tomorrow will look like. Or what this moment looks like.
It is with great gratitude for being able to experience this travel that I will conclude this chapter. Nepal, India, you have taught me well, showed unimaginable things, unexpectedly interesting and profound. Things I shall carry with me, that might have been big changers, or maybe just seeds in my mind, that will bloom much later. We’ll see how the next part of my life travel goes, and what it will bring. Thanks.
Posted half from phone and half from internet cafe with keyboard (man, keyboards are great).
