Benares:People

 

 

 

 

Benares : People

 

 

 

 

Golden Temple

 

 

 

 

Wagah

 

 

 

We are the purest of them all

 

 

We were driving to Garhera, described as the worst village in the surrounding areas. Mr D Singh (DS) who is driving the car tells me that all one caste villages tend to be filthy

because no one is less equal to another.

I ask him what he means. He tells me that Garhera is a village where only Thakurs live. No one wants to stoop down to the level of cleaning the streets.

Enter their houses and be assured that everything is spic and span.Almost everyone in the village owns land- something unique in this area.

Yet, on the outside, the squalor is comparable to that of an urban slum, to the worst of slums.

 

I was to meet the Pradhan.He was sleeping on a charpoy, barechested, wearing only a towel when I arrived.He woke up and ordered for chai .

I made lots of polite conversation and finally asked him about NREGA and about how many people had job cards. He said that this is a high caste village and  no one needed a job card here. I asked him what projects were in progress under the scheme.He said pond construction and the making of pucca structures for the borewells was on the cards.

 

I asked him if I could see these. He said that it was hard to get labourers in the village again emphasizing that high caste people didn't do such work.

 

 

It occurred to me  that in this village of filth , of black stinking water lining every street with houses with grand macho gates , a sense of greatness ran in the blood of its citizen any evidence of which was absent in any tangible form. The ancient delusion of caste superiority desecrated the streets. (Do I sound condescending, sarcastic, angry..? I think I am.Angry.)

 

One of the Pradhan's points taken though. Villages with a high SC population get more funds and privileges under Mayavati's government.

 

 

All the village Pradhans had to contribute 5000 Rupees each for Mayavati's birthday celebrations and 1000 Rupees from the village's ration account share.

 

Let's think about the structures we create man coz if they suck, it's gonna take generations to get rid of them.!That's just how profound I can be right now..

 

 

 

The sanctity of things

Watching women do the Aaarti to the Ganga is a humbling experience.It's that little bit of Hinduism that is still holding on to a past where our ancestors worshipped the forces of nature, to whom it even occured that a river is sacred .

 

What has happened to the Ganga at Varanasi or elsewhere is an ancient form of corporatization of worship.

In Anoopshahr , it is still only the locals who walk down from their homes and pray to the river, the water is still clean and being on the only boat in the gorgeous sugarcane juice like water is a spiritual experience with the soothing rhythm of the oars and the water.

 

IT's my favourite thing to do here.

 ''To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.'' Jiddu Krishnamurthi

 

that's a thought i am thinking about now.

 

 

Government schools

 

 

 

 

I went into a government school today and announced to the teacher that I am a journalist.He looked as if he would have a heart attack.He quickly opened and shut registers while explaining to me details on enrolment, attendance and staff. He said 50 students are present out of 57- I got up and went into the class to count. I first clicked candid pictures and then he came and yelled at the kids as seen.Here’s what I saw – in the school and later in the village.

The mid day meal is a huge success in luring kids to school. After the meal, they all run back home.

All you ladies..

 

 

A structured discrimination system against women has taken thousands of years to become a rigid tradition. It takes many generations to plant a belief in ourselves and our ability to live a beautiful life and nurture the seed within our hearts before it can take root in society.

 

For those of us who are free to do as we please, picking out a day to call ours may not seem as relevant .However , I embrace this day in solidarity with the men and women who are striving for  a better world and those who are bearing the brunt of the harsh unequal world, Happy Women's day.

Same same ...but different

 

A friend said he wouldn't want to be seen out on Valentine's day for fear of the Ram Sena. Recently, I was out with a bunch of friends when a group of men with sticks threatened to attack the ''girls''. We joked about it and called them the Ram Sena boys.

 

Ofcourse ,Bangalore is divided – the pulsating , spiraling IT world and the unchanging  old city.

 

Men are threatened by the new age financially independent women who seem to earn more with their white collar jobs than them. Locals are apprehensive that immigrants are taking all the jobs. The South Indians suddenly unite in all this and claim that the

North Indians are brash , loud and ''spoiling '' Bangalore's culture.

Envy is at the heart of it all. More important than envy however is economy and politics.

 

If the Shiv Sena tries to collect   the inner rage of the impoverished, unemployed or in some other way discriminated Marathi speaking person to control a metropolis then in another part of India, the richer Telengana region doesn't want to share it's resources with the rest of the state.

 

It's same same but different everywhere in the world.

 

While in a tram in Basel, Switzerland one day, a working class man starting screaming at two men who entered the tram. He was angry and hateful, the old man, I could tell even though the nuances of language were lost to me. The men he was screaming at were Germans.

 

One of the  rich looking German men said to the old man ''ok , ok'' and tried to calm him down but in vein. An Indian man intervened and started speaking in German. All this while, I was getting line by line translations from C. The old man calls the Indian man a black dog.

 

I looked petrified by this point so the Indian man in his very Indian man way came up to me and said in slurred speech (he was drinking) ''It's all ok ..don't worry.''.

 

It turned out that the screaming old man was telling the Germans  to leave Switzerland. Ever since the EU's policies changed, Germans have been coming to take high profile jobs in Switzerland which has created a lot of resentment among the locals and hence animosity towards the Germans.

 

But we are all human and we need money and we envy.

 

hangin with the pope..

Throw a stone and follow its destination. Chances are that you are at a world famous colossal monument that speaks of the grandeur of another era.  To experience Rome is to be swept away by the Colosseum, to walk down cobblestoned paths from fairy tales and eat the best pizza there is.

 

When we landed in the airport, taxi drivers rushed at us hoping to cheat clueless foreigners. This was not the only thing that reminded me of India .We took the shuttle to the centre of the town in an overheated bus. My swiss companion complained about how it was too hot and that Italians considered it cold . At 8 degrees, much warmer than Switzerland my previous destination, I was happy as can be.

 

 

Rome can make you feel like you are in a 70's movie with fiats or fiat like cars dominating the traffic space... Sometimes, its History modernity conundrum and it's somewhat chaotic nature reminded me of Bombay.

 But these are not the most important things about Rome. The most important thing is that the city is a living museum , each spot sprouting some evidence of its dramatic History.

 

On day one, we went to Vatican City and were amazed by its sheer size. The St Peter's Basilica is an impressive structure with a beautiful imposing dome that is free to enter but unfortunately the queue was too long for our taste. We decided instead to pay fifteen Euro and enter the museum and  see the Sistine chapel instead . 

 

In the hallway , the roof was spectacularly painted where each square foot was a master piece in itself.  Hungry for the grandeur  that Rome had so far pampered us with , we couldn't imagine what the Sistine chapel would be if an ordinary hallway was this grand.

We walked past sophisticated maps and  paintings  to enter  a silent room with about a hundred people staring at the ceiling in silence interrupted only by the guards saying in that delightful Italian accent '' no phoo ooo tooo'''.

The curtains look real , Jesus looks alive , and books jut out from the ceiling, the story of creation is not merely drawn, it unfolds . The Sistine Chapel is human genius to its highest extent. Is it painting or sculpture or just magic?

 

 

We left the Vatican and went to the centre of town to see the gorgeous Trevi Fountain whose Italian name is more evocative of its beauty somehow – Fontana Di Trevi. There were Bangladeshi photographers all over persuading tourists to use their services and this too reminded me of Indian monuments.

 

The Pantheon , for all its greatness is unlit at night because believe me Rome has way too many monuments for them to be able to light up all of them at night. Lit or not , The Pantheon is a massive magnificent structure. Today the Pantheon functions as a Church.

 

Colloseum  , the construction of which started in 69AD is designed to hold 50,000 people. It's almost surreal to stand there and imagine all the glory and brutality it's walls have witnessed over 2000 years.

Apart from History, food is a big reason to go to Rome.  However, if you don't scratch below the surface , you will be disappointed.

Restaurants are jaded and in most you won't find the ''cooked with passion by a sweet Italian mama''  food that you are looking for. Many of them have ''tourist menus''.  If you have the patience to drift off the well trodden tourist paths and veer off to where the Romans eat, I promise you that you'll remember the meals forever. Research and ask the locals.

 Trastevere on the other side of River Tiber is a working class neighbourhood now made fashionable by the new restaurants and the tourists who throng there for the '' real Italian experience''. A local we chatted with told us that the best pizzas in Rome are to be had at Dar Poeta (The Poet). WE spent about 40 minutes looking . With a map in hand and very little linguistic skills except  our  stock basket of twenty useful words, we made our way through narrow cobble stoned paths lined by charming buildings painted in orange and brown to finally find the restaurant in Via Bologna, a quiet street .

Down to earth in appearance, the place lived up to our expectations.  I had freshly made thin crust pizza with rocket, mozzarella and  pomodoro tomatoes  and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it nothing short of ...poetic.  There's lots to try in Italy including creamy gelato, home made pasta , biscotti, pastries and the list goes on.

 

Everyone wants to learn English evidenced by ads everywhere selling Anglais classes for cheap. Hardly anyone speaks it though. An old woman comes up to me in a clothing store , taps me gently and starts a whole monologue in Italian about the clothes not giving me time to interrupt. Another woman had to intervene and suggest that I, perhaps given my obvious foreign tourist appearance did not speak English .

 

 

 

There are huge hoardings everywhere depicting Michelangelo's 'David' tied to helicopters flying over London. The Italian caption above threatens the exporting of Rome's art if no one went to see it.

 

Yet , one gets the sense that Rome is so burdened by its past that it has nothing new to offer, no young scene to speak of. It is largely a tourist city. In 2001, the then Deputy Prime Minister started out a project to modernise the city while still retaining its historical character. There is some new architecture , new venues but nothing you'll notice on a short visit.

The last thing we did at Rome was to go to The Forum, We walked near the ruins which are a testament to human ambition , tragedy and ultimately the transience of all things – even great civilizations. I wondered how future humans would react if they found the ruins of New York . Would they piece together the Empire State building and wonder how they built it without robots, would they preserve the head of Liberty in a museum? Would they find it as beautiful as we 21st century humans found Rome?

Roman Holiday part two

 

 

 

 

The story is coming up!

A Roman holiday

 

 

 

 

A house with a hundred rooms - Switzerland and other stories

To get to St Moritz is a long drive from Basel and you drive through Davos , Zurich and all the other hubs where the wealthiest settle to escape paying taxes in their own country.Suddenly,  in a surreal situation your car drives in to a train and the train takes you up the mountains. This time you are late as the train comes every half an hour. The guard says he is already three minutes late and he cannot delay the train further by one minute so our poor car can crawl into it quickly.  

En route I find myself, (as I seem to have developed a talent for planting myself in places so far away from my own world) , in a beautiful Swiss Café with a gorgeous Ukranian waitress .I chatted with four Swiss people there while eating pasta Napoli with tomaten and drinking water fresh from the glacier. Their stories are incredible. The man who had a house with a hundred rooms but worked as a chef in a low profile restaurant earning a minimum wage.

 

The temperature is – 6 degrees Celsius and outside the beauty of the Alps  is so intense it hurts your eye.

 

Welcome to Switzerland.

 

When you are sledging down the steepest slopes on the Alps, you can't see what's coming and you are going full speed . You are caught between the need to concentrate and the need to gobble the extreme beauty of the mountains as the setting sun gingerly paints their peaks a glowing orange. You are on an Alpine slope near St Moritz in Switzerland where Hollywood comes to unwind, where old women are dressed like in a 1920's movie with fur coats and hats.

You take it all in  , sleep over it and and wake up to an amazing breakfast of freshly baked fluffy croissant, a  nutty  traditional bread, exquisite cheeses, coffee and juice.

C of course cooks the most exquisite food in the world, far better than anything I have had in any restaurant I went to in Switzerland and Italy. The description of this would merit another blog post , A typical tradiitonal Swiss  farmers breakfast which is a simple but gorgeously delicious meal of roast potatoes and fried eggs- Rosti.

 

There are no simple Swiss farmers anymore.Not counting the virtual Heidi who blows you a kiss on the train to baggage claim in the Zurich airport.  Ive been here long and haven't met a single  cow yet. The youth of this country are rich from the spoils of their parents generation. The recession seems to have barely pricked the surface of this rich country given the bustling luxury stores at St Moritz.

 

I hear stories a lot. There is a woman , lets call her m , who is petrified of going broke. Her father is easily one of the richest men in the country..She inherited money from relatives which makes her richer than her father. . She works as a nanny because she is afraid of being broke. Her divorced mother thinks 60 000 euro a month as alimony is a  pittance and can barely buy her one handbag.A legal dispute is on. 

 

 I spent most of my time in Basel and went on short trips to the hills, to Rome and to Zurich.

Basel has small town charm , the two parts of the city are connected by a bridge over River Rhine. The centre of town is charming , museum studded and on sunny days a small lively street market props up . A stray musician plays the violin arranging for my typical romanticized vision of an European town.

Zurich is larger but similarly constructed around Lake Zurich and has a landscape studded with beautiful church towers that change to modern industrial buildings as you go further away from town.

The streets around the centre seem to have a small but interesting art scene with many shops exhibiting sculpture and painting for sale. C says the nightlife is surprisingly hot for a city so small.

Although C complains that Switzerland is too perfect , it is interesting for me to see a world that works, where you don't worry about leaving your bag  on the tram floor because no one will steal it. I have developed an unjustifiable trust in some western countries. With no offence to anyone, Italy is excluded from this list. For the basic necessities of life and a little more, the state is accountable. The streets are clean. The public transport is reliable. The government can afford to not be corrupt about basic things and concentrate on the bigger things.

At the Zurich railway station you pay the equivalent of 100 rupees to get in but the toilets are surely the fanciest and the most spacious I have seen in a public space.

Sometimes, my Indian upbringing means that I have a subconscious dread towards toilets in public spaces. The Edinburgh park toilet swept me away with its clean floors, nappy changing stations etc but Zurich was even better.

In Rajasthan , I have seen toilets with layers and layers of aging shit garnished with fresh shit and watered by pisss. in public loos.

 

Sorry my dear reader, The Alps are beautiful ,the chocolate is out of the world...just think of that to get the previous image out of your head. And I promise to put up pictures soon.

(I've slightly changed the stories of the people I have talked about to protect their identity)