Return To The 300 Temples (The Dirty Version)

News story of the day: a study has revealed that prisoners in the jails of Tamil Nadu state almost all gain weight in prison where they are given a balanced and nutritious diet. It's official: living in India is worse than living in an Indian prison.

Quote of the day: "Our cities are the dirtiest in the world. If there is a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would get it." - Jairam Ramesh, Minister of the Environment, my homie.

Moving on from Jodhpur my nexy destination was Bundi, located far away in the corner of Rajasthan. The direct bus was a 10-hour slog and I had little desire to spend an entire day confined within one of these four-wheeled slaughter cans. So, I decided to instead risk dismemberment on two separate 5-hour bus rides over two days. I was to transfer in Ajmer and stay a night again in that fetid hole, where, if you will recall, my most vivid mermories were of lying on a hospital table and receiving a series of unidentified IV's labeled in coded shorthand and languages in other alphabets.

I was somewhat uneasy about returning to Ajmer. I do after all have a stalker who resides there. He has called me several times over the past month, showing that my ice-cold shoulder has done nothing to chill the heat of his passionate pursuit. I therefore studiously avoided my old haunts, which included the only affordable sanitary hotel in town. The result was that I stayed in an overpriced and scum-infested flophouse and navigated the city through a collection of bazaars and back streets that got me comically lost every time I stepped out the door. The hotel was simply atrocious, as they tend to be in Ajmer, charging the price I would usually pay at a respectable guesthouse for a room that did not even have a shower and was graced by only half a coat of paint. The manager was a sour cow of a woman who demanded I pay many spurious charges on my account and clearly was less concerned with earning the hotel money than in making me lose it.

After settling my business in this glorified beetle-hostel and making the necessary inquiries around town for my escape to Bundi, I set off for an afternoon in Pushkar. This of course involved a bus ride over a geological formation known as Snake Mountain, whose winding, switchbacked mountain road seemed custom-built for sending the bus's already questionable crude steel gearshift into morbid throes and convulsions on the uphill, and turning the bus into a careening ten-tonne bobsled on the downhill. Bicyclists swerved off the road at our coming; monkeys scattered down the rocks.

Last time I was in Pushkar I caught only a brief glimpse, in the full swing of its absurd religious festival. I passed through quickly on my way to the epic camel market, not knowing that my dehydrated delirium was but a precursor to my bout with complete biological deconstruction that would render me unable to see the rest of the fair. I do recall that it was a tourist-infested madhouse full of religious loonies, freaks, priests, and esoteric street performers. I expected that this return would see a more tranquil side of Pushkar, a small town in the desery with countless temples, an air of devotion, and joyful groups of pilgrims.

When I got off the bus I was immediately accosted by three drug dealers cackling while they offered me hashish and opium, clearly breaking the cardinal rule of pushing. ("Don't get high on your own supply." Act like you know something.) Though the hordes were gone and the insanity had greatly diminished, I did not find Pushkar a very pleasing place. Though it is said to be the 2nd-most pilgrimed place in the world, beating out Rome and only losing to Mecca, the environment was unquestionably one dominated by the dollars of secular foreign tourists. Though many reverential pilgrims were there, the holy atmosphere was unimpressive. Pushkar, they boast, has over 300 temples. Big. Deal. This isn't like saying a city has 300 churches or mosques. In the Hindu world any town worth naming has at least a couple dozen if not a couple hundred temples for myriad sects and deities. many of the temples ring its "lake", a cavity formerly occupied by a sacred lake. Brahma would have done well not to create the world and convene the universe's deities around a body of water in a place where it routinely goes years without raining. Around this dusty hole are a number of very holy ghats, including the one where Brahma himself bathed, the one where Vishnu incarnated himself as a boar (don't ask me why), and the one where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were sprinkled after his murder. The temples aren't much to look at, except the Vishnu temple which looks magnificent from outside but won't let you in.

Pushkar has a Brahma temple, one of the only Brahma temples in the entire world because according to legend his pissed-off wife cursed him and decreed that he would never be worshiped anywhere but Pushkar. Strangely, though he is one of the "big three" along with Shiva and Vishnu, pretty much nobody bothers worshiping him that much. Whether this is because there are no Brahma temples around or vice versa is very much a chicken-and-egg question. I went to the Brahma temple - essentially the one and only temple to the creator of the universe - and found it quite mediocre. Hinduism is a very strange, self-admittedly a profoundly disorganized religion that nonetheless seeks to stringently organize the whole of society while leaving its own practice open to an infinite triage of devotional priorities, personal needs, and popular favorites.

Pushkar is a weird place, where donkeys are painted pink, camels are adorned in feathers, and the cows think nothing of outright thuggery, mimicing the priests and saddhus who get up in your face and plead "baaaabuu, baaabu, money for food" as if you can't see their half-clad potbellies jiggling to and fro like those of their bovine co-extortionists.

The most dominant presence in town though are the tourists, not the waddling Americans or the platoons of culturally oblivious retired French people who look like they've just stumbled tank-topped and floppy-hatted out of a baguette shop in Cannes, but legions of equally oblivious backpackers. These throngs of contemporary pseudo-bohemians, found in concentrated colonies throughout India, are catered to by a plethora of merchants dealing in pashmina shawls, Om t-shirts, sloppily-printed baggy trousers, and a slew of other hippie-shit "Indian" goods that no Indian has ever worn but can be traced around the Subcontinent like uranium waste deposits by a Geiger meter upon the bodies of Israeli, Spanish, Chilean, Australian, American, French, and other neo-hippies who've traded patchouli oil for iPods and "environmentally freindly" canteens that they fill with bottled water. Hot spots of this activity such as Pushkar and Delhi's Pahar Ganj are veritable Chernobyls emitting toxic levels of self-absorption from "alternative travelers" who believe that they and their kind alone are truly immersing themselves in India. I good-naturedly but dryly told a group of Israeli girls who looked like extras from a straight-to-DVD Jerry Garcia biopic that if they really wanted to be Indian they should either go all the way and buy saris or just score some sequined jeans and sew randomly-chosen numbers to fake Ed Hardy shirts. They were nonplussed and proceeded to talk amongst themselves in Hebrew for the remainder of dinner.

As they talked a pair of incredibly stoned men straight out of a Hell's Angels rally drove by on monstrous motorcycles with Vishnu tridents affixed to the rear, and for a moment - just for a moment - Pushkar had me impressed.

CORRECTION: The world was not created at Pushkar, it is merely a very sacred creation of Brahma, the Creator, who created the rest of the world elsewhere.