Quickie (Apr. 25)

It seems the suits in travel-writing headquarters have noticed I haven't done any work for them in some time. Though they seem no less eager to part company than I am, they did draw attention to the fact that my article on Agra had the word DRAFT right on the title, and many of the subheadings read "incomplete". As I am contractually obligated to give a full reporting of Agra, I was forced to return to that vile city, take my revenge upon it, and in the meantime assert my independence once again from the malignant imperial forces of tyranny. It's like "Return of the Jedi" meets the War of 1812 up in this bitch.

So anyways, I dutifully returned to Agra and Fatehpur Sikri and once again slogged about taking photos and writing notes for paragraphs about Mughal tombs. (Sample note: "lame. add more jokes"). Thus, my friends, you are now blessed with Ghostface Buddha's very own pictures of the above-named cities, and guess what, the Taj Mahal looks pretty much as it always has, save for a layer of smog so foul that when you stand by the riverside you can't even see far enough to discern that you are in the midst of a million-plus population city.

It is still mercilessly hot, and so there are actually almost no tourists in Agra at all, and all the vulture-like merchants of the tourist zones are too busy hiding from the heat in darkened stores to bother trying to screw you. It's like the film "I Am Legend", where you walk almost unmolested on famously obnoxious streets, but can safely assume that anyone who approaches you ought to be machine-gunned in the face. Also, as I've hinted at before, my life is about 30% modeled on the film career of Will Smith. Unlike Agra, Fatehpur Sikri has no seasonal mellow. After 24,000km on the road and a second visit to the place, I now confidently report that the modern village of Fatehpur Sikri is home, on average, to the most annoying human beings in all of India, and the upper-extreme outliers are truly a contemptible marvel. Ghostface Buddha may have had to slap a fool.

Anyways, I gotta go for now. According to my sources, I am dangerously close to missing the closing hour of "the only not-very-bad food eatings restorent in Sanchi", and I like my eatings restorents to be not very bad.

Terror-Creatures From Beyond The Ghats

edit: forgot to mention, Kushinagar and new Varanasi pics are up. Also, this is the 100th post on this blog. How did THAT happen?

Upon returning from Nepal I ticked off the last stop on my tour of the great Buddhist pilgrimages of India, the village of Kushinagar, where the Buddha died.

Even for a Buddhist pilgrimage site in a country that is less than 1% Buddhist, Kushinagar is so sleepy it's almost sad. It's located in a poor, rural part of Uttar Pradesh not far from the Bihar border and is little more than a wheat-farming village with a handful of incongruous temples along one of the roads. Even the monasteries sort of blend in, the ones from the poorer Buddhist countries being indistinguishable from your standard village brick-piles save for the fact that their cheaply-painted murals offer fortune-cookie tips to spiritual enlightenment rather than competing manufacturers of steel rods. In the center of town are the excavated ruins of old Kushinagar, which aren't much to look at now, and in the center of these is the new-ish Mahaparinirvana Temple. This temple allegedly marks the precise spot where Buddha died and achieved the ultimate Nirvana. It's an odd space-ship'y building blending the ancient design with a bit too much modernism. Inside is an enormous gold-covered statue of the Buddha lying serenely on his deathbed, a scene so inspirational it is the one place I have actually observed Hindu people being silent. I saw it firsthand. This is the Indian equivalent of sending a swirling, screeching jar of distilled ectoplasm to the home addresses of the Nobel committee. Aside from the statue, however, the interior of this most important temple is truly hideous. It has polished stone floors, but halfway up the walls become plain, unpainted concrete, and you can see the rusty ventilation fans hanging in the upper windows. It looks like the lobby of a deceptive budget hotel in New Delhi with a massive ancient treasure ready to disappear into a shipping container somewhere.

Beyond the temple and a row of monasteries one could mistake for hardware stores there is basically just a lot of rice and wheat. I found myself on a bit of a stroll through the "village", which was mostly unfinished boundary-walls and stacked blocks of cow-dung fuel next to thatched huts. After about fifteen minutes of surprising quiet in which I saw more ditch-lounging buffaloes than people, I finally found what I was looking for: the ruins of the huge ancient stupa erected on the site where Buddha was cremated. Sure enough, it's still there, in vaguely stupa form, in a blissfully quiet little lawn dotted with palm trees, with nothing but empty fields stretching in every direction. It was fabulous.

I was making my way south from Nepal to Madhya Pradesh, because I hate myself. More about M.P. and Ghostface Buddha's ingrained masochism* later, but the point is I found it convenient to stop in Varanasi as I headed south. *nobody's ever loved me

I arrived in Varanasi six months to the day from my previous sojourn here, and some things have certainly changed. The city seems strangely empty in comparison, perhaps because it is not now the peak of one of India's largest festivals, or perhaps because I am now irredeemably accustomed to suffocating multitudes. The Ganges river, after a problematically dry winter and spring, has fallen many feet, and it is now possible to actually walk up to the door of the sunken temple just off of Scindia Ghat. I would have taken a peek inside the small chamber that is normally immersed in the sacred waters, but feared that it would merely lead me down into a vast lower temple where I would have to negotiate an arcane system of traps dependent on magically-changing water levels and playing wind instruments. On the other hand, the narrow alleys of the old city surely remain the world's most dangerous bottlenecks of cow-shittery. The more things change the more they stay the same.

I went wandering about the alleys again, this time with bolder explorations in mind. As I twisted through the confounding maze of alleys, I couldn't help but notice the heavily-armed platoons of paramilitary police at every corner, and got the strange feeling of being under some sort of quarantine. Then it all made sense...

Varanasi is plagued by zombies.

Think about it: how else to explain the massive paramilitary deployment, the unspoken nocturnal curfew, the photography prohibitions, the insistence upon burning all bodies immediately upon death? The Vedas were telling no mere parable when they declared that Varanasi is "ungoverned by the Lord of Death"! So many pieces fall together. Why are there so many raving holy men seeking nothing but a liberation from further "lives"? Why are the inhabitants of the city so compulsively vegetarian? You would be too if the consumption of flesh brought horrific reminders of the insatiable undead! And why else is there such a profusion of arcane rituals if not to root out zombies incapable of following through with the complex motions? Why are so many buffaloes necessary, if not as mounts for the cow-headed, buffalo-riding Death god Yama? And is it mere coincidence that the interminable ringing of bells - a virtual homing beacon of living worshipers- takes place on elevated platforms or behind closely guarded doors? I think not. And do the authorities think that a mere zombie plague excuses them from clearing the streets of cow shit? OVER MY DEAD BODY

Like it or not, I was not given a chance to do battle with the living dead as I was confined by the curfew. Slipping through the alleys just before lockdown I had a chance at least to test my reflexes, and almost took off the head of an elderly woman who reached with a whispered groan towards my arm from a dark recess in the street. A city where people go to die can be a creepy place.

Ultimately, the greatest threat to my well-being came from others among the living, and as usual, from myself. I was poking about alleys as before, and found myself at an intriguing-looking Hindu temple, and decided to peek inside. I discovered later that it was a semi-underground super-hardcore orthodox temple, one of those that had been established precisely as a spiteful answer to the other temples of Varanasi which were now letting the likes of the lowest castes into their hallowed grounds, and one of the last places it would be wise for me to be. What I discovered then, however, was that this foreigner was clearly not wanted, an insinuation made less than subtly by an angry, screaming mob dragging me into the streets by my shirt. Shit, as they say, got real. I was subjected to a rapid barrage of half-shouted, half-spat, somewhat rhetorical questions like "DO YOU RESPECT RELIGION?" and "WHY DO YOU BRING YOUR DIRT HERE?" I walked a tightrope of apology and defiance, spouting as much semi-relevant Hindu theology as I could muster to save my ass, apologizing profusely, wriggling free of my immediate assailants, and stalwartly refusing to go into the darkened temple offices to "see the high priests for a discussion." Instead I managed to talk so much I drew away a handful of English-speaking mob members and carefully increased my distance from the furious rabble until I backed around a corner within sight of a police patrol. The police and the small detachment from the mob both hesitated; clearly the mob knew there could be trouble and didn't know what to do, and the police were waiting for an indication from the mob to see whether I should be hauled away for a discussion with them instead. In the awkward no-man's land I made another burst of quick apologies, some praises to the various Almighties, and passed off about $11 dollars in bribe before quickly spinning off into a warren of lanes leading to the waterfront.

The moral of the story? Conservative clergymen are assholes. I'll take the zombies any day. At least if you disintegrate their heads you don't have to perform ten thousand fire-stake penances or take a basket of 108 conch shells on a pilgrimage to the fucking moon. Amen.

Operation Jungle Storm, Pt. 1

Forgive the lateness of my posting. It is uncommon to find broadband internet and wild tigers in the same location. For the few of you who couldn't guess, my last excursion was to the village of Thakurdwara on the outskirts of Bardia National Park in the remote southwestern jungles of Nepal. That's right: Ghostface Buddha left India. My journey to this isolated spot was a three-day affair by train, bus, bicycle, rickshaw, foot, and jeep.

The story begins, as so many of mine do, with an Indian train that was approximately six hours late to a destination supposedly less than six hours away. Passing through the massive state of Uttar Pradesh, the train became an embodiment of the territory it crossed: outrageously and uncomfortably crowded, constantly patrolled by beggars and clueless hawkers ("Why, yes, we all did just get on a 5-hour train to shop for wallets! What? What do you mean you haven't sold a damn thing?"), and reeking of man and machine. The pair seated across from me were a near-miraculous couple of elderly peasants, whose one gift in life appeared to be the mastery of constant belching. The wife, at about 15-second intervals for most of the trip, would summon a croak-like belch which would be followed by a few seconds of wheezing as her tongue hung out of her dessicated mouth, and concluded each performance with a burp of a slightly different timbre. Her husband was more restrained, as he was usually asleep, but every half-hour or so he would awake and produce a series of sounds reminiscent of a dragon ingesting a heard of distressed buffalo deep within the Earth. There was something biologically wrong with these people, and I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised to hear that their families had married them off to each other at a young age for the sake of the village.

After a night in the surprisingly un-awful Uttar Pradesh city of Bareilly, I boarded a public bus to the small border town of Banbaasa. Needless to say, it was late. My surroundings grew continually more rustic, ramshackle Indian towns giving way to listless villages with crumbling Sikh gurudwaras until we entered the edge of the Tarai, the strip of jungle that has separated India and Nepal for centuries. I got off the bus and hiked down a half-paved road. A man pulled up on a bicycle and demanded I hop on. I balanced my backpack across the grocery rack and straddled it as my lift pedaled on out of town and into the woods, cutting through fern-lined dirt tracks until finally we emerged at a canal, followed it to the river, and he deposited me at an Indian police checkpoint. The road to Nepal was across a one-lane bridge atop an open dam ("barrage"? I'm no engineer). I joined the flow of Nepalis crossing the river on foot, completed the necessary formalities at Indian Immigration, and walked the remaining three kilometers across no-man's-land to Nepali Immigration, from where I hired a cycle-rickshaw to carry me the last seven kilometers to the Nepali border town of Mahendra Nagar. All told it was a bit of a performance.

The contrasts between the Indian and Nepali sides were evident immediately. Replacing the junk-strewn concrete villages of India, alongside the Nepali road were mud-walled huts and thatched roofs. I had difficulty speaking to some of the Nepalis, because they had soft voices and didn't like to bother you. In Mahendra Nagar I had boiled eggs for dinner, and was tossing the shells into the dirt. A Nepali man chastised me. "The shell is natural, but does not look so nice to throw trash on the street." Holy shit. We're not in Uttar Pradesh any more, Toto.

Another night in a crappy hotel. In the morning, a bus to Ambaasa, a random little intersection near my final destination. Though the bus was zippy, going was slow. We constantly stopped for passengers and Nepali Army checkpoints. Armed soldiers boarded the bus and gave everybody the once-over. They were looking for Maoists, who were suspected of smuggling arms through these parts. They found none on our bus. Perhaps they should have looked more closely at the convoy coming in the other direction: five cargo trucks full to bursting with cheering Nepalis waving red flags adorned with the hammer and sickle. That might be a good place to look for Maoists.

Until recently, Nepal had been in the throes of a latter-day communist revolution, with large swathes of rural Nepal being controlled by the Maoist guerrilla army. Now the Maoists are the largest party in parliament and peace has been restored but the army is clearly still wary of the rebels stocking munitions. As we drove along, we saw each town with its Indian-style symbolic town-gate. But rather than being adorned with elephants, Hindu gods, and frumpy-looking local politicians, the towns around were were painted with the hammer-and-sickle and communist slogans in Nepali and English. Across the lintel would be portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, with the Nepali Maoist leader Prachanda discreetly in the corner. After some five hours we came to the Karnali bridge, an epic new suspension bridge across the gorge where the Himalayan foothills spew forth a river onto the lowlands. It's been less than ten years since the entire part of the country West of the Karnali river has even had a reliable connection to the rest of Nepal. No wonder there's so many Maoists.

The bus stopped here for a chai break and I was invited to sit and drink with the locals. "What is your job?" one of them asked.
"I'm a journalist." I said. (Close enough)
"You're a journalist?" he replied, "Great, you're a journalist, I'm a socialist!"

There was much laughter. When it died down he repeated "OK, you be journalist, I be socialist."
"Can't I be both?" I asked ingenuously.
"You're a socialist?"
"Yeah, sure" I answered.
"What kind of socialist?" he asked, putting my knowledge of left-wing ideology to the test.
He probably would have been surprised by my knowledge on the subject, but instead I cheekily raised my glass to my lips and answered "A tea-sipping communist." The crowd could hardly contain themselves, and chai was on the house.

Directly across the bridge we passed through the edge of the national park until I hopped off at Ambaasa, which turned out to be two chai stalls, some houses, and a police checkpoint by the turnoff for a dirt road. There I sat for several hours, talking to a dude named Santoosh over a campfire and waiting for his jeep to show up and take us to the lodge. Under darkness again now, Santoosh and I were joined by his colleague Santosh and a pair of Brits. The jeep took us down the dirt track through the woods, splashing through streams and catching an assortment of deer and buffalo in its headlights. We arrived at the lodge late at night and I began planning my next day. I was to go on a full-day jungle walk with the lodge's expert guide, a fellow with a fiendishly difficult name who introduced himself by his surname, Gautam.

It was too good. "Gautam?" I asked.
He began to answer "Yes, you know, like..."
"People call me Buddha."

The next day, Gautam and Buddha hiked off into the forest together. The entire day we didn't run into a single other visitor. Even in the high season, this park is so out of the way for most tourist that it is visited by an average of ten people a day, including Nepalis. In the middle of winter, we literally had an entire national park to ourselves. We tromped along a riverbed and crossed into a dense jungle on the other side. Almost immediately we began running into tiger prints, and we both got very excited. Shortly thereafter, we heard a rustling in the bushes. We stopped, silent as rocks, and Gautam crept forward through the undergrowth. I could just see his hand waving for me to come. I slinked on between the branches, holding my breath, and emerged to find myself in a small clearing mere yards from...a giant, floppy wall of rhino ass. Rhinos are practically blind so we got even closer. I caught a few glimpses of its face, but it wouldn't turn around. It seemed unaware of us, which was good, but to entice it to turn and show its face would have required making sudden noises near a rhinoceros over open ground. Discretion being the greater part of valor, we chose instead to spend some time admiring the flaps of leathery armor on its big, gray butt.

As the morning went on we saw an innumerable variety of birds, as well as three species of deer: the spotted deer, the hog deer (a strange, dark, portly creature with antlers), and even the vanishingly rare swamp deer. Gautam taught me the basics of animal tracking in the jungle, but wisely insisted on doing the actual tracking himself. Walking along another riverbed I said "Look! Elephant tracks!" And indeed, they were elephant tracks. Locating where a herd of elephants has walked in soft mud is, I must tell you, a subtle and delicate art that I am proud to have mastered. We set off quickly in pursuit of the elephants, hoping we would find them lingering around a nearby bend. Cutting through the woods, we heard splashing, and ran to the riverbank, where we were disappointed not to see wild elephants, but a group of local elephant-drivers taking their mounts for a washing out in nature.

We tromped about the jungle and the grasslands for the entire day in search of more animals, hoping to find wild elephants or even the elusive royal Bengal tiger. At one point we found more tiger prints surrounded by a mayhem of deer tracks and a very clear trail of drag marks leading off into the bushes. Some deer wasn't coming home tonight. We pressed further up the river to a good tiger-waiting spot, and waited, and waited. After a few hours identifying birds with the binoculars we heard noise coming from the distant trees. A pack of monkeys was making a clacking noise, which Gautam told me was the warning of a tiger patrolling below. A group of deer crept out from the long grass and stood frightened in the open ground, looking in every direction but especially towards where the monkeys were yelling. The tiger was almost certainly in the stand of trees, not more than 100 yards from our position. We lay in complete silence and watched the scene unfold. The clacking began to subside, and through the binoculars we could see monkeys cautiously hopping between trees in our direction. The tiger had gone to the other fork of the stream, and though it was still close by there would be no way for us to approach it undetected. We concluded the day with no tiger sighting. Gautam apologized, and took some time to explain how rare it is to see a tiger in the wild, but I fully understood and wasn't disappointed at all by our close brush with the tiger. Gautam seemed sad too to have missed it.

We left the park at dusk. The lodge was on the far side of Thakurdwara village. At the park gate I heard a lot of giggling, and was soon invited to the fireside by a pair of attractive young park Rangers from the village. They told me that the Maggi festival of the local Tharu people was coming up in two days and they insisted that a nice boy like me stay for the festivities. Why the hell not, I figured, how many chances would I get to see an authentic rural festival here? I said I'd think about it.

On the way back to the lodge we passed through the edge of the village. I was invited into a longhouse to sample some of the local brews: "roxi", a hard alcohol made from rice that tasted a bit like kahlua, and "chaang" or "rice beer", a urine-yellow concoction that tasted like a bargain white wine with rice floating in it. After politely consuming two large bowls of this stuff, I discovered that it was not only closer to wine than beer in its taste, but also in its potency, and I was quite drunk. Gautam and I merrily hiked the remaining way through the fog as a silly drunken smile crept on my face, getting sillier and sillier. I tried and failed to read a book, then had dinner. At about this time, Santoosh walked in and asked me if I had happened to meet some park Ranger girls. I said that I had, and Santoosh told me that apparently I had become the talk of the Ranger force, which was largely composed of 18-to-22 year old Tharu girls, and that those who had not met me were most eager to, while those who already had spoke very highly of me.

Santoosh and Gautam asked if I would be staying to see the Maggi festival. With quite a bit of chaang floating in my system, and more than a little bit of an ego merrily bloated by the reports from the Ranger base, I agreed to stay. What would the next days bring? Only time would tell...

Monkey See, Monkey Douche

Fun fact: everyone knows monkeys can do it doggystyle, but did you know that monkeys can do it doggystyle while breastfeeding a hanging baby? Gems of knowledge, gems of knowledge. The only good thing about my extended stay in Faizabad was my growing acquaintance with the 50-strong pack of monkeys that lives at the train station, apparently subsisting on discarded fruit and stolen family-size bags of Indian Cheetos. Though watching the antics of this pack was greatly amusing and partially redeemed the otherwise atrocious experiences I have with that train platform, their brethren down the highway were not so endearing...

I will concede that Faizabad has a very nice colossal mausoleum, but it is otherwise the Indian equivalent of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is to say that you should never ever go there if your interests include fun. My real reason for being in Faizabad in the first place was to visit the nearby Hindu and Jain holy city of Ayodhya. By now I should really know better.

According to Jain legend, Ayodhya is where five of the tirthankaras were born, including the first, Adinath, who lived there in a mighty city of gold. Of course, this occured an incredibly long time ago as Adinath lived for a modest 593 quintillion years, which seems about right based on the amount of decay necessary to reduce Ayodhya from a golden city of gods to its current condition. Ayodhya is, of course, a dusty little city full of Hindu pilgrims and temple spires dotting the skyline. Most of all, it is completely overrun by monkeys to the point that priests may actually insist you bring your shoes inside the temple proper, lest they be stolen by Ayodhyan simian miscreants. When a stuck-up brahmin priest tells you to break the holy rules, you know there is a problem.

I toured the various temples and they were quite impressive, although the Golden Temple (not "the" Golden Temple, this is just what Indians understandably call any temple in their hometown that is full of gold) was closed. I was constantly implored to visit the temple of Rama, where Rama was supposedly born, but I declined as the temple is not ancient and dates only to 1992 when the mosque that previously occupied its location was conveniently misplaced amidst an angry Hindu mob. As a result of this, religious violence swept the country. I did get lured into one mediocre temple where apparently several people were killed in a bomb blast and ensuing gunfight a few years ago.

The building of the new temple was promoted by politicians of the BJP political party. The BJP, you see, is a powerful, militantly Christian nationalist party that wants to "take back" their country, idolizes the security forces, and lies in bed with big business and unrestricted industrial development that befouls the environment and enriches industrialists without really doing anything for the people, who still vote for them anyways because, hey, fuck Muslims. Oh, wait. Excuse me, I was talking about the Republican Party. The BJP is a militantly Hindu nationalist party...

Anyways I wanted nothing to do with this temple, which I hear sucks anyways, so I spent most of my time in the hilltop castle-like temple of Hanuman the monkey god. A word of advice to aspiring religious architects: if you simply must have a single ceremonial entrance and you reside in a country with more than a few hundred million people, said ceremonial entrance ought be more than six feet wide. Climbing the many steps up to the temple door I became engulfed in what could most accurately be called a throng. Thousands of pilgrims shoved their way up the ever-narrowing stairs and tunnel like sand through an hourglass until finally after a long period of mutual exchange of sweat and body odors, I was propelled through the final gate like a bull being released into the rodeo.The temple was like the inner courtyard of a castle, with numerous brightly colored shrines on the periphery and great lengths of Hindi or Sanskrit text adorning every wall. Though I can read a bit of Hindi I did not even try to decipher these writings, because to do so would be like trying to interpret the Old Testament with a first-grade education, and as I am not from Arkansas I am not inclined to attempt this. I hastily bolted for the side of the temple as the crowd swarmed the central shrine where a troupe of laborers presided over the scramble to perform worship. The scene resembled  the frantic trading of the New York Stock Exchange, except with more throwing of flowers at statues and the added urgency of believing that if the trade is not made you will earn the unholy disfavor of an extremely powerful and displeased monkey, like Diddy Kong wielding the Hammer of Thor. It would probably be unwise to fuck with this entity.

I for one did not see fit to engage in this flower donation because I appreciate not having my ribs crushed by hordes of little old ladies and men with sub-par porno mustaches. To hell with the monkey god I thought, I'm not dealing with this mayhem. Perhaps not coincidentally, I spent the next four days trapped in fucking Faizabad.

Next time I'm in a Hanuman temple I'm doing what I'm supposed to. I'm not getting this deity any more pissed at me than he is already. I've read Congo.

Faizabad

Fuck Faizabad.

My greatest wish is for a Faizabad-sized alien mothership to blow this place away a la Independence Day with a plasma cannon. No, I lie. My greatest wish is to get the fuck out of Faizabad. I returned to the train station to tell the ticket office that I wanted to trade an essentially worthless gamble "wait list" ticket for a useful ticket to "literally anywhere but here." When I got back to the prison-like Reservations Office, there were this time not one but two cows within, and they both pissed on the floor. This sums up my experience with Faizabad. I hated Faizabad even before I got stuck here, and now I am trapped in this shithole for another THREE DAYS. Fuck Faizabad for all eternity. Allow me to list just a few of Faizabad's numerous shortcomings as a center of human civilization:

Faizabad has the charm of a burnt pork rind.

Being in Faizabad is less adventurous than watching the 2am timeslot on QVC.

Faizabad has the topography of linoleum and the biodiversity of an Oklahoman prison cell.

Faizabad is less interesting than a Country Music Awards afterparty.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could write a book about Faizabad called The Lameness Atoll, but this book would be boring.

If Faizabad were a woman it would audition for Rock of Love but not be cast.

200,000 people live in Faizabad, presumably by accident.

Faizabad is host to fewer worthwhile cultural events than Pripyat, Ukraine.

If Faizabad were a food it would be a bowl of salted lettuce

Faizabad is less memorable than the film Home Alone 3

Faizabad is as relevant as Shia LeBouef's views on professional lacrosse.

If Faizabad could cling to rocks, lichen would grow on it by mistake.

When one attempts to think about Faizabad, one's mind drifts instead to guessing the volume of empty buckets.

If Faizabad were a video game it would be the demo version of Windows Notepad.

If Faizabad hosted the Olympics, every athlete would compete in one event -Leaving- and the gold medal would be awarded to people for never fucking coming.

Happy Diwali, G's

I have left Varanasi and yet again my war against Indian livestock has moved to new soil. While waiting in line to get a train ticket the hell out of Faizabad (more on that later), I found myself in a typically dense line in a small cage-like enclosure they see fit to call the reservations office. About two hours into this almost meditative excercise in monotony,a great yelp erupted from the crowd and people began fleeing from their covetously guarded positions in line. I tried to discern the source of the commotion, and it became quite obvious. Not more than two feet behind me was a gigantic bull, which had found its way indoors and around through the door of the reservations office, and was determined to force its way through the mass of cueing customers. The customers wisely chose not to resist. Having caused such a stir, the longhorned monster was quite content to sit in the corner of the office and swat flies with its tail. Always,fucking cows.

Diwali is a month of good luck and festivals. At its climax is a Festival of Lights, which includes formal rituals and more importantly, fireworks. As such the occasion is much loved by Indian children who spend at least a week prior randomly detonating firecrackers, and is equally despised by Indian monkeys, who have no idea what's coming. There is no creature capable of greater athleticism than an urban monkey fleeing a cataclysm. From a Varanasi rooftop I was treated to a 360-degree panorama of colorful explosions that went on for hours. Indian fireworks are spectacularly cheap and unsafe, so the locals amass sizeable arsenals which they launch gleefully well into the night. There is an added element of excitement as projectiles may misfire in any direction at any moment, periodically sending volatile mixtures of gunpowder and chemically-treated birdshit rocketing ever so gracefully into, say, a third-storey balcony.

The kids, whose enchantment with fireworks knows no bounds, buy firecrackers by the sackful. They have also discovered that the safest and most convenient way to light them is by standing them upright in a cow turd. This is usually fine, until someone misjudges the potency of the explosive and the situation becomes utterly catastrophic, most of all for the children themselves who take no heed of the great distances being rapidly covered by their elders, and are surprisingly slothful for people who know they've just set a bomb in a pile of wet shit. Serves them right.

My last day in Varanasi tied up a lot of loose ends. I finally bought some clothes I've been pretending to waffle on for days to score a better discount. I attended a fire ceremony at the ghats and paid my respects to my favorite saddhus.

I met a guy who calls himself a Truth Speaker, who took me on a tour of the Varanasi underworld. He showed me where the false holy men lurk to count the money they begged from naive pilgrims and buy opium, the stair-alley where a guru was murdered for speaking out against the desecration of sacred river fisheries, and past the boat where a prostitute he particulatly disliked ("nobody likes this family" he alleged) lures customers for illicit contacts on the holy river. Though I had suspected much of what he told me I was glad to see a side of the city most of the tourists don't. Finally he took me into the actual underworld of the city, where an ancient shrine to Vishnu was concealed 25 feet underground through a twisting passage hidden in an alley I doubt I could ever find again.

I'm back on the road. Mo' trains, mo' towns, mo' fireworks at 3am. Farewells can be bittersweet. Some can be sweet. I ran into my shoulder-fondling freakshow one last time. Upon telling him of my immenent departure I saw the last glimmer of hope fade from his eyes as he ungrasped my hostage hands and dissolved into mist, whispering "no ten rupees...". Then he was gone.

This Shit Is Banaras

One of the reasons for my lengthy stay in Varanasi was to ensure that I celebrated the day of my birth in a place I knew not to be a complete craphole. Determined to make a special occasion rather than just stroll along the ghats for hours yet again, I looked for some way to mark the day in my memory. Inspired by the sight of bathing saddhus and swimmers, I decided to take a ceremonial plunge into the Ganges.

This was an exceptionally poor idea.

Though I intended to use the experience to take in my surroundings and allow the reality of my awesome new life to sink in, the only things that sank in were a plethora of industrial byproducts, and the various forms of waste deposited by the approximately 200 million people upstream. I have also been reminded that in Varanasi alone about 100 corpses are dumped in the river a day. Fantastic.

I freely admit that I am no stranger to vomiting on my birthday, but I would say that it is preferable to achieve this via foolishly dedicated binge-drinking than it is to do so as the result of tropical diseases. I spent much of the rest of the day having an adventure in plumbing, as Indian toilets (a bizarre and fascinating topic on their own) are even more uncomfortable and degrading to puke into than Western ones. At least they have knee pads. Fortunately the effects of this folly were short-lived and after a lengthy rest I was well by the next day.

I am being stalked by a masseur. There are countless men at the ghats offering massages and using the "Varanasi handshake" to trap unsuspecting tourists into an experience with their less-than-supple hands. One of these men follows me great distances every day, argues with me, frequently puts his hands on my face, and has numerous times sneaked up behind me and started rubbing my shoulders. Today I snapped at one such intrusion after he had trailed me for about 500 meters and lashed out with a would-be devastating insult, only to be reminded that my razor tongue only limply wiggles when deployed on an Indian audience. "Ten rupees sir, only ten rupees", his incessant refrain echoed as he grasped me by the cheeks. "I wouldn't give you ten rupees if your oldest daughter was massaging my dick", I shot back. "...Only ten rupees sir. Good massage."

I suck at India.

There is a dog - Cerberus is his name - that lives below my window. He is the single most evil-spirited animal that I ever hope to encounter. His hateful, dragon-like growls haunt my sleep and I have many times awoken to the yelping of dogs and puppies he has bitten or the thundering hooves of tooth-scarred cows rounding the corner. Were I not locked in here every night I would grease my chest, dig the leotard out of my backpack, put on my lucha libre mask, go outside and knock that fucker's teeth out with a bar stool.

I met a silk wholesaler today and for journalistic reasons (Ghostface gotta get paid) visited his factory to take notes on the weaving and dyeing process. All you need to know is that the scent of each color is capable of producing a subtly different form of nausea, and that the presence of that much dye is enough to make you feel like your eyes are going to bleed, and not just because the designs are way too garish for autumn.

Much more pleasant was my half-planned run-in with my old homie the buffalo herder. "I wait for you," he said "take one pole." Sweet God, yes.

With the neophyte zeal of a fraternity pledge I joined in herding his buffalo out of the Ganges and up the massive steps to the city streets, slapping buffalo belly and waving my stick all the way. Dozens of people stopped and stared , but I've come to accept that as the price of doing anything really fun in India. Maybe it's because they're so unused to seeing a member of the tourist hordes give up their dignified distance and actually immerse themselves in the day-to-day of common Indian life, or maybe it was because a guy in royal blue Indian pajama trousers and a Serbian t-shirt was loudly slapping a herd of buffalo.

Finally I ran into my saddhu friend. This guy is an old man who just spent 45 days walking barefoot from Delhi to Varanasi with nothing but an orange robe and a sack of body pigments. We sat down and in very stilted English talked for some time about the meaning of love. After offering a great many romantic tips (Do not let her father see your filthy toes; shop at her parents' store and casually flash wads of cash), he concluded "What is good? One wife, whole life." I swear, somewhere in India is a massive academy that instructs people in the English language solely in rhyming verse. "Burning is learning, cremation education". Even people with only the slightest English know at least half a dozen random couplets. I'm going to donate a truckload of Snoop Dogg CD's to this academy and blow India's mind.

Young Buddha Got It Bad Cuz I'm Brown

Right about now Indianz With Attitude court is in full effect.

Maharaja Dre presiding in the case of IWA versus the police department.

Prosecuting attourneys are MC Curry, Ice Lassi and Masala muthafuckin Chai.

Order order order. Ice Lassi take the muthafuckin' stand.

Do you swear to tell the truth the whole truth

and nothin but the truth so help your pajama-wearin' ass?

Why don't you tell everybody what the fuck you gotta say?

FUCK THA POLICE

On my way back to Varanasi from a place called Sarnath, my rickshaw got stuck in a mix of vehicle and pedestrian traffic that had all the makings of a riot. Dozens of assault-rifle wielding police officers were escorting a backhoe which I first thought was just being a pain in the ass and blocking traffic. Soon I realized it was methodically assaulting shops and tearing down parts of the storefronts as shopkeepers and cutomers fumed within. Crawling down a kilometer long stretch of road we saw the evidence of a day spent unannouncedly destroying parts of people's livelihoods, bricks and iron laying in twisted piles in front of hundreds of shops, and people's eyes fixed in rage upon the invading machine. I'm sure somebody knows why this is happening, but I'm just gonna go ahead with what is usually the proper response and say Fuck Tha Police.

It's been a busy day, between hanging out with my surprisingly philosophical gaggle of little children, visiting monumnents out of town, and having lengthy discussions with priests and gurus of three different religions, I absorbed a fair amount of knowledge, leaving just enough time to slice my way through an angry mob.

First things first. One of my little child friends informs me that last night's episode with the handgun was nothing to be concerned by. To paraphrase my little buddy "If he own a hotel in this hood, fo sho he packin' heat." It's becoming increasingly obvious that I'm living the hood life. Last night in addition to the customary dogfight, I also got to hear an argument over the price of opium. The lodge shuts itself closed with steel doors at 10 and the owner takes a gun when he goes out at night. This is why I'm always shutterred up in this bitch blogpostin'. At least until I get my nine.

Today I decided to get out there a little and I took a day trip out to Sarnath, a peaceful little town with an assortment of ruins marking the spot where Buddha gave his first sermon and thus started the cycle of the wheel of law. It is the birthplace of Buddhism. One day they're gonna build a stupa to Ghostface Buddha at a netcafe in the Pahar Ganj of Delhi marking the spot where I first made a cow shit joke online.

Sarnath is a lovely little place. There are a plethora of quiet Buddhist temples and monks from the various Buddhist countries wander around and mingle with the foreign tourists and Indian picnicking couples. I'd have to say the Sri Lankan temple was my favorite, as it was quite nicely built, had a tranquil garden of palms and a sacred bodhi tree, a golden Buddha statue quite like the logo of this fine website, and also had a deer park. I spent a great deal of time walking about reading pearls of Buddhist wisdom carved everywhere in about 15 languages. I also talked to a Buddhist monk but he had to scurry off and assist a pack of Japanese Buddhists, who even in their grey robes and orange sashes still carry a bevy of GPS-enabled, mp3-playing, remote-control-helicoptering cameras and needed someone to take the group photos.

You take your shoes off to visit temples, but I decided to just wander around the whole town barefoot. The very idea that it was possible to do this without having to constantly dodge paan spit, broken masonry, and animal manure was an irresistible novelty. People looked at me funny. Them bitches got a smile and a toe-wiggling they will never forget.

I eventually stumbled into a Jain temple, where I talked to a disciple for about an hour. Jainism, I have concluded, is essentially Buddhism on acid. He opened our discussion by distinguishing between the two branches of Jainism and proudly announced that he was of the minority Sky-Clad variety, meaning that when he becomes a guru in his own right he will go around completely naked. To illustrate this point he presented a massive folder of photographs of himself with the various naked gurus he studied under, naked-ass gurus blessing government ministers, and a picture of the Dalai Lama seemingly bowing before a Jain guru's member. Sarnath is holy to Jains because one (three? I forget how many) of the Jain tirthankas (sort of like prophets) were born here....hundreds of millions of years ago. They were also several stories tall and lived for various periods of a thousand to 8 million years. Mahavira, the last tirthanka and a historical figure quite similar to Buddha makes the most sense, while the others sound like characters from the underwater sequence in the film Yellow Submarine. Because of their diminishing size, the fact that Mahavira was a reasonable human height leads Jains to conclude that the next one who will show up in about 100 million years will be approximately a foot tall. The disciple confessed that he had great difficulty understanding these matters, as they were incredibly bizarre in comparison with the actual philosophical tenets of his faith...which is saying something.

One thing I have to say about the Jains is that they're consistent. Though they've been around 2500 years, they are willing to accept the implications of modern knowledge on their faith. For instance, now the naked gurus aren't even allowed to wash themselves, because this would kill bacteria and they are sworn to harm no living thing. I quickly concluded that I don't want to be a Jain, because I roll over in my sleep, potentially killing insects, and I also am not attracted to the idea of pulling out all the hairs on my body one by one with my bare hands. I am a hairy man. Plucking my thighs alone would give me arthritis; going any higher would leave my hands reduced to a cyborg appendage on a stump, leaving me looking like a naked, bald Luke Skywalker.

Finally I entered the archaeological site where the ruins of some of the world's oldest Buddhist structures are lying around. Among these is an enormous round brick tower marking the precise spot where the Buddha first expounded the core of Buddhism to an audience of 5 erstwhile ascetic friends. The Buddhist monks I talked to spoke with deep reverence for the place. It's not every day when you can see the place where your deepest beliefs originated. I'm no Buddhist (or a Jain, no matter how cool they are) but all told Sarnath was a pretty cool historical experience.

Back in Varanasi I instantly ran into my kid buddies again. This time they directed me to a riverside Diwali ceremony where fire-dancers and yogis performed on mattresses at the ghats while hundreds of ecstatic saddhus singed and clapped along to the music, pausing only to smear red paint on my face and toss candles into the river. One of my urchin chums bought me dinner and me and the cook talked about the meaning of life.

India rules.

My Home Away From Home. Also, A Gun

Varanasi is the holiest city in all of the Hindu religion. It lies on the Ganges river and is said to have been founded by Shiva, the most important of the Hindu deities. To die in Varanasi grants one instant liberation from the cycle of birth and death, the ultimate goal of the spirit in Hindu philosophy.

I'm sorry, I have to stop for just a second. I just started typing this basic history of Varanasi when the restaurant manager at my lodge comes up to me at the computer and excuses himself to open a locked drawer just above my keyboard. He pulls out a pistol and says "This is American gun, from Obama." This is happening in REAL TIME. OK now I am having a discussion about Barack Obama and the history of the Nobel Prize with a man casually waving a firearm. Something is being muttered about Muslims. We're now discussing the alleged stupidity of both Barack Obama and the nation of Sweden. Now he's reading what I'm typing. Now I am telling you in real time about what my subject is saying about what I am saying about him in real time. I think I just founded Gonzo Postmodernism. The gun has been tucked into his trousers, and he's going out into the alley...

OK where was I?

Historically, the city has been a major religious center since at least 1400 BC and a handful of sites have been used continually since that time. It is a beautiful and bizarre place.

Arriving in Varanasi, one gets the familiar feeling that surely nothing must be holy, because Varanasi forms the third apex of what I call the Douchemuda Triangle, the well-known trio of Delhi, Agra, and Varanasi that suffer from the worst of tourist-plaguing scum. Fortunately, my India game has increased substantially since the dark early days in Delhi and I was able to navigate the thoroughly unnatractive new districts on the fringes of town with relative ease. The rickshaw drivers dropped their full arsenal of attempted scams, until I caused such a scene that they had to call in other drivers whose reputations had not yet been tarnished by being caught in bullshit. After being dropped on the edge of the Old City, more rickshaw-wallahs offered to take me here and there, all bullshit. When I finally told them where I was actually going one guy offered up "Is very far, over two kilometers!" Knowing this was patently false I said it was more like 500 meters and the rickshaws weren't allowed there anyways. "OK OK, one kilometer" he offered, performing an astounding feat of rickshaw-wallahdom that moved the location of the Golden Vishnuwarantha Temple and transcended geography and physics as we know them. "Oooohhhh magic!" I exclaimed, prompting uproarious laughter from the assembled crowd (India is crowded, crowds assemble themselves over anything) and impressing the erstwhile scammers such that one actually took it upon himself to lead me through the alleys without a hassle or pitch.

Once you get into Varanasi's Old City, everything changes. It is a dark maze of exceptionally narrow streets between centuries-old lodges, bazaars, and countless temples and shrines, ranging from 9 to 2 feet wide. There are no cars, no rickshaws, and for the first time in India I heard no honking. It was bliss. Walking down the street one brushes shoulders with a diverse cast of characters. There are tourists. there are merchants and the ubiquitous hustlers and fixers they rely on. There are drug dealers and pimps. The drug dealers identify themselves immediately ("want something high?"), whereas the pimps blend seamlessly into Indian society, revealing their true intents only once they have tested the waters with lengthy small talk. There are policemen by the hundreds, armed with rifles and tucked in squads into tiny alcoves from which they maintain order, most importantly serving as a shield against religious fanaticism, because if there is anywhere where religious zealotry could suddenly combust, it is here.

Most noticeably of all, there are the myriad different Hindu priests and holy men. One of the great things about Hinduism is that it accommodates an essentially infinite variety of religious practice. However, this also has the effect of giving the loonies free reign. Varanasi draws a dazzling array of wandering religious men, most of whom have long beards, painted skin, and orange robes draped over their haggard bodies. Some are additionally weighed down with purple and yellow cloths, wreaths of flowers, skulls, bells, pots, conch horns, and an array of offerings to be made on the circuit of the city's greatest shrines. Some of these men carry the very aura of piousness, others seem suspiciously like kooks who take great pleasure in leading a life where they can paint themselves and harangue strangers with bells.

There are the cows. Dear lord, are there cows. Fat, happy cows. In Varanasi, the myth of a single cow bringing all traffic to a stop is true, not because traffic ever really stops for a cow (there are no rules to the road, you just go around), but because the cows are so fat and the streets so narrow that one may find oneself in a standoff with a creature that takes up the entire passage and has horns. However, I can't bring myself to dislike the cows here. They just seem to belong, hanging in their favorite alleys and wandering the cityscape without a care. Within the physical body of every cow is God, I was told one night over tea by the side of the Ganges. The cows here are so serene, so strangely noble, that I can feel myself almost starting to believe it.

Finally, in Varanasi there is the unmistakable presence of death. It was here that the Lord of Death was given his power, except in the City of Life itself. Varanasi's spiritual heart is the ghats, the massive riverside steps that extend along the length of the city. There are dozens, each capped with temples and shrines. From the steps people commune from all walks of life. There are the laundymen, the meditating saddhus, the pious pilgrims washing themselves in the God-infused waters of the Ganges. Finally there are the dead. Two of Varanasi's ghats are the great burning ghats, where the dead are publicly cremated by the sacred river. At the larger of the two cremation ghats, massive piles of firewood line the streets and barges offshore, with dozens of funeral pyres burning at a time. The heat is tremendous and the smoke, though mostly from the hundreds of kilograms of wood in each pyre, feels as though it fills the lungs with the ashes of the dead and the crackling cloud-bound embers of liberation.

With liberation as its reward, countless people travel here to die. Above the ghats where the dead are burnt, within the warmth of their glow, lodges house the dying who await their turn. One can look through the darkened windows of these lodges and see nothing for the dying lie too low to be seen, but every few minutes a party of Untouchables carries another veiled corpse from these quarters or from the narrow alleys leading to the rest of the city. Over 300 people are burnt here every day. An additional 100, Untouchables, lepers, outcasts, and holy men who have transcended the caste system are bound to rocks and dropped into the Ganges.

I'm not drawn to these spectacles of death. Indeed, for the most part I avoid them. The heat is uncomfortable, the endless activity of overlapping funerals at the ghat approaches the mundane so much that it is numbing. I find myself tethered here instead by an intense awareness of life. Perhaps with such stark contrast in evidence, pillars of white smoke perpetually marking the cremation ghat's position on the riverside, an awareness of life is all but inevitable. Everyone else here seems to feel life too. The sincerity of the pious gazing longingly into the Ganges, the remarkable color and vibrancy of the city's spiritual life, the ever-present clamor of bells, the majesty of the massive steps leading up into the city, the claustrophobic lanes where one can't help but be bumped into one of the innumerable shrines, flowerpots and candles floating downstream, the brilliant flood-weathered architecture all make this an inescapably alluring place.

Aside from working on a valuable article for work about the finer points of travel by rickshaw, I've mostly just been absorbing the city and learning my way through the labyrinth, periodically sit by the river and learn my way up and down the riverside through all the gates. I have favorites. The Marikarnika Ghat, though known mostly for its cremations which I avoid, has also a fascinating pool, said to be the well into which Shiva dropped his earring in a cosmic dance at the time of creation. Just beyond this is the Scindia ghat, where a massive Shiva temple has fallen into the river, leaving its ornate spire tilting out of the waters. The waters rise several stories every monsoon season. I am assured that the trees on the plain across the river are left completely underwater. Looking at the height at which the main shrines sit above the steps, and the height to which the steps are caked in thick, packed mud, I am inclined to believe this. The city maintains a fleet of small pump-boats whose purpose is to blast river water at the mud and clean off the monsoon's deposits on the ghats. Firehoses are pumped without regard for passers-by and without warning, sending pilgrims and cows alike to scatter in shock. Sometimes this occurs at perfectly clean ghats. I suspect this is the stepcleaners' way of fucking with priests, cows, and the Establishment. If I could turn firehoses on smug-ass cows and unsuspecting meditating saddhus every day, that might be the one job in India I would trade for my own.

I'm making Varanasi my base in India, a place to periodically return. I can sit on the ghats for hours, and the absence of honking and smog make it an appealing place to work between journeys. Indeed, I have all my needs met without having to leave the twisting confines of the Old City, free from the ugly commotion and decrepitude of New India. I have a little room in a lodge in a tiny alley. At one end of the alley is a marvelous Japanese cafe, at the other an Indian restaurant with live Classical Indian music. I've got a computer and hot breakfast and it's cheap. My alley has a rotating cast of cows, some of whom I'm starting to recognize as regulars. My only complaint is that I have a first-floor window facing an even narrower alley leading to a busy temple, and every night a battle between three angry dogs for mastery of this alley takes place beneath my window, interrupted only by the occasional interventions of a man of questionable mental health.

I was going to write some more about my theories regarding the Indian rules of traffic, the institution of Indian pimphood, and the beginner's guide to buffalo herding I promised, but I got carried away writing about how much I love Varanasi. That and I was literally interrupted by a dude with a handgun.

He hasn't come back. I'd really like to know what he's up to.

Life

Life, it could be said, is like a road through the perceptible universe. Though each life has a single beginning, each holds infinite possibilities, and at any moment there can be a fork in this great branching path. Some of these forks are clearly posted; we understand their implications. The realization of this phenomenon gives us free will, reason. Other forks are unclear, inscrutable, hidden. Events unfold and our lives take turns we never expected. Contemplating on these mysteries we conjure destiny, or the will of God. I reflected on these matters a great deal, as I tried to pinpoint the exact moment in my life that I became the man I find myself to be today. How, I wondered, did I become a man who was uncertain whether having a skull and a flaccid penis waved in my face should be a cause for alarm?

But to understand the great moments in life, we must first grasp the everyday. You may wonder, when not at toil on his travel guide labors, what does a philosopher/hip-hop legend like myself do with his free time? Well, tonight for instance, I stayed in, sewed a pouch and attempted to watch televised cricket.

I've been spending more and more time just chilling about, starting to actually act like I live in India. I talk to kids a lot. Kids are always fun. When linguistic difficulties arise, silly faces are always appreciated. Once they reach the teenage years though, things are different.

Westernization is an odd thing. It is never the adoption of Western customs by another culture, but rather the adoption of what that culture perceives to be Western customs. The results are typically hilarious. Hip young Indian teenagers, males in particular, embody this phenomenon to a fault. The typical fashion of young middle-class men here could be described as A-Capella-Singer-Meets-Jersey-Guido. It's truly horrendous. In addition to their meticulously greased hair, they invariably carry sunglasses, which are rarely used to shield themselves from sunlight but are constantly lowered over the face for over-serious inpromptu photo-shoots. American Eagle is huge in India. For weeks I've marveled at how these people could possibly watch Western media and then emulate it so ridiculously. Then I saw MTV India.

Indian TV in general is patently absurd, being a potpourri of religious programming, news broadcasts in various languages, Bollywood movies, Bollywood gossip, and cricket. On MTV India a watched a show called "Rock On" which is basically an American Idol/Rock Band hybrid from hell. The one act I watched was a self-described "fusion" group, that sounded like Hindi pop (itself egregious enough in its own right) being double-teamed by Incubus and Linkin Park. India is essentially in 1999. As I walked through the new city in Allahabad I saw a place named F.R.I.E.N.D.S Cafe, the entire premises plastered with promo shots of the cast of "Friends" circa season 7. I don't think Rachel even had the baby yet. Ugh. India is so backwards it's disgusting.

Cultural exchange is in many ways selective. The adopting culture largely picks and chooses those elements of the foreign that appeal to it, and add their own touches in ways that truly tickle the heart. I could only smile at the elaborate red and yellow military garb and turban worn by Pizza Hut security.

When I ask Indian people which their favorite American movies are, I typically get three responses. The younger ones are fond of the Harry Potter and Spiderman series. The third movie, much beloved amongst middle-aged Indians, is Jesus Christ Superstar. At first I was flummoxed. Then one man explained to me "Is like Bollywood movie!" Very true, very true.

Goofy-looking marching bands are ubiquitous and amusing enough, but I have started to notice (although notice may be too subtle a word) that Indians have somehow come to believe that it is a good idea to mount a dozen automated tubas to the back of a truck. And this is only the beginning of the atrocities. Now hitting the Indian interwebs is YouTube sensation "Happy Feet", except because Indians aren't really feeling the Crunk, the video is awkwardly set to a Hindi-language cover of "I like to move it, move it". If this continues it will be mere decades before half of India decides to become Amish.

I have time to write about these little observations because my article about Allahabad took about twenty minutes. Allahabad, you see, is a very holy place where the sacred Yamuna river which I have essentially been following for a week meets the even more sacred Ganges as well as the mystical subterranean Saraswati (river of enlightenment). As such, it is the host of the world's largest religious festival, the Maha Khumbh Mela, which last time it was held drew in excess of 17 million people to a single spot, probably marking the single largest gathering of humanity in history.

That is all you need to know about Allahabad, other than that it sucks and you shouldn't go there. There is nothing to see and nothing to do. The holy Kumbh Mela ground is a big-ass patch of mud and rest of the city is crap. More pilgrims, more rickshaws, more fucking cows. Save yourselves the trouble.

Ghostface Buddha: going to Allahabad so you don't have to.

All this came of course after a gruelling 12-hour train ride in "Sleeper Class", which is clearly a codeword for "WWII-era Red Army surplus." These carriages could serve no purpose originally but to ferry a totalitarian empire's troops to the front. Which brings us back to today's train ride. Failing to locate the carriage for which I had a reservation, I slipped at the last moment onto a "Second Class" carriage, which is the worst type of carriage in India. I do not recommend Second Class. For starters, it becomes so overcrowded that passengers crowd onto the floor, lying under seats, and clambering like monkeys onto the luggage racks for lack of space. In lieu of the personal teapots and newspapers served by silly-hat-wearing attendants in "AC Chair Class" is a rotating cast of beggars, chickpea-sellers, and tea-peddlers at each station. When worst comes to worst, a religious ascetic may harangue you in Hindi while first shaking a mongoose skull at you until the ineffectiveness of this communicative technique forces him to resort to waggling his noodle-like ash-covered penis in your face.

How, I ask again, did my life come to this?

Innermost Reflections: A Meditation On The Taj Mahal

I perform profoundly unnecessary tasks. I just spent the night until 3 AM writing garbage that sounds like this:

The Taj Mahal is a wondrous edifice, surreptitiously effervescent in its timeless versimilitude

Ugh...work. Writing meaningless and subjective judgments about well-known monuments? Why is life sooooo haaaarrrrdddd.

My budding career as a writer is a tour de force in gross generalizations, misused vocabulary, cursory historical research, and superfluous literary flourishes designed to push me over 1000 words for that crucial bump in the paycheck. I'm like a middle-schooler who's just discovered double-spacing. I may as well slit my wrists.

So that being said, I ain't got shit to say about the Taj Mahal. I'm 300 words short on my real article and nobody in the bazaar sells a thesaurus. Fuck my life. Time to review hotels that offer a bathtub and a toaster.

I get paid to travel India, but this entails composing sophomore-caliber art history essays about the world's most famous building. Just put a gun in my mouth and shoot me.

I spend an afternoon touring marble palaces atop the Agra Fort, but I have to write an article about that too. Fetch a ladder. You'll find me swinging from the castle walls.

I have to type information from a street pamphlet about Aurangzeb's battlements without the aid of copy-paste. Dredge the river, I'll be in there somewhere.

Here. Here is some useful info about the Taj Mahal: http://www.google.com/search?=Taj_Mahal

Now read that while I find the train tracks.

Agra-vation

(sorry but it had to be done)

I heard bad things about Agra. There are so many idiot tourists ripe for the picking that it is nigh-impossible for a foreigner to accomplish anything without being hassled or scammed in search of a buck. I had seen Agra already. It was putrid, a Dickensian wasteland where smoke, acid, and shit stain the human heart of the city. And I'm here to write about a fucking postcard.

I jumped off the bus at a clogged intersection where I saw vacant rickshaws, my attempt to depart a la indien comically thwarted by the size of my pack pinning me in the door. Men approached me offering their rickshaw services. I followed a pair, got in with the driver, and was ready to go. What happened next defied all reason. As we made a U-turn around the road divider the other man in the pair leaped into the moving rickshaw and began to scream in Hindi. My life became a scrapped Indiana Jones movie as I was in the back of a moving auto-rickshaw while two men wrestled and punched each other a the wheel, massive buses blaring their horns as we wobbled to and fro between lanes. We struck a cycle-rickshaw, briefly adding a third aggrieved rickshaw-wallah to the fray. With great determination the driver brought us to a stop precisely where we began. The argument continued, drawing in the entire rickshaw-wallah community who formed an inpromptu court around the scene. I gathered that the two were not a pair (though this I had suspected when the punching began) and that the argument centered on who had "claimed" me first, presumably to pop my fresh tourist cherry and get commissions on crap I would naively be pressured into buying at whatever marble shops of fabric stores they would lug me to on the way to the wrong hotel. As the debate went on, seemingly in circles, I felt very passive, acting like a little baby waiting for the grownups to decide what to do with me. Up to this point my unintrusive silence had me a boss acting a bitch.

This could not stand.

"MOTHERFUCKERS" I bellowed over the din of the mob, "SHUT THE FUCK UP." The F-bomb, when used judiciously, is remarkably effective in India. A tourist taking command, showing some balls? Unheard of! The stunned silence began to fade as the wallahs discussed the outburst, prompting the assailant to resume his diatribe. "I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS" I screamed at him, at the crowd, at every sob-story and bullshit-peddler across the entire Ganges Plain. And truly, I did not give a fuck. I had places to be. I was not going to sit around while they summoned the Wazir of Rickshawistan or whoever to dispense justice. "NOW TAKE ME TO THE GODDAMN TAJ GANJ." With that, it was decided. Acting as one, the mob hurled the assailant from the vehicle and scolded him fiercely. As we drove away I saw him being smacked upside the head like a little child. I turned to my driver and calmly said "Taj Ganj, direct, no bullshit, 40 rupees". It was the last and only problem I had in Agra.

Once you penetrate the newer parts of Agra (the Excrement District, the Sulfur Dioxide Quarter), the center is actually reasonably nice. It may have helped that I was staying a mere 50 meters from the South Gate of the Taj complex and didn't really have to go anywhere passing through the unpleasantness. In the Taj Ganj district someone hassles you every five feet to buy cigarettes or postcards or come into their marble shop or whatever but they are remarkably easy to repel. There are so many fools about - fat old tourists with stupid hats and knee-socks seemingly stretched up most of their spinal column, as well as legions of rich, carefree Japanese - that even the hint that you are willing to be a difficult asshole makes you not worth the trouble.

I ran into someone with something useful to offer, a cheap ride across the river Yamuna to see the sun set upriver and cast a glow on the rear side of the Taj Mahal. It was quite peaceful. The other side of the river was a mostly rural area, with some small vilages and old pleasure gardens. Though the vantage point was superb, only about 20 tourists were to be seen nearby, ambling silently about while an adorable little scamp used his superb English and hilariously apropos (I am told) Japanese phrases to make a living setting up humorous photo-ops. On the way out a man implored "please sir, touch my soft hairy camel." "Only if you buy me dinner first", I responded. The quip fell flat. My attempts at being a wiseass in India are almost always failures.

First thing this morning I woke up and did not don my usual battle armor, the carefully planned array of money stashes, writing gear, and daytime neccesities that I meticulously conceal on my person. I was going to the Taj Mahal. If there was ever a time when it did not hurt to be a dumbass-looking tourist this was it. I sent my various Indian garments and carefully selected T-shirts in obscure languages to the laundry. Rocking a bright cotton t-shirt with MEXICO emblazoned on the front, shades perched on my head, and a camera pouch slung over my shoulder, I marched out towards the gate.

Ali Baba and the 40 Mexican Novelists

Children under the age of 12 are in unanimous agreement across India: my name is Ali Baba. This information is usually conveying to me with a wide grin and stroking of the beard they might have in a decade or so. They are the only one's who don't buy my story. I've been sowing disinformation...telling everyone I am a Mexican novelist, and occasionally when my bullshit reserves are getting depleted I admit I am a Mexican travel writer. The kids see right through this act. Clearly I am Ali Baba.

Swastikas and camels are both common in India, but I was still incredibly surprised to see swastikas painted on a camel. Perhaps it is the black paint on a living animal that gives the design an alarming tatoo-like quality, as if this was an angry, prejudiced camel. It seemed as though the swastikas should be accompanied by other tatoos reading DROMEDARY POWER, or BACTRIANS RAUS.

I would also like to point out that the 50 rupee bill is the purple one. Cool people know what's up.

Finally, it occurs to me that there is no excuse to plaster a city with ads for "Anus' English Academy". Come on Anu, you run an English academy, you should know better.

Yesterday was my first extended bus ride, a local route through the countryside to the abandoned city of Fatehpur Sikri via Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. There are many technical high schools around Agra, meaning the buses quickly become overloaded with teenage boys who, like their counterparts the world over, are the most obnoxious things imaginable. I haven't spoken to a single Westerner since I got to India but this bus treated me to my first encounter with the Japanese. They were clearly in utter misery on this loud, hot bus in the chaos of India. One retreated behind a scarf over her face, anxiously tapping away at some device with an electric stylus while her friend simply cowered, foldering her big floppy hat over her ears. She whispered quietly, perhaps begging her higher power to deliver her back home to a land with orderly lines and digital toilets.

The city of Agra is utterly revolting. It is half slum, half industrial hellscape, and it is a modern Venice of open sewers. Distant glimpses of the Taj Mahal and the liklihood of being able to stretch this city out into multiple articles and get mad bank from the bosses are the only things giving me reason not to dread my impending return.

With only one street, you'd think that the village of Fatehpur would offer some peace and quiet. Ha. One street is plenty of room for traffic jams and general insanity in India. Here motorcyclists and auto-rickshaws must merely content themselves with mostly directing their compulsive honking at camels and horsecarts. It's an odd little town. Traveling as a Mexican usually throws the nags off their routines, but here when I say I'm from Mexico people start shouting "Acapulco! Acapulco!" Turns out this town has a tradition of cliff-jumpers who earn their living by diving from the walls of the mosque into a shallow pool. The Acapulco divers are admired so greatly that many of the villagers have learned Spanish. I've picked up a little Hindi, and I had a very entertaining trilingual conversation with a 12-year old.

The monumental old city of Fatehpur Sikri above the village is truly astounding. Its massive scale is befitting its status as an old Mughal imperial capital, and the stonework is the finest I have seen anywhere in the world. I can't go into too much detail about the architecture because I blew my literary efforts on my work article and I'm really not supposed to be releasing that content publicly. Anyways,in short it is a whimsical but incredibly potent mishmash of Hindu, Muslim, Jain, and Buddhist structural elements into a compelling architectural vocabulary. Fatehpur Sikri is awesome. More people should go there.

I've accumulated a small traveling library. I brought some guidebooks for India and Nepal with me. After a successful trip to the bazaar I now am the proud owner of the following titles:

1) Cambridge Self Hindi Teacher: A Step By Step, Practical Simple, And Scientific Approach For Mastering Hindi, Equally Useful To Foreigners, Tourists, Businessmen And Students

2) Outwitting Squirrels: 101 Cunning Strategems To Reduce Dramatically The Egregious Misappropriation Of Seeds From Your Birdfeeder By Squirrels

I'm about to get on a bus to Agra, the lion's den of Indian tourism. The village imam prayed for my safe travels, but I don't need God's help. Agra bitches is gonna find Ghostface Buddha is more than they can handle. GAUTAM CLAN AIN'T NOTHING TO FUCK WITH.

Bovis TYRANNIS

How many people fit on a blip on the map in India? In the case of Mathura,over 300,000. Today I was resolved to get somewhere even more "miniscule" so I hopped on a bus to tiny Vrindavan and its 60,000 inhabitants. I do mean that I hopped on the bus. There is no such thing as a bus stop here. The vehicle comes to a full halt only at the termini, leaving a steady stream of passengers jumping on and off at any moment. As we pulled into Vrindavam traffic was brought to a crawl by the digging of a massive ditch across which merchants still tried to peddle their wares, presumably offering to throw the goods across or to deliver them via a bag on a long stick. We saw here a typically Indian dilemma...four men attempting to maneauver a 45-foot lead pipe through heavy traffic by strapping it to a tricycle.

Vrindavan, an extremely popular pilgrimage site due to its association with the marriage of Krishna and Rama is somehow even more pious than Mathura. A majority of people on the street are half-naked pilgrim saddhus and the gall of the city's cows is the greatest I have seen yet. In addition to the many liberties taken by cows elsewhere, those in Vrindavan have adapted to outright confrontation with their human peons.

As I sat on a vacant stoop preparing to eat a lunch of rotis and dahl, I saw one of these bovine holier-than-thous making a beeline towards me. It stopped a foot or less from me, taking an extreme interest in my roti and then in my goodie-bag. I produced a dish of dahl, which drove the beast even closer to the verge of daylight robbery. The cow thrust its face withni inches of mine, staring me in the eyes with its snout at my lunch. I tried to resist but it loomed closer and closer until we touched brows. There was no way out...I was held prisoner by a docile but imposing behemoth five times my size, surrounded by religious zealots who considered it sacred and wielded heavy-looking sticks. In desperation I tossed my dahl away. It dribbled down the pavement as a rather bemused cow attempted to lick it up, granting me the precious inches needed to make my escape.

In a town of infirm beggars, veiled widows, and religious mendicants I was the most pathetic creature to be found. For the first time in my life I had succumbed to a mugging, and I had been mugged by a cow.

Resigned to eating plain rotis as I toured the various shrines, I made another discovery. Vrindavan, as everyone was eager to tell me, is the global headquarters of ISKCON. From this acronym I envisioned a cabal of smartly-dressed Indian government officials in a nuclear command bunker with Modernist-inspired elephants carved into a lead blast door, ready to bomb Pakistan into the stone age in a contest over silly mustaches. In fact ISKCON stands for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or as we call them, the Hare Krishnas. Sure enough, as one walks closer and closer to the Hare Krishna compound there is an increasing density of bizarrely multinational monks wandering aimlessly about with their hands clasped. They earned their common name for the frequency with which they say "Hare Krishna", their response to nearly all external stimuli, which they utter ceaselessly and inscutably like some sort of neo-Hindu Pokemon (attacks: New Age Orientalism, 15 culture damage; Praise Krishna, +25 social interaction resistance).

The guidebooks all concur that Vrindavan is dusty, giving me my first chance to make a radical mark on the travel guide world. Vrindavan is not dusty. It is muddy. Lonely Planet can suck a fat one.

I began to suspect that everyone in Vrindavan was either a nutjob or a fanatic (a purely philosophical distinction in my book anyways). Then things got really, really weird and confirmed this suspicion. A young devotee about my age approached me. We made the customary small talk until he said to me "You like poking? You want poking Indian?" The tone of his voice revealed he was not referring to a Facebook poke. I laughed. Repressed societies invariably create pervs, and in India one of the ways this expresses itself is by a prurient interest in how we foreigners get our thangs in action. "If you want poke Indian we can go." Oh great, I thought, it's hardly been a week and I've befriended my first Indian pimp. Why always with the pimps? I was very mistaken. My grin disappeared when when he leant over and whispered in my ear "We go to my room. Poke now. Please." Oh dear. Oh my.

Some two hours after being propositioned for anal sex by a monk I was back in Mathura. I hailed an auto-rickshaw to take me home in an increadingly fierce rain. The streets flooded and the entire city huddled in raised doorways looking at the rain in awe. Every other word I heard was "paani", water, followed by some incredulous-sounding remark. Even for Indians, this was some crazy shit. The waters surged down the streets until they were too deep for even the cycle-rickshaws to ply through, their pedals submerged by the torrent. My driver boldly pushed ahead until with great drama the auto-rickshaw stalled in its tracks and water flowed over into the cabin. As we bailed out the rickshaw tipped with our weight. It was afloat in the street. Not my rickshaw, not my problem, I figured as I forged on alone through the streets. Hundreds of Indians waved and shouted at me in English as I waded through the now knee-deep deluge. Their shouts were a mixture of admiration and ridicule. Aaaaaahhhhhhh, I thought, just like home.

note: it has been made known to me by persons with nothing better to do that the proper genus name for cows is bos not bovis and that they belong to the family bovinae. Blow me.

ACTUAL CORRECTION: I would like to correct the egregious error of writing that Krishna married Rama. This is quite impossible. First of all, Krishna and Rama are characters in different epic tale. Secondly, they are both incarnations of Vishnu. And finally, they are both male. Rama was married to Sita.

In The Kingdom of Bovis Rex

As I write this (in my notebook) I am sitting along the ghats (river steps) by the side of the sacred Yamuna river in the Hindu holy city of Mathura, surrounded by an army of monkeys, one of whom just stole a silver trumpet from a hapless member of a red-coated marching band and absconded with it into a tree. A baby monkey just did a backflip in midair to beat its siblings to a cookie thrown by an orange-robed, dreadlocked pilgrim. The marching band is doing its utmost to restore its dignity as they have just noticed the arrival of about 25 teenage girls. Baby monkeys can jump at least 7 feet and accurately land on an area the size of a toddler's head. It takes about 9 people to eject a grown monkey from a ceremonial river boat. I know all these things because watching them happen is my job. My life is awesome, and I haven't even started to write what I sat down here to write about.

I left Delhi at an ungodly hour this morning bound for the mythical forests of Braj, the realm in which the blue-skinned superbaby Krishna fought evil princes and lifted mountains with his finger while still having time to steal girls' clothes while they bathed. Krishna, one of the most popular incarnations of Vishnu was allegedly born here in Mathura and the city is overwhelmed by the trappings of Hindu holiness. The most impressive site I visited was the fiercely contested complex where Muslim and Hindu places of worship faced eachother over a heavily guarded prison-like wall, vying for control over the ancient site whose foundations contain the simple dark stone slab on which Krishna was born. It's not much to look at, but it matters enough that the army has a permanent garrison to maintain order. Of course the forests of Braj aren't so mythical these days, replaced by endless farms on the plains with villages tightly packed every few kilometers around a decrepit factory. The train ride was comfortable but unsettling.
note: Here I have excised a lengthy passage about the train ride that largely dealt with the appaling poverty alongside the tracks. It is truly horrendous and merits inclusion in a more thoughtful and, frankly, better-written piece on that subject rather than inclusion in this more comedic post

My first impression of Mathura was its bazaar, a long stretch of utter madness which after just a week in India I already feel all too familiar with. Though swarming, the city has a much more human scale than Delhi, affording one the oppurtunity to enjoy such sights as the intricate ritual interplay of boats and cloth on the river. The city can be crossed on foot and no grand roads clog the air with fumes. I marveled that this hectic place could be but a blip on the map of Northern India.

I went outside to write because the power keeps shutting off. Though mostly the fault of ramshackle infrastructure, I have beheld that it is at least partially the fault of monkeys, who use the power lines as their personal footpaths, occasionally knocking something loose to spark to the ground, prompting witnesses to throw their hands in exasperation as a local shopkeeper pokes his head out, rolls his eyes, and sighs as he goes to fetch a ladder because it is his turn again to fix up after the damn monkeys. The inhabitants of Mathura must be forbidden to harm monkeys (as I believe most Hindus are) because otherwise the adorable little bastards would all be dead after all the mischief they get into.

Try as they might, the monkeys will never rule this place. Sovereignty was long ago unconditionally and perpetually ceded to the cows.

I was passing through a narrow walkway at the side of the bazaar when I suddenly felt two hard objects pushing against the rear of my thighs. I turned to see a white humpnecked cow with its horns leveled at my posterior. The cow surged forwards, pushing me down the street upon its horns. It raised its head, lifting me off my heels so that I had to quickly tiptoe to maintain pace and balance and avoid being flipped...or worse. I felt a most unpleasant sensation. As the cow's horns pressed into my thighs I could feel those organs usually located between my thighs being pushed forcefully into my abdomen by the cow's head, my precious jewels coming to a most cursed equilibrium nestled between the beast's eyes. There is no knowledge on this Earth so terrible as the realization that one's scrotum can feel a cow blink. For five more yards I was gripped with fear, initially out of the obvious concern for the wellbeing of my manhood, but then even more I feared what the crowd might do to me, for I was essentially teabagging the physical manifestation of God.

The cows of Mathura defy man with impunity. Roaming the city by the thousands, they amble brazenly through open doors and into stairwells, making their way to landings and even balconies where they sit smug and indolent, knowing that they sit where they sit and everyone can just deal with it. Bovis Rex, King of the Streets.

Cows rule everything around me
C.R.E.A.M
Get the money
Rupee rupee bill y'all