Guest Post: Pascal in India

Here, Pascal, stand right there...

My brother Pascal joined me in Calcutta for the Indian portion of the trip. Here are his first thoughts:

India has been described to me in different ways. On the one hand the rapid modernization, call centers, businesses, movies and industry spreading throughout the country. And on the other the slums, poverty, beggars, and swarming crowds of such that would make any tourist feel guilty with shame at their own wealth.

My initial extraction from airport-land happened in Calcutta, and during a day’s worth of walking around the entire downtown area I hardly ever came across a single beggar. Even in Varanasi, there were very few beggars and they were more discreet and spiritually oriented. There are definitely huge gaps between the abject poverty levels in some places and the wealthy who live in European-style environments. Overall, though, prosperity has clearly risen, and there are more people walking around with cell phones than scrounging on the streets to stay alive.

Before coming here I was worried about how we would work out transportation and if we would have to hire taxis and guides and so on. It turns out that it was all needless; the rail system here is extremely well-developed and I was impressed by the size and number of people at Calcutta’s Howrah station. Thousands and thousands of people streaming in and out of there every minute, rushing around like massive ocean currents flowing chaotically in different directions.

One of the biggest differences with home is how many scents are drifting through the air all the time. There are all the open-air cooked foods, the incense, flowers, fragrances and so on. I’ve heard that when people leave India they feel like they’ve lost their sense of smell.

Varanasi is one of India’s holiest cities, and the depth of it can certainly be felt. There are stylish building facades, people praying and bathing in the Ganges river. There is a maze of buildings where the streets intertwine like a spiderweb with no center. Some alleys are hardly wider than sidewalks yet somehow find room for cows, carts, and motorcycles.

Every now and then a funeral procession will rush their way through carrying a dead body on a stretcher. The body is covered with fancy cloth, color-coded for age and gender and later burned at a sacred ghat in front of the river. Surprisingly, it doesn’t smell, even a couple dozen feet away from where they burn hundreds of bodies a day. The remains are scattered into the sacred Ganges river, a watery cocktail of feces, sewage, body parts, human ashes, fish and bacteria. Despite this, thousands of visitors come to submerge themselves in the river or drink the water. We’re not sure if Indians are naturally immune to Ganges water or if they regularly get sick.

Back at the Varanasi train station, it’s a return to the bustle of the typical Indian city streets, with aggressive jostling for space by the many bicycles, cars, tuk-tuks, rickshaws, pedestrians, dogs, trucks, buses and cows in between shops and stands of all types and sizes.