Jaipur, India

As you may recall, on the last day of October in 2009 we were at the Pushkar Camel Fair, about to be taken through a Hindu Pilgrim ceremony. Our guide started by making sure we were well aware that coughing up a few Rupees in exchange for this privilege was de rigueur. With that, he took us down to Pushkar Lake. When you see Pushkar Lake in photos, it looks awesome – bright blue water ringed by temples and ceremonial Ghats (gates) all adorned with bright ribbons and thousands of luminescent yellow marigolds. When you see Pushkar Lake in person on October 31, 2009, you see a marshy dry lakebed teeming with trash, with only a few puddles of water here and there. Around the erstwhile shore of the missing lake were 5 or 6 cement pools filled with brackish water in which Hindu pilgrims were bathing as part of the Puja.

A Puja is a mini-ceremony in which you recite some prayers, sprinkle rose and marigold petals on the water and have some holy lake water sprinkled on your head. Peggy and I, as far as we know, are not Hindus, but for some miraculous reason, we were invited to do a Puja at Pushkar Lake. Because all of the money collected from said non-Hindus is diverted to the poor, the lame and the widowed (except for certain donations which I’ll get to), it can’t possibly have anything to do with enriching the dozens of Brahman “priests” or their “volunteer” pledge collectors, so I guess it’s just because the happy people of Pushkar love spreading the joy of Hinduism that they allow us outsiders to take the Puja.

Our guide book fairly warned us that part of the ritual would be an attempt to guilt us into giving a lot of money, but we felt we were strong enough to stand up to the pressure, so we forged ahead. Our Rough Guide said a fair amount to pay for a Puja was 51 Rupees (the odd number is for luck), so that is the amount I was planning to donate.

Our priest, a scruffy young man in a dirty white robe, sloshed a little water from one of the pools into a small metal urn, then sat us down on the steps above one of the pools to take us through the ceremony. He said lots of uplifting things about Hinduism, reminded us for the umpteenth time that all money collected there was given to the poor, the lame and the widowed, then held our hands and asked us to repeat Hindi phrases after him. This was an impossible joke. We couldn’t understand any of the words and our pathetic attempts to imitate his sounds were laughable. At one point the phrases “papa ooh maw maw” and “ram a lam a ding dong” started going through my head and I almost started saying those things instead of the sounds he was asking us to repeat, but I knew we would both burst out laughing if I did, so I just kept trying to go with the flow: “O wha”, “ta goo”, “siam” (say those phrases over and over very quickly and you’ll probably feel just like I did).

Finally our holy dude told us to make a wish for our family and friends while he recited the last chant for us. I thought about taking this seriously and wishing for peace, health and prosperity for all my family members and friends (which is what Peggy did), but I felt so used that all I could do was pray that this farce would end soon.

The chanting finally stopped and we were told to deposit the props used for the Puja (marigolds, colored powders and sweets) into what appeared to be a garbage can. Normally this stuff is sprinkled over the waters of Lake Pushkar as the Puja is being performed, but as I’ve already reported, Lake Pushkar is now Dry Swamp Pushkar, and apparently Puja biz is booming to the extent that the amount of tourist Puja Paraphernalia would overwhelm the small pools that contain water, so into the dumper goes our holy relics. We were rewarded with red smudged tilakas on our foreheads and we did get to keep the holy strings, which were tied around our wrists. These are filaments, supposedly harvested from Temple flags, usually in hues of red and orange, that almost every Hindu wears. They’re the equivalent, and then some, of the plastic yellow Live Strong bracelets that many people in the US sport. Our strings were ongoing testaments to the reality that we had performed Puja.

Thankfully, we were almost done, but we did yet have to face the bill collectors. Our “priest” took us to these guys who had very official looking receipt books using three part carbon paper (journal books with multi-part carbon paper are all the rage in India, even in places where everything appears to be computerized) and they asked us to write down our particulars and then make a pledge that would be collected on the spot. As noted, our guide claimed that a pledge of 51 Rupees is quite common. Given the high pressure we’d already been subjected to by our guide and our “priest” I figured I better up the ante a little. Our “priest” had earlier made suggestions that ranged into the thousands of Rupees. I wasn’t going there, but I figured 101 Rupees had a nice ring to it. But when I wrote that number onto the multi-part pledge form I got such sour looks from the accountants and “priest” alike I knew it wasn’t going to fly. They pointed at a very professional looking sign on the wall that listed recommended pledge amounts. I didn’t bother to read any of it beyond the minimum number I saw which was 201 Rupees. So I pledged that amount, Peggy was more or less forced to do the same, I produced the appropriate amounts and started backing away when priest-boy stuck out his hand and said something that I don’t remember but caused me to reach into my wallet for another 100 Rupee note which seemed like a pretty cheap “get out of jail” card at that point.

I hope the whole odd number of Rupees for good luck thing works inversely because I gave him an even number. A big element of the Hindu religion is the concept of Karma, which is sort of a life-long accounting of your good and bad works which get added up after your demise to determine what type of entity you get to be re-incarnated as. I’m not sure which Hindu god acts as the CPA in this regard, but I am convinced that none of the shysters who extort money from tourists with phony religious rituals are going to get return tickets that are much better than dung beetle or banana slug.

Just to be clear, I have nothing against the Hindu religion. I don’t understand it, but it’s probably every bit as good as any of the other major religions. My problem is with the practitioners who have subverted and perverted it in ways that I doubt Brahma had in mind when he took Hinduism public many thousands of years ago.

Having not enjoyed our interlude with guide Ashok to any great degree, we let him speed-walk us back to our car, gave him a 100 Rupee tip, thanked him (with dripping sarcasm that felt so good to me but I know was wasted on him) for all he taught us about the Hindu faith, answered his predictable question about whether or not we were happy with big smiles, then took off in search of other adventures at the Pushkar Camel Fair. We bargained hard, ate more Agra Sweets, rode two-up on a camel’s back and enjoyed the trappings of a busy carnival evening.

One of the more interesting, but very disconcerting, activities going on at the camel fair was the collecting, sorting, stacking and selling of the camel and cattle dung that was being deposited at world record levels all over the fair grounds. The collecting was done by a variety of Indians, but Peggy was very disturbed to see the high proportion of young girls who were participating in this task. Her very valid point was “Why aren’t those girls in school?” (For the hyper detail oriented and observant amongst us, I should report that Saturday is a school day in India). The dung is sold to the very poor at presumably exceedingly low prices to be used as cooking and heating fuel. There are lots of things about being dreadfully poor that are not appealing, but heating my house with poop would probably have to be one of the worst.

Back at our hotel, we were amazed to hear yet more Kenny G coming out of the Muzak system. Kenny G is such a mainstay at Indian hotels that I’ve finally concluded his real name must be Kenny Gupta. Dinner that night included the best mutton sausage of the trip to date and a wonderful local desert that had enough butter, cream and sugar in it to raise our blood sugar into dangerous territory.

On Sunday morning, after breakfast, I called for a bell-wallah to carry our bag up to the office so we could check out. As we were strolling peacefully along the path to the office, another bell-wallah came up and asked for the key to our room. I knew what he was charged to do – he had to go count the items in the mini-bar, because I assume an India Wide Tourist Alert had been issued to all hotels instructing them to be on the lookout for a certain American who was trying to score free Pringles everywhere he went.

Later that day, on our drive to Jaipur, we had another great driving adventure. We came to a stretch of the two-lane highway where both shoulders were parked full of trucks for a long distance. It just so happened that our lane crawled to a stop at that point. Sanju craned his neck to see if anything was coming in the other lane, but there was a long line of nose to tail traffic in front of us, and he was afraid of getting out in the oncoming lane only to find traffic coming with no place to duck into. But within seconds a large truck went by in that lane (going in our direction which means the wrong way for that lane), followed almost immediately by a passenger bus and then a minivan. That was all Sanju needed. He jumped in behind the minivan because we now had a little convoy that had totally commandeered the wrong lane! We passed 15-20 trucks before we ground to a halt – oncoming traffic had materialized and they were not happy. So those of us in our little convoy just slowly nosed our way back into our own slow moving lane, feeling ever so smug about the minute or so we had saved on our 5 hour commute to Jaipur.

Jaipur is the handicraft capital of Rajasthan, which itself is the handicraft capital of all of India. In Jaipur they make block print textiles, wood carvings, brass castings, clothing, jewelry, rugs and pottery.

We met our guide, Kamesh, Sunday afternoon, and he was a pleasant improvement over his brethren with whom we had not been overly pleased so far. His English was excellent, his knowledge of tourist attractions in Jaipur superb and he was warm and funny to boot. Finally, we thought, we have found a guide who just wants to attend to us rather than try to divert us to local shops where he can score a commission off anything we buy.

He started by taking us to the Jantar Mantar, which is one of the coolest things we saw on our sweep through Rajasthan. The Jantar Mantar contains 18 huge stone astronomical devices constructed by Jai Singh in the 18th century. These instruments not only tell the time of day (to within 2 seconds accuracy), they also were used to support intricate calculations of astrological signs, helping the local practitioners determine the most auspicious times for weddings, celebrations and bowel movements.

Although the end result of the Jantar Mantar instruments was the somewhat questionable “science” of astrology, the astronomical underpinnings that were represented there appealed to our nerdy, scientific senses.

When we left the Jantar Mantar we were entertained by a couple of snake charmers coaxing their cobras into the hypnotic, weaving dance that seems so trite when you see it on TV, but which is absolutely marvelous when you see it in person.

Next we visited the City Palace, in the center of Jaipur which is commonly called the Pink City. Why it’s called that remains a mystery to us, because almost all building in Jaipur are a reddish rust color. Apparently someone somewhere decided that color was called Pink in the English language, so the inaccurate description has stuck.

There was another really cool thing at the city palace, two things actually. There were two large silver urns on display there, each with a capacity of 8182 liters. It seems that an heir to the dynasty in this region, one Madho Singh II went to London in 1901 for the coronation if King Edward VII. But, like tourists even today, he was worried about the effects the local water would have on his delicate system, so he had these urns made and actually hauled many thousands of liters of water from the Ganges (which today would make your stomach turn) on the trip to England with him so he wouldn’t have to drink the foul water in England. Bottled water is an older concept than I would have imagined.

We were so enjoying the refreshingly open nature of Kamesh’s guiding style that our guard was down when he had Sanju stop at a Rajasthan crafts market. Our guard went quickly up again when we noticed that we were the only customers in a three story structure crammed with all sorts of knickknacks. We looked at miniature paintings (Naveen from Udaipur had already scored our commission on that item), Punjabi Dresses and carved elephants, which I had taken a strong liking to a day or two earlier. We let our hosts tip their hand by slyly offering to provide “better” pricing (this at a supposedly fixed price store) but we were in no mood to buy anything at this location. Our belief that Kamesh was a shining knight in a land of villains took its first hit.

Pix here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26545681@N07/collections/72157622773921922/