Agra to Jaipur

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It's difficult to imagine how the rest of our trip will compare after seeing the Taj Mahal.
We had a few last stops on our way out of Agra, the Agra Fort (remember, the place where Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his petulant son?). We got to have one last glimpse of the Taj before moving on to Jaipur...

On our way to Jaipur, we stopped at Fatehpur Sikri (an ancient fortified ghost city which used to be the capital, built by Akbar in 1659, but later abandoned due to lack of water). We also saw Jama Masjid, a stunning mosque in Fatehpur Sikri.

On our drive from Agra to Jaipur, our driver, Gurdeep, took a detour down a clandestine street to show us a popular place to 'consort' (shall we say?) with sex workers. Phred and I weren't quite sure if Gurdeep was gaugeing our interest or just showing us to increase our cultural knowledge. Regardless, it was quite a site to see, stunning young girls and women, like sirens, draped within stone gazebos called us hither...while it was difficult to see such young girls selling themselves to make a meager income, part of me wanted to step out of the car and learn more...

Thoughts...
I have been in India for four days and while I know that poverty is pandemic within India, today I witnessed the most intense and numerous scenes of poverty so far. People with no work and little to do but wait and survive, struggle to cope with the intense Indian heat, create homes out of whatever materials are available (straw, sticks, tarp, mud, boxes, tires, tin), wait on line to get meager water rations from a community water pump, children run naked, emaciated dogs, cows and goats rummage through the endless piles of garbage on the streets for whatever food and water they can find...These communities are so large in some places, it's hard to even imagine.
The poverty is simply indescribable, but I don't want to forget any part of it. I don't want my memory to trick me into thinking it wasn't so bad, so intense, so vast. So, I try to capture it in some way...Part of me wants to capture the scenes in photograph, but it is too heartbreaking and as I peer through the lens, I feel too detached...as if I am looking at objects, not human beings. Yet, I cannot find the right words or enough words...

Despite all of this...India is still one of the most beautiful and complicated places I have ever experienced.

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Comments

[Teva]

thoughts
I am particularly struck by your comments on the poverty and how important it is to remember that along with all the enormous and breathtaking beauty one must not forget that this beauty, somehow, goes hand in hand with the poverty. And I think, from the (not anywhere near yours) experiences, this is difficult to come to terms with. For me, it is almost the same way my mind responds to beauty, right? I almost cannot process it. So when you say that there is this lens (physical and mental) between you and the poverty, it makes sense to me. But still, I don't know what to do with it, except, to remember it. Both ways... the beauty and the poverty. I think that is the biggest mistake people of privilege (I'm making a large generalization) make... to somehow censor what they deem un-beautiful.... And there is such a large difference between seeing (viewing) and living there. I remember my Grandma Zelda couldn't understand why I didn't love San Francisco and Berkeley and it was largely because I could NOT overlook that... She just neglected to see/remember the things she did not want to see. I could keenly feel how disparate the beauty and the poverty was and perhaps, couldn't process it.