Advertisement
Published: December 26th 2007
Edit Blog Post
In case you are curious, we have been in India for 10 months as of today (December 24, 2007), and it looks like we will be able to go the distance (2 years) and possibly longer, if that opportunity comes our way. I am not sure that we would want to stay if it wasn't for all the traveling we have done. Call us spoiled if you like, but living in India has many challenges that we never had while living in the USA.
The challenges are charming for the first 4-6 months, but after that you start missing the easy life of clean air and water, and grocery stores filled with rows of beautiful clean and fresh fruits and vegetables not sprayed with pesticides banned in the west. You also miss buying items at reasonable marked prices instead of bargaining to buy everything and paying more because store owner's in India assume foreigners are stupid. We really aren't that stupid, we just don't want to argue for 5 minutes to save 50 cents. It would seem that the transaction costs of negotiating every sale limits them to a store the size of a postage stamp since only one employee
(the owner) has the power to set the price.
The products are not marked, so one person must negotiate every item before it can be sold. So instead of having thousands of sales occurring simultaneously by hundreds of employees at fixed reasonable prices, they slow things down and have one employee negotiate with each customer. In the end, the store owner's business model is limited because it won't scale. They are limited to how fast they can personally negotiate with each customer. It costs me 50 cents more because I don't care to negotiate, but I save 5 minutes which is worth much more than 50 cents to me. But these small negotiating stores may have trouble staying in business when the modern business model migrates to India.
Don't get me wrong, we like India and we are not ready to go home. If India were not different from the US, we would not have bothered leaving home. But living in a foreign land, you still get annoyed from time to time, and miss things about home.
Our friend Genevieve (Gen) is visiting from Portland, Oregon, USA, for Christmas and the New Year. After spending a few
Varanasi
Kim, Dan, and Gen days in New Delhi we headed out to see Varanasi for Christmas, which is in India about 450 KM east of New Delhi.
Varanasi is considered holy by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. In Hinduism (according to our Hindu guide and translator) there are three main gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Varanasi was the home of Shiva who is known as the destroyer god. Hindus believe that if they are cremated on the shores of the Ganges river in Varanasi, they will be released from the continuous death and rebirth of reincarnation and suffering and will return to god for their final place of resting.
On the morning of our first day there, we took a boat ride on the Ganges river and saw this sacred city from the river. Varanasi is the city of Shiva the destroyer. You are fully aware of, and in the grasp of, death and destruction as you walk the narrow streets of Varanasi. You see men carrying the dead bodies of their elders above their heads on bambo gurneys as they walk toward the river. They dip the heads of the deceased in the river so water from the Ganges can enter the
mouth of the dead.
They then place the body on a pile of wood gathered from the forest, and walk in a circle around the body as they chant "god is true." They then set fire to the wood and watch the body burn to ashes in a few hours. After the body is well engulfed in flames, they break open the skull to let out the spirit of the dead so it may return to god. The ashes are then placed in the river. The family then baths in the river every morning for 13 days as they morn the dead.
There are two main spots for cremating the dead in Varanasi. The ashes are dropped in the river at these two places after the cremation is complete, and workers sift through the sediment of the river bed for gold (from the teeth) or jewelry that survives the cremation. The air in this part of the city is full of the smell of cremation and you are overtaken with the finality of it all.
Varanasi is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world.
Five kilometers from Varanasi in Sarnath is where Buddha
gave his first Sermon (http://www.hinduwebsite.com/buddhism/firstsermon.asp). After giving his first Sermon in Sarnath, Buddha spent the next six winters there building a society to spread the word of enlightenment. In the eleventh century, followers of Islam destroyed this birthplace of Buddhism and killed 3000 Buddhist monks. Fortunately, many Buddhist monks had left India and were able to spread Buddhism throughout Asia and the west, where it survives today. Buddha lived to about 80 years of age and died about 500 BC (http://www.buddhistbible.com/default.aspx?MPID=42). There is a large presence of monks from around the world who come to see the origins of Buddhism. Our Hindu guide said that the locals view the Thai monks as the least evolved monks, because they eat meat and Buddha was a vegetarian. I asked a monk about that when I was in Thailand, and he said that you should not refuse meat because it is a choice that judges the giver. I am not sure where you draw the line then; doesn't refusing sex, drugs, and alcohol judge the giver?
For a thousand years, the symbol of four lions facing the four corners of the earth has been the symbol of India. Excavations of Sarnath show
that the symbols of the four lions represent Buddha's desire that Buddism be spread to the four corners of the globe. According to our guide, Buddha's contemporaries in the Hindu faith believed at the time of his life that he was a reincarnation of lord Vishnu.
Sarnath includes a deer park. You may remember the deer park surrounding Buddha's temple in our Nara, Japan blog? I asked our guide about this, and he confirmed that the deer park in Nara is modeled after Sarnath. The world is getting smaller for us.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.049s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0217s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Steve Sobota
non-member comment
cool!
merry christmas! your friend touched that water. guess she'll have to cut her fingers off. :)