Varanasi

A much more hectic city than I had expected from the religious centre of India. Very Bangladesh, especially the traffic.
Our guide today told us that there is only one rule with Indian traffic; whatever side of the road you're on, is the right side. He also said the reason it is the religious capital, is that if you experience the traffic here, you will be compelled to believe in god.

A previous guide told us that three things are required to survive on Indian roads; good brakes, good horn, and good luck.

How true those statements are.

On our way to our first event for the day, the bus dropped Sarah and her mum at the hotel we will be coming back to for lunch. Her dad comes from Varanasi, and she has relatives who wanted to meet up when we came into town.
The rest of us went off to a Buddhist shrine. More of a ruin really, it's the location where Buddha made his first sermon. About 600 years BC. Buddhism is an offshoot of the Hindu religion, but without all the idolatry.

I find it intriguing that people have this compulsion to stick gold foil to things. Part of their process, I guess. Anyway, the signs clearly don't deter them. Real gold leaf, by the way. Or so I'm told. It wouldn't surprise me, actually. Despite the poverty, they still have a thing for real gold, 22 carat, no less. That's why the jewellery you will see on Indian women is much yellower-looking (is that a word) than what we are used to seeing. We tend to use 18 carat, because it's stronger. Anything less than 22 carat they tend to regard as costume jewellery. Go Figure.

The thing I was most impressed by, is a giant statue of Buddha, virtually next door to this site. It was built between 2001 and 2011 by the Thai Buddhist movement, as a response to the Taliban destroying the previously largest statue of Buddha, in Afghanistan.
As one of the others in my group said, that's the perfect non-violent response.
"Fuck you then, we'll just build another one, where you can't get to it." Excellent!!

Interesting that Varanasi is a pivotal location for both the Hindu and Buddhist religions. Not always. Many centuries ago, some ruler decided to ban all Buddhists from India. The religion, which started here, was now dead. Except that it had already spread to Thailand, where it has continued to thrive. It was only when this ruin was discovered a couple of centuries ago that Buddhism was allowed to take off again.

Something else I learned about the Hindu caste system. It isn't. Or at least it wasn't. Originally, the caste labels were intended as a description of somebody's career or skill. Kind of like our white collar and blue collar workers. If somebody studied hard, they could move from the streets to a much higher position. Just like in our society, anybody can move from a working class background to something better through hard work.
Obviously, if you are born into a particular class, it will be easier for you to succeed there. Again, no different from western society.
What happened here was that some born into the highest levels, the Brahmans and the warrior caste, wanted the benefits of their birth status without having to work for it. Through political pressure, the caste system moved from a skill category to birth category. Apparently, the writings of the Hindu faith make no mention of the caste system, because it simply didn't exist when they were written.

As we were about to leave in the bus, I saw something I have never noticed before. A sugarcane juice vendor. He has a cart, with what is effectively a wringer mounted sideways on it. As a small motor turns the wringer, he feeds a handful of sugarcane into the mouth of the machine. As he pulls the crushed stalks from the other end, juice pours back out of the mouth of the wringer, into a jug hanging underneath. He passes the cane through a few more times, until there is nothing but shredded pulp left. He then sells the juice to the public by the glass. He makes it to order, so the customer watches his drink being made.

Then back to that hotel for lunch. I meet Sarah's uncle, aunt, cousin and nieces. A lot of smiling and nodding, because they haven't found a need to learn English. So they leave, and Sarah's mum hops into a cab to go back to the train and rest. She didn't sleep last night, and is feeling crappy.

We then went to the temple of mother India. It's not really a temple, so I happily went inside. Other than a walkway around the outside wall, the whole building is a giant map of India on the floor. Not painted, but carved out of marble. A perfect scale topographical map.

A very impressive undertaking, built in the early 20th century, and consecrated by Gandhi. It's surprisingly fun to get a real-life perspective on an entire country. It includes every mountain in the Himalayas, plus surrounding islands. I haven't seen anything like it anywhere.

After that we went to a traditional silk weaving house, where they make saris, scarves, bedspreads. Other than the guy using a manual machine, I was very impressed to see them using what is regarded as the worlds first computer. A loom like the manual one, but it runs off a series of punch cards, linked together into either a continuous chain, or a very long sequence. Each punchcard tells the machine which bobbins to use, creating the pattern for a single line. So they can create a pattern that repeats every twenty lines, or one that has five hundred distinct lines of code.
The first computer. The first computer program. Double cool.

Then it was off to the Ganges river. Into a boat, and off we go, putt-putting our way into the most revered location in the Hindu world.