What I Did On My Holidays: India Trip 2014

Despite having a Sagittarius Sunsign in both zodiacs, I'm not by nature a traveller. From 22nd February to 4th March, however, I was journeying in India, between Delhi, Varanasi and Agra, a mixture of familiar tourist spots and off-piste experience. The country has a hold on many people's imaginations and in defiance of my 'inner traveller' stance, my trip was part holiday, part pilgrimage. 

Varanasi Supermodel

"Everything you say about India, the reverse is also true", I was told. For sure there are extremes of wealth and poverty, colour and squalor, spirituality and sleaze. Delhi, home to 18 million people, is a very green city, with endless parks and tree-lined streets, which seem also to be permanently swathed in a charcoal-smelling haze. Its new Metro system is a world-class facility and the prevalence of the English language makes it easy for Westerners to get around. For all its teeming energy and anarchic roads, there is an underlying softness, unlike London for example, which has a much harder, colder atmosphere.

Delhi

Thousands auto-rickshaws, or 'Tuk-Tuks', swarm around the city like bees. They are basically three-wheel motorbikes with a chassis and run on compressed natural gas, making for virtually zero-emissions. This is another planned environmental policy and explains their iconic green and yellow livery. Boris Johnson, are you listening?

I asked our driver if there are any rules on Indian roads. "Yes, many rules", he said. Which nobody pays any attention to: "We are a free country, the largest democracy in the world". You see a gap, signal by honking your horn and take your chances, rather like the fairground Dodgems, and the experience strengthens your faith. On the inter-city highways, nobody bats an eyelid to see a camel-drawn rickshaw coming the opposite way down the inside lane. We saw a couple of crashes, but no road-rage as such: if this was the UK, there would be murders on the road daily. 

Ganges at Varanasi

Varanasi is the epitome in many ways of India's paradox. This city of a thousand temples, a hundred mosques and twenty three churches is bursting with life and energy, and gives an impression of what India must have been like centuries ago. It is part Biblical, part Wild West frontier town, and all post-Apocalyptic. Buildings seem to have been abandoned then completed later, or built over in a completely different style, for quite another purpose. Its roads are mostly dirt tracks, bulls and buffaloes wander the streets like honoured guests, and the traffic is a free-for-all of bikes and beeping horns, making for the uninitiated a dizzying cocktail of culture shock. 

Varanasi

Even in the UK, some sacred sites have a hypnotic quality, where it is cautioned against spending too much time. You know anyone moving permanently to Glastonbury, for example, is making a statement and entering an otherworldly phase of their life. On a balmy evening, Varanasi has a magical quality that you only fully appreciate after you have left, since there is probably nowhere else in the world quite like it. It is not a serene or tranquil place, but a powerful mystical portal where air is thick with spirituality, and it is hard to stay there for any length of time and be unaffected. 

With Pandit Lakshmi Shankar Shukla

There is a gravity to the city too, which after all, is a place where people go to die. Varanasi's famous bathing ghats on the Ganges are a place of pilgrimage, among the most auspicious of all places to leave this world. Bodies wrapped in sheets are carried through the streets on the way to the waterside, sometimes by hand, sometimes on the roof racks of cars. Some families save up for months to afford enough sandalwood to cremate their loved ones at the holy Ganges side, where 250 bodies every day are burnt in the open air.

Meditation at Sarnath

Sarnath, on the outskirts of the city, is the birthplace of Buddhism, where Gautama preached his first sermon. It is a major Buddhist shrine, containing a Tibetan university, which attracts pilgrims from the far-East in particular, year-round. I was fortunate to spend time with Vedic pandits at a temple in the grounds, as they performed the Rudrabhishek Yagya morning and afternoon. This recitation, which takes about two and a half hours in total, is for health, wealth, peace and protection. Being present while the pandits chanted was a privilege, but this facility can be viewed on Skype and is available to everyone around the world. 

Rudrabhishek Yagya at Sarnath

Agra, after Varanasi, was a more regular sight-seeing experience. The Taj Mahal is arguably the world's most beautiful building and an icon, like the Mona Lisa say, that brings out everyone's inner tourist. Drinking in its sheer Cathedral scale and symmetry does not disappoint, and there is not an angle from which it doesn't dazzle. What you don't see from a distance are the inlaid semi-precious stones: onyx, malachite, lapis, jasper, and the precision and intricacy of the work. Twenty thousand labourers took twenty years to build a monument to undying love. 

© The India Tourist Board

In Agra, I also had my first informal sitar lesson. I volunteered to one of a classical duo playing outdoors in a restaurant that I was a guitarist and he was kind enough to show me the basics. Sitar has many similarities with guitar, basically fretting notes and plucking strings, except another layer of strings lying underneath supply a drone. The specific tuning also depends on what piece of music one is playing, with the morning, afternoon and evening ragas all having different tunings. This approach strikes me as very Indian: subtle, complex, with an innate understanding of the rhythms of life. Adjusting to sitar is rather like learning Jyotish after cutting your teeth on Western astrology.

"Where's the volume control?"

I returned from the trip feeling slightly different in ways that are hard to articulate. It is rather like waking from a vivid dream. Varanasi in particular has a profound effect and is not somewhere from which you emerge with a neutral opinion. I miss very much the way astrology and yoga are steeped into the soul of that city, and how their various practitioners are respected, or revered actually. A top Jyotish pandit has status simlilar or superior to that of a doctor. Returning to a Western city, you see far more orderliness and material prosperity, but it also strikes you what relatively superficial lives we lead. 

I was also humbled by the warmth and hospitality shown by everyone. 'The guest is God' is an admonition from the Upanishads which my friends in Delhi and Varanasi take very seriously. As a Westerner, my expectations of ever spending quality time with yogis and Vedic pandits would be pretty small, but I was welcomed and made to feel included. Next time I'm staying longer.