Only in.....

So...there are reasons for and against visiting any country. With India, there are strong reasons for and against. On the plus side, India holds a seemingly endless handfull of trump cards to cancel out any negatives. Most of those cards fall in the suit of "Only In India". Tami and I can see the difference most tangibly in how much we write and how many photos we take here compared to other countries. If you've spent time here, you have some idea of what I'm talking about. True to form, the past month has coughed up an unbroken string of such "OII" moments. Just yesterday I was walking down an alley here in Mysore and I saw this booth out of the corner of my eye:

I continued walking for fifteen or twenty paces wondering if I really saw what I thought I saw...so I went back, looked at the sign and asked the man sitting on the floor if "setting bones" was his actual business. "Yes! Bone setting...and massage!" Okay . . . .

It happens all the time here. This morning I went out to buy yogurt for breakfast. It was early and the streets were quiet but just down from our corner I saw a tight cluster of maybe 30 men gathered around someone along the side of the street. As I approached I could hear the call and response between a man's voice and a high-pitched, muffled boy's. Occasionally a drum played by another boy and a high-pitched whistle punctuated the exchange. I looked over the shoulders of the crowd and the ringleader was evangelizing about something as he exchanged folded pieces of paper for money with the onlookers. Par for scenes like this, the men and boys stared motionless with wide eyes. From what I could gather, the man would get Rupee notes of a given denomination and a young boy hidden at his feet, under a wicker basket, covered by a rug would call out the amount that someone had handed the man...all without seeing the bills. At the end, the spectators who handed over cash would read the papers which may have been something like fortunes...but I don't know.

I already mentioned the pilgrammage Tami and I joined in Tiruvanamallai. (Tami wrote a full blog about it.) There, every month on the full moon, hundreds of thousands of Hindus come to join in a 14 kilometer walk around a holy mountain. They start late in the evening just after the moon rises and the crowd flows all night and into the next day. Indians are pretty serious walkers and, in a collective setting like this, they hustle. We were both exausted and sore by the time we finished sometime before dawn. That all the pilgrims walk barefoot on rough, pebble strewn asphalt made the circumambulation sincerely humbling.


The masses start by gathering and performing different rituals at the temple in the center of town. Thousands gather at the main gate (tallest one at the far side in above photo) and the atmosphere feels for all the world like something straight out of the Middle Ages. After the appropriate amount of fire oriented devotion, they troop off through the neighborhoods to the edge of the city. All along the way the route is lined with ancillary temples big and small and old and new. Almost every pilgrim veers off the road to perform prayers at these.


As you might expect, there are also all manner of wacky participants of different natures. There is a legion of beggars, food and chai sellers, a few free food stations provided by larger temples, performers (among them a handful of blind musical groups), booths selling religious paraphenalia and videos and dvd's of various gurus preaching the gospel, palm readers....and on, and on. The guy with this van was one of a few we saw who had a computer mounted in a console that apparently told your fortune.

The whole walk took maybe five or six hours but those were some of the most interesting hours I've enjoyed. Scenes like this are not common (or expected) for a guy raised in a small, Midwest farm town. On the future "to-do" list is a repeat of this walk on the full moon of the final month of the lunar year (usually November or December). At that time, on the main pilgrimage of the year, the local holy men erect a huge, ten-meter tall "wick" on top of the mountain, saturate it with three thousand liters of oil and set it on fire.