For the sake of a post

Lord Krishna using a hill as an umbrella - seen at one of the hundreds of temples in Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh state, India

This new job is killing. I've switched from having about an hour or more of internet surfing, to err... about 2 minutes per day, and that is if the friggin internet is working. The rest of the day is just work. The most hardworking I've been since the first job after graduation, I think.

OK, I've decided to leave some photos of Mathura / Vrindavan taken donkey years ago in conjunction with Janmashtami, Krishna's Birthday which'll fall on the 1st or 2nd of Sept this year. Mathura is the birth place of the Hindu god Krishna, and the Mathura-Vrindavan area is where he spent his childhood frolicking with the milk maids (he's quite a lady-killer as a boy) and performing his early miracles.


The Birla Temple dedicated to the Bhagavad Gita, Hinduism's holy scripture, on the outskirts of Mathura






Birla Temple, Mathura


The Pagal Baba (Mad Papa) Temple, Vrindavan


The Hare Krishna Movement Temple in Vrindavan

Agra

The Itimad-Ud-Daulah, aka Baby Taj, at Agra, Uttar Pradesh

I realize nowadays that I have nothing fun, interesting, or even distressing to write about.

Yes, I still reminisce about going to far-flung places where nobody’s ever been to, but apart from that …nothing. No fantasies about romancing the next Ms Universe, no plans for having a wild party the coming weekend, or the weekends to come, not much knowledge about what new movies are in town, no daydreams about monsters, buildings or scenarios to put on paper while attending a boring meeting, no ideas for creating new writing scripts, no looking forward to a good old computer hack-the-helloutta’em game, no longing for a nice novel, no roaming animals in the street to gawp at (because this is a bloody desert, and animals, apart from camels, are usually smart enough not to loiter around a barren patch of sand)…

And no ideas at all for a stupid title to this entry.

The only things which are in my mind nowadays, are, what type of management systems I can put in place for the new Project we’ve just got? What sort of bloody way we can use to tackle this new project? When is it time to go home to be with wife...

I think I better go with pictures of Agra from last year… That’s the place where we did our weekly grocery shopping when we were in Bharatpur. Agra is about 1.5 hours away on our very own Project Highway, 2 hours or more when the state border guards decide to check the lorries (usually at night when all you wanna do is go straight home and jump into bed, and you’re caught up behind, in front, or beside a mess of huge trucks arguing, blowing their horns, bloody flashing their lights…). Driving to Agra and back are the highlights of any trip to Agra, you get to manoeuvre around slow big fat tractors, killer trucks and buses, safety barriers (ours) and potholes that pop up from nowhere; squeeze your cars in between the hordes of rickshaws, push-carts, bicycles, street vendors, pedestrians, cars, …gosh, how I miss that…


Anu and the surreal Taj Mahal ...bloody expensive entrance fees (for foreigners), i've paid 3 times the 750 rupees!


On the bank of the Yamuna River, at Itimad-Ud-Daulah


Anu’s eldest sister Manju and son Kunal at the Agra Fort

The Lost City of Akbar

This is Fatehpur Sikri, a city commissioned and built by Akbar, one of the greatest kings of the Mughal Dynasty – the dynasty that built the Taj Mahal and ruled most of India until the British kicked them out. Fatehpur Sikri sits smack within our Agra to Bharatpur Highway Project, so there’s no chance not visiting it.

Fatehpur Sikri was for a short time, the capital of Mughal India until Akbar found it near impossible to channel water to it despite the engineering marvels of the time. He promptly moved the capital back to Agra (about 40km away), and abandoned the city to the ravages of time – No, it was not a folly, he knew from the start that it’d become a tourist attraction in about err... 400 years time and then the foreign tourists would have to cough up about 20 times the amount that a local would have to pay, and generate loads of revenue for his country, apart from generating job opportunities for the local boys (as tourist guides), who would generally bug the shit out of you, and tell all how great Akbar was, how he was very respectful and tolerant of all religions, so much so that he had a Hindu wife, a Muslim wife and a Christian wife all at the same time, living in the same place ...i.e. this place. Now, that’s what you call, a king.


Anu's sister Manju, and her son, Kunal at Fatehpur Sikri


Anu glaring at the countless guides, touts and you name it at the Buland Darwaza (literally Huge bloody Gate - ...my translation)

Where people come to die...

On the river Ganges, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh


The Ganga Arti (prayers to the Ganges) in process at Dasaswamedh Ghat

This is just about the best place you can visit in India – Varanasi (also popularly called Benares), the holy city of the Hindus, the place where many Hindus would want to die in (…die at, …aww, what the heck, if any of you know the correct preposition to use, please tell willya?), since dying here is supposed to release one from the cycle of birth and death, or moksha. Great huh, you can finally die, …for good.

Besides dying, Varanasi is actually great for many other things. You can take a gulp of the water from the holy Ganges, wash away your sins, and in the process kill yourself and attain moksha (it’ll be a miracle if you survive anyway, don’t believe me take a look of the Ganges here yourself). You can take a dip in the holy Ganges and while away time watching the multitude of things that can float on water sail by, boats, garlands of flowers, lit offerings to the Gods, a stray bra or underwear, empty plastic bags and bottles, unidentifiable floating objects, crows having a good time dining on the carcass of a buffalo… You can have a swell time tracking across the 2km stretch of Ghats lining the revered Ganges river visiting hidden temples, learning about the different types and costs of wood used for burning up dead bodies, chatting with the holy men, and the not-so-holy, who’ll try to sell you stuff, show you stuff, or pry stuff (especially money) out of you. You can explore the narrow lanes and hidden alleys near the ghats and play hide-and-seek with the cattle (who’ll take up the entire width of some of the alleys), dogs, goats, monkeys and dangerous looking people, all the while holding a hankie to your nose, so that you won’t faint from the exotic smell of incense, dung, urine and garbage. You can shop till you drop at the streets and streets of shops (believe me, the bargain shoppers (aka women) will love this place, but luckily for us men, the smell of this place will hopefully limit the natural tendencies of our better half huh?). You can practice your oratory skills, in Hindi if not in sign language, with the uncountable rickshaw-walas who’ll try to ferry you to any place, except the place you wanna get to, all for the sake of showing you the sights of Varanasi, or more likely to waste your precious time, piss the shit out of you, and get extra money for ferrying you back to the same place you’ve started from so that you can get another rickshaw, who’ll try to play the same trick on you, and the cycle goes on…

So, wanna experience India at its best? Visit Benares.


A bored security guard at Munshi Ghat


What a local hotel boss does when he’s bored…


Somewhere near Manikarnika Ghat, Varanasi


The rickshaws of Varanasi, …Yes, it’s always this congested (…ok, maybe not at 3am in the morning, but who’s gonna be up to find out huh?)

…but come to think of it, on a less cynical tone, and to be fairer to the city, I actually kinda like Varanasi. Amid all the chaos and hustle and bustle, Varanasi has its subtle charm, like something surreal, some lifestyle of the ancient past which is still very much alive today. This is where you can catch the soul of Hinduism (…if you can somehow ignore the greedy, and the crooked), this is where you can experience the real India with all its colours, customs and culture, this is where a lot of foreigners come to seek spiritualism, jam music and just, chill out. I think there’s hardly another place with as much connection to its past and to its after-life than Varanasi, the city where people come to die…


An offering to the Ganga...

Destiny's Path

Recently I got married. …Huh? What?!? Yeah, it’s true, after all I’m friggin human, I’m 36 bloody years old, I’m not gay, and I also wanna have a family of my own, and like it or not, destiny seems to have decided that it’s about time this …err thing happened.

Although destiny didn’t put it in such a straight-forward kinda way. No, don’t get me wrong, everything went on quite normally at first. There was friendship (we knew each other since January 2006, but never in our minds thought we’d be together, …we used to tease each other and pair each other off to potential partners). There was love (of course) and then a proposal (first, on the phone with my now-wife and then I went to her house and family in Assam state and formally proposed to her mother and her brothers). There was courtship (for about ONE WHOLE MONTH, after she accepted my proposal hehehe – when in India, do as the Indians do, right?). There was rivalry, …a lot of rivalry (after all my wife’s not that bad looking and somehow seems to attract a lot of …unwanted (on my part) attention, which include big names which I will refrain from naming here, and yours truly isn’t that bad in the attraction department himself, never would have guessed huh? hehehe). There were a lot of obstacles, ...there was a lot of heartache (refer to my earlier entries – “A Note of Illumination” and “Casualties of Love”). And finally there was our daring escape from Mizoram, when my wife left everything and everyone that she knew, to be with me, God bless her, and it’s no easy task to escape from Mizoram or for the matter of fact, her village (and her house which is inaccessible by car), without a soul knowing about it (don’t believe me, just let me see you do it). So, there you have it, we’re together and happily married now, far from the reaches of Mizoram.

And somehow, after you’re married your writing creativity and inspiration just don’t seem to work?!? …beats me, …but maybe there’s just no bloody free-time, …oh, YES HONEY, I’m coming…

By the way, my wife’s name is Anu, short for Anuradha Rajput.


Gary & Anu at the Sun Temple, Konark, Orissa


Gary & Anu at Taj Mahal, Agra, Uttar Pradesh