Fredag 27 november 2009

Om hippies, Rana och andra funderingar...

They are everywhere in the small coffeeshops in Assi, in the streets and on the hotel roofs - the Varanasi:ed westernes with long beards, shawls, brecelets, hippie-trousers, dreads and apatic non-seing eyes. They never look you in the eyes and they try desperately to be so unique that they all end up looking the same, finding themselves up in the same spots, talking about the same stuff - Nepal, traveling, friends, ganja etc etc. But who am I to talk out of turn? Are we students from Gothenburg better or more nuanced? Perhaps not, but I once was the same as they - searching for my ego in a strange environment - and I dont want to trade lives with them... Maybe I see things differently now. Or maybe not. We are all tourists...
I dont want to trade lives with the Indian people on the streets either, the young unemployed men trying desperately to sell you every useless thing you can imagine, the mothers with their dying babies on their laps. And where are all the other women, really? The streets are filled with men, boys, traders, beggars. Some 80 % of them are men. It may be worse in the neigbouring Pakistan, in the cities Lahore or Peshavar where some 99 % of the people in the streets are men, but this is bad enough. Where are the women?
Placed unvisibly in the homes, cooking and nurturing younglings.
But then every sceptic thought of India and its culture and future is rivalled by our eminent lecturer and culture-geographer Rana P B Singh, from BHU. In dynamic manners he gives (on the evening 26th) an inspiring lecture on the geomantic universe of Varanasi, the cultural capital of India, Shivas city on earth. 150 minutes (and one cup of chai) later the students of our group stagger out in the open air, fed with archeoastronomic, symbolic and galactic facts on how the city was contructed according to geographic landmarks and planetarian phenomena, how observations on winter and summer soltices have helped creating the structure of the city and how pilgrims from ancient times have gathered here to perform rituals in honor of the holy river Ganga and the other gods. From now on every student will remember the number 108 with awe and... horror. Rana Singh will be our guide on a forthcoming tour around Varanasi and with his words ringing from the oxygene-emptied room where he talked these unstructured thoughts on hippies, women and cultural geographyfade away.
It is extremely fascinating to once again have the opportunity to be here...