My first week in India had been eventful to say the least. Two days before I arrived in India, a friend from college hooked me up with her friend, Vik, in Delhi. Vik’s family offered to take me for a couple of days until I get oriented in another new country. It couldn’t have been a better situation because Delhi is quite a hectic place where everyone needs a quiet place to catch their breathe. I got lucky yet again. Thanks Mary.
I didn’t really know what direction I wanted to take with my project in India. There are so many different aspects to investigate with cattle. India has thirty per cent of the world's cattle with twenty six different breeds mixed together. Cows are everywhere! Because the cow is respected as a sacred animal, it's allowed to roam unharmed, and they have grown accustomed to the traffic and the rhythm of the city. So, you can see them roaming the streets in towns and cities, grazing unmindfully on the roadside grass verges and munching away vegetables thrown out by street sellers. As opposed to the West, where the cow is widely considered as nothing more than walking hamburgers, in India, the cow is believed to be a symbol of the earth - because it gives so much yet asks nothing in
return.
For animals powerful enough to stop traffic and holy enough that they’ll never become steak, cows are treated dreadfully. Scrawny and sickly, they survive by grazing on garbage on the street. Due to this maltreatment, different religious organizations in cooperation with the government have set up gosadans (homeless cow shelters). No joke! I plan to visit some of these shelters soon to see them for myself. I have also heard that the city of Delhi has cow catchers to round up the homeless cows and take them to the gosadans. I could see myself wrestling down cows in the streets of Delhi. We’ll see?
Another aspect that has fascinated me is an organization called RSS, composed of members from the extreme right of the Hindu faith. I have heard stories of people following around cows awaiting fresh pee to come pouring out so they can fill up their cups. They believe that a cow’s pee replenishes the body. This is similar to the Maasai’s belief of drinking blood. Both are thought to rejuvenate the body and spirit. I am trying to get in touch with the RSS to see if the rumors are true.
In the time it has taken me to figure out which direction to take, I have been the ultimate tourist visiting numerous temples, mosques, shrines and forts that are scattered across Delhi and the surrounding areas. My favorites have been the ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri, Humayun’s Tomb, Taj Mahal, Jama Masjid, and Nizamuddin Sufi Shrine. Fatephur Sikri was built by the Mogul emperor Akbar to be the imperial capital. After building the city from scratch and living in it for over ten years, they finally figured out there wasn’t enough water to survive. So, they abandoned the capital city and it remains a ghost palace even today. The Taj Mahal is simply incredible due to its size and detailed art work in the white marble. Jama Masjid is the largest mosque in India and I think the largest in Asia as well. On Fridays, it is flooded with people trying to pray inside. Nizamuddin Sufi Shrine is one of the seven required shrines that every Sufi has to visit during pilgrimage. It is hidden within a bustling Islamic neighborhood that the average traveler would never stumble across (I was lucky and had a friend to show me around).
It is also wedding season in Delhi. Hindu weddings are quite the affair with it being more of like the coronation of a new king and queen rather than a matrimonial union. Every night since I have been in India, I have fallen asleep to the thunder of fireworks, blaring Bollywood favorites, and a little Justin Timberlake thrown into the mix as well. I asked my hostess, Praveen, how I could attend one. She smiled and showed me an invitation to a wedding the following night. I was excited. I went out the next day to buy a traditional Indian kurta-pajama and was ready an hour before our scheduled departure. We arrived to the wedding that was in a huge tent with wall to wall carpeting, a neon green, pink and orange dance floor, pink fabric forming small huts and an endless buffet serving India’s favorite dishes. It also turned out that I was one of only four or five men wearing the traditional kurta-pajama with the rest of the men wearing a suit or khakis with a button-down shirt. A great lost in translation/culture moment. After Praveen made me sample every type of food on the endless buffet and I could no longer move, the groom arrived on his noble steed preceded by his dancing family members. His family dances up the entrance with the bride’s family standing flat footed ready to receive the dancing mob. It took the family about an hour to dance up the ten meter long entrance. They were in no hurry and were pulling out some impressive dance moves. I was nodding my head with the music when someone spotted me and pulled me into the mix. I cut a rug for a brief moment and then retreated back to the masses. The bride and groom made their way into the tent and took their places on the red velvet covered chairs on center stage. There were about four hundred people there and that is considered very small. A large wedding reaches well over a thousand in attendance. It was still a great time even if it was “small”.
It has been a busy week getting adjusted. I will be the first to admit that India is not for everyone. It is a land of extremes that are endlessly confronting: rich and poor, pristine and dirty, terrible but incredible, material and spiritual. India can’t be generalized or even be put into a few categories because it has everything and its opposite living side by side. In most countries this incites violence stemming from jealousy or resentment but everyone seems to co-exist here in their own way.
