A bad-tempered post
Indulge me while I launch into a small rant about Pushkar. Before going on various tangential paths, I must remind everyone that the town is ancient and sacred. I found more of the profane than the holy: people love to speak of the ancient myths before driving them into temples.
Pushkar, Brahma, Antiquity.
Pushkar is one of the few places with a temple dedicated to Brahma, the Creator God in the central Hindu pantheon. The three major Gods are Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (or Siva). If you do a superficial analysis of the three Gods, you discover Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu is the Preserver, and Shiva is the Destroyer. When Shiva opens his third eye, he destroys the world. He has opened his third eye, but the world exists. If you explore this point further, you will travel into a rabbit hole or open the portal into a multi-layered and complex world. Vishnu and Shiva possess creative aspects which many are not aware of. Brahma, however, had one major role: he created the universe.
As per legend, when Brahma visited Earth, Pushkar made him content, and he meditated there for one thousand years. After remaining there for one thousand years, he dropped a lotus, which made the Earth tremble. Later, he revealed he dropped the lotus to kill a demon called Vajranabha, who was killing children.
It is worth noting that demons are not all evil in Hindu/Vedic mythology. They possess shades of complexity. Nowadays, we perceive religion in two hues: black and white. Our perception of religion is binary. When you study Hindu/Vedic mythology, you understand ancient Indians recognized and accepted the many shades of grey. Hindu/Vedic mythology is fascinating, with depths of meaning and symbolism. Anyone can spend a life studying the myths and wish to return to Earth to continue their studies.
I won’t go deeper into Pushkar’s significance. The Sikhs have a major Gurudwara here. The Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas all mention Pushkar. In addition, archaeologists have discovered Mohenjo-daro-style artifacts here.
By now, I assume I have convinced everyone of Pushkar’s religious and mythological merit and importance. You would expect a holy town like this to be clean and well-preserved, but it is not. Neither are the people. I will write about my journey to and from Pushkar later. Allow me to resume my critique of the town and its citizens.
The Thuggish Locals.
I visited Pushkar with an old friend. We hired a taxi in Jaipur and drove to the town to attend the last day of the camel fair. The two of us booked a tent to stay in. I liked the tent and waking up to the sound of prayers booming from microphones at dawn. While the tented accommodation was nice, it was not worth our price. If we weren’t sharing the cost of the room, I’d scream blue murder. Our breakfast was awful. Stale bread; weak, tepid tea; suspicious cornflakes; butter with a strange texture and mixed fruit jam: this was breakfast. My friend suffered in the bathroom, whereas I survived to tell the tale.
When we reached Pushkar, a stranger swooped onto my friend and stole a few items from his camera bag. My buddy was lucky. Our driver was alert. After chasing the miscreant, he retrieved the items and clubbed him in the ears.
Low-Class tourists populate Pushkar.
Pushkar did not welcome us. When I visited in 1995, local pilgrims filled the town. Now, western tourists make up almost half the town’s population. These are low-class tourists who live in Pushkar for months at a time. They swarm the streets, hang around in awful restaurants, and hunt for drugs. Some of them are thuggish, others not. Since they give the local citizens good business, they tolerate the louts. We are a soft state, and it is no wonder the British colonized us.
The few sub-standard restaurants have menus in Hebrew, Korean, and other languages. The Israelis are the most thuggish of all the foreigners who live in Pushkar. Considering the way they brutalize the Palestinians, their loutish behavior should surprise no one.
Several times during the day, I thanked my foresight in having a considerable breakfast before leaving Jaipur that morning. The samosa I ate in one of the horrible cafes made me want to vomit. The chai helped me keep the bile down, so I drank a second one for luck.
We wandered up and down the town. Some shopkeepers objected to my friend photographing them and wanted to smack him. They were violent.
The Horrible Restaurant.
That night, we found a restaurant that seemed promising. The sign said it had a five-star rating on Trip Advisor. The only good thing about the establishment was the small terrace overlooking the lake.
Our server kept pushing us to order pasta and tofu. We insisted on eating Indian food and pointed out the restaurant had it on the menu. After a few moments, a moth-eaten, blond couple walked in and occupied a distant table. The man dropped us and rushed off to the pair. He danced around them like an obsequious rat. You should have seen him dance, pirouette, and bow to them. In his eyes, they were little Gods, whereas we were rats from the gutter. We got our food only after the moth-eaten blond couple had eaten, paid, and departed.
Learn from the Chinese
It is bad enough to have endured almost two centuries of discrimination from the British when they were in India. But it is worse when we continue to scrape our noses on the ground for the meager dollars and cents we get from tourists.
We must learn from the Chinese: they have a profound contempt for anyone who tries to appease them. The Chinese respect strength. We must learn to be strong, give, and command respect.
If you read the scriptures, you may regard Pushkar as holy. But when you encounter the people, you will change your perception of the town and its people, as I did.
Wow. I went through .