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Pastimes : Desire And Grief -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HG who wrote (1181)	1/14/2003 3:11:13 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1595

It's funny. On my first trip to India I avoided the Taj as I would the plague. Too many tourists. A marble shrine to a departed wife that took 22 years to build...amid a sea of poverty...No, no, nooo! I would not go. Way too decadent, I thought. I went to Rishikesh and Rajgir, to Meenakshmi and Mahablipuram, to Banares and Bodh Gaya. Met a Rimpoche in Dharmsala who agreed to teach me dharma, but had visa problems and paisa problems and didn't know the magic words to get the visa renewed again. So I reluctantly hitchhiked back to Istanbul, and eventually home. Got a job on Wall Street, studied calligraphy to steady my nerves and watched my firm (duPont Glore Forgan - Walston) go under in 1974, amid the flight from financial to tangible assets. Whereupon I returned to India for a short 3 month visit to see what I had missed on the first journey, the famous places that tourists were supposed to see -- Ajanta and Ellora, the Taj, the ghats in Banaras, Konarak and Kujaraho, Tagore's house in Calcutta. I timed my visit to your fair city with the rising of the full moon and I sat in the bagh and watched it creep over the minaret in front of the Yamuna and I wept for the lovesick emperor and I wept for my first love, a sixteen year old poetess from Queens, NY, and I watched the huge moon devour all my passion. My favorite part of the Yamuna was in Old Delhi near Kashmiri Gate, a stretch along the Ring Road near Ladakh Buddha Vihara where Tibetan kids played and hatha yogis practiced their asanas and mud wrestlers exercised. The park across the street had the canniest monkey thieves that I have ever seen. I was given a charpoy to sleep on at the Vihara and watched the rich tapestry of Indian life slowly unfold. My third and last visit to India was in the summer of '76 for an internship at Centre for Development Studies and Acitivities in Pune. My undergraduate work was in economic development with a focus on India. I studied "Indo-Muslim culture", and Urdu, read The Courtesan of Lucknow, took Modern Hinduism from an aging BHU professor (Mehta) at Harvard Divinity School, while devouring everything I could find on economic development. Always thought I would return to India as a development economist, but ultimately decided it would be better off without my intervention. <g>