Sikh

Our initial plan for 6 weeks in India has been quickly fiddled down to a meager 11 days. What happened?

If I were to do it again, I would come later in the year to explore more of the southwestern jungles of India. I’d also avoid making plans to meet friends in the middle of trips. If it weren’t for meeting Sam, Avi, and Ojash in October we would start a Nepal trek now and head to SE Asia afterwords. Lesson learned.

On the whole traveling in India seems slightly masochistic… not in the way of sexual pleasure but traveling through this country definitely needs a personality where you really find enjoyment in challenges of travel. We stuck to larger cities which also affected our view. I like to think of myself as a “traveler” and the cities of India were just too much for me. Too much noise, too many people, too much. However, India is massive, and my ten-day opinion is not the end all be all of the country.

We leave for Bangkok tomorrow at 5 am.

On our last day in Delhi we walked from our hotel to Indian Parliament. The walk took an hour and a half, and along the way we munched on samosas and dripped sweat. Pictured is an indian crunchy dessert we concluded the snack with. It tasted like popcorn. We passed a large white temple, and a guard outside motioned that it was okay to enter. A man approached and explained that, in order to enter the temple, we needed to cover our heads. The man lent us two bandanas, we checked our sandals at the door, and we entered.

The turbans and rituals clued us in that we were in a Sikh temple. People sat barefoot around the perimeter of the floor and a group of four older men sat elevated on one side of the room. They sang loosely choreographed, somewhat call & response songs while playing a drum and two pump organs. A golden altar sat in the middle of the room covered in marigolds and a fifth man stood above the altar waving what looked like a hairy wand. A google search for Sikh Hairy Wand let me know that we were observing a Chaur sahib (there’s an entire sikh wikipedia?)… image shown is from google.

At one point the men stopped singing and one of them approached a mic situated in front of the altar. Everyone in the room rose to their feet. The man began preaching and chanting, interrupted intermittently by the communal response of the congregation. This portion felt similar to people responding “amen” or “hallelujah” in a Christian sermon. Afterwords people returned to their knees and bowed their heads to the ground. We tried to follow the movements of the people as best we could.

From there we walked past Indian Parliament and sucked down a mango smoothie from a roadside stand. While we drank we watched monkeys dashing out of the trees in attempts to steal bananas from the vendor. They succeeded twice before an employee scared them away with flying chunks of ice.

We found a patch of grass near the capital and sat to play cards. Men washed themselves in a water reserve nearby… this would be similar to people bathing next to the white house. It didn’t seem so strange here.