Vandana of Varanasi

I encountered her by accident: the reason one travels.

I was staying in a flat outside of the noise and din of Varanasi, the holiest city of Hinduism, far removed from my first visit to Mother India in the deep south of the country, the state of Tamil Nadu, locus of the glory of the Hindu religion and her temples, away from the slaughter and destruction of the Muslims further north, that fake religion of peace which threatens the civilized world wherever it spreads, like a virus.

Here I had gone north. The difference was substantial but similar. The ear piercing cacophony of Indian traffic is an assault when first encountered. Then, like everything in life I suppose, one gets used to it and the noise fades to mere background. I've become adept at the notorious Indian "head wobble" signifying something (yet I somehow manage always to know when to deploy it), as well as making way for cows on the road. Don't pet them, by the way.

The city is also known as Benares, Banaras or Kashi. Puts me in mind of Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. Some of our world cities have long histories behind their current label.

Except Rome, eternal Rome.

As Mark Twain said: “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend  and looks twice as old as all of them put together!”

India is Hindu. I've only ever been there to observe. And learn. I'm not a convert. Isn't learning enough?

* * * * 

Like some story board from a movie, I met Vandana on one of my last days in Varanasi. I was staying in a VRBO above where she lived, tight against the ghats on the Ganges, the owner a literal descendant of Indian royalty. The dismantling of them by Nehru is second only to his agreement of the partition of the subcontinent. Some crimes cannot be forgiven.

* * * * 

I had two keys. The first let me out of the yard of my flat, into the back, toward the river, the Ganges, universally called "Ganga" in India. That name was foreign to this foreigner. What do they know? I preferred my own pronunciation but never spoke it. When in Rome. 

The second key was to a gate that allowed me to climb down the steep steps to the Ganges, steep as in if you fell forward you'd be dead by the time your carcass flopped onto the landing. A shabby death, as a dear friend of mine might call it.

When I looked right, instead of left, that's when I saw Vandana. The steepness of the steps never changed in either direction but there were fewer of them to the right than to the left.

I'm not entirely sure why I climbed those steps to the right but I did. She spoke limited English but I spoke no Hindi. She was a bright young girl, self possessed and charming and with a modicum of English. "Hey mister!"

She took me left, around the corner where the steps ended and then showed me a litter of puppies. Other Indians immediately crowded round as she showed them off to me. Here's a white guy, an obvious visiter (no matter where I travel abroad I don't think of myself as a tourist. Some may find that a conceit; I think of it as a mindset). Four, or six, I can't remember. Cute as only dog or cat babies can be.

After making nice for awhile, I told Vandana that I had to be off to the Ganges. We'd rounded back around the corner and she invited me in for chai into, apparently, her family's home. I declined with all the graciousness that pigeon English and hand gestures could muster. She understood but asked if I was on WhatsApp. I confessed I was and so phone numbers were exchanged.

* * * *

I dropped off several kilos of puppy chow to her before I left Varanasi. One can only do so much, but wherever one is, one should do that much, at home or abroad. I also gave her a 500 rupee note (with my right hand, by the way, never the left). She knew at a glance what it meant and thanked me, profusely if she had had her way but I made my exit quickly. Many people live for thanks while I've always found it a personal indictment.

* * * * 

Vandana texted me via WhatsApp for awhile after I returned to America, always calling me "uncle," a term of respect for older men who are not literal family relations. I responded as best I could, given the language and age barriers. After some time, she went silent. I don't know if her family could continue to afford an internet plan or not. Food first.

* * * * 

I don't know why Vandana returned to me, why I'm only writing about her now for the first time, more than a year later. Possibly because I know I can't travel this spring (Berlin/Vienna), although I always go to India in the Fall, which is still likely to happen, so I'm not sure that's it. 

Likely it's because when people ask why I "vacation" so much, as opposed to what I do, which is travel, she's the reason. 

India's Cataclysmic Election & Narendra Modi

India's poor voted to no longer be poor.

That's the level best I can do in trying to get across to Americans the scope and significance of India's election returns, which started coming in to us last night and continued throughout the day. The scope of Narendra Modi's victory can hardly be overstated. In fact, it left virtually all political observers in and out of India grasping for words, for metaphors, for some image that can adequately convey what is clearly a historical turning point for the world's largest democracy and, consequently, the world itself.

Modi's political party, the center-right Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, won in almost every state, in every direction throughout India, in areas where it hadn't won for a long time and in many cases where it never had before. In India's parliamentary system, a total of 272 seats are needed to form a government and for the last several decades they have been coalitions of various parties, with the Congress Party ruling for the most part. Congress is the party of Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and most recently Sonia Gandhi, who took over after the assassination of Rajiv, her husband. These Gandhis have no relation to India's most famous one, Mahatma Gandhi.

Modi was the former Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, population 50 million. His achievements there were nothing less than spectacular, ensuring steady power to homes and businesses, clean water, sound education to every level of society and more. In short, Gujarat worked because Modi worked. He took his tested accomplishments to the nation and, fundamentally, asked it if it wanted to stay poor under Congress and its allies or if it was ready for the future, for India's destiny. The answer astonished even the most jaded.

The BJP won a governing majority outright, with 285 seats. Together with parties aligned with it, the number reaches 340 out of a total of 543 seats. India has never seen election results like this. I won't belabor the details here because I wanted to give Americans a quick understanding of this election, the consequences which will play out dramatically in the next five years.

However, readers should know that in the West the backlash against Modi has already begun. Why might this be? Because India has slaughtered liberalism on a scale unprecedented in the modern age. Everything generally liberal or progressive in the West was embodied in the Congress Party. A nation of more than one billion has turned its back on it; from this there is no return.

Consequently liberals in the West, in the media and academe, will say the usual tired things about Modi they said about Reagan, or Thatcher, or to a lesser extent Deng Xiaoping, each a leader who transformed their country.

Don't buy the criticism, especially that Modi ignored communal rioting in 2002 that left many dead, mostly Muslims. That charge has been thoroughly vetted in India and was found to be without merit. This doesn't stop Westernized Indian liberals like the ridiculous Pankaj Mishra from claiming the world's largest democracy just elected a mass murderer. Right. Couldn't he at least have worked in climate change to the mix? In America, the once respected magazine The New Republic was hot off the blocks in making a similar but less pointed case against Modi. Yes, that's all they've got but a wholesale rejection of liberalism in India puts the entire world's liberal agenda in peril. Good.

While I said at the start that India's poor no longer wished to remain so, clearly most other segments of society in the world's most diverse country also saw something in voting for Modi. There is no other way to explain 340 seats in parliament. Remember this when the intellectual thugs and despots of the Left come calling to trash this election and results.

Yet, if you're for the advancement of the human condition, if you're for the dignity of the human person, if you're for compassion instead of suffering, if you're for the equality of women, if you're for the advancement of culture, technology and knowledge, you'll welcome the advent of Prime Minister Modi.

But mostly, here's to the average Indian voter, literate or illiterate, who had the courage and genius to realize that the future does not come often in elections and as a nation seized it with both hands.

Allahabad & Death, The Non Transit Of Venus

Last month American Hindu friends of mine were off to a joyful wedding in Lucknow, just outside Allahabad, India. I joked that it must be like Mira Nair's "Monsoon Wedding." If you haven't seen that movie, stop reading and do so now. But I didn't have the wedding quite right.

No, my friends insisted, this was not a Punjabi wedding, the subject of Nair's famous and exceptionally accomplished movie. This wedding was Rajput style. Beyond those strictures I could not understand. It wasn't even in Hindi, as incomprehensible as Latin to this Irishman.

Two days after my friends' departure Twitter brought the news to my beeping, awakening iPad: some dozens devotees had died in a religious pilgrimage of death toward not God but a train. They had been in Lucknow to partake in the Kumbh Mela festival, one of the largest gatherings of humanity known to humanity. Google it for astonishing images of faith you won't recognize. Their deaths took place in the Allahabad train station, the return central city from which in faith they had ventured to Lucknow as devout Hindus.

None of my friends or their families were lost. It took me another two days to find this out. Twitter friendly Mother India is sometimes not. I calculated the odds, read the Indian press brought to me by those Indians on Twitter whom I follow (@HinduIDF among others), and prayed (to whom?) that this family wasn't caught in the crush of death. Banal. Shabby. Final.

Yet there were the manifestly dead: husbands cradling wives who were dead yet in a moment before were worshipping God on the return journey of faith. Life, and life, over in a flash. In a crowd. In the noise and din of yet another hateful Indian train station.

Not exactly the final dance scene from "Slumdog Millionaire." Which, come to think of it, was a movie.

The photo above was taken before the most recent transit of Venus, which is to say shortly before I turned forty for a passport renewal. It was a particularly difficult period in my life. The placidity of the photograph surprises me now.

The now, no matter where you are in life, is always the surprise.

Flannery O'Connor (dead at 39) famously wrote that "everything that rises must converge." She borrowed that from another writer but someone else can track it down. (Teilhard de Chardin?)

Politics matters deeply but not more than many other things. My worry about the death of loved ones far across the world drove the point home to me.

Attachment & loss, Buddhists would say, is the cause of suffering.

Being Irish, I'm good with that.


This post is for Benedict XVI.