mobbed

This afternoon I ventured out to see the Aarti, the most touted event of this holy city of Haridwar. At dusk, hundreds of people buy a banana leaf filled with marigolds which, after a small ritual including drinking Ganges water, is set on fire and floats down the sacred river to more prayers and chants. A lovely, beautiful, spiritual ceremony – or so I thought.

I walk through the narrow streets taking in the plastic bottle wallah, a man walking with all different sizes of plastic bottles in large quantity radiating out like an oversized plastic peacock, translucent and blue, the young boy rolling a 4’x4’ cart of vibrant nuts and other edibles I’ve never seen, while shoppers, walkers, motorcycles, bike and auto rickshaws keep flowing down a road barely 6 feet across. It all works in India.

I come out to the Ganges, camera in hand and want to take a picture of a group of sadhus hanging out. Suddenly they start coming toward me – uh oh, have I shown disrespect? But no, they want a donation, but they can’t take money. So I head off accompanied by 7 sadhus to buy rice. As soon as they hear the generous amount I’m willing to buy, they immediately ask for triple. A hard negotiation ensues between sadhus, shopkeeper and me, but everyone ends up happy. Then, still inspired by Cristian, I give a beggar some money and – I’m mobbed. Kids, grannies, cripples, and other deserving pathetics all over me, at least 10 in the first encircling, grabbing and clawing at me. I start screaming NO and am fighting to get out. I suspect some kind Indians behind me pulled away the worst of the crowd and the grannies and cripples couldn’t keep up with me as I started running but the kids are tireless and have nothing else to do, so they just stayed with me, endlessly chanting, ten rupees, ten rupees. But you know what? This was not even the worst of the begging. Once away from the real ones, the ghat priests and administrators hit me hard with official paperwork. Each one has a different organization that demands money, though it is not obligatory. As soon as one leaves, the next shows up with the next receipt book. Suffice it to say that after an hour of being mercilessly financially hit up by anyone who possibly could, I went back to the hotel distraught and tired.

This unfortunately is not an atypical foreigner’s experience and it also unfortunately makes perfect sense. Of course these people want our money, it’s not there for them in their own lives and they know for us it’s nothing, if they can just figure out how to get it from us. They're beggars, so they beg. Sadly, the first tier of interaction with India is often with the forgotten, the hopeless and the desperate, unless it happens to be with the aggressive staring men, the cheaters - or all of them at once. Sadly, some foreigners never really see anything else, except in the safety of the hotel and through other insulating techniques. Sadly, it's a vicious cycle in which as a foreign tourist I can't not play my own despicable role, merely by being here. Shortly after this incident, my life in India took me completely out of the tourist areas and this experience has not been repeated. I’m staying in an area unused to foreigners. The children are friendly and there’s no begging, though it's a poor area. But the deeper issues still pain me. Is it inevitable that foreigners wreck something of India by their mere presence? And what can I do? I no longer give beggars money, I can't take that risk, but perhaps, as I stay on, it's time for me to find a way to be genuinely charitable, out of gratitude to this amazing place that is so, so, so much more than what I've described. I don't know how I got so lucky to be taken in, but I have been. So now we're going to enter another India.