Sunday, December 04, 2005
Amritsar, December 3. Arrived after a cold 8-hour bus ride, fought my way through the touts and took a rickshaw to the Golden Temple complex. There is much less English spoken here than anywhere else I've been. Took a rickshaw to the Information Office by the entrance to the Temple to talk about Sikhism and find out about the free accommodations. The Information Officer, Subedar (Retd.) Dalbir Singh, was a carreer military officer and we made an appointment for tomorrow. He gave me a stack of booklets to read and we made an appointment for tomorrow. The freebie rooms are basically spartan hostels - dormatories. They also have some private rooms for low cost, but those weren't available to me. So I spent the night in a dorm. Lord - my clothes are crawling off my body. I was wearing multiple layers of shirts and pants in McLoud Ganj and Dharamsala for the cold, and still couldn't strip down here either in the middle of an unheated coed dorm. The guy in the bunk beside me was a big nice gentle brute from Japan. The bunk was a padded board on legs, with a heavy quilt as a blanket. At 5:00am they began broadcasting calls to worship periodically.
The Golden Temple is quite imposing, in its solid imposing gold-block kind of way. Inside, it is lavish and exquisite. But after walking through it and around it and taking lots of photos (none allowed inside), there isn't a lot more to do. I'd hoped to get more of a feel for the practice of Sikhism in the Temple, but it didn't work out that way.
December 4: I changed to a nearby guest house. The room is in the front, so it is noisy. But so was the dormatory, and here I have TV and a HOT SHOWER WITH ACTUAL RUNNING WATER for Rs.300 - about $6.70. I can treat myself!
Spent several hours at the railroad station getting a ticket for New Delhi tomorrow morning. What an ordeal! I don't know how the lines can move so slowly. And first I had to go to the Information Office to find out the schedules. Then to buy the ticket, and the lines aren't marked so I waited an hour in the Ticket line instead of the Reservations line where it took another hour and a half. At least the price can't be beat. Eight hours to New Delhi with a reserved seat, for $2.25. I just have to get up early, as the train leaves at 6:10 tomorrow morning.
Then I visited the Jallianwala Bough, where in 1919 a British brigade machine gunned a crowd of 20,000 peaceful demonstrators lead by Mohatma Ghandi. Even the British admit that it was a massacre of monumental proportions. Somewhere between 357 and 12,000 people killed depending on who is counting, with many many more injured. More than anything else, it sparked the active movement for Indian Independence. It is a very moving site.
After that I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting on Dalbir Singh, as there were suddenly a raft of VIPs visiting the office that he was kowtowing to. But right after I finished writing a letter telling him how disappointed in him I was, he got more or less free and we had quite a long discussion. I had a list of questions that I had to keep bringing him back to, because he kept wanting to go off on his Introductory Lecture which was interesting but didn't adress my questions. But by the end, he was introducing me to the VIPs as a Sikh Researcher from America.
From all this, I do feel that I have a little understanding of Sikhism and what it stands for. Some of it I like very much, a lot of it I think is self-contradictory, and it is all encased in a very local, ethnic (Punjabi) context that makes it difficult to access. I'm sure I will write all this up for the diary, but not now. I'm pooped.
Tomorrow, New Delhi again. I was thinking that I've about done what I want to do with the rest of my time in India. Still three goals in New Delhi: Visit the B'hai Temple, ultra-modern and spectacular in the pictures I've seen of it, the Mosque at Noida, again very modern and supposedly fabulous, and the India Habitat Center to see more what goes on there. In the time left over, maybe I can find a course on Indian cooking.?. After that, I think I've had enough.
The Golden Temple is quite imposing, in its solid imposing gold-block kind of way. Inside, it is lavish and exquisite. But after walking through it and around it and taking lots of photos (none allowed inside), there isn't a lot more to do. I'd hoped to get more of a feel for the practice of Sikhism in the Temple, but it didn't work out that way.
December 4: I changed to a nearby guest house. The room is in the front, so it is noisy. But so was the dormatory, and here I have TV and a HOT SHOWER WITH ACTUAL RUNNING WATER for Rs.300 - about $6.70. I can treat myself!
Spent several hours at the railroad station getting a ticket for New Delhi tomorrow morning. What an ordeal! I don't know how the lines can move so slowly. And first I had to go to the Information Office to find out the schedules. Then to buy the ticket, and the lines aren't marked so I waited an hour in the Ticket line instead of the Reservations line where it took another hour and a half. At least the price can't be beat. Eight hours to New Delhi with a reserved seat, for $2.25. I just have to get up early, as the train leaves at 6:10 tomorrow morning.
Then I visited the Jallianwala Bough, where in 1919 a British brigade machine gunned a crowd of 20,000 peaceful demonstrators lead by Mohatma Ghandi. Even the British admit that it was a massacre of monumental proportions. Somewhere between 357 and 12,000 people killed depending on who is counting, with many many more injured. More than anything else, it sparked the active movement for Indian Independence. It is a very moving site.
After that I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting on Dalbir Singh, as there were suddenly a raft of VIPs visiting the office that he was kowtowing to. But right after I finished writing a letter telling him how disappointed in him I was, he got more or less free and we had quite a long discussion. I had a list of questions that I had to keep bringing him back to, because he kept wanting to go off on his Introductory Lecture which was interesting but didn't adress my questions. But by the end, he was introducing me to the VIPs as a Sikh Researcher from America.
From all this, I do feel that I have a little understanding of Sikhism and what it stands for. Some of it I like very much, a lot of it I think is self-contradictory, and it is all encased in a very local, ethnic (Punjabi) context that makes it difficult to access. I'm sure I will write all this up for the diary, but not now. I'm pooped.
Tomorrow, New Delhi again. I was thinking that I've about done what I want to do with the rest of my time in India. Still three goals in New Delhi: Visit the B'hai Temple, ultra-modern and spectacular in the pictures I've seen of it, the Mosque at Noida, again very modern and supposedly fabulous, and the India Habitat Center to see more what goes on there. In the time left over, maybe I can find a course on Indian cooking.?. After that, I think I've had enough.
