After more than 3 months of dwelling in the north of India and enjoying the quietude of meditation halls and empty mountains, we are headed to the more Hindu part of the continent...well at least as Hindu as a Sikh capital can be.
Amritsar is known for its tourist and pilgrimage land mark, the Golden Temple. We believed that as a place of religious devotion it would be a smooth transition to the more bustle full and notoriously noisy Indian cities. As if we had not learnt from our stay in Istanbul that devotion and religious fervor in Asia does not necessarily mean silent contemplation!!!
"This can't be it!" - is the first thought I remember from the moment of entering the town. Thick gray blanket of fumes, transportation vehicles of all possible shapes, forms and speed, driving, cycling, pushing, rolling and galloping in all directions, colorful turbans and saris, and....SOUND, many millions of tiny screeches, rustles, whooshes, tongue clicks and exhales, and monstrous honking, screaming, roaring and neighing.....a multiple of assaults on one's senses, one enormous collective beast...
We rushed to the Temple desperately hoping to find a shelter from the "insane world out there" and to shake off the dust and the exhaustion from the 10hr trip from Bir (we had woken up at 2 a.m. to catch the buss). The residences of the huge temple complex were not as easily accessible as we were told. After some arguing and futile efforts to persuade the militant looking Sikh gentlemen at the reception that we were not a threesome with the friend we were traveling with, we were given one room for the three.
Making our way to that room would have been quite smooth if we weren't stopped every minute by pilgrims approaching with "Where from?" or its variation "Which country, Sir?" (in India I can relax back and let Misha handle all questions as there are always addressed to the male.
We did finally visit the Golden Temple situated in the middle of a large rectangular pool, where pilgrims perform ritual baths while listening to the incessant chanting from the temple and the towers surrounding it. Even though alive with the constant move of the crowds circumambulating it, the place breathed peace, I should say a certain joyful lively peace. My favorite impression of it were the reflexions of the glistening gold and the color on people in the waters of the pool (which you can see in Misha's beautiful pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/69781927@N00/sets/72157603252840196/detail/ and the detailed mosaic on the white tiles of the base of the temple (too fine to be photographed).
Marveling at Misha's photo work at the Golden Temple, I caught myself finding the place much more captivating than I did in reality. It made me ponder... What was in the pictures that made things different? Or what was NOT there? The pictures framed a detail, pointed at circumstantial combination of color and shape, removing the distractions from it (in a way ikebana masters do that when trimming a rich blossoming branch). The photographs also filtered the pollution, the wet-gridy-dirty feeling of the bare feet(which created a deep connection with the thousands of people walking barefoot and the enormous kitchen all these people were fed in for free), removed the intense stares directed at us...........made it all perfect. If only we could capture moments in such a way!
The night spent in the guest house of the Temple matched the earlier impressions. At 10 p.m. the Holly Book of the Sikhs was "put to bed" ( a special ritual was performed for this purpose), and we collapsed in our beds unable to even share impressions of the day. The temple chanting was far and lulling until....not long after we had fallen asleep it was renewed with a mighty rigor amplified from the loud speakers of the nearest to us tower. I appreciate devotional music, but 8hrs of LOUD night chanting, often quite badly performed, crazy harmonium and drums couldn't challenge the music love only of a pilgrim, which we unfortunately were not.
Naturally, we decided that one day of sightseeing in Amritsar was quite enough, and even a bicycle rickshaw driver we hired to the Art Gallery could not convince us that the town was a relaxing place (in comparison with Delhi). That night we happily embarked on a train to Hardwar.
