Rishikesh for addicts

It’s 1st May today and this marks my fourth week anniversary of arriving here from Sri Lanka. May Day traditionally marks the first day of summer and throughout the UK Morris and maypole dancers will be celebrating with the time honoured pagan festivals. In York where I have lived for many years, there are always impressive displays of folk dancing and a carnival style atmosphere.

Here in India, inevitably it’s different, although festivals still tend to group around cycles of agricultural productivity (sowing, harvesting) and associated lunar phases, as they do everywhere around the world, at least in traditional societies.

Summertime apparently arrived over the Easter weekend two weeks ago, celebrated as a public holiday here and heralding the holiday season, so the weekend trippers now arrive in droves from Delhi and neighbouring states, although exactly what they do to pass the time here is harder to see. The traffic is backed up down on the road, with tour buses and land rovers bearing inflatable rafts on their roofs, saloon cars of every kind, motor scooters and, of course, pedestrians by the thousand. Whenever I go into town, the small street food stalls are always doing a brisk business. I don’t know the nightlife scene here in anyway, but assuming there are clubs then I presume they’ll be full of ravers partying ‘til late. The sounds of other guests at the hotel returning late into the night, slamming doors lends credence to this too.

As I write the air is full of vehicle horns blaring long and loudly, a sound which continues day and night, whenever there is traffic in fact, as folk hereabouts drive on their horns, which I can only suppose expresses a sense of frustration or annoyance, or some primeval ‘I’m here; get out of my way’ as given everyone is in the same predicament, which is to say caught up in slow moving lines of traffic, then it’s hard to see that it serves any useful purpose whatever. It has little effect on the many cattle roaming around the roads either. Born on the streets they couldn’t be more sublimely impervious to thundering trucks passing within centimetres of them. They stand in the centre of the road and confront vehicles of every size with the same impassivity. I have even seen a small herd (‘the local group’) settling down for the night in the centre of the road just beyond the hotel.

Police sirens and tannoys complement the roar of traffic and blaring of horns; here in the place where the rishis (sages) of old sat in the deep silence of meditation by the Ganges River, or contemplated ancient theological texts about the nature of Ultimate Reality.

Visitors to the town include a spectrum from colourfully and traditionally dressed rural or village folk coming for temple pujas, a now steadily increasing presence of newly arrived western tourists with the gradual reopening of the country following lockdown, the many colourful sadhus and swamis, some with staffs and begging bowls, and the overwhelmingly dominant traffic of visitors from neighbouring states and cities. Certainly it’s an eclectic brew.

Rishikesh is an addiction, or so the colourful graffiti proclaims, and certainly it seems to be so, whatever the reason people of every kind flock here, whether for temple pilgrimages, yoga or thrill seeking of a more extrovert kind.

The ashrams and yoga schools that Rishikesh is traditionally famous for are now open again for business. Construction sites everywhere throughout the town mark the building of more as determination to cash in on the lucrative spiritual industries combines with a kind of deliberate bordering on desperate blind defiance to the newly emergent and menacing order of global reality with its dangerous acceleration of armed conflicts, its shifting, self serving and disingenuous strategic allegiances and the inexorable advance of global warming as the backdrop to it all. This season has seen some of the most severe fires in the region as the rainless conditions and high winds consume precious hectarage of forests and attendant wildlife here. And the annual rains aren’t expected for another month. Who was it it who fiddled while Rome burned?

 

https://images.app.goo.gl/qxMbEoVZvz4kqsx87

Image is from 2021, although the fires this spring are as bad.