There are elections this week in Rishikesh. Haven’t worked out for what exactly, but I assume regional as there was a national general election earlier this year. A couple of methods of canvassing have made an impression on us. One is slowly driving a 4×4 around town with speakers mounted on its roof rack, alternately blasting Indian pop music and (presumably – my Hindi hasn’t progressed beyond namaste) someone reading from a manifesto. The other is the posters stuck everywhere. Every candidate is assigned a symbol – here’s ice cream and pineapple:
This week Karolina has been to a few yoga drop-in classes, including at the school she attended last year, as well as a lecture about Tantra and a breathwork session. Her thoughts on the breathwork session: “a powerful and strange experience”. She also had a think about ‘dynamic meditation’ at an Osho centre but decided against it. There are a few Osho places around town – in the 80s some of his followers deliberately poisoned hundreds of people in a city in Oregon in an attempt to rig a local election. There’s a great documentary available on Netflix called Wild Wild Country about this and everything else they got up to.
We both also attended a couple of satsangs at different ashrams. They both had a similar format: you first arrive to singing of mantras accompanied by musicians and then await the guru (not entirely sure if this is the correct term – certainly both were senior spiritual leaders). Once the guru arrives they first direct you in around 15 mins of meditation, followed by a lecture – in one of the sessions this was reading and analysis of a holy text. Finally attendees are invited to ask questions of the guru – these ranged from queries on the reading to “what is love?”. Both sessions were also filmed, and one was live streamed on Facebook (click here for a sample).
In both cases I was struck by both gurus’ relatively informal way of speaking and interacting with the audience versus the reverence displayed towards them by the other members of the ashram. In one of the sessions we were read a list of dos and don’ts before the session began. I guess in fairness they want to make sure day trippers such as myself don’t ruin it for everyone.
K caught part of a festival involving fireworks and effigies of Rama and Shiva being set alight.
We spent a couple of days trekking to waterfalls (waterfall count now 3), and every day eating curry in our favourite restaurant (80 INR for a thali so big they have to bring it to you in stages as everything doesn’t fit on the plate).
I also discovered how to add hyperlinks to the blog, so I hope you clicked some.
We go to Jaipur on Thursday (17th) evening.
Carol and David On Tour 