Just read a great travelogue on Varanasi, written by Namit Arora. What struck me was how similar the author's experience was to ours, even though he traveled three years earlier: everything from the terrorist threat days before... through the visceral/intellectual/religious fascination of the burning ghats.
He writes:
"Curiously, a subset of Hindus ought not to be cremated here—sadhus, lepers, children under five, pregnant women, and snake-bite victims are to be consigned directly to the sacred river. Their corpses, it is said, do not need further purification by fire, so they are taken in a boat to the middle of the Ganga, tied to a stone, and sunk to the bottom, becoming food for fishes and river turtles. Some of these corpses, or parts thereof, later float up to the surface, spooking unsuspecting tourists. The liturgy of death in Varanasi is not for the squeamish...
Watching the spectacle on the burning ghats from a balcony above, I felt a liberating calm visit me, the kind that steadies and concentrates the mind. What better way to peer into nothingness and to see our common fate, laid out evocatively in the Book of Common Prayer: from earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Why, there is nothing morbid about death. It is a simple fact of life that should inform our daily choices and opinions. Yet, the greatest wonder, as Yudhisthira says in the Mahabharata, is that "each day death strikes, and we live as though we were immortal.""
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