No Curry, No Hurry - Still In Pushkar
Trip Start
Sep 29, 2007
1
167
221
Trip End
Ongoing
Pushkar,
Rajasthan,
India
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Nadine has stood in a mountain of sacred cow shit so big that her entire beaten up Birkenstock sank in and her whole foot was immersed in the fresh crap. Is the shit sacred too, or just the cow? We've both had a touch of Delhi Belly, been chased by gangs of skanky dogs with no fur, had a stunt at standing in the above ground sewer water in the gutters next to the Israeli falafel wrap shop and have narrowly avoided serious injury by jumping out of the way of crazy Evil Knievil motorbike riders at the last milli-second. I've been forcefully pushed by the horns of an arrogant holy cow wearing a scarf and also had a red-stained betel nut golly spit land on my Afghani pants having been spat from a rooftop above, maybe it's lucky like bird poo? It would be difficult to shake our positive view of India, we simply adore it and the feelings it envokes
sadhu
. We seem to be detached from the stink and filth. I think we have the contents of harden up cans in our blood now thanks to the slog in Morocco, Egypt and South America and are at the stage of naturally producing it ourselves when facing challenging situations.As i started exploring my new business idea around town, it was becoming evident that the idea is going to be a very good one and time for exploring the possibilities was needed plus we met some great travellers here including the very cool cat Nikki, the funky couple Guy and Alby and photographer Kat from Australia and Dominique from Italy who is learning to craft jewellery. We didn't really feel like moving much anyway after the fast pace of our journey so far. Time to breathe and still the mind.
So in the rest of the time when the mind has not been still, i've been busy gathering a network of tailors and wholesalers, a lengthy process but i have many new friends and people i can trust in business. This was mostly done by sitting on shop floors discussing textiles with vendors, talking designs with cutters, checking out samples, getting some made, playing with children and drinking countless cups of masala chai tea. I had a couple of designs made and shipped to Australia by courier along with some tribal jewellery and leather. I learned very quickly about how to deal in business in India. All is not as it always appears and times and dates are virtually useless. I'm looking to fuse hand-stitched, antique, Rajastan embroidery with modern style designs using new textiles resulting in a unique garment
temple with Pushkar Holy Lake in background
. The styles i'm interested in can be described as wearable costumes, vaudeville, old skool circus, tribal, exotica, pixies, theatrical, gypsy, victorian, post-Apocalyptic, steampunk, whimsical, earthy, organic, otherworldly, cabaret and glamour. The idea is that the clothing and accessories not just be worn by performance artists but by others too in all situations of their everyday operational lives. It's unique gear for individuals dancing towards the revolution for truth, harmony and LoVe on Earth. The clothing is designed with the intention that it will be worn to celebrate joy and the hope is that this joy is shared with others by the wearing of the garments and more people will join the dance. Anyway, it's an exciting new venture to direct energy into. In other news, my cool flip out screen camera died after two years of continuous daily use, a good effort by Canon i thought so i had to invest $330 in a new one which has the added bonus of being considerably more compact than my old one. Digital cameras are hard to find here and out of most Indian people's price range. I had one of my tailors source me one but it was difficult to tell if it was a real Canon or a copy so we caught the bus to Ajmer city to get a newer model. All good but i have very few photos of our extra time spent in Pushkar or of our new friends.
There's a thing in India we call "Pimp My (insert item here)". Basically the Indians take a brand name product, copy it and produce a fake item that looks the same as the old one but will no doubt be of lesser quality
mama and baby
. They do this with everything from fake Adidas caps and fake Marlboros to fake Kit Kats and fake Pantene shampoo. I'm probably sitting in a fake office chair looking at a fake Lifes Good computer monitor as i type on a fake Compaq keyboard. Is anything really real?Books are even copied here and there is "pimp my Lonely Planet travel guide" copies going on. This is great for us because books printed in Delhi are very cheap for us to buy. The current books we are reading list is "Autobiography Of A Yogi", "Arjuvedic Yoga", Hermann Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldmund", "Understanding Krishnamurti" and Tom Robbin's "Jitterbug Perfume".
Being in Pushkar means we have become lacto-vegetarians who eat dairy products but no meat or eggs because these are not allowed here. Such diets have been popularized internationally beginning in the 1960s by the Hare Krishna movement. The foods are not consumed here for religious reasons. The food has still been good here and we've managed to try quite a number of Indian and Western fusion dishes. Mostly we've eaten bananas, samosas off the street, bhuja mix, the Israeli wraps, peanuts in the shell that are roasted in sand and warmed by cow dung fuel, chapattis (a staple flat roti-like bread), curries, sesame seed sweets and the delicious Pushkar specialty of Hello To The Queen that consists of ice-cream, chocolate sauce, banana crumble and cashews. The culinary highlight so far has been the sizzler dish, named for the noise it makes when served
The Lake
. It is vegetables, nuts and rice with a choice of extra added feature ingredient like tofu, mushroom or eggplant and rice, lying on slightly charred cabbage leaves and all served sizzling hot on a steaming cast iron plate. The dish is nutritious and smells and tastes divine. For some reason i have a fetish for the smell of burnt cabbage leaves. Nobody knows where the sizzler originated but most restaurants serve it. It costs around 80-100 rupees (approx AU$3.50) and will fill you up when you haven't eaten all day. Little Tibet restaurant is still our pick of the bunch but the Original Sai Baba restaurant also has a great chef, a wood-fired oven, a cute daughter of the house and a pulley system to carry the meals from the groundfloor kitchen to the rooftop chillout space. At around 4pm everyday, the monkeys arrive in town and attempt to steal fruit from the ladies selling their wares on rugs on the ground at the market and the restaurant owners are reasy with long bamboo poles they use to shoo the monekys away.We drink chai at Sai Baba or Bird's Eye with views to the lake or when there's seats we sit at the 5 rupees chai shop on the street where all the cool hippy kids hang out and watch the street scene. I call it fashion research for the business. We met the smiley Om Baba there who sells Baba bags to stores on behalf of Sadhus around town. Baba bags are well made shoulder bags having taken weeks for Sadhus to make them and are traditionally what Sadhus use to carry around their very few possessions
hey! everybody in a turban get in the shot
. They have renounced nearly everything. Om Baba has no legs and gets around on a hand pedalled cycle contraption or uses his flip flops on his hands when not on the bike. A very friendly chap and a local at the cool kids chai shop.The contraband beverage beer is served in Pushkar but only in secret and not listed on the menu and the only beer they seem to stock is Kingfisher or more commonly, the Australian Fosters that we expect has been pimped (copied). Fake Fosters.............. why fake what is already a horrendous brew? A really good cold drink we like is the Lemon-nana which is crushed mint, ice and lemon and it could be a cocktail if vodka was on hand. Lemon, ginger, honey tea and masala chai is the hot drink of choice.
We moved hotels from Sanjay on the market to Milkman which is an Indian family run guesthouse down a couple of back alleys where cows like to wander and children play. The houses are built around a central courtyard where there are sometimes impromptu jam sessions. The family has three brothers and one daughter living there and each works for the family business. The dogs there have just had four very cute puppies. We became friends with beautiful, intelligent artist Dooga, the daughter who is heartbroken because the parents have set up an arranged marriage for her when she is deeply in love with a guy the parents don't approve of. It's very sad to see her upset and the drama is just like a Bollywood soapie. Poor Dooga lives in a tiny bedroom under the stairs because all the rooms are available for tourists
typical Baba bag the sadhus make
. The home-made food is wonderful there and made by the middle brother, especially his cashew nut curry and butter chapatis. There's a nice grassy rooftop chillout space which is gold for the morning sun rays and perfect for late night chats. We have a TV in our room on which we sometimes watch late night Bollywood shows or Indian Idol.There's a few little businesses set up along the streets leading to milkman and they all try to get your attention so you buy necessities from them. There's one guy who is like a laughing buddha, he sells supari (chewing betel nut candy) to Nadine then chuckles as he says "good tourist, good tourist" as we walk away. One guy calls out without fail every time we walk past. You can still hear the spruiking of "water, toilet paper, cigarettes, candy, chocolate" as you reach the end of the street. Toilet paper is expensive because Indians don't use it, instead they use their left hand and water. The rule of not touching anything communal or shaking hands with your left hand is an important one. Many times i cringe when i shake beggars hands knowing they haven't washed in a very long time but i always do as a sign of friendship then remember to get some sanitiser onto it. It's constant.
It's wedding season at the moment. Hindu weddings are very bright events, filled with ritual and celebration, that continue for several days. They are not small affairs, often with 400-1000 people attending. Though most marriages are arranged, some couples in urban areas have love marriages
toilet paper, cigarettes, water, chocolate!!!!!!!!
. The true Indian wedding is about two families getting wedded socially with much less emphasis on the individuals involved. There's all kinds of parts to the hindu wedding like a feast, a procession, vows with priests, gods and goddesses, present giving, the couple being tied together, a fire ceremony and a breakfast. We witnessed lots of wedding preparations like singing and henna painting for the ladies, stringing garlands of flowers and then bands in the streets, loud, marching brass bands every night who walk through town escorting the bride and women. Next the turban wearing groom appears on decorated horse back with men dancing behind and shoving money into the musicians mouths as they play to make them play louder and faster to let everyone know yet another wedding is happening. One time Dooga the milkman's daughter was up for 24 hours gluing beads onto and painting the decorative pots that the women carried on their heads for the neighbours wedding. Some bright spark had the idea of everybody in the parade carrying fully lit lamps that are designed to be used inside your house, not on the streets. This meant that the parade needed electricity and so everyone was joined together with wiring that was powered by a generator on a trailer at the back of the parade. Classy stuff. Everyone in Pushkar seems to have hired the same band and venue for the nuptials. In Pushkar, the wedding vows happen last and then there is a party with modern Hindu pop music and lots of paper and tinsel decorations strewn around the artificial grassed area, everybody tries to dance and they eat foods from paper plates
peanuts, peanuts get your peanuts here!!!!
. The song of choice at the moment is a kitschy Bollywood version of "Hare Om, Hare Om, Hare Krishna, Hare Om" that plays all night on repeat. We also saw two garish red velvet and gold thrones in the street that they use for the photos. Of course, we crashed a couple of weddings for a look in.We did the trek up to the Savitri Temple on the hill which was built for a wife of Brahma. It wasn't as fa as it appeared to be. We watched squirrels and monkeys play on the way up. The monkeys have just had babies so we were lucky to see the very new and cute little ones playing and being carried around by the parents. There was a killer view over Pushkar and the surrounds and surprisingly there was a little cafe serving chai with the music soundtrack being supplied by an entrepreneurial lad selling beautiful music. I had a go on some poi then found a little quiet spot for some meditation. There was a delightful, peaceful and quiet feeling at the temple so we stayed for a couple of hours. We watched a couple of foreign, kamikaze extreme sports guys attached themselves to parachutes then jump off the mountain and fly around paragliding style in the wind currents until they reached the bottom and ran off. God damn adrenalin junkies!
We have a good friend called Raj who works at the internet we use. Raj works seven days a week, loves trance music, is always happy to see us and brings us free chai tea at regular intervals, we buy him pimped out Kit Kats. Raj gave us each a postcard that told us he misses us when we were leaving
wedding groom on horse riding through town
. We miss him too. We also have a banana guy, a sesame snack guy, a peanut guy, a water guy, a cake guy, a bindi guy, three falafel guys, a cigarette guy, a post office guy, a courier guy, a CD guy etc etc, it's our little community. We have a begging woman that we buy chai for and give her bananas for her baby everyday. We also have a very intelligent street kid we call Kangaroo who adores us and often follows us around chatting in good English, he's a good kid and very cheeky and charming and we like that he never pushes us too far in asking for anything. We get hugs and give him arm and thumb wrestles. He wants to marry me but i told him that when his palm is as big a mine and his finger tips reach mine then we will go on a date. One day we bought him a pair of new jeans to replace his old ones that were falling apart and filthy and an hour later he had convinced another tourist to give him their denim jacket so he had a matching suit. Smart one. Sometimes we buy him dinner. We know that giving him money and food is not really helping his situation because he'll be in the same position when we leave Pushkar but we like the kid and why can't he have some treats? He's learning English by being with us so at least that's something. Some of the other kids can get very tiring by hanging around your legs asking for food all the time or chapati flour money.One day i went alone to the Honey and Spice restaurant in the middle of the day after buying a very funky jester waistcoat with antique embroidery and looking glass mirror work applied
monkey
. The eccentric owner of the cafe gave me an English newspaper to read then asked me if it would be okay with me if he could attack some Louie The Flies that has started a party at the next table. I told him to go ahead and start the war with the flies. I expected him to return with some spray or citronella oil but instead he came out swinging a tennis racket that was an electric mozzie zapper. The guy practised his serving and his backhand technique and swatted flies with the strings that made a zapping noise and sparked up at every death. This comical routine went on for half an hour and i realised that more flies were arriving just as quickly as he killed them. It was pure fly killing as a sport and i thought it to be out of character for a Hindu man to practise this violence. Funny to watch him diving all over the cafe though. When i let him know i thought he had won the match he launched into a major spiritual discussion about man and flies. Another day we met an artist in the street who sells antique amulets, old coins and paints diagrams of chakras and reflexology, shiva dancing, mandalas and sadhus in meditation onto cotton canvas. I suspect the guy to be a little bit psychic as a lot of Indians are, they really are just highly intuitive because of their spiritual way of life. The guy was talking about how he followed his passion and became an artist and talked of work's role in life in general. I thought he was going to finish the conversation with "and that's exactly what's on your mind", because it was
Maharaja artwork @ Milkman Hotel
. Spooky. I bought some very cool carnival ride token coins from him that say "For Amusement Only- No Cash Value" and a Hanuman monkey god amulet. We also bought some silver amulets for Nikki, Guy and Alby as a farewell gift. The guy gave us a small silver Ganesha statue each for good luck and to clear obstacles. Friendly fact for the day, Indian males have the skinniest legs in the world. The younger boys have started the trend of wearing bell bottom trousers to make their matchstick pins appear bigger. I often think they will just snap over in the street and always wish to take them out for a feast of a lunch. They are always perfectly groomed too with sleek haircuts styled by shiny oil and freshly pressed shirts.
Music we've been getting jiggy with is Shiva Moon, Prem Joshua, Hilight Tribe, Gayatri Mantra, Shraddha, Dance Of Shakti, Om Nameh Shivay, Indian Lounge and some drumming. There's alot of great instruments in india and alot of unique music. All the CDs we've bought have been copies for about 100 rupees a piece (AU$3). Nice one.
We said our farewells to all our new Indian friends and had one final Sizzler dish at Moon Dance. We said good-bye to Kiara and Stuart, a friendly Italian couple who have given me some wonderful guidance in the exporting business. I left them with a brochure about the Australian trance parties in the hope that they come and visit us.
Why are toilet roll holders installed in Indian bathrooms when they never supply toilet paper?
Next we're off to Jaisalmer.
Just try getting the smiles off our faces.
