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The Ganges
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People visit Varanasi for the sacred Hindu Ganges River. The following is an exerpt from www.travel-wise.com with an excellent discription of what I saw:
================ Benares (now known as Varanasi) [is] a city which embodies the spiritual soul of India, and whose beginnings over 2,500 years ago, are steeped in Hindu mythology. The Ganges, or "Mother Ganga", India's holiest river, flows past Varanasi in the course of a 2,600-mile journey-from the remote fastness of the Himalayas, across the fertile northern plains of India, to the Bay of Bengal. The Ganges is a paradox, both beneficent and destructive by turns. It provides sustenance for countless millions of people who live along its banks, but it also inflicts merciless flood damage during the monsoons. At Varanasi, it is polluted by raw sewage and charred, putrefying human and animal remains which swirl and float on its surface. Yet, for thousands of Hindu pilgrims who come here daily to bathe, to chant devotional hymns and to scoop its waters in their palms and drink it like a libation, it is a river as pure and ancient as faith.
The ghats become a shifting pointillist painting, dotted with thousands of people: women bathing fully attired in colourful saris, muscular men stripped to G-strings performing Yoga exercises, naked fakirs (holy men) in pretzel-like poses of meditation, pot-bellied business men clad in white loin-cloths dipping into the waters. Vendors selling chai, cold drinks and hot-gram weave through the crowds. Further upstream, washerwomen exchange gossip and banter, while whacking garments against the stone steps, and laying them out to dry like patchwork quilts at the water's edge. Varanasi is a city which celebrates death as no other city in India does. For a Hindu to die in Benares, and to be cremated here on the banks of the Ganga, is to be absolved of karma, freed from the wheel of reincarnation and absorbed into the Infinite.
==================================================== Visiting the Ganges River was a fantastic experience. Considering how filthy the water is, it is amazing the locals can drink it faster than we drink bottled Dasani water. btw, I will begin to place less photos here and more at my Photo website located at: Click Here Come by and check it out often! More thumbnails ...
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