Varanasi – Ramana's Musings

Satisfaction.

This post has been inspired by a story narrated by a character in a fascinating book about Banaras, or Varanasi as it is now known.

“After breakfast I go go my shop. It is a grocery shop run by my two sons,. The oldest and the youngest. I have three sons. The one in the middle is a lawyer. Our financial troubles are behind us now, I am a happy man. But I was a happy even during the difficult days because I was always satisfied with whatever little I had. I never asked anyone for favours. Satisfaction is the most important thing in life. If you have satisfaction, you have everything.”

This character is a man that the author meets in an akhara. He is a retired old man who had come up the hard way as many characters in the book do. Like him, the others in the book too come across as satisfied people who enjoy living in Banaras and the author goes on to say this finding of his too.

“That’s my takeaway message from this trip to Banaras: satisfaction is everything. All these days I was rubbing shoulders with sadhus on the ghats, but finally, on the day of my departure, I have come across a sage, that too in a gym.”

Varanasi has always fascinated me and I have written one story about my own experience there in one of my blogs. I have also reviewed a film Masan a story located in Varanasi, in my blog.

While the author Bishwanath Gosh, was impressed by the Banarasi’s satisfaction quotient, I think that he has missed out on the macro picture of the satisfaction levels of most Indians. Having travelled across the length and breadth of this country during my working days, and a garulous one easily chatting with strangers, I can vouch for the fact that it is a remarkable attitude of most Indians to be satisfied with their lot in life. For instance, I am sure that it does not come as a surprise to my readers, I for one am a very satisfied person. I do not envy others more wealthy or healthy as, I am quite content with what I have and what I have become. Almost all of my friends and family members are like me and many foreigners have observed this trait and commented negatively as being stoic or unambitious. I think that Bishwanath Ghosh has found the correct description of this trait as being satisfied with one’s lot.

I think that this is what the great American sports personality meant when he said:

“The measure of who we are is, what we do with what we have.”

~ Vince Lombardi.

Please do go over to Shackman’s blog to see what he has to say about this same topic.

Comfortzonitis.

I did.

The last few days saw me going out of my home on a number of occasions for various reasons. First on the 28th it was to attend the reception, lunch and then subsequently the dinner that I had to attend along with my classmates for a reunion.

The 29th saw me going for lunch at a friend’s place, followed by a visit to two other friends in the other side of town to exchange some books and also to discuss another friend’s recent visit to Varanasi and Allahabad.

I then had two days of staying at home but on the 1st of February, had to go out for lunch again with some classmates. One of them and his wife subsequently joined me at my place to spend the afternoon before they caught a flight to Delhi.

The 2nd saw me off with a couple of friends to another friend’s place 30 kms away for lunch where I met some very interesting people besides having excellent food.

Yesterday saw me going off in the afternoon to have tea and snacks at another friend who is a on a visit to his daughter here.

The one common feature of all these outings was, my eagerness to get back home at the earliest. I have decided to call this urge Comfortzonitis.

When earlier today, I mentioned this urge to a couple of other friends of around my age, they too indicated that they suffered from this malady too.

Do you?

Travel Series V.

Lin, I wrote this one too for the LBC over three years ago. The topic was suggested by Padmum. This gives more than just one incident and to that extent kind of sums up my travelling days and some of the incidents that took place. There are many more but I shall, write new stories without committing to a series and recalling older blog posts. So, the five posts that I promised you conclude with this one, but there is one more that is really funny which I shall post as a bonus tomorrow.

“Travel Troubles

Having been in a career that involved a great deal of traveling, I have had my share of the usual troubles that all travelers face; delayed/cancelled/missed flights, trains, taxis breaking down, bad weather, flash strikes by transport and hotel workers and so on and so forth. I had one experience of lost luggage that was more due to a language problem, more about that later.

The unusual troubles that I have had are few, but I shall list them here.

The lost luggage incident was at the Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. My suit case did not come out on the carousal and I had to run from pillar to post to find some one who could speak English. That was when I understood what a disadvantage speaking English is in France. After about an hour of running around, I found a sympathetic policeman, who helped me locate the luggage and I left the airport with the suitcase. There was another incident where language was not the problem and I had to wait for three days for the suitcase to be located and returned to me in London, but something good came out of it as I had to buy some essentials till BA could locate the suitcase for which they very efficiently paid up.

In 1982, I was touring the Eastern Uttar Pradesh and had left Varanasi for Gorakhpur by car late in the evening, hoping to reach the latter by about dinner time. On the way, luckily near a small town, our car broke down and we were forced to catch a rural taxi leaving the car and the driver behind so that we could go to Gorakhpur and send a relief vehicle. The driver of the taxi misbehaved with us on reaching our hotel and left in a huff. He took his own back by going back to the abandoned car and driver and a big police case had to filed and I had to return to that God forsaken place a few times before everything could be settled.

On another occasion, we were returning from Chennai by train to Pune after a family wedding. We left well on time and were driven by our friend’s son in law, but about half a kilometer before we could reach the station, we were caught in a traffic jam caused by communist trade unions taking out a march. Urmeela, Ranjan and I had to carry our suit cases and walk to take a pedestrian subway to reach the station. Luckily for us, as we neared the subway, a railway porter who had brought some one else’s luggage across the road came to our rescue and we reached our time well in time. The railways meanwhile, apprehending such difficulties for other passengers, decided to delay the departure and all our sweaty physical endeavours were for nothing.

On another occasion, while on tour by car in the South of India, I was harassed by the police and a false case lodged against me, during our infamous emergency days about which you can read more here.

In 1994, I was to catch a flight at Bengaluru for Pune to return home for Diwali. On reaching the airport, I was advised that the flight had been cancelled. This was quite common those days with the Indian Airlines being the sole airline in India. I decided to take a taxi from Bengaluru to Pune and was able to secure one with two drivers alternating and after a journey of 14 hours of driving, reached home in the wee hours of Diwali morning. I offered a bed and some rest for the drivers, but they opted to drive back home for Diwali too. They reached by afternoon of the Diwali day and phoned me to say that they had reached safe.

On another occasion, I was stranded at the Bahrain airport after having checked in for flight that did not arrive from London. I was forced to travel by another airline which was the worst flight that I have ever had. The ground staff and the flight attendants were extremely unprofessional and to be transferred to that kind of an airline from BA was most unfortunate. For diplomacy’s sake, I do not want to name that airline, but people familiar with flights in and out of Bahrain will no doubt find it easy to identify that.

Many such stories of travel troubles come to mind, but one flight out of London’s Heathrow to Mumbai is etched deeply for its uniqueness rather than for any trouble. The trouble was that our Air India flight was delayed due to fog and we were stuck at the Maharajah Lounge at the airport. I had the good fortune of meeting personally two great Indians there in similarly waiting mode, J R D Tata and Dhirubhai Ambani. The former all alone and the latter with Kokila Behan in attendance. The memory is strong because of what happened when we landed in Mumbai. All three of us along with the few others ahead, checked out of Immigration and I saw Dhirubhai immediately surrounded by a crowd of people who whisked him away leaving a few minions behind to collect the luggage. JRD waited with me at the carousal and chatted with me and a few others too, and when one suit case came ahead simply took it off the carousal and sat on it to wait for the next one. When that came, he took both and walked out of the luggage bay all by himself acknowledging the greetings of many who recognised him. What a contrast! JRD was the founder of Air India and only recently had been ousted from the Board of Directors by the petty minded government of that time.”

Story 8. The Zamindar.

“All of us are going around with an entire story of our lives, completely different from the story of our lives that anybody else would tell. So much of our lives never breaks the surface.” – Claire Messud in The Guardian.

Before I sat down to write this post, I was visiting Facebook when Nick’s post caught my eye and I could not resist the temptation to include it here. Thank you Nick. I wonder what someone who has known me will write about me!

I met Balji Raju way back in 1961 in Hyderabad. He was engaged to be married to Shakuntala who was my then girl friend T’s close friend and classmate. Balaji, a few years older than the three of us, was also studying for his Masters in Hyderabad. Both Raju and Shakuntala were from the same Raju caste and the engagement had been arranged when they were both teenagers. While Shakuntala was staying in a girl’s hostel, Balaji’s family had taken a full house for him to stay and had equipped him with a servant, and a body guard cum driver and a Hindustan Landmaster car for his use. One of my unforgettable impressions of those days was how the driver, Venkaiah would bring hot lunch for Balaji in the car and serve him, while he sat in the back seat. The four of us would often go on double dates to cinemas and on picnics and all was as well as it could be for young people in those good old days.

I attended Balaji’s wedding in Vijayanagaram in 1962 and lost all touch with him till 1968 when I was posted for a few months at Hyderabad. By that time much water had flown down the Musi and both of us were very different people. I had acquired a BA, and an MBA and was working towards a career in a reputed company and was courting Urmeela. Balaji had settled down in Hydearabad as he did not like to live in his village where his father was a Zamindar. Like many such families, his family had extensive urban properties in the cities which were important for them to visit like Hyderabad, Madras, Vijayawada etc. By that time, zamindari had already become a joke with dwindling agricultural holdings, and Balaji was in the process of encashing what he could of his family’s estates and investing in urban properties. He and Shyamala were living in the same house that Balaji had stayed in while studying and were living a life of the idle rich.

I used to meet them on and off whenever I had the time during brief visits to my in laws, but such meetings tapered off due to the short time that I used to spend in Hyderabad and Shaku was not particularly friendly towards Urmeela.

When I was posted in North India, a mutual friend from Hyderabad was visiting us in Delhi and informed me that Balaji was then living in Varanasi. Since it was a certainty that I would visit Varanasi sooner or later, I had arranged to get his address so that I could visit him when I did.

Before we proceed any further, something about Varanasi. Many rich Indians used to and still do own ancestral residences there as pilgrimage in the olden days meant a few days spent there during the days when accommodation for pilgrims was in short supply. Hindus would go to Varanasi for various reasons and to be comfortable, many had bought homes there to be used by family and friends on pilgrimage to the holiest of all holy towns of India. To die there and to immerse the ashes there in the Ganges is believed to release one from the cycle of births and deaths. Moksha as it is called here. The older Hindus would prefer to go to Varanasi to die there.

In late 1980, I did visit Varanasi and found out where Balaji was staying and landed up there in the evening after work. He was living in one such home bought by his ancestors. The ground floor was rented out to two traders and he was living in solitary splendour in the upper floor, cared for by the old family retainer Venkaiah.

It was obvious to me that Balaji was not well but I did not know quite what with. He was gracious in his hospitality and reminisced about our old days together and we parted company. During my next visit to Varanasi in 1983, I met him again and it was obvious that he had deteriorated in health further but I could not find out details as he would simply brush it off joking that his time for moksha was nearing. In our chat that evening I learnt that Shakuntala had left him to live with her parents and was in Hyderabad teaching in a school and after that parting, Balaji had moved to Varanasi to be far away from her.

I met Shankuntala in Hyderabad in 1989 when I heard the full story. Balaji had squandered the entire estate after the death of his parents and was a full blown alcoholic. He had no place to live anywhere and was an emotional drain on Shakuntala who finally took the decision to leave him to his devices. He moved to Varanasi as that was the only property left and he was strapped for cash. He was in no condition to earn a decent living. He had died in 1985 at Varanasi and Venkaiah returned to Hyderabad with the keys to the house to tell the story that he had died of cirrhosis of the liver. Venkaiah had performed the last rites and immeresed the ashes in the Ganges, packed up his meager belongings and come away back to his own family.

Balaji would have been about 45 when he died. What a waste of a life that could have been very different. Perhaps, he got the moksha that he joked about.

Travel Troubles

Welcome to the Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where twelve of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by Padmum. The ten other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Magpie, Maria SF, ocdwriter, Padmum, Paul, Rohit, The Old Fossil and Will. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!

Having been in a career that involved a great deal of traveling, I have had my share of the usual troubles that all travelers face; delayed/cancelled/missed flights, trains, taxis breaking down, bad weather, flash strikes by transport and hotel workers and so on and so forth. I only had one experience of lost luggage but that was more due to a language problem, more about that later.

The unusual troubles that I have had are few, but I shall list them here.

The lost luggage incident was at the Charles De Gaul Airport in Paris. My suit case did not come out on the carousal and I had to run from pillar to post to find some one who could speak English. That was when I understood what a disadvantage speaking English is in France. After about an hour of running around, I found a sympathetic policeman, who helped me locate the luggage and I left the airport with the suitcase.