A Walk Through Vraj

A small group of us met with Dhanurdhara Swami for a guided walk through Vrindavan.  We saw only a small portion of Vraj, but it was amazing nonetheless.

Before the walk, we were invited to Dhanurdhara's home to meet with him.  At this point we were still reeling from culture shock, so Maharaj did his best to make us feel better.  As we were leaving his home he suddenly turned around and quickly rushed us back inside.  It turns out there was a snake charmer in the alley and he is quite afraid of snakes.  On our walk over to his home we were stopped by a gaggle of monkeys fighting, which totally freaked me out.  So first the monkeys, now the snake.  Later on we encountered two dogs fighting that were slopping muddy poo everywhere.  Dhanurdhara Swami commented that he's never seen such things before in Vrindavan, and we of course joked that leave it to us to come to India and this stuff happens.

I am always amazed at how much can be piled up on a small cart.  And not just with this hay, but people, food, boxes, and dried cow dung as well.

As we headed into the fields we came across peacocks.  In the photo below you can barely make them out off in the distance to the left.

Towards the Yamuna River side of Vrindavan are hundreds of fields, which grow mostly flowers.  The flowers are sold to the temples for garlands and offerings. 

Unfortunately, the Yamuna had recently flooded and wiped out the fields.  So many farmers lost their livelihoods.

 We came across a farmer walking back to his small hut.  Lila speaks Hindi and translated a conversation for us.  He lost his crops and home in the flood.  He has a wife and children to feed, and when asked what he will do he said he rebuilt his home and replanted his fields.  We asked what does he do for food and money.  He smiled and said he has none, but he has faith that his replanted fields will provide for his family.  Can you even imagine losing everything - and everything being only a small dirt hut and a few pieces of clothing - and surviving with no money, food or government assistance?

If you don't have electricity you need to rely on alternative forms of fuel... this is about as natural as it gets!

I do not like monkeys.

Even the baby monkeys frighten me.  In Vrindavan you can't wear glasses or a monkey may rip them off your face.  You can't eat food out in the open or they will rip it out of your hand.  You need to be careful carrying plastic bags or they will rip that out of your hand thinking there is food inside it.  And you definitely do not make eye contact with monkeys. 

We happened upon a calf which was the cutest little thing.  Baby cows are not frightening. 

This is how buildings are constructed....

Who needs concrete when you have sticks and bricks?

Beautiful gopis with flowers in their hair!

We were told that these cows are the original Vrindavan cows, which you can tell by the sagging skin at their neck.

The girls enjoyed cow seva.  G was a little hesitant at first, and an unruly bull in the vicinity didn't help the situation any, but it didn't take her long to let go of her fear and enjoy brushing the cow.  Which then came to an abrupt end when she stepped in a huge pile of cow poop.

 

I think there was a story about this building and its bricks.  But now I forget what it is.  You can see in the photo where bricks have been removed and in some places replaced.

My husband arrived back in Vrindavan today.  We miss him already.  And honestly, I do miss India.  So for those of you who have taken excerpts from this blog and used them in your blogging, please for once excerpt this one good thing I just said.  I need a reprieve from being made out to be a naive, spoiled American.  :-)

ISKCON Vrindavan

It's only a short walk from Ananda Krishna Van to the ISKCON temple, also known as Sri Krishna Balaram Temple Complex.  However, the path to and fro is slightly challenging.  (Which I can't help making some sort of analogy to it being like a spiritual journey, if the path to it was easy would we cherish it as much?)  The road was dug up to install underground sewer pipes, which is much needed. 

You can't begin to imagine the smell from the open sewer that lines the roads.  I'm not kidding... you can literally see the sewage floating by.

A funny story about the dirt road being dug up...  the road is narrow to begin with and the giant ditch pinches it tighter to the point of it being only one person wide.  There is nothing fencing off the giant trench, nothing to keep someone or something from falling 12 feet down.  In America that entire street would be closed off.  In India, you just go about your day and be careful to not trip or slip into it.  If you did fall into it, well, that's your stupid mistake.  In America if you fell into it you'd sue the township, county, and state and walk away a millionaire and a law would be enacted in your name to prevent further ditch falling tragedies from occurring.  I like the India method better.  But I digress from my story.  One day we were heading back to Ananda Krishan Van, G was in front of me and Chris behind me.  I turned to say something to Chris and all I could see from behind him were two giant horns.  I think I said his name in a panicky voice and I'm sure my face looked equally panicky.  He turned around and was face to face with a bull.  There's no where to go on this road - to the left was a wall and to the right was the 12 foot trench.  I hurried G along the 2.5 foot wide path as quickly as I could and all I could think about was the bull tossing Chris into the air.  We made it safely to the other end and stepped to the side to let the massive cow pass by.

So, enough about sewage and on to the beautiful temple complex.  It's probably sacrilegious to mention sewage in the same post as a temple and deities, but oh well.

The Sri Krishna Balaram Temple Complex is built with marble and is quite striking.

I particularly liked the temple with its open courtyard in the center.  My picture was taken in the evening and in the rain, so it doesn't do the temple justice.

Here is a photo taken from Veg Recipes of India blog, which shows a better shot of the open area.

"The temple has three altars. On the first altar are Sri Sri Gaura Nitai, the most merciful incarnations of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Nityananda Prabhu who appeared about 500 years ago at West Bengal. The divine brothers, Sri Krishna and Balaram, are worshiped on the central altar and on the third altar are Sri Sri Radha Shyamasundara along Their confidental gopis, Lalita and Vishakha."  (ISKCON Vrindavan website.)

For those of you who don't know this, taking care of deities is a time consuming job.  Although the pujaris don't see it as a job, they view it as a service.  The deity outfits are changed twice every day (morning and evening) and they are offered arati and bhoga (food) six times everyday. 

Wondering what arati is?
Gaudiya Vaishnavism performs arati by blowing a shankha (conch) to start the arati.  Then an odd number of incense sticks are offered to the deity. The ghee lamp is offered next, and then offered to the devotees, who wave their hand over the flame and then touch their face/head with that hand. A conch is then filled with water and offered to the deity.  The water is then sprinkled over the devotees. A cloth and flowers are then offered, and the flowers are circulated to the devotees, who smell them. The deity is then fanned with a camara whisk and a peacock fan.  A devotional song is sung during the ritual.

Wikipedia gives a good explanation as to why arati is performed:
"When arati is performed, the performer faces deity of God (or divine element, e.g. Ganges river) and concentrates on the form of God by looking into the eyes of the deity (it is said that eyes are the windows to the soul) to get immersed. Arati is waved in circular fashion, in clockwise manner around the deity. After every circle (or second or third circle), when Arati has reached the bottom (6-8 o' clock position), the performer waves it backwards while remaining in the bottom (4-6 o' clock position) and then continues waving it in clockwise fashion. The idea here is that arati represents our daily activities, which revolves around God, a center of our life. Looking at God while performing arati reminds the performer (and the attendees of the arati) to keep God at the center of all activities and reinforces the understanding that routine worldly activities are secondary in importance. This understanding would give the believers strength to withstand the unexpected grief and keeps them humble and remindful of God during happy moments. Apart from worldly activities arati also represents one's self - thus, arati signifies that one is peripheral to Godhead or divinity. This would keep one's ego down and help one remain humble in spite of high social and economic rank. A third commonly held understanding of the ritual is that arati serves as a reminder to stay vigilant so that the forces of material pleasures and desires cannot overcome the individual. Just as the lighted wick provides light and chases away darkness, the vigilance of an individual can keep away the influence of the material world."


We arrived in Vrindavan on the last day or Kartik (for info on what the month of Kartik is, visit this website), so we were able to see Lord Krishna (as a child) being tied up by his mother for stealing butter, before it was removed from the temple.

Dhanurdhara Swami talking to G about the deities:

Devotees stringing garlands in the temple:

Coming soon (or at least eventually... this job thing is really getting in my way of blogging)....
Prabhupada's Samadhi
Prabhupada's rooms at the Radha-Damodara temple
A walk around Vrindavan
A Goshala
Madan Mohan Temple
MVT
Loi Bazarre
Lila
Taj Mahal
Indradyumna Swami
Sandipani Muni School

Ananda Krishna Van

We did our best to prepare ourselves for India, especially in regards to what we would see and the conditions we might have to stay in.  But even still, the shock of Vrindavan was unbelievable.  I remembered a swami saying during a talk on Vrindavan that you have to be able to see past the oil to get to the water.  I kept thinking that there is a heck of a lot of oil and would I ever be able to get past it to the water.  I so desperately wanted to see the water!

Once we stepped off the litter strewn, pot-holed, dirt road and over the giant threshold into the Ananda Krishna Van complex I felt a teeny tiny bit better.  (Although that didn't last long.)  Inside it was clean and nicely landscaped.

We were led to a room that was slightly below ground and next to some sort of maintenance/laundry area.  The room was noisy, damp, musty and I found mold behind the bed.  I started crying.  Which obviously didn't help calm G down, and she started crying too.  I was panicking.  There was no way I could stay in this room.

Chris left us in the room to see what he could do to make the situation better and he returned with a beautiful, young Russian woman named Lila.  Dhanurdhara Swami arranged for Lila to show us around Vrindavan, and she arrived at the best possible moment.  (More about Lila later... she is an amazing woman and we would have been lost without her.)

Lila speaks Hindi and conversed with the manager about placing us in a better room.  While we were waiting for the new room to be cleaned (which only involves bringing in a new mattress and squeegeeing the bathroom floor), we had our first free roaming monkey experience.  A few monkeys came on to the property and freaked G out.  And me too.  We had been prepped on how to deal with these bold and sometimes nasty primates.  I immediately took off my sunglasses (and didn't put them on again until I returned to America!) and avoided making eye contact.  It didn't take long for a staff person to come along and shoo them off the property.

We eventually lugged our suitcases up to the second floor and into a room with a balcony.  It wasn't great by any means, but it wasn't damp, musty or moldy.  I carefully inspected the bed for bugs, which I probably wouldn't have thought too much about if it weren't for my friend Amy making me paranoid about bed bugs.  I didn't discover bed bugs, but I did find hairs and questioned the cleanliness of the sheets and mattress.  Thankfully I shoved a set of sheets into a suitcase as a last minute thought right before we left home.  And at the end of our stay here I did not bother to bring them home.  In fact, G and I each left a pair of shoes behind too.

Shower curtains are apparently a luxury in Vrindavan, which wouldn't have been a big deal except for the water pooling on the marble bathroom floor made it very slippery.  And since there is no daily cleaning of your room, you're kinda left with evaporation as a means of removing the water from the floor.

But we did have hot water as well as a quasi-Western toilet.  No toilet paper, but we brought our own.  As you can tell from the photo below, daily cleaning (or any cleaning at all) of the rooms doesn't appear to be a priority.  We went through a lot of hand sanitizer.

The crazy thing about our lodging is that it's considered the nicest in Vrindavan.  When someone asked where we were staying and we said "Ananda Krishna Van" they would say "ohhhh, that's so nice" or "wow, that's expensive."  We paid $40 a night.  And after the fact we were told we got ripped off as it should have only been $22.  So, $22 a night in Vrindavan is expensive.  My opinion is that we got $22 worth of a room, maybe even less.  Once again, it's all about perspective.

As far as lodging goes in Vrindavan, there aren't many options.  The only other "decent" place is the MVT, which we tried to stay at but it was booked even 5 months out.  We arrived at the end of Kartik, which is a very busy time for Vrindavan as thousands of Hindus and devotees come here during this time.  Rumor has it that Uma Thurman's father is some sort of Vedic scholar and they rented out almost the entire MVT.  Some told us we were lucky to even get a room at Ananda Krishna Van.

There is another lodging complex being built that's a little farther out from where we stayed, which is being advertised as a luxury place.  Given how many people make pilgrimages there, I can see it doing quite well.

To Vrindavan

We spent three days in Delhi; which is not enough time to see everything.  I had to seriously prioritize our "to do" list and just accept the fact we couldn't do everything.  In hindsight we should have arrived at least two days before the wedding, not one, and planned to spend at least one more day, if not two, in Delhi before heading to Vrindavan.

It took about three hours to drive from Delhi south to Vrindavan. 

The drive was quite interesting.  We started to see a lot more free roaming cows and we spotted our first camel.  The road was four lanes wide (two for each direction), but occasionally we were in the oncoming lane of traffic to go around all sorts of slower moving traffic.  As I said before, the painted lines to divide the lanes doesn't mean much.  And just as it was in the city, there was still lots of horn blowing.

We stopped at a very busy roadside rest stop.  There were a lot of tourists here on their way to Agra, where the Taj Mahal is.  Here we saw our first snake charmer.  One of the things Chris' dad kept telling us to be aware of - and stay away from - were the snake charmers.  So we of course had to take a picture!

Next to the snake charmers were men with monkeys.  

When we turned off the main road to head into Vrindavan the road became dirt and it was quite a bumpy ride to our lodging.  When we pulled up to Ananda Krishna Van Chris and I looked at each other with nervous expressions of "you have got to be kidding me... there is no way this is where we are staying."

 

Welcome to Vrindavan!

Also known as Vrindaban, Brindavan, and Vraj.  The village is home to hundreds of temples.

The religious heritage of Vrindavan, as told by Wikipedia:  "Vrindavan is considered to be a holy place by all traditions of Hinduisim. The major tradition followed in the area is Vaisnavism, and it is a center of learning with many Vrindavan Ashrams operating."

Vrindavan is nicknamed "City of Widows" because of the large population of widows who come to live here.  Wikipedia explains why:  "According to some Hindu traditions, upper caste widows may not remarry, so many of those abandoned by their families on the death of their husband make their way here. There are an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 widows living on the streets, many of whom have spent over 30 years there. In exchange for singing bhajan hymns for 7–8 hours in bhajanashrams, women are given a cup of rice and a pittance of money (around Rs.10) which they try to supplement by begging on the streets."  I have to add that I didn't see many widows begging - most were at least trying to sell something, no matter how small it was.  I'm not saying there weren't any, because while shopping on the street across from the ISKCON Temple I did have an elderly lady and a young girl follow me for a few minutes asking for money; but I didn't get the impression there were hundreds of widows begging on the streets like Wikipedia sort of eludes to.