Aha, one more chance at blogging! I won't try to summarize any more of what we've been seeing; eventully I'll sift through my photos and post a few.
It might do me good to try to put in words some of what I'm feeling about being a tourist here. As our local guides lead us through narrow streets and markets I wonder if we aren't seen as another kind of cattle, herded through town by a skilled shepherd. Little children call out "hallo hallo!" in small villages and wave as we pass (in places where tourism is more established "hallo! pen? chocolate? money?"). Our tour description suggests what we will feel like Bollywood movie stars, but I wonder. It's too easy to think that white people look like gods - a common myth about the Spanish conquest of the Americas and in Oceania, effectively dispelled by more recent scholarship - so what are we then? Just rich, strange? Clearly we have some kind of power, or access to powers.
A man next to me in the bus yesterday gave me a clue when he kindly explained reincarnation to me, concluding that if youre very bad you are reborn as an animal and if very good you might be president of the United States (he wasn't being ironic); all the poor people one sees around had clearly been bad in their earlier lives, not like me who was clearly "enjoying your life." I murmured that I felt lucky rather than virtuous, realizing that the contrast makes little sense here. I considered mentioning that Christians think that nobody's virtuous enough to deserve anything, but quickly realized I'd have a hard time explaining the extreme disparities of wealth and poverty one lives with here. But why suppose that the disparities back home, less extreme but still very real, are easier to account for? The buck stops upstairs in either case.
But back to touring. As we are shown around castles and temple ruins and told grand stories about their builders (not the actual builders) and are shown where the best spots for picture-taking are it all seems a bit like a safari, or a hunt. How do the locals, whose ancestors built these things and would never have been allowed in, feel about our taking their treasures home with us?
I'm not at all sure what I think here. But it's easier to be think about than the vast waste of human potential which is Indian life...
