In the Village

Oct. 9

We spent the morning in Mt. Abu. It was so nice and peaceful and cool! We went to this big lookout point on a mountain that had a great view. And then to this temple that was up on the mountain so you had to go up all these steps to get there; my legs were sore the next day! It was so sad! Then there was this big Brahma Kumari place; as far as I could tell it was this Hindu sect that has branches all over the world. These guys gave us a tour, but I couldn’t understand his accent, so I really don’t understand quite what it was all about. Also the religious ideas were pretty foreign to me- they kept talking about the “Copper Age” or the “Golden Age.” It was an odd tour because there were just these paintings to tell the story and then we went into this big auditorium. In another part of the city there was this Brahma Kumari Peace Park in this kind of typical Indian garden style. There are a lot of shrubs and topiary and gaudy colors, trash cans with animals on them. I still don’t understand their poor garden design. There is just a huge lack of sophistication and aesthetics. There was this like Quanset hut in the middle with this “laser show” with a video talking about Vishnu as the father and how he loves all his children, and these meditation rooms. It was pretty weird.
But we finally left for Udaipur which was about another 5 hours, but again the landscape was really beautiful with all the hills. We stopped at this little highway hotel and there was a village across the way, so we walked over there to see it. A woman started showing us around and then a boy who spoke English. There were all these buildings made with hand-laid stones that were really beautiful. But they had used some mass-produced gates and pieces and had then built onto the house with more standard materials like plaster. Nihal and Gaurab were saying it was too bad that they hadn’t used the stone. I said I think we were being hypocritical, because they probably got a bit more money and wanted to upgrade their house, and that there were probably a lot of downsides to the stone houses. We were just looking at it from our middle-class perspective.That it was just like we would do, if we got a raise we might put new siding up or repaint or something. They showed us their big well and the machine that they hooked to an ox to turn and bring up the water. We walked through their fields where they were growing wheat, and there were these little channels dug from the well to irrigate the fields.