Traveling through Braj bhoomi

When I decided to spend the summer in Delhi working with the IBM research lab, I wanted to visit two other cities at all costs. One was Agra, and the other was Amritsar. Agra is now out of the way and along with it, I also covered Mathura, the birthplace of Lord Krishna. With the summer heat beating down relentlessly, I scheduled my trip after the predicted rains arrived--which they never did. Its been a merciless summer in Delhi and without the AC in the lab and in the guest house, I would have easily had blisters in my butt, especially after a merciless and record-breaking mid-west winter. For company, I had two fellow interns. Our train tickets from Delhi to Agra got confirmed just the previous night, and the tickets for the return journey were still on a wait list. Despite that, we set out with hopes that the return tickets would also get confirmed at the last moment.

After reaching Agra in the morning, the UP-ness of it all struck me with full force. Every fellow on the road is a tout full of contradicting and mostly untrue claims, with the sole purpose of extracting as much money from you as possible. Even as someone who is used to nagging auto fellows and scheming locals in touristy places, this was at another level. A 6-km ride from the train station to Taj mahal costs Rs. 100 by pre-paid auto. I ended up paying Rs. 105 due to some undocumented 'slip-charge' which the policeman at the booth conjured up out of his rear orifice. But hey, this is Mulayam territory and I am only getting a first hand experience of what I had known for quite some time. The auto fellow also would not just start his auto and take us to the Taj Mahal. He would instead try to convince us to take a tour package and keep on nagging us with a worn out rate card. Throughout his attempt to convince us, he lied liberally and put up a decent 'sad face'. When he finally cut out the bull shit and dropped us off, he challenged me that I would end up spending more than the Rs. 500 that he wanted to extract from me through his stupid tour (we ended up spending significantly less). In the Taj Mahal, more nagging. I seemed to attract these fellows whenever I put on my shades--perhaps mistaking me for a foreigner? One of the guards inside the building even asked me whether I was an Indian, since foreigners have to pay a higher entrance fee. This question was amusing, and at some level offensive. One of my companions in the trip, a girl from Manipur, was visibly upset and gave an earful to someone who insisted that she show an ID despite her fluent Hindi. She told us that she had faced similar questioning in Hyderabad as well. Having lived away from home for a while now, I know that it would be extremely painful if I was treated like an outsider in my own country. I don't claim to know the solution to this very real problem but at least in the context of national monuments, it is time that they levied a fixed charge for all humans or checked IDs for everyone who claims to be an Indian. I think the former is more feasible, fair, and comes at a small monetary cost.

The Taj Mahal itself is a stunning monument. In spite of stories about how the building has been tarnished by pollution, it still is a symbol of symmetry, perfection and 'louv'. To visit the actual tomb, one has to either take off shoes or wrap them in bags. So carrying an extra pair of socks or polythene bags would help unless you want to do what I did--hop around in the midday sun. From the Taj, one can see Agra fort, where we headed next. The girls thought it would be a good idea to get a guide so that we could get fundaes about the place, and we found an old chap who was nice and put good fundaes for the most part. I simply chose to not contest his stories about how great an emperor Aurangzeb was since I was too tired from the heat. But apart from the Taj, I have never felt any joy while visiting any of the Mughal architecture. For me, it is all a sad story of violence and Islamic imperialism.

Mathura is around 60km from Agra, but the bus journey took us around 2 hours due to the UP-ness of the whole affair. Multiple unscheduled stops and a refuelling stop later we were there. The holy city of Mathura, birth place of Lord Krishna. No touts, only friendly locals, Krishna songs belting out of the shops, reasonably clean streets and the most amazing lassi I've ever tasted. One of the lassi shop guys gave proper directions to an authorized prasad shop. Five huge balls of kanha-ji's prasad for Rs. 50 with shopkeeper and a fellow customer giving proper instructions on what to do. We then visited the Krishna Janmabhoomi temple--'surprisingly' next to a mosque, which in all likelihood stands above the original temple. So the security procedure was rather elaborate. The temple is built on top of an unnaturally high staircase, just to match the height of the mosque next to it. As such, the temple is new and not as impressive as the temples down south, although it is clean and nice enough. We then took a rickshaw to Vishram Ghat, my favourite place of the whole trip. With bhajans sung with gusto, monkeys playing on the banks and trying to snatch away your stuff, people lighting up diyas, bathing in the river and thanking the setting sun, we were at one of the nerve centers of Sanatana Dharma and the Bharata of our ancestors. A man sipping tea came to us, and asked us if we wanted to take a ride along the river for Rs. 100. He told us that his name was Bhagwan Das, and that he had been a boatman for 30 years to earn his daily dal-roti. When we asked him about why Yamuna-ji was in such a bad state, he told us that the rains automatically improve the river's condition and it is Delhi's sewage that pollutes her. This is not something new, but plugging Delhi's sewers seems to be the most important and effective ways to solve Yamuna-ji's problems. I keep referring to the river as Yamuna-ji since that is the term used by the locals to refer to the much loved and respected river. It was amazing to see the sun set while relaxing on Yamuna-ji's lap. Such a contrast to how the day started in Agra. I asked the boatman why I liked Mathura better than Agra. He summed it up well, "Agra mein ashanti hai, Mathura mein shanti hai".

We got off the boat, bolted to catch our train (whose tickets got confirmed) and got back to Delhi at night. The night was topped off with some lassi, pedas and kanhaiya-ka-prasad. The trip was so intense and so random that it would need another blog with some background in mean-variance portfolio optimization.