Naggar

I was up at 6 AM on the morning of the 16th to catch one of the first buses headed to the town of Naggar. On Nirja mami's suggestion that it was a beautiful place (I didn't find out till later that she hasn't been there herself), I decided to go. It turned out to be the highlight of the trip.

The Rs. 15/- busride took about 45 min. and was my first experience with India's public bus system. Totally not as bad as people make it out to be. It was crowded like you wouldn't imagine, but not actually uncomfortable. I had to keep asking 'How far to Naggar?' to make sure I didn't miss the stop, but I eventually made it. My first stop on the climb up the hill was the Gauri Shankar Mandir, a 12th century temple dedicated to Shiva. The first thing I noticed was that I recognized the carvings. The lotus shapes, the plant pots at the tops of the pillars. They looked like older versions of the Swaminarayan Mandirs that BAPS is building now. There will be some pictures up for comparison.

The highlight of Naggar was not the temples, though. As I looked uphill, I saw a waterfall and decided I would climb to its source. As I climbed up its downhill stream, the sounds of the town, then the village soon faded away. I figured I would be all alone again. Then up ahead I saw a man sitting on the rocks by the stream, by himself. I folded my hands when he saw me as a silent namaste. As I reached him he asked where I had come from, and if I had spent a lot of energy climbing up the streambed considering that there was a dirt path not more than 10 feet away just up the embankment. I laughed and answered that had I been on the road, I wouldn't have noticed him sitting there. That's true, he said, have a seat. And he flipped over a stone so I could sit on its flat side.

He's a stone worker. You can see his colleague at work carrying stones in the recent pictures (my acquaintance is in the background). It's a brutish job, carrying 35 kilos of stone on your back like that. For the next half hour, though, my Rice degree gave way to the wisdom of a poor stone worker from the villages of India whose insights into life and religion left me thinking for the rest of the evening.

I came to India to see how Hinduism is practiced in its homeland. This stoneworker gave me some amazing insights. As we commented back and forth on the peacefulness of the surroundings he said,

"That's God's grace - you are made to live in a big, noisy, dangerous city. Yes, you have wealth and money, but you have no peace - that's punishment! Here there is peace. I'm not rich, but then again, I don't have to worry about trains blowing up or whether I can afford the rent. If I don't work, I don't get rotis. So I work for food. If I get it, it's thanks to Him. If I don't, it's thans to Him. I work for food. The rest is up to Him.

"I could make paisa into a Bhagwan like the city people do, but what good would that do? You think it brings you convenience, but its really just more of a headache. You wash your clothes in 10 minutes in a washing machine, but then work for hours to pay the electric bill. Big cars get stuck in big traffic. The worst traffic here is my neighbors herd of cows.

"I hear that in the city they think that God has forgotten us villagers. Bhakwas! (Garbage!) I have seen the madness of city life. It turns garibs (poor people) like me into bhikharis (beggars). God gives me the strength to work, the serenity of nature to surround myself with, and the protection of a village where I don't have to even have a door on my house to lock in the first place. I have food on the table and I have peace. I know what I could have if I worked harder, but frankly, I don't want it."

I get the impression that he's spiritually light-years ahead of the rest of us, and he doesn't even know it. I asked him if he goes to the mandir.

(Laughter) "Of course - I have darshan every morning at the Krishna mandir at the top of the hill. You should go there." And that was it. No satsang sabhas or large gatherings. Darshan in the morning for him was enough for God to pervade his whole day. I began to understand how Hinduism worked in the villages. It's not a religion in the villages. It's not something that is practiced. It is simply lived from moment to moment. It manifests as a contentedness. A freedom from want. In fact, every villager I saw higher up in the hills of Naggar was just that - content. Not because they didn't know what they could have. But simply because they didn't want it.

I began to wonder if they pitied my state of materialism.