June 20th, 2009 -- A journey down Ganga

We woke up early to get a boat ride on the Ganges. As we got to the banks of Ganga, we saw a dead man lying face down in the water. This was ~10 feet from the canoe we were about to board. The sad part was that nobody batted an eye... it was life as usual. In fact, people were bathing ~10 feet from him (see below).
The rains haven't come yet, so the width of the Ganges was narrow. We saw several of the ghats from the river including the 2 that are for funeral pyres, which one had a body burning as we passed it. As we had heard before arriving in Varanasi, the water was pretty dirty.... most of which was due to the ashes floating downstream.

Varanasi is a difficult place to understand. On one hand, it is the oldest and holiest city in India, where Hinduism is celebrated and people come to wash away their sins and attain salvation. On the other hand, dark and sobering emotions are evoked when I see dead bodies on the streets, in the river, and burning on the banks (funeral pyres). I thought this trip to Ganga was going to be this awesome spiritual experience, but in reality these polar emotions ended up in a visit that overloaded my senses.

Varanasi is very unique b/c you are exposed to extremes all at one time. Growing up in the States, I am accustomed to compartmentalizing different activities and phases of life. For example, the place where I bathe is different than where I pray or different than where I wash my clothes or where I eat or where I go to mourn the dead, etc. Here on the Ganges all those parts of life occur in one place... it seems b/c the poverty level is high here and locals have no choice but to live all parts of their life on the banks of the Ganges. The most appropriate phrase to describe my Ganga experience is "It is what it is."