From Jaisalmer (suite)

Mandawa, Bikaner, Jaisalmer ... look up your favorite encyclopedia for more info about the location and history of those places. I'll just deliver personal impressions and images... Images of dust,  light, desertscape, starry nights, hot and dry days. Walled cities,  winding streets lined with shops and cluttered with human and animal life. Dejections and rubbish piles, ornate "hovelis" of past maharajah glories now turned into guest houses.... the tourists being the new Maharajahs to be waited on. Rajasthan in Muslim-Hindu, about 50/50 and the streetscape here looks like what you can imagine of Pakistan more than India. In Bikaner, the young guy who offered to show me around the old city (while Reiko had the runs and had to stay at the hotel for a few hours) gave me his name with a laugh: Saddam Hussein. Well, Hussein's pretty usual name in Allah land. Saddam too... So... Anyway, he was in his 20's, spoke perfect English, and knew history just as an Anthropology student that he was should. But this young Saddam was ... gay... and his boyfriend is Hindu. Interesting.

 

Ah, by the way. We are driving with a rental "chauffeur"... which comes less expensive here than simply renting a car in Europe or America. So, it's a lot of flexibility and an opportunity to get of the beaten path.

 

 

My personal impressions? The older I get and the farther I travel, I come to realize that, despite all of its flaws, ugliness, crazes, madness, the "Western" --typically secular, "rational"--Weltanschauung is the one that comes closer to offering the mind and the body the closest thing to nirvanic freedom. In other words, it's okay with "We-re-all-one" communal orientalism as long as it is in California or the Auvergne. Everywhere on earth, man is scared of freedom and did, and does, anything he/she can think of to restrict his/her ways to gulp and imbibe life without fear. He's invented religion, superstitions, rituals, customs, what have you. Anything that can place a barrier between him/her and life. Even that young, educated Saddam Hussein could not grasp the notion that you can get married without saving beforehand enough money to pay for a grandiose wedding ceremony that, even here, cost more than most can earn in several years of hard work. The same with notions such as a woman and a man can hold each other's hands in public or can have sex (that is, PHYSICAL PLEASURE with one another without having to have recourse to whores when they're unmarried.... stuff like that irks me more and more as I with age and really, no way, no one on earth should have the right to be a jerk. Everyone, except medical cases, is born with the same number of neurons.

 

I'm enjoying the trip, because I am basically curious and I love first-hand experience, but I won't come back home with more respect and love for humankind as I had before I left. It's a lost cause for me. India will NOT make a yogi out of me, you can be sure of that.

 

To be continued....

 

 

Nous avons eu deux converses intéressantes cet aprèm en ville avec de jeunes indiens males. Ils ont tous les deux confirme ma triste impression. ILS SONT BRIMES ET REPRIMES SEXUELS. Ils le disent, le reconnaissent (c'est déjà bien!!) Il leur reste à faire le pas d'en sortir. Dewal, Soda, Mijay, ILS DISENT TOUS la même chose : qu'à leur âge, (ENTRE 20 et 23 ans), ils n'ont jamais vu le sexe d’une femme ni même effleure la peau de l'une d'elle. Cela devait encore marcher en Inde quand ils se mariaient à 13 ans, mais à présent,...... Le fossé qui sépare les sexes leur pèse, mais ils ne SAVENT comment s’en échapper. S’ils essayent d'enfreindre les règles, ils deviendront vite des parias dans la communauté et leurs moyens de survivre matériellement diminuent. J'aurais aime enregistrer leurs témoignages. Reiko et moi les avons bien sur encourage à en sortir, a se débarrasser de leur craintes, et ils l'ont très bien prit. Peut-être qu’à force ....

 

Je voulais simplement ajouter ce témoignage sur le vif afin d’étayer mon argumentation. Car il est évident que J'AI FONDAMENTALEMENT RAISON!!!!

 

Nous continuons la route demain vers Jodhpur. A+.

 

 

 

Reiko and I held two interesting conversations today in town with a couple of young shop keeping Indian (Hindu) guys. They all confirmed my sorried impression: They are a bunch of SEXUALLY REPRESSED young'uns. They say it, they know it (that's already something!) They just have to actually get out of it. Dewal, Soda, Mijay, they all say the same thing : in their twenties, they're still virgin, and they have not had a chance to look at a woman's vagina. Not even touch a woman's skin. That state of things worked when they married at 13. Nowadays, it becomes unbearable, especially in constant contact as they are with passing Westerners. However, if they try to break the rules, they're immediate outcasts to their community and their life becomes hell.

 

I just wanted to add this testimony to my argumentation. It is obvious that I AM  FUNDAMENTALLY RIGHT. Something's got to give.

 

 

Till next time, yours truly. (The Anti-Missionary in India)