India is the most culturally colorful and photogenic place I've seen on earth yet. It matters not at all which direction you direct your camera. All is interesting. Every scene and image requires interpretation, triggers fascination. In no place in India was this more true than Varanasi, an ancient city on the Ganges river - a city so old that it's known by its Sanskrit as often as by its Hindi name, Benares. The noise and chaos and color of India are strikingly, shockingly ever-present here.
To get a sense of its engergy imagine New York City during rush hour. Now take away 90% of the cars and taxis and add instead large cows, goats, dirty old dogs, emaciated children, rusting steel rickshaws, hundreds of bicycles, thousands of pilgrims, blaring loudspeakers, families of four and five sharing a single motorcycles, cow shit underfoot, human shit in the alleys. Don't forget to add a hundred happy, smiling children in the cleanest, brightest clothing imaginable. Now, make one half of everyone march east in the street and the rest should run west. If you throw in a medeival market and a small circus, you'll get a sense of what Varanasi is at sunset during festival season.
As I rolled from city to city and gazed upon the Indian lanscape outside the window, I couldn't help but lament the fate of India's urban and suburban rivers and streams. They are sewers, full of garbage, pigs, cattle, and human beings evacuating. I pray the future of the world's rivers doesn't look like this. Obviously in the waterways look better, but they're hardly pristine. The EPA reports that in the United States 60% of surface waters are not fit to swim in, let alone drink. I can only imagine in horror what the figures must be here.
The results of this kind of abuse are obvious, especially in communities where the majority depend daily on these rivers. The ecologist E.O. Wilson suggests in his writings that humans have an innate love of nature. Karl Marx too argued that humans normally love nature. He thought that the greed inherent in capitalism was the root cause of environmental abuse. He wrote that in a communistic state the natural world would inevitably thrive, but after 70 years of planned economies the Soviet Union was perhaps the most polluted country on earth. Here in India, where rivers are celebrated and sacred, it becomes obvious that we humans are casual abusers of the land when we crowd together. Capitalism can h
ardly be the cause of the problem in the rural areas I visited. It's barely taken hold in these agrarian areas. I suspect that only careful, deliberate efforts and action will protect the world's natural resources. Neither the 'free' market, communism, nor human nature will solve this fundamental problem.Levels of pollutants in the Gang
es by the time it reaches Varanasi are infamous. One report I read stated that fecal choliform bacteria levels are 17,000 times U.S. EPA standards for safe drinking. And yet, thousands of pilgrims come to the ghats of Varanasi to cleanse away their sins in its holy water. It's a beautiful and moving spectacle, maybe more so because of what I know about the scientific status of the river. I was amazed to learn that pilgrims collect the water and take it home to store and savor for months.
