Photos of readers

September 6, 2019 • 2:45 pm

Reader Glenda Palmer documents her presence in India. Her words are indented:

India 2007: One of the highlights of our trip to India was to visit Rishikesh to attend a Ganga Aarti. The Hindu faithful believe that the Goddess Ganga came to Earth in the form of the river to help the people. As the Ganges River she brings life, physical and spiritual, to India. Indians call the river Mother Ganga and worship occurs nightly in various locations to honour her. These services are called Ganga Aarti.

The followers were dressed in orange and yellow and a large centre fire pit was burning. There were torches, lights flickering on the river and the bells and drumming blended with inspirational chanting. This intensified as the evening went on. The light and shadow became surreal and the sounds and vibrations began to move up my feet and resonate in my chest and head. The total effect was mesmerizing.

Photo #1 gives a sense of what the service looked like in the dark.

Photo #2, me being treated at Sant Paramanand Hospital (western medicine) in New Delhi. Within two weeks of arrival I came down with bacterial pneumonia (air quality) and an allergic reaction to the Indian food. My husband took the photo of me trying to breathe using a steam container. The American-trained doctor, a lovely Indian gentleman provided sage advice. “You don’t belong here Madam. Go home.”
Here is a 12 minute YouTube video taken in daylight but it does give an idea of what the Ganga Aarti was like.

I’m adding one photo that Glenda sent me earlier, showing her kindness towards DUCKS!

23 thoughts on “Photos of readers”

  1. I imagine what I trust to be the reasonably pleasant experience of a number of ducks, somewhat warily eyeing me, nibbling at hand-fulls of grain and meal worms.

  2. We attended the the Ganga Aarti at Varanasi a few years ago. We watched from a boat just offshore. Great experience.

    1. Must just be a single weird ingredient, right? I’ve cooked and eaten Indian food for decades (never experienced the real thing in country though…dammit). But I wonder about allergies; they’re no joke.

      1. One issue with Indian food is that they use an enormous number of herbs and spices. A friend living in the US keeps a cupboard as big as an entire wall stocked with ingredients. It’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.

          1. I’m never going to move again…so I say. But I’ve never figured a perfect spice cabinet/drawer/slide-out. dunno. I’ve seen some examples. dunno.

          2. I put shelves in the broom closet and then installed Rubbermaid sliding drawers. Not super elegant but it does the trick. The bottom drawer is Filled with the typical Assortment of Tupperware and yogurt containers…

          3. That sounds like a good set-up. I’ve always wanted temperature controlled spice cabinets; sort of like how they make wine “cellar” cooling units. I keep a lot of bulk spices in the freezer as well.

        3. You never know what you’re going to get.

          Which is pretty much why I stopped wasting food on spices.

  4. It sounds like it was an amazing experience. (Minus getting sick.) Love the colors in the duck picture.

  5. Sorry for the illness. I hope you recover completely.
    BTW, I was just watching the Chandrayaan moon landing attempt. Not sure if it was successful yet.

      3. We know that they lost contact with the lander (“Vikram”) at a couple of kilometres altitude. We don’t know why. So there’s potentially still data to recover. It took about 8 years to find the remains of the Beagle-2 lander on Mars, dscovering that it had landed safely (tick of a number of design decisions and technologies as “flight proven”) but only half of the solar panels had deployed. So … things to learn from a “failure”.
        The orbiter (“Chandrayaan-2”) is still working and returning survey data, X-ray and ground-penetrating radar data and several other classes of data.

        1. With so much attention on the moon lately, I would expect a current orbiter or a subsequent one to be able to spot the craft on the surface – if, in fact, it landed.

          1. They announced that they’d imaged it … well, last night UK time, but today India time, I think. (Corollary – with active missions controlled from Tokyo, southern India, German and America, spacecraft operations really are a 24×7 task to keep up to date on.)

  6. Thanks for sharing this great experience with us, Glenda. Did you take the doctor’s advice and go home right away?

    I love your beautiful brood of ducks.

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