Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Our conversation was soon joined by Ravinder—a hotel manager from Calcutta who
spoke perfect English—and another sadhu, a fierce-looking man with a shaved head and
goatee. After dinner, we retired to one of the tents to practice English and talk about how I
should stay on with the yatra, go to live at Maan Mandir, and devote myself to Krishna.
I couldn't, I said. I had to go home. I was done traveling. I missed my friends. I missed
my family.
“But God wants you to be here, wants you to be at Maan Mandir,” Ravinder said.
Maybe I should have considered it. I'm sure there was a bedroll for me up in the temple
building. I could sleep under a mosquito net in a row of sadhus. I could wake up to the
words of Shri Baba, and a view over the hills and ponds of Braj. Was that so much less than
I had to look forward to in New York? And I liked these guys. Usually I bristle at people
trying to convert me to their religion, but sitting here I was somehow gratified by how they
didn't insist.
In my eyes, they were also pioneers. They were among the few people in the world who
would purposefully make a sacred pilgrimage to a river full of shit. They were expanding
the sauntering possibilities of the human race. It was precisely because the Yamuna was so
desecrated, in fact, that they were pursuing this additional reverence.
And because Shri Baba's strand of environmentalism doesn't require a sacred place to
be pristine or free of human settlement, it lacks the kernel of misanthropy that nestles at
the core of Western environmentalism. A paradox of the conservation movement is that it
both depends on personal experience of nature for its motivation—and clings to the idea
that modern humans have no place in a truly natural world. To include people in the equa-
tion—as with the loggers of the Ambé project—seems like a concession, or at best a neces-
sary compromise. In the minds of many environmentalists, whether they admit it or not, the
ideal environment would be one in which people were sparse, or absent. But the problems
with this as a conceptual starting point are obvious. We're here. And Shri Baba and his
sadhus, it seemed to me, offered the possibility of a different mindset, in which one could
fight for the environment without pining for Eden.
Since I had Ravinder and company there, I tried to nail down a few Krishna basics.
Could someone please tell me the exact words to the
Hare Krishna
chant?
“It is called the Harenam Mahamantra,” Ravinder said, writing it out in my notebook in
capital letters.
“Like we use soap for cleaning clothes,” Fierce Baba said, “we use the Harenam Ma-
hamantra to clean our minds. To clean ourselves from within.”
We went from there, and soon the tent was in a holy tumult, with Ravinder and Fierce
Baba debating and correcting each other's storytelling and theology, and Ravi and Ramjeet
