Change In Plans

Pushkar - Rajasthan - India

This post is about attending the Pushkar Camel Festival in Rajasthan over the last few days.  It was a wild experience.

The festival is a tremendous “only in India” spectacle.  It sprawls over about 250 dusty and crowded acres, located just outside of Pushkar village.  The largest area is devoted to camels, with smaller sections for horses and cows (think milk, not meat).  There are also carnival rides, tack shops, feed and water stations, a few makeshift movie theaters, food stalls, and a small stadium for games and feats of animal husbandry.

The general idea is that farmers walk with their herds to Pushkar from all over Rajasthan.  While they are all at the fair, they buy and sell animals, depending on need and market conditions. 

In practice, this means that about 10,000 people, and 30-40,000 animals, converge on the fairground, and camp for several days.  From the center of the fairground there are camels as far as the eye can see in every direction.  Many of them have been painted, or branded, or had their fur trimmed into patterns.  Some are hung heavily with bells and colorful afghan-type blankets.  Some camels are hobbled, with one front leg tied into a bent position, so that they hop around gracelessly.  Many camels are expressing their general displeasure with the low, loud, gargly roar and squeak that only an angry camel can make.  

Surprisingly (at least to me), there is no bad smell associated with all of this livestock and with all of this compressed humanity.  Camel dung comes in very dry little pellets, looking remarkably like roasted chestnuts (Merry Christmas!).  The cow dung is somehow rapidly gathered and dried for fuel.  We saw huge stacks near some of the larger herd areas.  I don’t know how they manage human sanitation, but it seems to work.  The main smells are dust, people, and cooking.  

Apparently, the average price for an adult camel is about $1,200, which seems like a good deal for an all-in-one tractor, passenger car, milk source, status symbol and store of wealth.  The camel can also reproduce, doubling the value of the investment.  Eventually, of course, there will also be meat and skin.

The horse section is definitely higher class than those for the camels and cows.  The herders looked more professional, and the sale prices went as high as $200,000.  Many of the horses looked just beautiful.  Tallulah insisted that we take dozens of pictures of them.

Most of the activity at the festival is associated with the animals: feeding, watering, grooming, test-driving, inspecting teeth and hooves, and negotiating prices. The horse test drives are hazardous to the hundreds of people walking continuously on the dusty corridors between animal herds. We leapt out of the way several times as a bareback rider thundered through the pedestrians at full gallop, seemingly with limited control.  We only saw one ambulance evacuation, but it wasn’t clear whether the man had been run over by an errant animal, or kicked by one of his own.  

In several places around the grounds, there were dozens of men packed closely together in long lines.  After a deal is struck for the sale of livestock, the papers have to be notarized by a government official.  The few officials were overwhelmed by the volume of deals brought to them, and the lines backed up endlessly.

We made three separate visits to the camel fair, each for about 2-3 hours.  We were all dazzled by the bright colors of the saris and the turbans, the relentless activity, the beauty and novelty of the animals, and by  the noise.  Our kids were mobbed again and again by people eager to take a picture with a small blonde person.  They both handled the attention well, although Tallulah’s photo smile looked progressively more forced as the day went on. 

On our final visit, last night, we watched the sun set from the hillside overlooking the camel area, and then took a cart ride into the carnival area.  We rode the pirate boat and the 150-foot-high ferris wheel, both of which seemed at least adequately safe (but not by much). 

From the top of the ferris wheel, we looked out over the early-evening spectacle of cooking fires, gas lamps, carnival lights, and tents.  We could see hundreds of camels being roped together to start walking home at dawn.  Mostly we could see thousands of people laughing and eating, taking care of their families and their livestock.  It has been an amazing experience.  India, coming at you.

Pushkar - Rajasthan - India

This post is about our two days and two nights of camping in the desert near Pushkar, Rajasthan.  I will write about attending the Pushkar Camel Festival itself in a later post.

On Friday morning we drove roughly 200 km southwest from Jaipur to Pushkar.  Pushkar is an important pilgrimage destination for Hindus, because it has 400 shrines, including the only shrine to Brahma in all of India.  50 weeks out of the year, Pushkar is a quiet town with about 17,000 residents and a handful of religious visitors.  For 2 weeks in the Hindu month of Kartik (late October/early November) Pushkar hosts the biggest, loudest, most colorful, and dustiest cattle fair in the country.  The fair culminates with thousands of pilgrims converging on the town for a visit to the Brahma shrine and a ritual cleansing in Pushkar Lake.

We stayed in a quiet and orderly tent camp about 3 km from the fairgrounds.  Under the circumstances, the accommodations were very comfortable: twin-size army cots and blankets, mosquito nets, flush toilets, buckets to wash in, and a little outdoor area shaded from the sun.  The neat lines of khaki tents, with a large mess tent and dusty parade ground at one end gave a vaguely military feel to the camp.

The social dynamic in the camp was great: a little like being in a European youth hostel at age 19, but with much older people and less hooking up.  We befriended a couple in the tent across from ours.  He is the Chief Medical Officer for the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, and they had a 19-month-old girl who Tallulah adored. I spent an hour talking to two Canadian couples in their 70s, who had traveled to India together ten years earlier, and were making a return visit.  Two of the four had spent much of their childhoods here.  We found we had a scad of mutual friends with an Indian-American couple and their young daughter.  They had recently moved from New York to Singapore.  Overall, it was a remarkably open and friendly environment, so transient and so far off the beaten path that normal social strictures did not apply.  

On Friday afternoon we walked around the town, through the tourist-markets, down to the lake, and eventually to the famous Brahma shrine.   

The market streets were jammed with people, selling, hustling, shopping, and just hanging around.  An armless beggar followed us for several minutes, which I found unsettling.  Apparently the market is virtually empty for most of the year.  The shops open only for the festival weeks, and maybe for a few weeks after.  I was reminded of the short-term commercial intensity of the boardwalk towns in southern Maine, where the season is from mid-July to Labor Day.  Instead of fried dough, the air smelled of charcoal fires and people.

From the market, we walked down to Lake Pushkar, which was somehow very calming, despite also being thronged with people.  There are 52 sets of steps, all around the lake, leading down to the water.  Apparently each set of steps is used by different jatis, or sub-castes, of Hindus, as they make their way for the spiritual cleansing.  Strange set-up.  We were told that it gets very crowded in the last days of the camel festival, culminating on the night of the full moon, with many thousands of people in the water.  After bathing, the pilgrims float atonement candles on paper boats out into the center of the lake from all sides.  It must be an amazing sight.

Finally, we walked up to the bright-orange Brahma shrine.  We had to take our shoes off on the street, and walk the last 50 grimy yards to the temple in our bare feet.  Loudspeakers were blaring instructions to the pilgrims in Hindi, and dozens of police officers herded the masses through metal detectors and up the stairs.  Monkeys clambered overhead, and everywhere we were pushed gently along by the crowd. 

One of my favorite all-time Zola moments came when India (the person) made a reference to her mother, who is very neat and particular about germs.  India said, “Wow! Gramae would be having a heart attack right about now!”

Zola responded, “Mom, you don’t understand.  I’m having a heart attack right about now!”

We glimpsed the shrine, rang its bell, and threw flowers, before being swept away by the crowd and deposited back on the street.