Holy Pushkar

Pushkar is a tiny Hindu pilgrimage town in Rajasthan and sight of one of the worlds only Brahma Temples. The Pushkar Lake in the center of town is where Ghandi's ashes were spread and is an extremely spiritual place for Hindus to bathe. Here in this Hindu town there is no booze, no meat, no kissing and you must dress conservatively. It is a small and pious town in the middle of the desert and along with all the pilgrims, are the ever present tourists, like myself, looking for a bit of spirituality or a place to chill. Despite all this holiness you can never escape the shady factor in India. Here in Pushkar you have to dodge even the holiest of people: priests. The town is over flowing with priests of the Brahmin Caste ready and more than willing to make a profit off the spirituality of the pilgrims. They are especially looking for the Western tourists who naively let their guard down in order to experience this so called spirituality. In India everything comes at a price. If you are seeking spirituality and good karma, they are yours, but not without donations. Improving your Karma comes at a price even for Hindus but for American tourists you walk into these spiritual traps, and are asked for US dollars. We received our "blessings" by the ghat down at Pushkar Lake twice, neither time was very holy and both left Rooz and I feeling used. Our first experience with the "priests" was our first day in Pushkar we were approached by a "priest" who forced rose petals into our hand and told us to respect Pushkar and the Pilgrims we must throw petals into the holy lake and then give him a donation for the town. This dude was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, not the white robes of a priest, and barely had his routine down. So we walked away (but not without getting severely cursed out) and later saw this con man selling hashish to some Spanish kids at a pizza restaurant.



Two days later we went to visit the Brahma Temple and after were ushered down to the ghat a second time to supposedly "drop some petals in the holy lake". There we were led to the priests lair. At the main ghat we were taken to the steps of the lake were Rooz and I were split up to receive our blessings from these over eager priests. This time it was the real deal they had the sacraments all set up and they had their speeches down pat. These were real priests so we decided to go through the motions and receive the blessing. We did not want to piss off the priests by being disrespectful. I decided okay, they are going to asked for a donation but its part of the experience. I chose to visit a holy city I invited this aspect of Hindu culture into my trip. The priest was extremely curt and rude to me, he went through the sacraments at rapid speed. He told me to tell him the names of all my family members and repeat a blessing in which I asked for success, good marriage, sweet children etc, etc. He could tell I was very hesitant to participate and that I was acting like a frightened little animal about to run. So he rushed me through the blessing giving me ghat holy water to put on my head and giving me a bindi made of rice and red chalk. He made sure to tell me that everyone who receives this blessing must give a donation to the town (aka his personal pocket book) and kept asking through out the little ceremony how much I would be willing to give. He suggested I give 100 US dollars per family member and this way I would be sure to receive good karma and have a good trip in India. At the end of the ceremony Rooz (the sucker) had already given a donation to his priest of 70 rupees. Mean while, my priest was demanding that if I was to donate in rupees I should give a minimum of 500 rupees per family member. By then I was sooo over being polite and priest or no priest, this had gone far enough. I want to respect all religions but I am on a backpacker's budget my friends, so God is gonna have to take a rain check. I said "No, my friend has given a donation for both our families" and we booked it out of there as fast as possible, praying to everything holy they would not recognize us later.