Day Off

I needed a little break from the daily grind in the big city, and since I didn't have any interviews scheduled, I took the day off and took a long bus ride south to the holy mountaintop temples of Shatrunjaya. It is the most important pilgrimage place in the world for Jains, with over 1,000 temples. Reaching the mountaintop involves over 3,000 stone steps (nearly 2,000 ft) which is quite a sweat in the mid-day heat of summer, but the views and peaceful environment made it all worth it. One of the temples was undergoing extensive renovations; the crew of plasterers and chislers were very excited to see a foreigner amidst the pilgrims and started beckoning me up onto the make-shift bamboo scaffolding. I quickly inspected the lashings using my boyscout skills and determined they could probably sustain my weight, and climbed aboard. Soon I was surrounded by about twenty young men who knew about 15 words in English amongst them which put together with the approximately 10 words in Gujarati I have picked up didn't give us much wiggleroom for verbal communication. We still managed to spend about an hour up on the rafters using each of the words we knew in as many possible ways and improvising with charades and sounds. They thought the funniest part was when I offered to take any of them back to the United States with me if they could squeeze into my backpack. As the sunset, I walked back down all of the steps and through the small town, stopping various times to sit with the locals and drink chai as I told them about how great Obama is compared to Bush (they all seem to love Obama as well after his tough talk to Pakistan).

I think the pilgramage boosted my karma because upon my return (on the 5am bus) I was finally granted the interview with the Center for Environment Education, which I had been working on for the past ten days!