Pushkar

So I'm finally trying to catch up on my blogging with highlights from the last three weeks, but I'm feeling kind of lazy right now and sort of just want to upload pictures. The weekend of July 10th, the program had arranged for an overnight field trip to Pushkar, a nearby town notable for its significant Brahmin population. I think the teachers may have said somewhere close to 70% of the population are of the holy caste. On top of that, there's a significant Israeli Jewish population, which plays out interestingly on the ground. In short: there's a whole lotta God everywhere. Continuing with the theme of Indian religious landscape, here are a few of the statues that were put up around our hotel:

Pushkar is also famous for its ghats, which are essentially entrances into Lake Pushkar that carry religious significance. On the ghats, one can get a brahmin to carry out a puja in one's name. Or, in the case of Pushkar, one can try their hardest to avoid getting scammed by the literally hundreds of brahmins who hang around the ghats to try to trap tourists by starting a puja and demanding payment after the fact (happened to a friend of mine)

I'm also feeling pretty lazy about finishing this post, so here are some miscellaneous pictures of Pushkar:

One of 52 or so ghats leading to Pushkar Lake

... so maybe they're not all that exciting, but I really liked them

My attempt at a cool picture

So after arriving in Pushkar and briefly taking in our surroundings, our first scheduled event was up: watching a camel decoration. I think I can summarize my thoughts in two main points:

1) Camels are actually surprisingly beautiful animals.

Forget puppies, man

2) Camels, when decorated, actually are more stylish than I am

My desire to be a Mamluk has been increasing since this moment

After the camel decoration, we had some free time before we got to see Kalbelia dancers perform. Kalbelia dance comes from the eponymous tribe, famous in Rajasthan as the main snake charming community. One of the snake charmer elders came to our class to talk and perform a bit of snake charming for us on a later date, but that's for another post. The dance we saw in Pushkar was performed by 4 women, all of whom were incredible dancers. Here are a few shots I got (that do no justice to their talent):

Now, something that I had not realized was that the Kalbelia community is freaking sweet in more ways than one - aside from the obvious awesomeness entailed in snake charming, the community also specializes in this:

They charm snakes. Oh yeah, and on their free time they just, you know, breathe fire. Amma, Acha - I think I've found my backup plan for life if I fail out of college/can't get a job. I even got the contact information of the fire-breather. I think this is called maturity: most kids want to run away and join the circus, but few ever take active steps of preparation.