Last Days in Kolkata

What a wonderful city! The past 2 days I was able to visit 5 different temples. Most worship the Kali god, sacrifice goats (25-40 goats/day), feed the goats to the poor, and ranged from majestic/ornate to simple shrines. All had people giving offerings of flowers and/or money with huge lines to see the Kali idol. We only had one incident where we actually got to see the statue of one of the temples. This temple was packed with people and they were fighting to offer their basket of flowers to Kali. It was loud, people were screaming and pushing us left and right. We had no intention of seeing the idol because it was a mob and the lines were 3hrs long. But then came a priest. The priest said he could get us in front of the line and he would give us a private tour. He cleared the path and shoed people away. There were tons of people in front of Kali, so he pried between 2 people’s waists and pushed each of our heads between the worshipers. “Did you see the image!?” he screamed. “Yes” nod, nod. Stamp! After each “yes”, he stamped our foreheads with an orange bindi and rushed us out of the mosh pit. It was cool! Being in that scene. Getting to experience the worshiping day of a Hindu living in Kolkata.

This next part is sketchy. He showed us the alter where goats are sacrificed and then quickly walked us to a large swimming-sized pool of water with stairs disappearing into it. “This is our holy bath.” Really?! Two guys were brushing their teeth and swimming in it. Next, he pointed to a statue of Shiva that was about 100 feet away and handed us each a handful of fresh hibiscus flowers from a string. “We will offer to Shiva,” he commanded. But one at a time. We could see the first person in our group walking over to Shiva, bowing, tossing the flowers on her and then writing in a book. What’s going on over there? They wouldn’t let her come back to us and they were about to send another person in our group to go worship. Then, we see our friend who’s over by Shiva hop over the railing and quickly walk over to us. “They asked me to write down 4000 rupees, but I only wrote 500. Let’s get out of here.” What a scam! We quickly walked out and the priests weren’t very happy with us. My friend said in the book other people wrote 30,000 rupees, 40,000 rupees. That’s an expensive visit.

The other temples were NOT like that and were actually very peaceful. Families walked around the campuses, made offerings and there were no priests leading tours for tourists. I don’t have many pictures because cameras weren’t allowed in the temples. All of them were really interesting. Tomorrow, we’re flying away to Hyderabad. We’ll be staying in a very Western, posh area. Very different from this hotel. We here there is a 5-story air-conditioned mall across the street. What the?! That’s not the India I know.