Brahma dropped a lotus flower on the earth and a shitload of people decided to have a camel fair in Pushkar.  This camel fair was nuts.  There are thousands of camels, hundreds of thousands of people in this tiny town for this crazy thing that lasts 10 days.  I had to come after watching Michael Wood’s BBC documentary on the history of India.  It looked mad and awesome.  The madness was easy to find.  The awesomeness took a bit.  I was already a bit frazzled and tired of getting hassled.  The first day people were grabbing my arm in the streets, asking me to take pictures and then trying to charge me and just bugging the piss out of me.  It was hot and crowded on the fairgrounds and I felt overwhelmed.  There were very few places to retreat to.

I had some fun when I ran into Emma and Andrea whom I’d met on the train to Jaisalmer (and laughed about the obnoxious British ladies with.) They invited me to their nice, quiet guesthouse for dinner and a subtitled Bollywood movie called Namaste, London.  I’d been dying to watch a bollywood movie for a while, but it’s hard to find one with English subtitles.  They’re not subtitled in theaters.  This one was on DVD, so the subtitles were available.  The movie was incredible, not because I liked it, but because of what it revealed to me about the value system of the average Indian.  This was a wide release, big budget, huge hit of a movie.  All of the drama of the movie hinged on values that Westerners don’t have.  A British born and raised Indian girl is a headache to her mother and father.  She drinks, goes out to clubs, has boyfriends, and acts the fool.  Drama!  But wait, she’s professionally successful, twenty four and uninterested in marrying the traditional Indian men her parents try to set her up with.  Uh oh.  Drama gone!  What’s the problem with a 24 year old successful woman in London who drinks and parties with her friends and isn’t ready to marry?  Almost nothing if you’re American.  That would barely pass as drama in the fifties in the US.

After her father follows her to a club and sees her about to kiss a rich British guy, he explodes and she drops the bomb.  She’s moving out of her parents’ home!  And all the white people look at each other and say “about time.  Jesus, who lives at home at 24 if they can afford not to?” Dad apologizes and suggests a trip to India to fix their relationship.  We get to see what India looks like to Indians as a tourist destination when Bollywood gets to reimagine it in film.  Holy shit, I want to go there!  But wait, dad has an ulterior motive (keep in mind, he’s the hero.  She’s the villain.)  He’s lined up a series of boys to meet for arranged marriages.  Luckily, they’re all ridiculous one sided charicatures so she doesn’t have to marry them…until the last one.  They have a chance encounter, he falls for her and then she discovers he’s the one she’s meeting.  He loves her.  She doesn’t love him.  Dad marries them anyway, but she rushes them home before he can certify the marriage with the government or they consummate it.  Back in London, she declares it void since it’s not recognized in Britain and goes on to try to marry the British dude.  But the love struck spurned husband stays and vows to win her by demonstrating the purity of his love.  And the white people think “this movie is promoting love at first sight and arranged marriage over dating and marriages between couples?”  Of course, after significant undramatic drama (for those who can’t really side with the hero) the expected happens and the wayward girl spurns her British boyfriend at the altar and runs off with the Indian husband to return to a life as the faithful wife in India.  Yay happy ending!  Unless of course, you have a completely different value system.

Pushkar got a little better when I followed in the footsteps of Michael Wood and climbed to the temple on top of the hill overlooking the city.  They had music and chairs set out and served chai to people as they sat.  I met a cool American named Kyle living in Taiwan, learning Mandarin and traveling in India.  I’ve taken to “collecting” Americans.  If I hear an American accent, I go talk to them and ask what they’re doing in India.  American backpackers are rare so they usually have an interesting story.

Kyle told me about a dance program happening in town so after the temple, we went to see that.  The dancing was really amazing.  There was classical Indian dance, where they struck strange and almost yogic poses to the music and managed very specific facial expressions.  You’ve probably seen it.  Then followed specific local dances.  One cool one was a Gujarati dance where they carried sticks and did almost a square dance, smacking the sticks together at certain points in the music and screaming like banshees.  It was wild.  There was also a singer with a drum instrument I’ve never seen who played wild rhythms and keening sounds interspersed with singing and what sounded like reciting stories in Hindi.  The rhythms and melodies were incredibly catchy and the Indians loved him, calling for more and more every time he stopped.  I wish I could have understood the hindi but regardless, I think he should move to the United States and become a hip hop producer.  He could give Timbaland a run for his money.

The last dance was the most incredible though.  It was done by a tribe of Africans who had apparently moved to Gujarat from South Africa years ago and kept their African culture intact.  They were painted up with awesome face paint and wearing grass skirts.  It all started when a few drummers walked on stage and started playing drums and a tiny guy jumped up in the audience and started walking around like a monkey, peering in people’s faces, jumping back when they reacted, pulling all sorts of faces and absolutely cracking everyone up with physical comedy.  Then the dance started and it was frenetic and viscerally rhythmic, completely at odds with a lot of the conservative and posed Indian dances that had preceded it.  It was also individualistic.  Each member of the group came to the front and did dances that seemed to be inspired by other animals.  A lot of it was like pop -locking, their movements jerky but incredibly precise.

I loved it and it made me miss Africa with its physical energy and emotion.  I would say that is the biggest difference for me between Africa and India: physicality and energy.  Africa feels emotional and raw and India feels conservative and though wildly chaotic, still sometimes feels withdrawn and rigid to me.