Sab Kuch Milega

"Anything is possible."

varanasi from isaac niemand on Vimeo.

I recommend watching this full-screen by clicking the 4 arrows icon on the bottom right of the screen. It's pretty amazing.

In his book Autobiography of a Sadhu, Rampuri dedicates a whole chapter to his time in Varanasi (also called Benares or Kashi), the "city of liberation."

Massive ghats step down to the river from the city in broad platforms and upon these teems the spiritual and religious life of India. Kashi has, over the millennia, attracted, babas, intellectuals, musicians, magicians, bandits, and poets, all of whom are the kind of "marginals" that form Shiva's barat, his entourage. For as long as people have told stories, Kashi has been not only a spiritual and religious center but a city of culture, famous for its musicians, theater, philosophers, artists, physicians, astrologers, alchemists, and its sadhus.

Imagine seeing this, and these, and him with your own two eyes instead of through someone else's lens; imagine a boatman rowing you on the Ganges, past the Ghats and cremation fires...

The things you will see during your boat ride, may mark your life. Once you have ridden along the Ganges, nothing will be the same anymore. — from this photographic tour of Varanasi

J jokes that he could prepare me for visiting India by feeding me very spicy food and pulling me around over bumpy terrain in a wagon during these hottest of July days. Well, Kerouac did once write, "It's my contention that a man who can sweat fantastically for the flesh is also capable of sweating fantastically for the spirit." Oh, I already know from experience that I would wilt in a physically demanding place such as this, like the man in the video warns, and yet...

Varanasi's crowded temples raise their ornate spires of stone like worshiping joined hands and arms stretched in supplication toward the sky as their well-worn steps (ghats) descend below the greenish-brown slime of the river, which has absorbed more ashes of Hindu bodies than any other stretch of water on earth. The pungent smell of sandalwood, compounded with that of charred flesh and marigolds, wafts over Varanasi waters, borne on winds vibrant with mantra-prayers, punctuated with the tinkling of Brahman bells and muffled whimpers from scavenger dogs that hover around smouldering pyres, while carrion hawks and kites circle slowly overhead. — India, by Stanley A. Wolpert

And yet...

We stayed within the mazeway of Varanasi's Old City for more than a week, and became fairly well oriented within a short radius around our slouching old guest house... But if we ventured further into the Old City, or tried to re-enter along some other route, we would inevitably become bewilderingly and absurdly lost, so much so that it's now quite easy to imagine people arriving one day and remaining lost for a lifetime, absorbed by the enveloping city. This is precisely what I suspect has happened to a great many of the supposedly holy men who wander there, half-naked and smiling oblivious through a penumbra of hashish smoke. — The Meditator's Companion to the Buddha's Land, by Kory Goldberg, Michelle Dcary

Who knows. Anything is possible.