We left the warmth of Goa a few days ago and headed for Varanasi, via Delhi. This coincided with an unexpected and severe cold snap. Delhi was around 3 degrees C when we arrived, which is apparently around 9 degrees below the normal January temperature. It was bloody freezing.
Our hotel, in very much one of the less charming areas of the city, was also freezing. They did supply a fan heater, which the porter enabled by pushing the bare wires into a socket with a steel pen (!) and this, if on continuously, would keep the room temperature at about 14 degrees. We huddled together, wearing t-shirts and socks. We put our jumpers on top of the heavily embroidered quilt and were still cold. Outside, people gathered around bonfires on the pavements. Some had lightweight coats but most had only a thin cotton sheet for protection; many were wearing flip flops.
The following morning the papers revealed that of the17000 or so people that live on the streets in Delhi - yes, the nation's capital has the population of a small English town living on its streets - nearly 30 had died that night from the cold.
More importantly though, and taking many more column inches, the auction for the main players for the Indian Premier League Cricket Tournament, was to take place on Saturday with some players expected expected to reach over US$ 2 million. I couldn't help thinking that a small proportion of that might have been useful to the 30 dead, or the remaining 16970 still on the streets.
Onto Varanasi. This is apparently one of the holiest of places in the country. With ghats and temples for around four miles of the shoreline of the revered Ganges river. A great deal of Hindu religious ceremony takes place daily around the river so we thought we'd take a look. We took a boat ride for a couple of hours after paying a ransom to a licenced bandit disguised as a boatman and watched from the river, which is the best place to get a view of the scale of it. It was foggy and freezing, but we made the best of it. We also witnessed the rather unceremonious despatching of the dead, which probably included some of the 40 odd that died of the cold in Varanasi on Friday night, in traditional funeral pyres by the side of the river. Surprisingly this did not seem to be at all reverential, just a relentless queue of bodies carted in on bamboo trays, dunked in the river, unwrapped and then burned. I wondered if some of those that had died of cold the previous night could have done with some of the mountains of lumber that were piled up on the riverbank in readiness for the next dearly departed.
It seems that one family has the perpetual licence for these cremations. Apparently it is a lucrative business.
Otherwise Varanasi is a rather grimy place and there seems to be much poverty here. There is also a MacDonalds and a Domino's Pizza.
Thanks goodness. News just through that the first round of IPL auctions is complete. Gautam Gambhir was sold to The Kolkata Knight Riders for this tournament (which lasts just a few weeks) for US$2.4m and our own Kevin Pietersen went for US$650,000 to the Deccan Chargers.
I am sure that will be a great comfort to those people gathered around street bonfires tonight as the mercury falls to an expected 2 degrees.
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