Jaigarh Fort (there seem to be a whole string of these forts along the
ridge) is said by some (the guide) to be the world's oldest fort and over a
thousand years old, and by others (the Lonely Planet guide) to date back to
1726. We think the discrepancy is that there has been a fort in this spot
since 960 but most people say this particular fort was only built in 1726 by
Jai Singh (remember him?), and Nahagarh is also 18th Century. What we were
seeing did not look a millennium old.
The fort has two halls of a rather lackluster museum. They had some
small cannons and their history and some pictures of troops at the fort.
They had a few swords and daggers, but not really a whole lot shown off very
well.
But the real attraction of the fort is Jaya Vana, the world's largest
cannon on wheels. The barrel is twenty feet (six meters) long and weighs
fifty tons. The mouth is eleven inches in diameter and the cannon fired
twenty-two miles (thirty-five kilometers) when it was tested, the one and
only time the cannon was fired. (Does it really count if it was never
really used? Evelyn is not sure it counts, but Guinness thinks it does.)
To make the cannon maneuverable it was put on nine-foot-high (three-meter-
high) wheels. So lightly balanced is the cannon on its two wheels that only
four elephants are needed to re-aim the cannon.
Mark looked at the cannon; Mark looked at Evelyn. Mark looked at the
cannon; Mark looked at Evelyn. Mark said, The hills of Jaipur have given
birth to many myths and legends.
Mark doesn't think there is one person in ten thousand who would have
realized he was posing a trivia question and Evelyn, who had seen relatively
few films when he first met her, recognized that he was making a film
reference and knew almost perfectly the response. She said, Second only to
Keros. It was a nearly perfect response. It should have been Greece and
the islands of the Aegean, not Keros.
If you have no idea what we are talking about, it is an exercise in
film trivia. Ask us sometime.
On the way back from the forts we stopped for some photo ops. The
first was Jalmahal, the Water Palace. We also stopped at the Hawa Mahal,
or Palace of the Winds. This is the cover picture on the new Lonely Planet
guide and is a five-story pink sandstone building from which royal ladies
could see life outside unobserved behind marble screens. The facade is
beautiful, but if you look closely, you can see that the interior is a total
ruin. It reminded Evelyn of those false-front Western towns that are used
in movies. The fact that it was on a traffic-congested street full of all
sorts of run-down vehicles did not add to its photogenic qualities. (The
cover photo shows only the top two and a half stories.)
After that it was back to the city with one more stop at the Birla
Temple (actually the Lakshmi Narayan Temple, built by the Birlas, a
fabulously wealthy industrial family), a beautiful white marble Hindu
temple. As Mark described it, Around the outside are carvings of Hindu
deities, including Jesus, St. Paul, Socrates, Athena, and Moses. Again
remember Hinduism's odd approach to other religions. Rather than say other
religions are wrong and people must convert to Hinduism, it says that there
are many sects of Hinduism and any religion is such a sect. You don't
convert to Hinduism, if we understand it right. You have already been a
Hindu all of your life, but there is more to learn about Hinduism. That
certainly makes forced conversions unnecessary. Now if only it would get
rid of proselytizing. Of course if another religion takes the same
philosophy you run into the curious condition that each is a sect of the
other.
Mark continued in his log, If you have noticed in this log, I have
made a number of comments about religion. That is because as someone who
had little interest in religion as a young man, I have found as I grow older
I have very strong opinions about religion and what has gone wrong with
religion in the past. Each of these logs has me look at more of the world's
religions and crystalizes the principles of my beliefs. And they are:
0: It is impossible to know if there is a God or not.
1: There is no ritual sin. All sin is in your relations with other
sentient beings, exclusive of God, and we do not know if there can be
sin in your relations with yourself.
2: No action that is immoral without the existence of God is moral if
God exists.
3: Don't pretend religious knowledge exists and you have it. It
doesn't and you don't.
In further explanation, Mark says, Principle 0 says that the universe
just has not given us tools for a real knowledge of something like a god.
Principle 1 says that if there is a God He doesn't want your flattery. If
there is a God, He is good and just wants you to be good. Principle 2 says
that a good God cannot sanction hurting sentient beings to please Him. No
being worth worshiping could have wanted the Spanish Inquisition. Principle
4 says that you don't have the tools to have religious knowledge, so examine
other's beliefs with humility. Judge other's actions but not their beliefs.
Which means one cannot tell you these principles are right and yours are
wrong. But one can judge what you do to others. You can say you think
Christ or Osiris rose from the dead, but you cannot tell someone they should
agree with you. One cannot tell you that there is no Kali or that she
doesn't want you to kill. Believe that all you want. But if you decide to
start killing as a result, it is a virtue to restrain you and, if need be,
to kill you before you kill others. I believe all this as strongly as a
Muslim believes in Allah or a Hindu believes in Rama and Krishna. In
addition, I believe that this is all consistent with my being a Jew. Not
all Jews will agree and that is fine. I am proud to be a Jew, but these
beliefs are more ingrained than my Jewishness since they are not what I have
been told, but what I myself believe. Okay, off my soapbox.
After this we had hoped to make our train reservations, but we forgot
it was Sunday and the reservation office was closed. We did find out that
the train we wanted left at 12:50 PM and arrived at 10:05 PM, which was
useful information, and we bought some crackers and water (for which they
tried to overcharge us Rs10). Then back to the hotel for a well-earned
rest.
We spent the evening in the room writing. As we fought off mosquitos
in our room, Mark suggested that perhaps we want to have nicer hotels in the
future than the one we currently have. There is something to be said for
Tour hard, sleep easy. Waking in the middle of the night knowing you have
been bitten several times by little blood-suckers, having rooms not made up,
having equipment in the room not working, having to fight the toilet, having
to eat off of a sticky placemat and drink from a glass that has food from
someone else's meal on it, having a key that does not work in the door,
having to step over construction, having a shower that is nearly unusable,
having no hot water, getting hit on by hawkers in lobbies--these are all
things that qualify as sleep hard. Unfortunately, when we found what
sounded like a nice hotel for US$35 in the Lonely Planet guide, they had
just upped their price to US$80 a night.
Since Mark had used up something like two and a half rolls of film in
one day, it occurred to Evelyn to ask if he might not be going through his
film too fast. Well, Thing, his palmtop computer, has been telling him
right along what percentage of the trip was over. With a few instructions
Thing started to tell him also how much film he would have used up if he
used all his film at a uniform rate and also how many pages of log he would
expect to have used. Thing thinks he is actually using film a little slower
than necessary, but log pages he is a little more likely to run out of. If
he does run out of log, Thing will fill in the slack. Thing is useful in
many ways.
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Well, Mark woke up at 6:30 AM and started writing to
try to catch up after a full day yesterday. At about 7 AM there was a loud
noise, sort of like you'd get from a door slamming, and at the same time the
power went out. Mark doesn't know what happened but the power was out for
about fifteen minutes.
We went to breakfast. Mark had fried eggs and orange juice; Evelyn
ordered iddlies. Mark's came first and he'd finished it by the time they
served Evelyn. A few minutes later they brought him eggs three and four.
He tried to explain he'd already been served. He could not make himself
understood. Eventually the waiter just said, You don't want? Yes, I
don't want. He seemed put out that Mark would order what he didn't want,
but he took the two eggs away. He charged us for two eggs and we don't know
if he ever figured why Mark suddenly did not want eggs, but having eaten
breakfast already wrecks his appetite.
We had a bunch of errands to run. So we negotiated an auto-rickshaw
for Rs30 to take us to the railway station, the bank, the Central Museum,
and the Johari Bazaar. First we went to the railway station to book the
train to Jodhpur. Mark writes, We were able to get in the short line which
was reserved for 'soldiers, foreign tourists, the elderly, and freedom
fighters.' Maybe someone somebody can tell me how Indian railways
recognizes 'freedom fighters.' Maybe anybody who pushes into line to get
done sooner is a sort of freedom fighter. Now of those categories the least
pushy is the elderly, or so I'd figure. However, it looked like someone
from that category who shoved ahead of us in line.
Tickets to Jodhpur were Rs307 each, including all fees. (That's about
US$10 for a nine-hour train ride.) We got done so fast that it was still
too early for the bank. So we found a telephone to reserve a hotel in
Jodhpur, since we were scheduled to arrive there at 10 PM. Our first choice
(the Ajit Bhawan Palace Hotel) didn't seem to exist any more or has changed
its number; at any rate, we got the wrong party. Our second choice was a
nice luxury hotel. This was the one we referred to before that had doubled
its rates (from Rs1100 to Rs2300). And we could not find a phone number for
our third choice. Back to the drawing board.
Public phones here are different than back home. Here rather than
phone booths there are whole STD/ISD offices (Straight Telephone
Dialing/International Straight Dialing). It is an office in which somebody
maintains phone books and helps the user make a call. (Since the Lonely
Planet guide doesn't always list the city code for a city, this is useful.)
You call your number, an LCD display keeps track of the charges, and when
you hang up a piece of paper with the amount on it is printed. The clerk
shows you this and you pay him. Labor is cheap and technology expensive. A
local came to the office at the same time we were there. He got his
connection, identified himself, said one sentence, and hung up. No times
for pleasantries at these prices, Mark guesses. (There are also some public
phones for local calls that take a Rs1 coin, but these usually don't work.)
Our next stop was the State Bank of India to change another US$300, as
we had gone through two-thirds of the US$500 we changed earlier. On the way
we saw some workers sitting down to cool off and they'd seen us and were
smiling at us. Mark smiled back and waved; four people waved to someone
they'd seen for only about eight seconds.
Mark writes, Hey, don't get me wrong when I complain about some of the
people I deal with on the trip. The vast majority are very nice people. |
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