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Thursday, 24 July 2008 12:45
Thoughts thought idly in the city of Aurangabad

Aurangabad is a sleepy, dusty little town, population
2.2 million (only in Asia is it  possible top be 2.2
million and yet tiny), at the very top of the Deccan.
The touts and rickshaw wallahs practice a gentle form
of soft-sell, and the local Taj is both newish and
inexpensive ($60!) AND has a superb swimming pool AND
pretty architecture.  For most tourists, the main
reason to come here are the cave complexes at Ajanta
and Ellora, both very old, and, IMHO, a waste of time
(OK, you wont hear this opinion elsewhere).  But
look, except the Ajanta murals (see
http://www.india-journeys.com/gifs/ajanta.jpg and
http://www.indofresco.com/17.%20ajanta%20lady%202.html),
which, yes, truly remarkable both for their beauty and
their technical accomplishment (what is called retinal
fidelity:  perspective, movement, chiaro-scuro,
lifelike expressions), one is not, alas,  really
allowed to see  the rooms are kept too dark and the
visitors arent allowed to come close enough to the
murals to see anything  everything else is ungainly,
and, well, ugly.  Elloras famous Kailasa temple

-- stupendously beautiful, gushes the guidebook --
the worlds largest monolith (that is, a structure
carved out from a single rock because its builders
didnt know how to put one stone on top of another)
seems to me mainly remarkable for two reasons:  1)
somebody pulverized and removed a great deal of rock
here;  and 2) did it a very long time ago (both good
reasons to be in the Guiness Book of Records, I guess,
but hardly reasons to schlep all the way out here to
look at all these ugly and (mostly) damn-boring
statues.  (To be entirely fair to these stiff and
crude shapes, they were at one point covered with
plaster, and the plaster seems to have carried a lot
more detail, of a rather, if one is to judge by a few
fragments, intricate sort.  And maybe that was
beautiful.  But then the same fragments suggest that
they were once covered with garish paint, so the whole
thing must have looked a lot like a south Indian
gopuram (see

something, to my eyes, more out of Disneyland than
Parnassus.

OK, maybe you think its beautiful.  But while Kailasa
gets, in my book, the cake for **UGLY**, at least it I
interesting:  at least the Hindu gods are doing stuff
having sex, slaughtering buffalos, ripping up and
elevating mountains, stretching their legs to reach
the heaven, decapitating offensively proud kings, that
kind of stuff.  At least I can understand that.  But
the Buddhist caves are just **PLAIN DULL**  row upon
row upon row of guys with funny curly hair sitting
indolently on hard rocks in the hot sun and staring
ahead of them with bored expressions.  And you know?
This is a major problem for all the worlds religious
art  and all the worlds major religions:  when it
comes to representing nirvana, or heaven, or whatever
else it is the religion strives for, the artists have
nothing interesting to say  I mean, nirvana is about
the obliteration of the self:  how do you represent
that, unless it is by rows and rows of bored guys
sitting indolently and actively not-being?  Christian
representations of Heaven arent any better  I could
never understand, and I am sure I cannot be alone in
this mental deficiency, the attraction of standing
around in white robes and singing hosannas for
uninterrupted eons.  Id be bored stiff by 2 PM.
Wouldnt you?  It seems to me, therefore, that the
arts failure points out the intellectual bankruptcy
of worlds major religions:  they criticize the hear
and now as corrupt and sinful, but when it comes to
offering an alternative they dont have anything
concrete to offer. 

In the final analysis, I suppose, I prefer the Hindu
caves:  ;-)

Carrying on in this disrespectful vain, if you bear
with me, I would like to say that the most intriguing
object to me was a cave in Ajanta representing the
last temptation of Lord Buddha (yes, it happened to
Him, too).  He was tempted by a) ladies (youd figure
on that one, yawn), b) filial piety (the temptation to
be a good son to your parents, at the expense, if
necessary, of personal aspirations and happiness, a
temptation which represents, in my honest opinion, a
brilliant -- and rare -- insight into one of the major
causes of human misery) and c) political power.
Interestingly, it is the one temptation which also
tempted Jesus Christ (and I shall make you the prince
of the world).  Now, THIS is significant, isnt it?
I have never been tempted by political power.  Have
you?  I mean, what is tempting about having authority
over your inferiors?  To ask and receive of men and
women who are your equals, willingly, generously  now
that is a great satisfaction, a measure of ones high
opinion with people he loves and admires.  But the
power to command people of whom one thinks little, to
compel them by means of power and threat of violence
or lure of lucrative posts and money  what can
possibly be satisfying about that?  That these great
men  BEINGS -- were tempted by it says volumes about
them, doesnt it?  Was religious authority a
substitute for political power?  Was the urge to teach
and convert a way to channel the desire to rule and
control other, lesser minds?  A sort of sublimation,
if you will?

And what is the big deal about teaching?  Why spend 40
years of your life telling others what to think and
feel?  Like Lord Buddha, I too spent some years
sitting (figuratively speakig) on hard rocks in the
beating hot sun, meditating on the misery of life.
Like Lord Buddha, I too had my little enlightenment
(in my case it had to do with the properties of
compound interest and its effects on lifestyle rather
than the obliteration of the self).  But I did not
then rush out to tell everyone that THIS IS THE WAY,
did I?  Why should I?  Why should anyone?  ;-)

The one really good reason to come to Aurangabad, in
my opinion, other than the excellent, succulent,
delicious kebabs in Restaurant Tandoor, is
Khuldabad, a small, dusty, dirty town some 30 km away,
overrun with goats and naked children and plastered
with cow dung cakes, and covered with 2 inches of the
Deccan dust, where peoples houses stand in the broken
bits of its former glory -- its fort, palace, shrine,
royal gardens, and where, in the grounds of the shrine
of a minor sufi saint lies, in a humble tomb of raw
earth (see
http://pguillemain.free.fr/Inde96/Aurangabad_Rauza_p.jpg),
the most humble and yet the most powerful and the most
vicious of Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb, still loved and
admired here, as fresh flowers attest, for his
humility.  This conqueror of the Deccan, a fiercely
orthodox and fundamentalist Sunni, the destroyer of
Hindu temples and desecrator of Shia shrines, this
killjoy who banned miniature painting and the wearing
of silk as immoral self-indulgence displeasing to God,
in his spare time copied the Koran and sewed prayer
caps for the faithful poor.  Which is to show that the
Hollywood image of the quintessential bad guy as
someone selfish, in love with himself, self-indulgent,
who knows no laws other than his pleasure, and does
evil things just to satisfy his whims -- is
essentially false.  Guys who love their pleasure do
not make war  for campaigns are tiresome, it is hard
to bring ladies along, and it is hard to eat well
while busily desecrating temples.  It is the moral
fellows, the self-denying ascetics, the ones who live
for greater things than the pleasures and rewards of
the hateful flesh, who murder and desecrate.  Great
crimes are not committed from selfishness -- but from
principle.  Hitler, you see, was a vegetarian and
remained sexually pure throughout the war. He lived,
you see, for the cause alone. Great causes, you see,
are born from the hate of the world and the love of
something different.  Something which, usually, like
the Buddhist nirvana or the Christian heaven are
nebulous things nobody quite understands.

But why come and pay respects to Aurangzeb then, you
might ask.  A very simple reason:  it is from the
loins of this Aurangzeb that sprang that twig on a
tree of Abraham, that flower of manhood, that temple
of generosity, the price of princes, the King of
Punjab, my friend, Chopi.  And I am glad to know that
in Chopi there is no striving for some other nebulous
world but, instead, a clean, healthy, zestful pleasure
in the here and now, the food, the drink, the family,
the company.  He has seen through the emptiness of
Aurangzebs striving for a different, better, other
world:  wisely, more wisely perhaps than he even
suspects, he strives after this one.  And I with him.