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Varanasi: Shit-Hole of the Gods

Published 4 February 2007 Environment , India , Religion, Spiritualism & Other Make-Believe , Science & Technology , Travel & Adventure 85 Comments
Tags: Benares, death, disease, dying, ecology, Environment, environmentalism, excrement, exhibitionist, feces, filth, funeral pyre, garbage, ghat, Hinduism, human waste, hypocrisy, litter, moksha, pilgrim, pollution, public hygiene, pyres, rebirth, religion, religious festival, rubbish, sadhu, shit, shit-hole, shithole, solid waste, spiritual, spiritual fraud, spiritual poseur, spiritualism, spirituality, superstition, trash, Uttar Pradesh, Varanasi, Vedas

Ghats on the Gnaga, Varanasi

I’m posting this from the tarmac of the airport in Delhi (I no more enjoy calling it “Indira Gandhi International Airport” than I would willingly refer to National Airport in Washington, D.C. “Ronald Reagan Airport”), on my way to the 7th Annual International AIDS Conference. India is playing host to this year’s gathering of leading scientists, doctors, and NGOs working on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the venue for the conference is Varanasi.

I am looking forward to the conference, at which I will be representing an innovative biotechnology project that provides unique sample preservation tools to enable the diagnosing HIV infection through analysis of DNA. Still, I am dreading being back in Varanasi. Rather than recount my reasons, let me attach the text of an email I sent following my previous visit in 2002.
Continue reading ‘Varanasi: Shit-Hole of the Gods’

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