Cracker Jacks? You've all gone mad, haven't you?

When one embarks on a rail transit system in India, he can expect transvestites or transgender or trans....(apparently I didn't pay too much attention to distinctions in class) walking through the cars slapping their hands and asking for/demanding money. This is perplexing for the common white non-hindi completely out of his element twenty-something traveler, to say the least.

Further research both clarifies and perplexes further in the finding that this is an activity pertaining to a specific sect of Hinduism. The explanation from our camel driver would indicate that much of the population doesn't quite know why they should give them money, but they do it anyway. It's like singing during the seventh inning stretch. Any unknowing onlooker would conclude that the crowd had lost sanity simultaneously, while participants think their acts are expectedly mundane. Singing about cracker jacks in the US, then, is sort of like giving money to transvestites in India. Perfectly normal.

Further unrelated research accidentally concluded that the man-woman prowlers may be eunuchs with a historical importance crucial to religion and thus to society as the two describe the same on this South Asian subcontinent. Their role? Indian eunuchs eunuchs take money from believers and in exchange transfer your sins to their beings. They are in every way societal scapegoats. They take your burden by dressing like, and sometimes altering their anatamy to more closely resemble, the opposite sex.

In other revelations not so recent but necessary of portrayal, the whole issue that God is Love or God is Good or blow me some sunshine blah blah blah has been reversed in India along with every other aspect of rational or optimistic thought. Here, Shiva worship is primarily out of fear, which seems to be justified as when this particular deity came home to find his son guarding the doorway while his mother showered, Shiva lopped off his head as he was high off of a "special lassi" and wanted to get laid. Later, his wife forced him to give his son a new head - thus the elephant dome donned by Ganesh. If I were a believer, I'd cower in the face of the God of Destruction as well.

No, we have not found a magic machine to zip us to a backward existence, this is very very real.
How do you like India? I think it's great....but I'm glad it's so far from where I call home.


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In mundane news we zeroed in on Udaipur in Southern Rajasthan for a few days and have done absolutely nothing save sitting in gavebo-like extrusions extending over the lake from our hotel to admire the palace in its center and eating delicious, delicious food in a flurry of excited curry-flinging action while avoiding the unexpected yet incessant pleas to watch "Octopussy" as it shows every night in virtually every guesthouse because Sean Connery threw his manly charm at on-screen beauties here 25 years ago. We've had just about enough of the Rajasthani tourist mainstream for now, and in typical fashion are moving on tonight to enjoy a few bizzarely coincidental adventures in the coming spins of the planet.