On Monday, August 10th, my manager asked me if I would like to visit the skills center in Govardhan, UP, a five hour drive from Jaipur. Excited to discover a new place, I readily agreed. She responded that I would be leaving the next day, and would stay from Tuesday to Thursday. So Monday evening I quickly packed, trading three days in an office 9 to 5 to go on an adventure with my colleague Tushar.
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Campus tour
We drove on winding roads through fields and rural villages, accompanied by cows and monkeys. Whereas Jaipur’s busy streets were loud with honking, here everything was calm. When we arrived, Ram, the manager of SEDI center, gave us a tour of his campus. We saw the offices, classrooms and badminton courts all surrounded by nature. We entered each classroom and I introduced myself to all the students. I’ve been expected to speak in front of a crowd so many times since I’ve been here.
Stepping into each classroom was being teleported to a bank, then a restaurant, then a beauty parlor and finally, an art gallery. Students in the hospitality class were mixing drinks at a full bar with shelves of labeled glasses and ingredients. In the electrician classroom, they were inspecting iphone components through microscopes and building circuits. The beautician trainees were practicing doing each others’ bridal hair and makeup in a classroom with rows of salon chairs, a massage room and a photo booth. My favorite was the art classroom, where students say quietly in a circle and painted surrounded by all the artwork they had made.
We had lunch at the cafeteria, where the cooks served us homemade dal, and chapati cooked on an open flame.
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Temples
We went to the sacred town of Vrindavan to visit three temples: banke bihari, isckon and prem mandir. Vrindavan is sacred to Hindus, especially Vaishnavas, as the place where Krishna spent his childhood and performed his youthful pastimes with Radha and the gopis. Part of the Braj region, it's home to thousands of temples and draws pilgrims who consider the land itself spiritually charged. Extreme devotees perform a ritual where they lie flat, mark where their fingertips reach, stand, then prostrate again from that spot, repeating this full-body-length by full-body-length for 21km. We saw at least 20 people doing this on our way over.
The journey to banke bihari was one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had. My colleagues told me to leave my shoes and glasses in the car. My shoes, because they could get stolen (after having that exact thing happen at Katu Sham Ji, I readily took them off) and my glasses because they’d get snatched by the monkeys. They told me that monkeys take glasses and phones, and only return them if you give them mango juice. I looked up at them to see if they were joking, but no.
We left the parking lot and walked barefoot toward the village, the road warm under our feet. I did my best to keep up. The path narrowed as we climbed, first roads, then staircases built into the hillside, lined with vendors selling flowers and peda to offer to the deity. Near the top we joined a thick crowd waiting to get into the temple. Everyone was pressing up the hill together, barefoot, in the rain. We stood packed in like that for about an hour before we finally got inside. The crowd shoved, sang and chanted.
After banke bihari, we visited the ISCKON temple. Inside, people were dancing to party music. It seemed like some hybrid between a temple and a night club, and I immediately wanted to leave. My colleague told me this was the temple foreigners enjoyed the most, and that made sense.
Finally, we went to Prem Mandir. Prem Mandir is a marble temple built by Jagadguru Kripalu Ji Maharaj, inaugurated in 2012 after about 12 years of construction. Made entirely of Italian marble, it's dedicated to Radha Krishna on the ground floor and Sita Ram upstairs, with 80 carved panels depicting scenes from Krishna's life.
According to Hindu tradition, when Indra, the god of rain and thunder, sent torrential storms to flood the village of Vrindavan in anger after the villagers stopped worshipping him, Krishna lifted the entire Govardhan Hill with just his pinky finger and held it up like an umbrella for seven days and nights, sheltering the villagers and their cattle underneath. This humbled Indra, who realized Krishna's divine power and came to pay him respect. The story is why Govardhan Hill is considered sacred and why devotees still circumambulate it (parikrama) today.
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Field visit and henna
We visited a demo plot with vegetables I had never heard of. The sustainable agriculture initiatives here were very interesting but this blog post is already long.
The trainees from the beauty program were doing henna for all the women in the office and they invited me to join. I left Govardhan with a beautiful new henna and memories of a magical place.