Tripping with God

Todays young,urban pilgrim,like Joseph,travels for many reasons and in different ways. Their motivations often start off as religious but extend to the secular and arent limited to ideas of earning merit in the eyes of a divine power. They go to sacred sites seeking both adventure and knowledge. They adapt rituals and prescriptions learnt from families and parents to suit their modern lifestyles,personalising faith,even while practising it in a public space,surrounded by millions. Moving off the well-trodden track,they patronise places of worship,which they find meaningful. They travel with friends,sometimes with family,and often alone. While elder people who have fulfilled lifes duties have traditionally performed pilgrimages,today a few young people have made it a part of their travel and holiday plans.

Thirty-eight-year-old Haneef Ahamed,a Chennai-based businessman,who has performed the Hajj twice and gone on the Umrah (a pilgrimage to Mecca) five times in the last five years,says he has seen hundreds of young people at Mecca. With his mother having fallen into a semi-coma when she went on the Hajj,he strongly believes that people should undertake the journey when young and healthy. While growing up in Chennai,he wasnt too fluent with the Quran,but he finds that each journey to Mecca makes him stronger. Theres a sense of personal satisfaction. I feel I can tell whats right from whats wrong.

Shantum Seth,Buddhist scholar and teacher,who has been conducting Buddhist mediation tours for over 20 years,says,Mostly 50-year-old grey-haired people come on my tours. But I find the journeys with younger people,be it 18-year-old students,the most fulfilling. Seth,who practises Buddhism in his daily life, says he has seen an increase in the number of young pilgrims. You see the greatest shift with young people. In one group,a guy got off drugs. In another,I got a letter from a boys mother saying that their relationship had improved after the pilgrimage, he says.

The earliest pilgrimages in India go back over 2,600 years to the time of the Buddha. Sacred sites witness the largest gathering of humanity,be it the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad or the Hajj in Mecca. Rowena Robinson,author of Sociology of Religion in India (2004),and other religion books,says,Pilgrimage has always been significant in Indian culture. It extends to the popular religious practice of all faiths,and all religious communities have particular sacred sites on Indian soil or outside to which a pilgrimage may be made.

In India,much of domestic travel depends on spiritual tours.

A 2010-11 Development of Tourism Infrastructure Report details

that the Union Ministry of Tourism has launched a scheme for the development of nationally and internationally important destinations and circuits through its Mega Projects scheme. Of these 38 mega-projects,identified in 26 states,nearly 20 cover spiritual routes. Spiritual trips often offer the best of antiquity with stunning scenery.

Seth says that through pilgrimage we develop certain qualities like forbearance,patience and humility. When we travel to unfamiliar places,we are jolted out of our everyday lives. When you go on a pilgrimage,you become more attentive. A pilgrim goes with greater awareness than a tourist, he says. Aravind Krishnan,assistant professor at St Berchmans College,Changanassery,Kerala,who has been going to the Ayyappa temple in Sabarimala for 20 years,agrees that pilgrimages make one more aware of ones surroundings and help to centre oneself.

Hailing from an orthodox Brahmin family,Krishnans father has been going to Sabarimala for 52 years. Familiar with the Vedas,this 27-year-old finds that the trip to the bachelor-gods shrine,shows him Tat tvam asi (Thou art that),which means dont search for meaning outside,go within. If you have read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho,you get similar insights, he explains. If the annual trip is a Coelho-esque journey,for him,its also scientific. This chemistry teacher says its about reaching stability in chemistry,where a system achieves equilibrium with its environment,akin to what he experiences at Sabarimala.

Krishnan,who spontaneously quotes from the Upanishads to explain himself,strictly follows the 41-day vrita required of Sabarimala pilgrims,which prohibits smoking,drinking,cursing,non-vegetarian food,haircuts and shaves and demands celibacy. These restrictions,he believes,prepare and cleanse him for the journey.

If Krishnan goes annually to Sabarimala with family,26-year-old Jidesh JV working with the State Bank of Travancore,has been there five times with friends. This big sports fan who believes in God and likes going to temples,successfully merges faith with fun on his trip to Sabarimala. He tries to follow the vrita as far as possible,believing that if he cant, then he would rather not go. But for him,the lure of the trip arises from both the adventure of reaching there and the prospect of a darshan of this child of Shiva and Vishnu. He says,I like going to Sabarimala because we drive through the night. Leaving their homes (in Thiruvananthapuram) at 9 pm,he and his male friends cover the 200km distance in around five-and-a-half hours. The drive,to the accompaniment of devotional Ayyappa songs on the stereo,takes them through dense rubber plantations and wooded forests of the Western Ghats. Around 1 am,they reach river Pamba. From there on,it changes from a leisure trip to a sacred trip,as cries of Swami Ayyappa echo through the air. The best part of the trip is the climb to the final shrine,which takes a minimum of an hour,he says. That climb is being made in anticipation of seeing god. The environment makes it a religious experience,people automatically form groups,there is a sense of something bigger than oneself.

For Krishnan,the secular aspect of Sabarimala is another big draw,he says,The first thing I like about Sabarimala is that anyone belonging to any sect,community,caste or religion can come here and all are treated like god,we call each other Swami.

Ketan Pasalkar,a 27-year-old who runs his own computer networking company in Pune,and who completed a part of the 22-day Palkhi walk to Pandharpur in Maharashtra,similarly says,There were a variety of people walking along with us,from different age groups,castes,places,colours,nationalities,educational backgrounds,etc… We sang holy songs along with them,which added to the excitement and helped us walk a stretch of about 30 km in a day with ease.

Robinson elaborates that anthropologists have typically understood pilgrimage as a liminal time,when differences and social hierarchies collapse as the sacred merges opposites. But the social differences of gender and caste do not entirely break down as seen in Sabarimala where women of child-bearing age arent allowed.

Some modern pilgrims have secularised the pilgrimage,taking it out of its religious context and choosing their destinations for personal rather than ordained reasons. Anita Joseph spent a night beside the tal at Golden Temple,watching the last and first ceremony of the day. She says,A church can be so much about process. There is Mass,prayers etc. At the Golden Temple,I could sit there with no rules and just pray in my own way. There was so much peace. In September 2010,she extended the routine family trip to Velankanni church to include the thousand-pillared Madurai Meenakshi temple and the Nagore dargah of Nagapattinam,which provided shelter to thousands during the 2004 tsunami. During her solitary travels,Joseph has discovered,people are ready to embrace you if you show an openness.

Twenty-nine-year-old Kanchan Rana,a product designer from Chandigarh,has similarly undertaken many pilgrimages on her own. At 22,she went with a group of strangers to the ice-shrine of Amarnath,140 km from Srinagar. It was a tough trek,but I wouldn’t call it exhausting. We were slow,steady and soaked in the energy and beauty of the surroundings. The journey up there was as magical as the destination, she says. Two years later,she went to Tungnath,the highest temple in the world,and Atri Munis cave,both located in Chamoli district in Uttarakhand. As a member of an eco-friendly adventure group,Peace Trips,she found herself trekking in the mountains,camping in thick forests and even picking the garbage that had collected on grassy meadows. For Rana,the trip was about rejuvenating herself and reviving the countryside,while at it. For these pilgrims,tourism with a conscience aims to restore and preserve.

For scholars and enthusiasts like Pradeep Chakravarthy and Vijay who have visited hundreds of temples to study their inscriptions and sculptures respectively,temples are more than places of worship,instead they are repositories of information,which must be preserved. Chakravarthy,co-author of Thanjavur: A Cultural History (2010) and an Infosys professional,and Vijay,a Singapore-based shipbroker and accountant,bring the greater mindfulness of a pilgrim to all their temple visits. Vijays labour of love is Poetryinstone,a blog he started in 2008 to showcase temple sculptures made 1,300 years ago,recognise the artists and restore their artwork. The thousand-year-old Peruvudaiyar Koyil in Thanjavur,holds special significance for Vijay who goes there often as every stone has a story to tell and to move your hand over them is a soul-stirring experience, he says. Vijay prefers not to be called either religious or spiritual,but he hopes to reach out to tech-savvy youngsters on the Net and show them the beauty and skill that went into temple art. Chakravarthy adds,Everyone has their own reasons to visit a temple. For me,personally,religion is a force to make us better humans.

Young pilgrims have gleaned rituals and practices from elders but have moulded them to suit their own reasons. Theirs isnt religion-lite,its religion-bespoke instead. Tenzin Lobsang,a Tibetan Buddhist from Dharamshala,has been living in Delhi since he finished college,for the last seven years. We meet in New Camp where the lanes run narrow and the Tibetan prayer flags fly high,fluttering and fading in the sun. We pass the restaurants that sell Tibetan bread,momos and beef fry. Lobsang started on the Buddha path when he was just three. Seated in a basement office,he says that he and his family would go on pilgrimages once his parents had finished selling sweaters for the winter in Dharamshala. He has watched his parents offer prayers and holy water to the altar every morning. At his home in Delhi,he does the same. But he explains,Im not into the core of religion like my parents. We dont have half of their beliefs. They feel Buddha has done something (at the holy sites). I cant just believe that. For me,Buddhas teachings are practical,they are philosophy. They are about non-violence and peace. Thats why I like going. He continues,Our generation of Tibetans,we dont blindly follow the Dalai Lama. Weve seen what hes done and thats why we feel he is a holy man. His favourite destination on the Delhi-Nalanda-Bodh Gaya-Sarnath-Kushinagar-Lumbini route is Kushinagar,he says,looking intently at a picture from there of the reclining and serene Buddha. On his phone,he flips through photos of his journeys,which span the routine to the sacred from tea in kulhars simmering at roadside dhabas to the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya sheltering travellers with outstretched arms.

(With inputs from Nupur Chaudhuri in Pune,Parul in Chandigarh)