lake and palace country

Udaipur is a beautiful city. It is located on several manmade lakes in the middle of the desert, and tall guesthouses boast their rooftop restaurants with views of the water and surrounding hills. I am staying in a guesthouse in the old city's Lal Ghat area, which has a lot of tourists but is convenient to everything. At the street level, shops sell everything from antique jewelry to kitchen ware and a lot of folk art. Fabrics and miniature paintings are the main thing. Yesterday I went out of the city to a village where artists come to work and sell their wares, and for the chance to try to sell something, they'll explain how they do their art. One Gujarati sari weaver spins silk and tie-dyes the thread according to a complex pattern laid out on graph paper so the pattern emerges as he weaves. Another fabric artist creates elaborate bedspread-sized pieces using dye and wood-block stamps which he carves by hand. They come in all patterns and colors - most too busy for my taste but lovely nonetheless.

Rajasthan was a tribal and warlike state, but much of the art and architecture was created at the same time - and about 500 years before western Europe's renaissance. The forts and walls of the city are carved. On the top of one hill outside the city perches the Monsoon Palace - beautiful white marble with a small terraced garden. It is a bit dilapidated, but has great views of the city and it is easy to tell why they built it there - it has a constant breeze.

Life is not easy here - my driver for the afternoon yesterday said he is paid a monthly salary of 2000 Rs by the hotel, which turns out ok in tourist season when tips are good, but he resorts to working the land in the summer when it is too hot for tourists to visit. His is originally from a village about 35 Km from town. Buses that go there pack 150 people in, on and around them for the trip. A 10-seater jeep making the same trip will carry 47 people. Work is scarce and largely craft and tourist dependent - so far I have not seen other sources of income. The power goes out from around midnight till 11AM too, so a new type of business would be hard to start if it was too reliant on electricity. Internet is paid for by bandwidth usage. Rightly, education in this area focuses on training healthcare workers, as public health is a huge issue - but I'm beginning to see that if other parts of the infrastructure are not improved as well, and these highly intelligent people do not have access to other types of education, there will be little improvement. Though the living is relatively easy for the western tourist, it is hard to watch every person struggle to survive and provide a decent, hopefully better, life for their children. And it is certainly hard to attempt to come up with viable solutions. On one hand, we say that India is the world's largest democracy and a huge, growing market - but I have yet to see a lot of people who really benefit from these things.

And finally - on request from my grandmother, an explanation as to why the cows are so funny. Since they're the holiest animal in the Hindu religion, they do whatever they want, and they wander free through the streets. People feed them, but mostly they eat garbage. They lie in the middle of the road, basking in the sun, and people wanting to drive past just wait - they won't prod them out of the way. So maybe it's the people who are hilarious. At any rate, it's quite amusing.