Eye-opener

On Monday, my colleagues and I decided to head over to Sangam for some good Indian curry. I hadn't been to Sangam for a while, and never before for lunch. They have a thali lunch set where you can select two curries, either vegetarian or non-vegetarian, but they didn't have a selection for one of each. Instead, we decided to order a few dishes and share, so we had the mutton curry, the chicken curry, and the mattar paneer curry, (i.e. green peas and soft cottage cheese). I also ordered a vegetable biryani rice and some plain naan for the table, so we ended up with quite a lot of food, as well as a bit of variety.
During the meal, my colleagues told me that India had long been the place to visit as a college kid in Japan. The reasoning was that India would be a real eye-opener to the world; you could see just about anything. As an example, he said he'd heard of guys in India that climbed up a tree and lived there for years, although he wondered how they ate. Neither of my colleagues had been to India (although they've been to lots of other places, including Bangladesh, which is pretty darn close), but since I went when I was in college, I could attest that India had been a real eye-opener. I didn't see any guys living in trees, but I did see some interesting people gather for the Ramlila in Varanasi, including some holy sadhus--men who have renounced all attachments to live out their lives in spiritual practice--who emerged from the forests with their uncut, scraggly hair knotted up atop their heads and long, slopping beards with bits of who-knows-what nested in them (see Wikipedia for a visual). They were certainly some of the most colorful characters I'd ever seen, and it was electrifying to find myself sitting with them in a grassy field, with the Maharaja on his lavishly decorated elephant a few meters away, watching an open-air performance of the Ramayana near the Ganges River.
These memories came back as we finished our lunch and had some hot masala chai. The Indian subcontinent remains one of the most interesting places on earth, I reckon, although I would venture to say that the Horn of Africa has its fair share of eye-openers. Unless you don't consider a tribal cow jump to be just the slightest bit out of the ordinary.