Source: tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com
[HPI note: The New York Times’ upscale T magazine has a selective list of what the rich and the cool shouldd be doing this winter. The travel section includes skiing in the exclusive Courchevel region in France, enjoying the beat in Rio, staying at the best hotels of Buenos Aires and… pilgrimaging to Rameswar Temple, South India. Welcome to the world of fashionable Hinduism.]
RAMESWARAM, INDIA, November 17, 2010 (By Guy Trebay): It is confirmed now that I am a crazy person. I concluded this one April morning as I stood nearly naked in a temple in South India while a stranger in a loincloth hauled a bucket of water from a suspicious-looking well and poured it over my head.
The water, I was assured, is holy. It comes from one of 22 theertha kundams, or wells, at the Sri Ramanathaswamy temple on Rameswaram island at the southern tip of the state of Tamil Nadu. The temple is famed for its sculptured pillar hall, said to be the longest in the world; its immense central tower, riotous with the usual celestial mob scene; and its associations with the Ramayana, the Hindu epic. More than anything, though, it is known as a pilgrimage place, the only one in India where believers can participate in a particular sequence of purifying baths.
We went briskly from one well to another, following a route through the vast structure that seemed anything but sequential. By the fourth well, I had given up trying to guess the location of the next or where we were headed or even what I thought I was doing there.
As we headed back to where we came from, a weird feeling overtook me. While nothing exactly had happened, I was not altogether the same person I had been some hours before. The sensation did not lift on the ride home or that afternoon or evening. For a surprisingly long time, I felt afloat. I felt as though before my visit to Rameswaram I had been walking around with a land anchor over my shoulder and now was much lighter. And while I could not by any rational means account for this, I concluded that the Gods had released me for a time from what can sometimes seem like my karmic task as a journalist: explaining. Feeling it would have to suffice.