{"id":8223,"date":"2009-09-11T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-11T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/09\/11\/moksha-could-cost-a-lot-in-varanasi\/"},"modified":"2009-09-11T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-11T12:00:00","slug":"moksha-could-cost-a-lot-in-varanasi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/09\/11\/moksha-could-cost-a-lot-in-varanasi\/","title":{"rendered":"Moksha Could Cost A Lot In Varanasi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/timesofindia.indiatimes.com\/articleshow\/msid-4977446,prtpage-1.cms\">timesofindia.indiatimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>VARANASI, INDIA, September 6, 2009: Satyanarain Chowdhary supervises his family&#8217;s business: running the world-famous cremation ground Manikarnika ghat. The businesslike Chowdhary seems miffed at allegations of extortion at the ghat, where victim&#8217;s families have to cough up anywhere between US$20 to US$2,000, depending on their financial status, for last rites.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is merely a tax people have been paying us from Puranic times,&#8221; says Chowdhary, even as protesters marched earlier this week.<\/p>\n<p>A sophisticated network roars into action the moment a body reaches the ghat. Within minutes a dossier on the dead and the family is ready. Everything from family tree to the bank balance is made available.<\/p>\n<p>But the allegations are serious. &#8220;Not even the poorest is spared in Manikarnika and Harish Chandra ghat,&#8221; claims Kamal Patel, Varanasi corporator, who says there is a bloated price tag on everything in the cremation grounds, from the firewood to the numerous rituals. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com VARANASI, INDIA, September 6, 2009: Satyanarain Chowdhary supervises his family&#8217;s business: running the world-famous cremation ground Manikarnika ghat.,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}