Indian Himalayas

A GROUP of people are bent over a bundle on the ground –a middle-aged woman and some younger men, including one with a ponytail sprouting from a shaved head.
Gradually they start to shuffle the bundle towards the river, the man with the shaved head descending a couple of steps into the fast-flowing water and with the help of the others eases a large black plastic bag towards himself.
He tilts the opening and pours a cloud of dust that briefly swirls on the undulating surface of the river before dispersing. The shaven-head man submerges the black bag and fills it with water, washing out the remaining contents before releasing it as well to be swept downstream.
The man in the River Ganges lifts handfuls of water to douse his upper body before mounting the steps to the ‘ghat’ – a paved area with steps dipping into the river where Hindu rituals take place.
He briefly rejoins the woman and young men to stand and gaze downstream as the ashes of their dead relative disperse before making way for others who wish to perform rites, rituals or simply douse themselves in the river’s waters.
The River Ganges, worshipped as a manifestation of the goddess Ganga by Hindus, emerges from the Himalayas just a few kilometres from Haridwar.
The city has added spiritual significance because Hindus believe it is one of the sites where a celestial bird called Garuda accidentally spilt drops of the elixir of immortality.
As evening darkens to night those gathered on the ghat release wreathes of flowers with candles burning in the centre into the river to swirl in aimless eddies before catching a current and being swept
way.
Others gather in groups to chant mantras accompanied by drums, tinkling bells and crashing cymbals.
As well as milling pilgrims, and aimlessly meandering cows of course, there are wandering sadhus – holy men dressed in orange robes. Some of the younger ones have simply dropped out for a while but for the ones with longer beards it has become a way of life.
However, away from the ghat the spirititual frenzy takes on a more commercial tone and the streets bulge with souvenir kiosks, food stalls, shops selling mobiles phones, hotels and ashrams.
It’s all a bit tacky – Lourdes or Knock for Hindus.
Green hills rise in the countryside surrounding Haridwar towards the Shivalik mountain range that in turn ascends into the Himalayas.
Ragaji National Park is home to herds of wild elephants, two species of deer, monkeys, tigers and leopards.
In the distance a herd of elephants lingers close to the shelter of a tangle of bushes, a mother and baby lagging behind.
Sitting in a tree a white eagle screeches in the air while a stork, visiting to escape the savage winter of Siberia, soars overhead.
As the day fades the bushes rustle, the deer stand still, tense and sniffing the air but the tigers and leopards stay hidden and I leave disappointed.
From Haridwar I shift base 17 kilometres up the road to Rishikesh where the Ganges pours out of the Himalayas and down through India and into Bangladesh.
Here too Hindu pilgrims gather on the ghats to worship at its multi-tiered temples, but the shops are more new agey and the restaurants, while still for the most-part vegetarian, offer pizza and Tibetan cuisine catering for western spiritual seekers and trekkers who also gather here.
Rishikesh gained its international reputation in 1968 when the Beatles and their entourage came to find enlightenment in the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Back then the ashram included a hospital, post office, supermarket, hotel, luxury apartments and meditation pods overlooking the Ganges but it has lain abandoned since the early ‘70s.
It lies past the last settlements of Rishikesh and there are no signposts to it – a sign on the padlocked gate says ‘No Entry’, however an accommodating security guard (who is happy to accommodate
the 50 rupee note I slip him) unlocks the gate and ushers me in.
Pod number nine was where John Lennon meditated but it is cracked and crumbling now, tendrils of jungle slithering through its brickwork. The pathways are overgrown and strewn with huge elephant turds.
The luxury hotel, the hospital and even the Maharishi’s private accommodation are all being slowly sucked back into the foliage which was once cleared to make way for them.
At 1,500 metres the temple on top of Kunjapuri isn’t the highest in the area but it is from here that I catch sight of the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas proper.
Stooping into the temple to be engulfed by a billow of incense an old woman marks a tilik – a pressed thumb of red dye and some grains of rice – onto my forehead.
Brightly painted, almost cartoonish paintings adorned the walls as pilgrims mutter prayers before coming back outside to ring a bell.
The rituals and the significance of the temple are mysteries to me but the shimmering snow-covered crags on the horizon – Bandarpoonch and Chaukhamba, which is nearly 8,000 metres high – are hauntingly beautiful and I want to be on them, even more so as my superbly knowledgeable guide Chandar tells me about expeditions he has led or taken part in.
We start to descend along the winding road which leads up to the temple but soon cut off into barely defined track of shifting shale, past scrub and forest.
Occasionally the foliage is broken by a strip of cultivated land and a few houses, but Chandar tells me that most of them have been abandoned as people flee the unpredictability of life in the country for the crowded but more stable incomes provided by the cities.
Chandar stops to talk to a group of women gathering sticks and while I can’t understand the conversation their narrow, sinewy faces say more about the lives they live than language could ever do.
This article first appeared in The Irish News on March 10.

Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India by Rory MacClean

Hippie culture, its myths and legends, main players, clothes and music form the backdrop to this travel book with a message. Each of the chapters has a hippie song title and the journey covers the main stop-offs where 'the Intrepids' who ventured from Europe to Asia in the late sixties and most of the seventies made their mark.
MacClean briefly traces the origins of the hippies from the US Beat culture of the late 1950s name-checking Kerouac and Ginsberg, through to its identification with rock music and the anti-war movement in the 60s. Many were drawn to eastern spiritualism thanks to novelist Herman Hess, Kerouac's The Dharma Bums and of course the Beatles flirtation with Transcendental Meditation and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
MacClean writes with a whimsical nostalgia, as a man who came a generation too late to experience at first hand the original hippie trail and the spontaneous, hand-to-mouth existence of those who traversed it. He says they were the first invaders who came “to be colonised” and learn from the countries where they were travelling.
He frequently comments on the carefully laid timetabled trails followed by most modern indepenendent travellers who delude themselves that they will still find an undiscovered beach somewhere.
But the main theme of the book is the societal upheavals that have impacted on the trail in the intervening four decades since the Intrepids first began travelling.
Turkey has become a package holiday mecca, Iran an Islamist Republic, Afghanastan a war zone, Pakistan politically corrupt while India, the former spiritual home of the hippies, is now one of the fastest growing capitalist economies in the world.
MacClean wonders if the arrival of the hippies with their hash and psychedelic drugs, free love, unconventional clothing, or lack of it, and long-haired drop-out attitude acted as catalyst for the changes. He meets a Turkish bar owner who tells him the catering for the hippies made people realise that there was money to be made from the exotic travellers passing by and the millions of package follower who would ultimately follow.
And in Iran, did the experience of the Intrepids cause a stirring in Iran that led to the rejection of the the Western-supported Shah and a turning to Islamic fundamentalism as a barrier against the lose-sex and drug taking manifestation of the Intrepids who for many Iranians were the representation of Western values, even though those on who they were basing that judgment had rejected the societies from where they had come?
Along the way he meets various characters, including Penny a woman in her 70s who has fled the old people's home where she had been stagnating. She turns out to have been at some of the most iconic hippie happenings – with credentials stretching back to the Beats, being one of the first to hand out
flowers in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco (heralding flower power), and was at Woodstock where she led Janis Joplin to the stage.
Other survivors include Roddy Finegan in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu whose “Irishness is worn easily” and who is one of the few to have stayed true to the hippy lifestyle in “genteel poverty”. Another of the originals Geoff Crowther, one of the first writers and researchers of the Lonely Planet, is living in a drunken stupor in Goa, having blown a fortune made from writing travel books.
MacClean keeps a slight distance between himself and those he is writing about, like a ethnologist who has studied an exotic tribe and who envies their lifestyle but knows that he can never actually belong and who has the advantage to time to realise that their days were ultimately numbered.
"The sixties marked a change in consciousness. Ordinary people did extraordinary things. A generation rejected old unfeeling ways, questioned established practices, searched for new values. Then in the seventies the oil crisis and later Regan economics forced them on a financial reality check. Jobs became scarce. Time grew expensive. Borders closed. Hippie chicks swelled into earth mothers and their children needed new shoes. Greenpeace, Apple and MTV went from alternative to mainstream. Revolutionaries reinvented themselves as CEOs. Some kids couldn’t adapt, of course, retreating to log cabins in the Sierras of making a last stand as ecowarriors in mid-Wales. But most of them – like Penny and Roddy – found peace in themselves, even as rainbow bridges were brought down by bombs and rueful self-interest…” P268
Read my travel piece on Goa, the ultimate destination for many who followed the hippie trail , on my website here.

John Lennon, The Life by Philip Norman

The life of John Lennon must be one of the most chronicled in the world with extensive film footage, radio recordings, written material and of course song lyrics to draw on. And as lives goes Lennon’s was an intensely varied and often controversial one crammed into a relatively short period of time.
Being a member of the most successful rock group ever was not enough for Lennon and he was constantly trying to reinvent himself. Looking at pictures of him pre-1965 with his cherubic face and mop-top haircut and comparing him to later versions when his hair was longer and he was wearing glasses is like looking at two different people and even after that his appearance seemed to dramatically change right up to the emaciated figure whose hooked nose is more pronounced than ever who was shot dead in New York nearly 30 years ago.
Given that so much is already known about Lennon a biographer faces a daunting task in coming to his subject and trying to find something original to say. Previous biographies by Ray Coleman and Albert Goldman came from the two extremes. Coleman’s was awestruck and prepared to forgive Lennon’s sins as the foibles of a genius while Goldman’s was savage and unforgiving, pouncing on every negative rumour that was ever aired and reporting it as truth.
Philip Norman’s takes a middle route, repeating many of the rumours – such as that Lennon violently attacked Stu Sutcliff in Hamburg and blamed himself for his friend’s early death and had a sexual liaison with Brian Esptein. He even airs a few new titillating stories (apparently given substance by Yoko Ono) that Lennon almost had a sexual relationship with his mother and regretted that he had not pursued it, that he had a sexual crush on Paul McCartney and that he had contemplated having affairs with other men.
Despite this Norman’s book is more forgiving that Goldman’s and he is generally in the camp that portrays Lennon as a tortured genius, plagued by insecurities and traumas from childhood. It is a large book, running to more than 800 pages that sometimes gets bogged down in detail – such as the social make-up of post-war Britain and the society that produced Lennon – and then skips over other periods. The mid-1960s chapters when that first big metamorphosis between fab-four John and psychedelic John took place, were I thought quite weak.
Norman does try to get under Lennon’s skin, carefully analysing lyrics to try to analyse what was going on in Lennon’s head and the portrait that emerges is much fuller than the ones painted by Coleman and Goldman. He is more than generous to Ono but although she gave him numerous interviews while he was researching his biography she refused to endorse it, saying it was “mean” to Lennon.
The problem for Ono was that Lennon was not a particularly nice person. He may have liked to portray himself as a man of peace but he was also nasty and vindictive, holding grudges against former allies and friends. That might have been because of his troubled childhood and insecurity but the accusation stands, particularly in relation to his first wife and their son.
Despite his flaws he is a fascinating person and even if he had never achieved success as a Beatle he would probably have found some creative outlet. Reading this biography I was constantly thinking how weird it must have been to be him – to have that level of adulation that he had with the Beatles and then hatred following his “Beatles are bigger than Jesus comments” and the public ridicule that he endured after taking up with Yoko and trying to reinvent himself as a peace activist and alternative artist. Then there was the campaign to deport him by the US government which went right up to Nixon and which saw him being kept under constant surveillance.
Norman seems to believe that Lennon did find some contentment during his years as a recluse in New York and was ready to emerge into the public eye, rejuvenated and filled with new creative energies when he was shot dead in December 1980. However, a subtext seems to suggest that despite the intimate film footage shot of them in the weeks before he died and a continued creative spark between them that he and Ono had drifted apart and were living almost separate lives.
It can only be speculated upon what would have happened if Lennon had lived and if the Beatles would have performed again and possibly even recorded new material. However, given the evidence of what Lennon was producing just before he died and what subsequently was produced by McCartney and Harrison it was probably a good thing that we were left with the existing cannon, although according to the Beatle’s producer George Martin, Lennon was unhappy with those recordings.
During their last meeting in 1979, Martin reports that Lennon said: ‘“You know, George, if I could, I would record everything the Beatles did all over again’. I blanched. ‘Blimey John, rather you than me. Everything?’ He said: ‘Everything’ I searched my mind for all the wonderful things that we had done and said: ‘What about Strawberry Fields?’ He looked at me over his specs and said: ‘Especially Strawberry Fields’.”