Friday, January 13, 2006

walking to goa

thats what some chaps claimed to be doing last evening if you can take their banners at face value.

normally, i wouldn't really care what some unemployed marathi youth did with their spare time. but this once it got my attention since a thousand or so of these guys were walking on the road, and of course blocking traffic. so all motor vehicles around these fellows had to slow down and hence caused a jam that extended for miles till i managed to overtake the walkers.

these guys had banners proclaiming their love for sai baba and their intention to walk till goa as proof of the above mentioned love and affection. i mistakenly assumed that it was a cricket related demonstration since these road blockers were all wearing floppy cricket hats on their heads. mind you, it was past eight in the evening and they had just begun their walk from bombay to goa so there was no way they encountered any sun.

once i got through the chaos that had resulted from their walking i stopped cursing them and started thinking about the motivation that would make a lot of people undertake a task of this magnitude. i'm trying to imagine how recruitment for this kind of thing happens? then of course there's the entire cost factor, what manner of funding do such plans attract?

and what in sai baba's name will these guys do when they get to goa? which happens to be quite far from shirdi, as a matter of fact its even in the wrong direction.

1 comment:

Mesmacat said...

It is a pilgrimage I guess, why to Goa in particular escapes me too. While I have been to a few places around Maharastra, I have not been to Goa, though I understand it is not exactly considered the spotless spiritual capital of the sub continent.

The fact that it is human beings who have choosen to be there, rather than cows or the like makes it a little more irritating I suppose. I went and did this kind of thign when I was a much younger man, it is actually fun when you are on the inside, however enigmatic and traffic disrupting it seems from the outside.

These pilgrimages seem to take all sorts of forms. When I was a teenager I knew a girl who went one weekend to a demonstration of woman against the bomb outside an American airforce base, and they marched from somewhere to there, hundreds of them. I also knew another boy who, with a bunch of his friends and their elders, purposefully went to the same place to heckle the women amd give them a hard time. Same location, different groups, different worlds.