I am posting below a very nicely written description of a business trip to India by a Californian named G. G. Carl. It is always enlightening to learn about the experiences of others. This description was posted on the internet forum of the James Randi Educational Foundation. I post it here with the author's permission.
Cheers, Santosh ************************************************************************* GANESHA SAVED MY LIFE! by G. G. Carl In December of 1996, I spent 2 weeks in India on a business trip. I had never been to India before and was completely unprepared for the Indian experience. It's a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place: unimaginable poverty everywhere, but yet an enterprising people many of whom have come to grips with their existence. I was traveling with a sponsor, a Gujarati fellow who was very helpful as well as unintentionally humorous. I visited 5 cities in my 2-week stay: Dehli, Hyderabad, Chennai (Madras), Bangalore, Mumbai, then back to Dehli to get my flight home. My laptop started acting up almost as soon as I had landed. For whatever reason it just wouldn't boot up properly until the 9th or 10th attempt. At each one of the demonstrations I gave at various client sites, I'd have to boot and reboot while the customer waited, sometimes impatiently while my sponsor tried to keep them busy. Once booted correctly, everything was OK, except at Nuclear Power Company of India, Ltd. where the power went out!! I'll get to that in a minute. When I finally got to Mumbai, I was just about ready to throw the laptop away and go home. As I was complaining about it to my sponsor, the cab driver, having overheard me, pointed to a small figurine on the dashboard and asked, "Do you know Ganesha?" "Of course," my sponsor said with a look of eureka on his face. "Why didn't I think of that?" So both of them explained to me that Ganesha in the position displayed in the figurine was "the remover of obstacles and protector of travelers." I was to find out later that Ganesha had 27 or so positions, each one for a different purpose (one of them helps a woman get through her "dirty time"!!). "So what does it all mean," ask I. What it all meant was first going to the cab driver's cousin's store and getting a figurine of my own, which we did. I looked at it as getting a souvenir of my trip, but my sponsor and cab driver had a deeper plan. It was not enough merely to possess the figurine, it had to be blessed by the Ganesha priest. Handily enough, a suitable temple was close by. I'm sure it has an official name, but I called it "Ganesha Central." It was a rather large religous-looking building in a business district. A little incongruous, I thought at first, but actually quite apropos because in India, religion and business seem to go hand-in-hand more often than not. I got out of the cab and started heading towards the temple. I could have cared less about the religious nonsense, but India had quickly become endearing to me as a huge adventure, an assault to every one of my senses, and I was eager to experience as much as I could in my limited time there. "Not so fast," my sponsor stopped me. "First, you gotta have the proper offering." He gestured towards a store, doubless owned by a relative of his or the cab driver. The "offering" consisted of a metal tray of candies and flowers strung together for 100 rp. In addition to the figurine, this adventure had cost me almost 1000 rp. so far, but was about to go up even more. I'm sure I'd paid way too much for everything, but I looked at it as the cost of entertainment. Up until then I'd been having a good time. "Now you have to take your shoes off. You have to be barefoot inside the temple," my sponsor pointed to my shoes. If you've ever been to India, you know how much fear was in my heart at the sound of those words. When I was a boy, my mother told me to never go outside without shoes. As an incentive she told me that there were little worms that would drill holes in the bottoms of my feet and infect me. I really didn't buy mother's argument, but if there was anywhere in the world with drill worms, it was India, specifically the street outside Ganesha Central. Let's just say that streets in India are in dire need of cleaning. Knowing that I was probably going to die a horrible, painful drill worm death, I took off my shoes and socks and got into the entry queue with the throng that had just started arriving. The temple was going to open in a few minutes and soon the street was packed with thousands of people waiting for their blessings. As I was waiting, I was beset by a little girl who kept insistently tapping me on the arm holding up a few sad looking flowers. I told her politely about a thousand times, "Sorry, sweetheart, I already have my offerings." But the girl was very persistent. Finally, my sponsor spoke to her in Hindi, telling her to give me the flowers, and if Ganesha's offerings are accepted, we'd pay her on the way out, otherwise no money. The girl handed me the flowers and walked away. Shortly, the temple doors opened and the pressing throng carried us inside. If I had changed my mind about going in, it was too late now. As we got into the inner sanctum, many people dropped to the floor in full prostration at the sight of the big golden Ganesha statue lurking within. Many people had already dabbed a bit of orange paint between their eyes, and as we passed by a little bucket on a stand, my sponsor dabbed some and indicated that I should do the same. Feeling completely ridiculous, but still keen for adventure and sporting the orange dab, I entered the temple center holding my ganesha figurine in one hand and offerings in the other. As I approached the "altar," the first thing I noticed was just how big the Ganesha statue was. Son of a bitch, I muttered under my breath, that's a big-ass chunk of gold. "Is that gold"?, I asked. "Solid gold," my sponsor replied. I remeber wondering how much more good the gold would have been for buying food, clothing, and medicine for all the poor deluded now drooling and throwing themselves on the floor. The next thing I noticed was that the whole scene looked like a cross between a Baskin-Robbins store and a gaming table in Las Vegas. The priests were standing behind this counter wearing an orange uniform with those funny hats that made them look like an ice-cream vendor. In the counter were slots with those little push thingies in them where your money gets deposited at the Las Vegas tables. My sponsor told me to hand the offerings and figurine to one of the priests, then hand him a 100 rp. note. The priest had obviously done this a million times. He deftly juggled the stuff in one hand while quite dextrously depositing the money in the slot. Turning away from me he started his hand-waving and incantations. The ceremony consisted of the priest tossing half of my offerings onto a growing heap of offerings already piled up at the base of the statue. The he dabbed some orange between Ganesha figurine's eyes and turned around to face me. He somehow had this expectant look on his face, which, clever fellow that I am, interpreted that another donation of slot money was needed to complete the blessing. I was right. No sooner had the money quickly been deposited into the slot than he dumped the remaining offerings and figurine onto the counter and turned to the next person for service. My host suggested that I should eat some of the candy. Certain that I would immediatly contract some unpronouncable illness, I ate one of the candies. It didn't taste too bad, but still. This was towards the end of my trip and I didn't want to spend the whole of my 20-hour flight back home with my head in an airplane toilet bowl. Luckily, I got away with it, as I did al my other eating episodes in India. Properly blessed, we marched outside, only to be accosted by not only the little girl, but also who I guessed was her mother, sisters, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and a few other women of relations I could hardly guess. They quickly tossed the flowers in my tray apparently looking for the ones the little girl had given me. They weren't there, meaning, according to my sponsor, that Ganesha had accepted my offering and I should pay the girl 200 rp. As in the temple only a few minutes earlier, not even Randi could make money disappear so quickly. We put our shoes and socks back on and headed to the customer site, as I already mentioned, the Nuclear Power Company of India, Ltd. In the cab on our way, the cab driver and my sponsor told me I needed to make my request to Ganesha so that my laptop would not let me down. When I was a boy, we used to wish on stars and birthday cakes, so this amused me to no end. "Let's see," I mused, "how shall I put it? I know: please Ganesha , don't let me be embarrassed again by my laptop." All agreed that with the request in place, we were ready to face the customer with the certainty that all would be OK. Our meeting took place on the 14th floor in the boardroom. There must have 50 people there, the largest audience I had been in front of on my Indian Adventure. After enchanging business cards and a few pleasantries, the moment of truth had finally arrived. As I was booting my laptop, with a big smile on his face, my sponsor announced to the whole room of the power of Ganesha, waving the orange-dabbed figurine around, pointing to the orange dabs between our eyes. Almost everyone in the room started bowing and putting their hands together in a praying-like position in front of their chests, such was their belief. My belief? My laptop had worked perfectly back in the US, as well as in my hotel room after arriving in India the previous week. The visual manifestation of the problems I'd been having told me that it was somehow related to display refresh frequency, perhaps caused by the differences in electrical current at the various places I'd visited. Electricity in India is not as stable as it is in other countries, with plenty of frequent brownouts and outages. The Indian nuclear power grid was no exception to the rule. Before my laptop could completely boot, the power went out. We sat there stupidly for the next 3 hours waiting for the power that would come back on "any minute because this is the place where we make the power." By the time we collectively decided to pack it in, it was getting dark. BTW, because my laptop had a battery, it continued booting, successfully, I might add. But power out meant that the projector would not work, so we couldn't proceed with the presentation. It also meant that the elevator wouldn't work, so we had to feel our way down 14 stories in the dark. I chalked it all up to an unexpected benefit to my further Indian Adventures. On our way the next day to another customer visit, my sponsor advised me on the problem with my previous day's Ganesha-request. It seems I hadn't been specific enough. I had asked to avoid embarrassment, which meant that I was essentially leaving the decision of just how to avoid embarrassment to Ganesha. The method chosen by Ganesha was to make the power go out, transferring embarrassment to the customer, instead. So today's wording was quite exact: "Please Ganesha, let my laptop boot up correctly first time." Satisfied that we had the right prayer this time, we went to the customer offices where the laptop booted up first time, and the power didn't go out. My theory is that Mumbai area power is of a higher quality or better frequency than power in any of the other cities I'd visited. Maybe I'm wrong in my theory, but somehow I'm unwilling to accept that "Ganesha heeded my prayers." In my office here on a shelf nearby, I have various souvenirs I've collected from my world travels. Sitting among them is the Ganesha figurine, still sporting a bit of the orange paint between its eyes, although somewhat faded now, but with the memories of my Indian Adventure still fairly fresh in my mind. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-W-E-B---S-I-T-E-=-=-= To Subscribe/Unsubscribe from GoaNet | http://www.goacom.com/goanet =================================================================== For (un)subscribing or for help, Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dont want so many e=mails? Join GoaNet-Digest instead ! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Help support non-commercial projects in Goa by advertizing!! * * * * Your ad here !!
