Following a night of restful sleep, I spent most of Tuesday walking through the streets around Madurai’s Meneeksha temple complex,
watching pilgrims come and go. Seeing them gather as groups of family, friends, and young priests-in-training, as they bought flowers and sweets to bring to the gods in the temple, was moving. The act of coming to Madurai seems a major trip, and a very important one, for these people. Most Hindus, I now learn, try to take at least one major pilgrimage each year. Because India is overflowing with holy sites, this goal is not difficult to attain, except for the very poor dalits (“untouchables,” as they used to be called). Train service is 
extremely inexpensive, especially in the unreserved coach cars, and buses are also very popular.My overnight trip has now become a morning ride through the state of Karnataka, moving westward out from Bangalore and gently turning up toward central India. The landscape reminds me of movie scenes from African safaris, with a mixture of varieties of smaller trees, small plots of farming, and much grassland. I can imagine a tiger running across the plain, but that’s not likely to happen. I met some Australians earlier in the month who had booked a tiger safari ride, only to see no animals.
As this wandering through India reaches its final days, I am reflecting more often on what I have learned. Thus I begin some occasional “Travel Reflections.”
1. Indians do not smile a great deal, and with their practice of pushing and shoving their way onto trains and into temples, foreigners might perceive them as rude or inhospitable. But it occurs to me that I have only had one moment in the entire trip when I felt a bit unsafe, and that was during the first week (when my hosts were affirming that I had no reason to fear). In the land where a major terrorist attack occurred while I was visiting, I have felt no fear, no insecurity, no discomfort, regarding possible theft or assault. The more common actions related to “crime” that we hear about in American cities has not been a factor here. Indians indeed are tolerant.
2. India is very large and complex, in every way. Its land mass is huge and diverse; its religions run the gamut of spirituality and culture; and its people and ethnicities are multifarious. Winston Churchill once said, “India is no more a country than the equator is a country,” highlighting the impossibility of identifying any one Indian commonality. I did not realize how deeply rooted tribal identities are, and how strongly each state claims its own heritages and identities. But tolerance may be the commonality, at least over the long haul. Contemporary tensions between Pakistanis and Hindus, Bengalis and other northeastern tribes, among others, threaten to tarnish this common understanding.
2:15 p.m. After arrival in Mysore, I took at taxi up the 3,500 foot hill here to a special temple,
and then walked the 1100 steps down. I was especially struck by the beauty of the walk down, and one pilgrim who dutifully was marking each step up the hill with red powder, the same that is used to mark worshippers. Her devotion 
is admirable, indeed.
slp
