Varanasi (also known as Benares)

I have a miserable cold which is sapping my energy and much of my enthusiasm.  I lost a battle with the scanner yesterday.  Downloaded alien entities to my laptop and achieved complete paralysis of any scanning software that might once have been harbored in my printer's entrails.  Must wait for hubby to come home and bail me out technologically.

Yesterday I was thinking oh no, these do look so flimsy and negligible compared to the pieces I shared from the Boston Globe.  But today the sun is shining again in L.A. and the colors seem more felicitous and conducive to our lightened atmosphere.  They want to be shared.

Varanasi:  home of silks, of a venerable university and probably the holiest Hindu pilgrimage site: the ghats and temples on the banks of the Ganges River. Known affectionately by the Indians as "Ganga Ji", the Ganges is considered the mother of all life, a goddess.

On the other hand, it is said that the Ganges at Varanasi is biologically dead because of the paradox of the many myriad aspects of life that are ritualized in it.

Washing oneself

Prayer.

Washing other peoples'

 clothes

If you like these pictures don't forget to click and enlarge them.

There is a world of mysterious beauty here.  (If I say so myself!) 

Once the scanner is reconquered my great ambition is to achieve larger pictures WITHOUT having to ingeniously revise code or enlist the assistance of intermediary software.

Yeah right.  Meanwhile life will go on in Varanasi.  As will death.

The dear deceased will be burned at its banks.  And ashes sent into the water.

The whole of life is lived and comes full circle here.  

Varanasi takes the world into its arms.

And sends it's young into our future.