I have been to Asia several times, three of which were in India. This is a country that cannot be contained in a single photo. And there are too many Indians to be limited in one shot. The population density is three times that of China. I visited many places in my two months of travel. I reached 5,000 meters above sea level in a remote Himalayan village in the Spiti Valley and bathed in the sacred waters of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the spiritual capital of the Sikh religion. I slept in a 500-year-old haveli, among the blue walls of Jodhpur in Rajasthan, and got lost, along with thousands of other people, in the crazy labyrinth of New Delhi. But it is Varanasi that impressed me the most. It took me several days to visit this city. It is the holiest among the seven sacred cities. It’s a Dante’s circle, it’s hell on Earth: fire and flames design the landscape every day, making its contours shine. Hundreds of bodies are cremated every day, before everyone’s eyes. While the eternal fire of Shiva has been burning brightly for centuries, that smell sticks in your memory forever. There are many questions I have asked myself about this country, but I have been able to answer almost none of them.
But there is one that runs through my head more than the others, one in particular that encompasses them all: “How will God listen to all these people?“
