Manikarnika: Where Fire Becomes Eternity

I arrived at Manikarnika as the sun was preparing to leave the sky. The evening light had begun to soften the hard outlines of Varanasi. As I walked through the city’s labyrinthine lanes, Kashi displayed all its familiar contradictions at once—pilgrims and shopkeepers, temple bells and motorcycle horns, saffron-clad ascetics and foreign visitors, all sharingContinue reading “Manikarnika: Where Fire Becomes Eternity”

Varanasi-Rhythm in Chaos

(A visit to Varanasi can be both woefully frustrating and immensely rewarding. If ever a place defined chaos in its purest form, it is Varanasi—a chaos that has persisted through millennia, uninterrupted and unmitigated. It is a city where the temporal and the eternal converge in a symphony of chaos and divinity, a place whereContinue reading “Varanasi-Rhythm in Chaos”