Sadhus in Varanasi
(From "Sometimes Brilliant"):
About twenty of us were living on the Sterling Hog, the forty-foot-long bus with psychedelic paintings, rainbow-coloured cushions, and a grand kitchen, at least for a hippie bus. Wavy, Bonnie Jean, Ruffin, Dolphin and Goose, Claudia, Butch, Fred the Fed, Red Dog, and Gypsy were among our sisters and brothers on the bus. When Wavy saw all the hungry beggars in Benares, he wanted to organize a massive dinner to feed everyone on the night of Shiva.
A dozen bus mates wandered through the bazaars and shopped for veggies to cook in this most vegetarian of cities. We settled on a site for the bus in Assi ghat, or “Pier 80,” as we might think of it, a residential area on the Ganges that had become a meeting point between colourful Indian sadhus and equally colourful European hippies and travellers. Wavy went through the crowds with a papier-mâché megaphone announcing “Free dinner” in English; a few bilingual sadhus translated. One of the sadhu-translators was a naga baba, a naked “snake man” covered only with ritual sandalwood paste and ash.
It was only March, but the Indian heat was excruciating. The Hog Farm cooks kept the stoves on the bus fired up all day. We had planned to serve two hundred, although we figured we could stretch the food to feed four hundred if we were careful.
But we underestimated Wavy’s marketing prowess and the hunger of the beggars. Thousands came. Lepers, beggars, amputees, sadhus, elephant mahouts, naga babas, chillum babas smoking hashish, hippies, and travellers all waited in an ill-formed line that snaked around the bus in concentric circles. When it became clear that we didn’t have enough for everyone, the crowd turned unruly. They surrounded the bus and rocked it.
That was the night I learned that you can’t feed the hungry of the world with only good intentions, a lesson that has stayed with me forever.
To really make a difference, it takes much more than goodwill; it takes dedication to learn something to offer, skill or profession. It also takes perseverance. A charity that is not sustainable is over in the blink of an eye. The old adage attributed to Maimonides is right: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” To really change the world requires deep understanding and humility, doing the hard work of systemic thinking, a keen awareness of how a particular system operates, and—perhaps most important—an unwavering sense of what you, alone, are uniquely fit to do that will do the world a world of good.
As the crowd circled the bus, I was on top of it because I had some kind of awful dysentery. All day I had stayed out of the kitchen so I wouldn’t contaminate the food. As other members of the Hog Farm served the meal, I had to get away from the bus, and the only place left for me to go was up on its roof. I lugged with me an old thin mattress, a bottle of water, and the last of the toilet paper. Elaine was with the rest of our Hog Farm bus mates beneath me, doling out ever-smaller portions of food, hoping and praying for a modern version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
I felt like a piece of meat sizzling on a grill. When I tried to stand up, I almost fell off the roof into the crowds. I called for help, but no one could hear me over the din of the hungry crowd. I was wearing a kurta, a pyjama-like top, and a white Indian dhoti, a cloth wrap popular in North India and long enough so that in case of death it could double as a shroud or burial cloth. I could see in the distance the funeral pyres near the Ganges, and as I ran out of toilet paper I had to use strips of cloth from my dhoti until only the barest of coverings remained. I had no water and no Lomotil, the pharmacological cork. That left only a few rupee notes, my passport, and my medical license. Since I needed my passport to get home, I considered my medical license and remembered that, back in San Francisco, a psychotic patient had once told me to shove my medical license up my ass. Before it was over, I would have no choice but to do just that.
I collapsed in a sick, dehydrated clump on top of the bus, wound myself into a fetal position, and drifted into some kind of altered consciousness. The crowds were rocking the bus; I think Butch started the engine and slowly moved us off like a mahout moves his elephant. I hung on to something and prayed to all the gods and goddesses of Hindu and Buddhist lore and to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to make the bus go and my diarrhoea stop. Rocked by the movement, I fell asleep.
As painful as it was to run out of food, it was tremendously satisfying to feed the hungry. We kept doing it for the rest of our journey. We tried to find ways to distribute food and medicine in every poor pocket we encountered in India and Nepal.
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