March 17th: morning meeting

We woke up at 6:30 AM, and I quickly washed out my wounds in the communal port-a-potty they call a bathroom. We went downstairs where the "guru" was waiting for us and surprised we weren't up at 5 am for yoga, which he never mentioned to us. He then asked us what we knew about the Hare Krishna and when we said nothing he led us upstairs and had us sit down on the roof. Soon we were surrounded by about 16-20 devotees, all wearing headphones and I realized that one man was translating the guru's talk into spanish so everyone else could understand him. (most of the devotees living at the ashram were found in South America and "led" to India by the guru). The guru assumed, because we happened to be volunteering at the ashram, that unlike your typical westerners, we were living a life of purity and searching for meaning through a higher power. He did not know how wrong he was about us. He talked about wealth and beauty and plastic surgery as evils and purely materialistic and in his words therefore "horrible sins." He looked right as me when he said it as if he knew something, but them smiled and I realized that only one of his eyes was looking at me and I wasn't sure if it was the working one. His eyes were never looking the same direction. He talked about sex, aside form procreation, as an evil and drinking as well. He talked about love as something stupid that your soul in your temporary body might seek out in another temporary body, but that it wasn't really love because the only love you could feel was for god. I don't believe in God. He doesn't believe in Darwin. I figured we were even and dismissed any feeling of discomfort that his lecture had made me feel.

There are two little girls living here with their mother. One is 3 and the other is 6. They are originally from Australia. They each have nose rings, a side one and a bull ring. They have no manners and are rude and obnoxious. They know how to dance and preach to us about Krishna and what we should do to please him, but they don't know how to count. The guru talks about secular education as a downfall, but who is teaching these children? All they know is a cult religion. He talks about money as if it doesn't exist in India, and that westerners are ruining everything for them (He is German, everyone else is South American), but I had been in India for one week by that point and already I had noticed a caste system that still exists and has everything to do with money. The men working at the hotel we stayed at in New Delhi are treated like slaves by the managers there and the people across the street from the hotel were living in lean-to's made out of garbage. He also talked about disease as punishment for one's past lives and a lesson that has to be taught. I'm not sure if its a coping method, or if he has never been sick or known anyone sick, but I thought that was crazy. He thinks that everyone who doesn't believe in god is closed minded, but he seemed more closed minded than anyone I had ever met.