Varanasi

It's Friday night. We've been in Varanasi a whole week, and done almost nothing - we have both been sick in bed most of the time.

I'm struggling most here with how I feel about India - how I feel about giving a guy Rs. 10 (about 15p) for an hour of his time. I just don't want to do it, though logically that is perverse - surely it's better to give the guy the damn ten rupees and him be able to eat, than not? But I have this feeling that if I don't give him money he might go to the country and grow food. There are just so many people here able to get by on so little money (by Western standards). People can live on Rs. 100 a day, easily, I think. And because they can earn a living even without working solidly during the day, they all flock to the cities. Isn't it easier work cycling round a city all day carting a couple of Westerners in your rickshaw, than growing food?

Am I misjudging something? I think there are plenty of jobs available, and plenty of manpower. I guess everyone is just desparate... no, but it isn't even that, here. In the Holy City of Benaras, people are much less pushy than in Chennai or Agra.

Perhaps the sheer number of tourists passing through means there is enough money for everyone to be okay? It is quite a small city.

Our hotel is right on the Ganges, and I really don't like the river much. It brings up feelings of revulsion - it is brown, has litter floating it, lots of motor boats going up and down it, and it's just filthy and stinks. People bathe in it, swim in it. People in boats light floating candles. Only five minutes walk downstream they burn dead people (Brahmin using sandalwood; others using Mango wood; lepers and Dalits, I think, just get thrown in...), and have hospices for the terminally ill - the souls of people who die in Varanasi go straight to Heaven, apparently.

Of course they do. Because otherwise there might be justice, with good people - truly good people - being rewarded, and bad people going somewhere else. But I guess you have to believe that there is a Higher Authority able to do the judging, and I don't think I do.

But this leads me to a conundrum. If the people, en mass, choose to believe in this stuff, and run their society in a way where there is a caste system, labour is cheap, and so on (ignoring government corruption), then who am I to say they can't?
And I guess this kind of thing is the cause of so many wars - Group A wants the laws to work like this and group B thinks it would be fairer to have them run like this - wouldn't it be great if, after 15 years of fair and unbiased education, a person got a free choice of which group he or she wanted to belong to? No forcing people to say the same stuff as you or else.

Would it work? If not, what would?