A City of Contradictions

Accidentally supporting the drug trade in India

For me, Pushkar will always be a city of contradictions. As one of the holiest cities in India – the Brahma’s city – I thought it would be cleaner, calmer, and stricter than anywhere else I’d been. 

Instead, it was the city that truly showed me an underlying ugliness of the country. It’s a city of prohibitions – no alcohol, no meat, no drugs, no revealing clothing – but also the city where all these prohibitions seemed most prominent.

Within 10 minutes of my arrival, I met an Indian guy at the hotel who had come to Pushkar solely to smoke weed and get drunk. I simply couldn’t wrap my head around it… and I still can’t. Why in the world would he choose to travel to the one place where it’s illegal to do so? He was far from being the only one.

It quickly became apparent that Pushkar is one of the most popular cities to travel to for drugs and other illegal businesses. The city center was completely infested with blank-eyed and aimless-looking western hippies, remnants of dirty clothes hanging from their emaciated bodies. Our local guide told the group I was traveling with that a number of Western travelers continuously got stuck in Pushkar with no money and a drug addiction, selling their bodies to feed their unsatisfiable cravings; slaves of their own needs.

As soon as that depressing thought latched itself onto my mind, we had finally stepped off the road and up to the infamous Pushkar Lake – a lake that the city wrapped itself around. A Pundit (Hindu priest) took us through a beautiful prayer ceremony and the city was, once again, holy – the air heavy with his enchanting blessings.

The blessings seemed to wear off overnight, though. As I spent the next day weaving through people and cows in the market with Theresa, an English woman in her fifties, we haggled with salesmen and desperately tried to find respite from the scorching sun. 

Two homeless boys approached us, asking us to buy them food. They were polite, good at English, and couldn’t have been more than 12 years old. Or maybe they just looked young with their tiny gaunt bodies and huge eyes. Nevertheless, my heart was aching and I desperately wanted to help them.

Now I have done my research before traveling. I knew that you should never give begging children money. But these kids didn’t want money – they wanted food. They pointed to a shop nearby and explained that we could buy them chapatis (Indian pancakes) there. 

And after persistent begging, I finally caved – after all, if I bought them the bread myself it really couldn’t be all that bad, could it?

I let them drag me to the shop and they quickly picked out what they wanted – a very expensive box of flour that I didn’t have the money for. But by now I had already told them yes, and so Theresa and I took out all the money we had, frantically trying to gather enough money for it.

Before I even realized what had happened, the two boys had snatched the money right out of my hands and ran away, leaving behind the box of flour on the counter.

When I later related the story to our guide on our way out for dinner, he told us grimly that drug dealers often “own” the begging children who’ve become “hooked” for various needs at an early age; therefore, they stay indebted to their providers. 

I had likely – and unwittingly – supported an underground drug trade that used homeless children for profit, despite having done my research thoroughly before leaving home.

I felt ignorant and guilty. I had accidentally become one of the worst kinds of tourists – the unknowing tourist who feeds into illegal businesses and dooming children with their Western naïveté. The exact kind I’d so carefully avoided and arrogantly thought myself above.

To make matters worse, the universe chose that moment to throw all its ugliness at me at once. On that last walk in Pushkar, we passed an area the size of half a football field filled with trash, where a gathering of cows stood eating mouthful after mouthful of plastic. A few moments later, we passed a cow lying on the sidewalk painfully and unsuccessfully trying to breathe – likely as a result of a stomach full of plastic. We passed long chains of homeless people sleeping in the streets. And we passed a camel that had its nose ripped out – most likely from tugging too much at the rope that kept it from escaping so that tourists, like ourselves, could go on rides.

Of course, I’d seen glimpses of it all outside of Pushkar too.

The despair and pain and hopelessness is everywhere in India (and everywhere in the world really), and the frustration of not being able to do anything – just seeing it and having to keep walking… and furthermore accidentally supporting it – really got to me on the walk. India’s beauty had dulled a bit.

But that is India, I guess; it’s the dazzling beauty, an abundance of wealth, bright colors, intense flavors, diversity, and of course, a rich culture. It is also horrible suffering, unfairness, pollution, and poverty. 

It is good and bad – both, a series of contradictions.

You shouldn’t judge India solely on its ugly sides, but purposefully choosing to only see that beauty is ignorant. It’s a balancing act to understand a country – to both love it and to see its flaws plainly – and I’m still learning every day.

What we can do is to learn from our mistakes. We can help through other official initiatives and to keep educating ourselves. And throughout the following seven months in Asia, that experience stuck with me and, through my experiences, kept me from making a similar mistake.

I slowly learned to deal better with my emotions and distress every time my travels unavoidably showed me a new ugly side of the world. But that evening in Pushkar, I was relieved when we took a tuk-tuk back to the hotel, not quite ready to face the ugliness right away once more.