DAY FORTY ONE.. 47.12 miles (75.8 km)
Slept through the wedding. Tim said lots of fireworks and loud bombing sounds, not to mention the music.
What to do with your rubbish in India
- Throw it on the ground and walk away
- Find a bridge over a river. Stop your car, get out and throw your rubbish into the river.
- Sweep it into a heap and set fire to it (especially good for plastic waste).
The ride to our final, final destination of Bhubaneswar was very trafficky. We stopped enroute at the handicraft village of Pipili. I thought it would be a good place to buy some presents as the village is famous for its applique embroidery work. I’ve never seen such bad applique work in my life. It was worse than a child would do. Not only this but the shopkeepers were horribly persistent. They kept trying to lure me into the back of their shops, where presumably more of their stock was kept. But only more of the dreadful same stuff. I was having none of it.
The hassle of shopkeepers and the constant pressure and vigilance needed with the traffic; car drivers just stopping right in front of you and flinging their doors open … to try and get a picture of us, resulted in a very bad state of mind.
To top it all, when we were having a chai break, a man came up to me and showed me his prosthetic leg, then indicated it had happened on a bicycle. I took this all as a bad omen. Having shown me his leg though, he merrily rode off on a bike, so it didn’t seem to work as a bad omen for him.
We have diverted our route in order to visit Ashoka’s edict. The rock edict is Ashoka’s missive describing the reformed way of wanting his vast empire to run. It is basically a long set of rules and aspirations written on a very large boulder shaped into an elephant. The heart of it is a wish to protect and care for his people, as his own children, to promote morality and compassion among people and to prohibit the killing of animals. It is all very beautiful, all the more so because we know that Ashoka used to be a fierce and terrible warrior, who was cruel and violent. He was notorious on the battle field. It was the battle with the Kalinga people that seemed to be the pivot for change. In this battle 100,000 men and animals lost their lives, and a further 150,000 were captured and carried away. Seeing all the carnage on the battlefield, Ashoka apparently began to feel that he had not in fact gained a victory at all. Instead, he saw the suffering and the pain that he had caused.
At this moment, or so some stories go… a Buddhist monk, on the battlefield, attending to the dying, spoke to him. In his words he somehow conveyed something about the Buddha’s teachings of compassion, and ethical living. Ashoka, must have heard these teachings deeply because then, or soon after, he completely transformed himself, and by transforming himself, he transformed his empire. I wish this sort of thing could happen today.
