Street Temples and Jewlery

The Indian visa system is very inconsistent. According to their official publications, all student Visas are valid for a year and require the visa holder to register with the local police. However, just about all the AIIS participant's visas were issued out with different restrictions. Some people have six month visas, others 9 month, and other 12 months. About 10 people had to register with the police in Delhi, while about 20 of us had to register with the Jaipur police. While filling out the forms was tedious (everything had to be done in 4s and have a picture attached), actually going to the police station was relatively painless (for India especially). The police station is in the Old City, so we took a 15 min auto-rickshaw ride from the school and just dropped off our forms with the secretary. Apparently they'll deliver them in a week. This may seem like a tedious story about nothingness, but that's exactly what makes it exciting! Stuff like this never goes easily in countries like India. For example, getting a SIM card for my mobile phone required a two page application, a letter from my school, a copy of my visa and passport, and three passport photos. Even after I got all the paperwork together, the salesmen took over 30min to give me the SIM and half a day to activate it.

Anyhow, after the police station a group of us walked around town. The streets here are dusty, smelly, and loud; full of cars, auto-rickshaws, real rickshaws, bicycles, pedestrians, mobile merchants, as well as people just loitering about. A crazy place to walk around, but kind of fun too. However, thought my travels here and in China I’ve discovered that the craziest streets typically hide an entrance to a temple, monastery, or shrine. While being hassled to buy bangles we spotted an entrance to a temple. Entering the temple was like stepping into another world. All of a sudden you’re in a beautiful building and everything is quiet.

after walking through a small alley we see this!

There were about 20 people in the temple having a service. Luckily we showed up at the very end, so we were able to talk to some of the followers. The temple is 300 years old (new for India). It use to belong to the government, but a few years ago the government gave it to a group called Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan. They are followers of Guru Maharaj Ji, have temple all over the world (including US), and a website http://divyajyoti.org/. They were thrilled to talk to us, especially after they found out that some of us spoke Hindi.

Afterwards we stopped in a couple of shops not far from the temple. Jaipur is known for semi-precious stones, and a lot of jewelry factories are located in this region of India because of its history and cheap labor. I spent a while in a jewelry shop talking to the manager. I was looking at rings that were outside my price range, but not extravagant (200-400USD). We started talking about how long his family had been in the jewelry business (30 years), and then he started showing me more expensive pieces (10,000USD+), and then he took me into the office and opened the safe which held pieces costing upwards of 50,000USD. Everything was so beautiful, and I don’t even like jewelry all that much. Anyhow, I had a good chat with him about how his family runs the business. His Uncle is in charge of everything, he runs the store, his brother runs the factory, and his cousin lives in Milan to arrange orders and keep plus on the international market, his aunt and other cousin are in charge of designing the jewelry, and other family members to the other jobs. As he put it, “its good working with family because when the business does well everybody does well.” Honestly, I think the majority of business in the world happens because of familial and clan relationships.