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The Golden Hindu Temple, Varanasi for sale

Oil on Canvas - (130cm x 95cm)

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Here as an excerpt from the book to be an artist

"I booked into a budget priced box room in the Vishnu guesthouse on the ghats, nearby the Golden Hindu Temple. The view of this most sacred place from a cloth merchant’s second floor storeroom window did not disappoint. Their building nestling among the congested more narrow than usual side streets, if that can be possible. The cloth merchants enjoy a brisk trade – I for one bought a Nehru jacket. Varanasi one of the hottest urban places not only in India but also on this planet as temperatures recently recorded had exceeded 50 (fifty) degrees. Literally hundreds of people keeling in the superheated ancient streets, vulnerable folk promptly dying - riverside funeral pyres piled high with smouldering recently deceased bodies. What further explains this big show of death is belief that dying in Varanasi is escape from the Dharma circle. Die here - by-pass the reincarnation wheel. No need to again trade seven deadlies in many ways with the graces. Elderly people make arrangements to live out their twilight years here. They more open to this truly repressive, exhaustive summer heat.

Further along the ghats in this surreal backdrop of death, general disease and decay a cow gave birth. The calf attended- to immediately by animated shop- keepers - the circle of life being in constant motion so easy to believe in such moments, obvious, so lucid, and real. Must be the one animating this particular new life had not died in Varanasi, must have come from elsewhere."   Copyright - jerry gordon - Order your copy now - for more info and details see