Wow Place #292: Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, India
I have a confession to make. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve sort of lost my passion for traveling in India. It was different when I was younger, when the whole world was my oyster and I couldn’t believe I was allowed to visit an exotic place like India, where every day is a parade. Of late, though, I find myself more impatient with the country’s consistent lack of sidewalks, lack of traffic lanes and traffic laws…its incessant burr of taxis and tuktuks hawking their services, even after I’ve repeatedly said NO! You get the idea. India is truly a country where you cannot be a spectator; it comes right at you. And at this point in my life, I have to admit I prefer places populated by kind, courteous, organized folks who let me “chill.”
And yet…every time I’m ready to write off India as a country of just too much chaos/too many hassles, I stumble upon a wonder like the Jantar Mantar and find myself forced to reevaluate.
Completed nearly 300 years ago by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Sing, the founder of Jaipur, the Jantar Mantar is an astronomical observatory like no other. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the monument – one of five observatories the Maharaja constructed across India (in Jaipur, Delhi, Ujjain, Mathura and Varanasi) — features 19 astronomical instruments, including the world’s largest sundial. Its instruments operate in each of the three main classical celestial coordinate systems: the horizon-zenith local system, the equatorial system and the ecliptic system. The instruments measure time, predict eclipses, track the location of major stars as the earth orbits the suns, ascertain the declinations of planets and determine celestial altitudes. And they do all this via proper positioning and the precise capturing of shadows.
You wouldn’t know any of this, however, without a guide or guidebook. Upon walking into the Jantar Mantar complex, my first thought is, “This looks like a skateboard park.” All the “instruments” are made of primarily pale yellow or white cement. Some of them present as inverted bowls. Others resemble stairways to nowhere. If I didn’t know this was a world-class, historical observatory, I’d probably dismiss it as a contemporary sculpture garden – and not a very good one at that. Upon closer examination, though, I start to see the care that has gone into each object: the carefully inscribed words and symbols, the thin metal wires placed “just so,” the tiny tick marks measuring out time not just in minutes but even in seconds! This is a remarkable place…sort of a concrete Stonehenge…right in the center of Jaipur’s crazy traffic miasma.
India is not the easiest place to travel. I firmly believe the streets are not safe to walk on. There a lot of hassles to navigate. It’s very easy to contract a case of “Delhi-belly” here. And yet – no matter how many times I travel in India, the wonders just keep coming. The caves of Ellora and Ajanta in Aurangabad. The dazzling palace in Mysore. The Taj Mahal! And now, the Janta Mantar. Yeah, I’ll be back to India. It’s like the movie The Godfather. Every time I think I’m out, India reels me back in.
(So much of life seems to be about striking the right balance between challenging yourself and avoiding toxic situations. If you play it safe and stay in your comfort zone, where will that get you? But does that mean you should purposely go into situations in which you’ll be miserable, all for the sake of “personal growth?” To be honest, I have no idea how to navigate these two poles. Sometimes you just feel up for a challenge—other times, you need to get yourself out of a place, now! I will say that when you *have* committed to, say, visiting a place like India, or starting a new job, or entering into a new relationship, it does seem best to give it a fair shot and see what you can learn there… to stick around, check in with yourself constantly, and appreciate the good aspects of the situation. You don’t have to stay there forever. And maybe, just maybe, this environment has something valuable to teach you. At least for a little while.)