I’ve been travelling to India once or twice a year since 2003. I haven’t seen that much of the country as I like staying in one place and not moving about too much.
For the first couple of years I mostly travelled down South and stayed in the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe which is near Mysore. More recently I’ve been travelling North to Varanasi and staying in with the faithful in Sarnath for a month at a time.
Sarnath is an important Buddhist pilgrimage destination and from October through to March it is filled with lots and lots of interesting people.
The guy on the right in the bottom photo is Christopher Titmuss. I met him and his companions a few times at a tea stall I frequented opposite the Maha Bodhi Society of Sri Lanka’s Temple (Mulagandhakuti Vihara) in Sarnath. The stall owner had real coffee, used an Italian coffee makers and so made halfway decent coffee — a rare thing in India — he also sold nice biscuits.
Anyway, I didn’t know Christopher Titmuss was an Insight Meditation teacher until the third day we we met — I’ve been known to be a tad slow at times for the penny dropped.
He was another reason Sarnath was all a’buzz — he had a big teachathon happening with (I guess) a few hundred of his followers and when you added that to the general Buddhist throng that comes and goes through Sarnath, it seemed to make the place especially alive.
