Moti Bazaar, another one of India’s markets, the Main Street is not more than a mile long and packed with thousands of people each day. This time of year, with Shivaratri fast approaching, the city of Haridwar is multiple times more packed than usual, making it both a sensory hellscape as well as an amazing reminder of just how many people there are in our world. If you’ve ever gotten the feeling that you’re small while looking at the stars, looking at the streets here is a very similar feeling though with a little less time to process it. And, all while being swarmed by every person who could possibly ask you to spend your money.

 Luckily, we had some helpful guides who knew the place. A few of our older friends from Sri Ram Ashram led two groups through the market. Now, if you want to buy bangles, fancy rings or items for worship, it is the best market to go to. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the market for any of those things, so I got to spend my time actually taking things in, while failing to find any Kurtas (the male equivalent of a sari) that weren’t thin and made of cotton. Our friend Neha told us that this was because of the location of the market and the time of year. As for the flow of the market, it is pretty swift. I was honestly really impressed with how slow the second group managed to walk. It’s almost like they stopped to look at every Bangle they saw. We moved our way through the market and I noticed that the shops were basically just repeating with a few variations of course; an alleyway with a huge snack shop, a spice shop with a few powders I’ve never heard of before, and a few with different woodworks. For the most part though, if you’ve walked fifty feet you’ve walked the whole mile or so. The variety wasn’t anywhere near as vast as the streets of Dharamshala though the volume was much higher.

The thought of just how many people are moving through these large markets at all hours of the day is sort of incomprehensible. They just aren’t numbers we are used to thinking about. The human mind can maintain active relationships with about 150 people and perceives almost no difference between 250 and 500 people. In the almost two hours we spent there, we would have seen at least sixteen thousand and that is a low estimate considering the proximity of Shivaratri. The feeling was surreal. -Mordecai Coleman