Kindle Edition Download to your Nook (eBook) Amazon Author, Claire Krulikowski My Facebook Author Page Category:  Travel Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN-10:  1504040643 Type: Non-Fiction Pages: 144 Copyright: 2006 ISBN-13: 9781504040648 Price: $7.99 (eBook) Walk beside the author in this personal India travel memoir, as Claire Krulikowski follows the call of the Ganges River ("Ma Ganga") to come to her banks and experience life with non-physical eyes. 'Hooks of fear' clawed at author Claire Krulikowski on her first morning's awakening in India, a land she'd never planned to visit. However, in Rishikesh she heard the call of Ma Ganga, the Sacred River, The Ganges, and accepted its enticing invitation to leave everything she knew behind...Diving into the river of life teaming around her, including meetings with lepers, holy cows, swamis, stalkers, wounded monkeys, pilgrims and more, Krulikowski stepped outside her beliefs about how things "should be," trusting life and everything in it! She came to know happiness and peace moment-by-moment. Enjoy the stories in her pleasurable memoir...l          Excerpt "Have you ever done something believing you understood all the reasons for it, only to realize later that there were purposes beyond any you'd previously comprehended? I'd believed I was going to India to help prepare the ashram. I'd thought I was going in order to write articles about this fortuitous dedication ceremony, and I'd planned on writing the final chapters of a biography in a quiet setting. Yet, Spirit had other plans for me...The river is instinctive, sure, and ever faithful to the essence of life. Those wisdoms carried for each of us to drink upon the Ganges waters spring from the source of its existence, which is the source of our own."

Moonlight on the Ganga
"Willa Cather once wrote: "One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and holds fast to the days." Claire Krulikowski went to India for the dedication of an ashram and wound up having her soul enraptured by the Ganges and the town of Rishikesh ("City of the Divine"). This devotionally rich paperback is a collection of spiritual essays about her experiences. Above all, Moonlight on the Ganga is a transformative journey to the sacred center where the author sees with the eyes of the heart — as the Sufis would put it.

Krulikowski's wonder is awakened by the Ganges: "The river flows unceasingly, taking what is given and giving what is needed. Sit and be with it. Let yourself flow with it. Watch it. You'll notice that it never disappears from sight. It will merely round a bend and go beyond that which you, as yet, can see. . . . Watch those people who come to its banks; watch those who come in the blackness preceding every morning's dawn and in the fading light preceding the setting of the evening."

The pilgrim within the author is drawn out in encounters with a sacred cow, a boy with elephantiasis, a curious young man, and a wounded monkey. Krulikowski honestly deals with all the emotions that India evokes including fear, paranoia, awe, fascination, and feelings of bliss. She allows the river to flow within and to take her into the welcoming arms of surprise.

In one of his songs, Van Morrison chants: "I'm a soul in wonder . . . I'm a soul in wonder." It's a fine description of this sacred journey by Claire Krulikowski." (Reviewed by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat; Published in Spirituality & Practice: http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/view/2683/moonlight-on-the-ganga )Reviewed at the book's 1st release in 2003.


Sometimes It's the Journey, Sometimes the Telling
"Readers of Claire Krulikowski's Moonlight on the Ganga will learn an important fact: India is still, at the beginning of this high-wired twenty-first century, a destination for the spiritual seeker. This remains as true for X-gen lost souls, new age soul-searchers, or fusion Asians seeking their roots or shoots as it was for ancient Africans or Tibetan monks. The world has long been beating a path to India's holy speakers. Moonlight on the Ganga is 104 pages of short, compelling chapters that form a very readable account of one woman's journey into the whirlwind experience that is Indian spiritualism.

Moonlight on the Ganga chapters move the readers at a fast clip through the varied experiences of the autobiographical journey of transformation that the subcontinent is famous for. Each chapter is introduced with a clever quote, some of which I have copied and placed over my writing desk. Thirteen in all, these quick views into people and places also delve into the author's experience of the sights and sounds of "exotic" daily practices of faith.

Remember that India is the land that stumped Alexander the Great. Herman Hesse spent time in India in 1910. His Siddhartha was published in Germany in 1922, only to become a major cultural influence in the U.S. in the sixties. Henri Michaux spent a short eight months in India and wrote a book, A Barbarian in Asia, that would have him labeled racist by some for many years to come. Christ is said to have spent his mysterious years there. If Einstein is right that time is relative, then nowhere is that more apparent than in India. Krulikowski finds out early and repeatedly that in this land, things are not what they seem. While she is not always sure how to interpret what she sees, her saving grace is she goes slowly and gently and is not quick to pass judgment, other than the expression of her utter joy of being there. Fair enough. She's come far enough.

The word Ganga, pronounced with two hard g sounds, is the Indian name for the river Ganges. This is the most holy river in India. The river courses through Benares, the city full of temples and ghats and steps and sounds of prayers and smells of incense, which makes for much of the book's setting. It forms the current of Krulikowski's book, carrying the reader through a series of sights, sounds smells, and conscious evolutions whether or not you admit it. Vats of boiling milk steam street-side in the morning air and their smell mixes with the "bad fuel" of the rickshaws.

The author also travels to other spots on the Ganga such as Rishikesh. Sleep is dashed out of jet-lagged brains by devotional music that blares at sunrise. At one point a 'nutritionist' advises our traveler to drink only the water from the river. It's from drinking too much purified water, too many chemicals that westerners are becoming so sickly this 'expert' claims. Our traveler listens with believers' ears to the words as they are spoken in the sweet cadence of the accent that she traveled so many miles to hear. Lucky for us all though she does choose to drink only cola and bottled water.

In the chapter Seeking Higher Ground, she is part of an encounter with an injured wild monkey. Now, this is a scenario not possible in very many places at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Where are there towns that accommodate the free range of wild animal within the constraints of its streets? (Quite frankly the cohabitation with other members of our animal kingdom is what I miss most when I return from my trips to the subcontinent.) The monkey is a young adult, male. He was healthy before he bit into an electrical wire. Soon a crowd forms around the fallen beast and you have what you often have, a tamasha. The power dynamics between men and women, between tourists and locals, between animals and humans that ensues would delight any sociologist or novelist. What in the U.S. would most likely have been officiously settled by a simple badge and a bullet, in India grows into a session of psychic humming equivalent to a reiki session for a suicidal monkey.

Throughout the book we meet many souls journeying: not only the author, not only tourists from outside of India, but Indians also. We meet them and we are treated to insights that make up some lovely portraits. In the chapter Conversations on the Sands of Time, we meet a beggar who turns out to be a pilgrim, a fellow seeker, someone whose words the author feels the need to document. Reading further, this "simple man" becomes quite obviously a member of the Indian bourgeoisie.

At times the language in the book is quite poetic. There are moments where it is uneven and almost dizzying in its enthusiasm. Still, you want to forgive the text for its overreach in the face of such newness. As with any traveler's vision, it's one perspective in a myriad of choices. However, I certainly am glad for the direction that Claire Krulikowski chose to point her travel lens.

Here, I have to state the obvious. India is more than the spiritual. This statement is made in response to the unfortunate history of the world. The common misery of colonialism and the anthropologisitic imaginaire that haunts us still, whereby all sexuality was assigned to the African continent and all spirituality was deposited in Asia. Nevertheless, I have traveled enough to state that India is hot when it comes to the spiritual. It's a good bang for your spiritual buck. You can find ashrams and swamis and mystics and have an actual, honest-to-goodness consciousness-expanding adventure rather easily.

Travel books often reveal as much about the author as they do about the places visited. Having traveled into spiritual India, I am pleased to see that Claire Krulikowski brings to her work a certain sophistication and maturity as well as a sensitivity that is human and politically correct without becoming rigid or idealistic and indianistic or hindu-philic. (I take upon myself the presidential liberty of vocabularizing, also called Bushing.) However, it is her first visit to India. She is not claiming to be an expert. This gives freshness of perspective, but sometimes at the cost of mistaken interpretation of information.

Case in point: As an Indian woman, when I read about that pilgrim described above in Sands, it was so clear to me that the man was presenting a class argument from the upper-class perspective. This is complicated in a country that has ignored a huge poverty problem for essentially five decades. He probably owned factories. In some way or another, he likely exploited Indian labor to get foreign contracts. He might have been a Thakur. He is one who is doing devotional duty just as would any Mafioso who goes to Mass and prays. Krulikowski can't get away from seeing him as a gentle Hindu, possibly an angel. Well, that did have the bonus of getting us this dialogue: "America must run country, (India!, my exclamation point.), manage factories. America has machines and America will make things better for us." Only one kind of Indian talks that way. Thank you, Claire, for letting us hear what your "angel" has to say. One finds all types of people on the rounds of temples and cathedrals and holy sites in India.

For those of us inclined to seek things more elusive than the three dimensions of beauty, things commonly referred to as "spiritua,l" or those of us who have an attachment to India's spirituality, Claire Krulikowski's Moonlight on the Ganga is a worthwhile read. While it may not offer any answers, and its interpretations are at times difficult for this reader to abide, the visuals were well worth the ticket price. If you don't have the ten C notes for the flight at the ready for your own spiritual journey to the land of mother Ganga, take the armchair option. Get some chai. Start here. Enjoy." (Reviewed by Poonam Ssrivastava ; http://www.tribes.org/web/2006/08/19/moonlight-on-the-ganga-reviewed-by-poonam-srivastava)


Moonlight on the Ganga
"[A spiritual journey that takes place in Rishikesh on the Ganges River, home to many seekers & ashrams. The author does a good job of illuminating the experience of independent travelers - trying to be open to a very different culture, but struggling with wariness of strangers and differences that we cultivate in our culture, where we think WE are the ones in control." (Reviewed in TV's "Passport to Adventure" - http://www.passporttoadventure.com/travel-books/adventure-travel-books.shtml