Varanasi is the maddening, mysterious nerve center of India's spiritual life. It is also an intense paradigm of modern India's five thousand years of conflict with its fraught but splendid past. This book attempts an unusual exploration of Varanasi's ideas, events and places that make the city so remarkable. Specially, it focuses on its people– the Sanyasis, the priests, the young Banarasis – who sustain and perpetuate the concepts of life and death that animate their city.
