The newer city is a cacophony of traffic, noise, pollution and filth, in short, a municipal nightmare with no easy solutions. The amazing thing, though, is that the people of Varanasi take all this in their stride, either because they are born stoics, or congenitally oblivious to the travails of the material world, beyond too much worry about what is wrong today, because, after all, the measure of time is eternal, and much like the millennia-old Ganga, only a speck against the infinite canvas of time.
