Shedded Illusions of a Young Man by the Ganges 

"The oldest living city in the world".

I met this young man one morning as I was walking along river Ganga in Varanasi (Benaras).
It was the kite festival and less people were working that day, that might be the reason why he came to the ghats early in order to wash his laundry.

He reminded me Samar, the main character of Pankaj Mishra's book," The Romantics".
This book is a variation on Flaubert's ''Sentimental Education,'' though it is not set in France during the 19th century but in India in the 1980's.
Like Flaubert's classic, ''The Romantics'' concerns the adventures of a young provincial who arrives in a big city to seek his fortune and falls in love with an unavailable woman.
Samar is looking back on his youth, those days when he had just arrived in Benares and was trying to decide what to do with his life.
At 19, Samar had never had a girlfriend, had never even flirted with a girl.
In the world he grew up in,''romantic love was looked down upon as a kind of sensual derangement that briefly affected insufficiently acculturated or Brahminized youth and then left them broken and disillusioned soon afterward.''

In ''The Romantics,'' Mr. Mishra has been exploring the clash of cultures in contemporary India.
Like Flaubert, he seems to possess a simultaneous fascination with and wariness of romanticism, and he uses that ambivalence to explore the ways in which people from different backgrounds glamorize foreign cultures, be it Americans romanticizing the mysteries of India or Indians romanticizing the freedoms of the West.
He has written a resonant and highly subtle novel (The New York Times).