The Sunday Market: Think “School of Fish” Meets “Feeding Frenzy”

After going to church on Sunday, the team headed into Pondicherry to peruse the “Sunday Market”, a weekly gathering along “Mahatma Ghandi Road” to peddle pretty much everything you can imagine for pennies on the dollar. It is the “collecting basin” for every knock-off brand manufactured item on the planet, and each vendor simply spreads their wares along the street and then hollers “auctioneer style” to those who pass by in an attempt to get them to stop and look.

For our part, the simple mass of humanity concentrated in a single location was mind-boggling. There were probably 10,000 people or more in each ¼ mile stretch of road (and the road is probably only 20 yards wide to begin with), and negotiating it (or just attempting to either move or keep from having to move) proved about as effective as resisting time or taxes. When in India, you find yourself “going with the flow” more by necessity than choice, because the sheer weight and will of a collective mass of people is irresistible in most instances.

At one section of the street, there was also a Hindu temple that we managed to capture on film. It is included here as well.