Watch out for fake brahmin at Pushkar Lake!
 

Warning, do not accept a single flower from anyone around Pushkar Lake. There are FAKE Brahmins(people in India of priest class) hooking people into rituals, and then after a one minute ritual where you put flowers into the water, they proceed to VERY AGRESSIVELY ask for 1000 rupees per family member. They have several of their friends standing right there bullying you even more. Luckily I only had 70 rupees on me, and that's all they got. But a couple sitting close to me who had just arrived in Pushkar 15 minutes earlier, got pretty much robbed for 5000 rupees!

Watch out for the real ones my spouse says. The Pushkar scam is fairly common. Try calling out for the police in Hindi. That seems to back 'em off. But, a few Rupes won't kill you. Once the shock wears off it makes a colorful story. My sis in law loves to tell about the monkey that jumped on & off her in Badami.
Cheers & good travels..

Same scam in Khandagiri caves, Bhubaneswar. Those who didnt buy peanuts for the monkeys were greeted by one jumping on them (and it was a heavy black faced langur, mind you). It cost only Rs 10 to get the monkey off your back (literally ...) :D

Which, you might want to add is almost the same as the English word: "pulis".

A few thousand is not a few rupees. And whether or not you can miss it is beside the point. The being /feeling forced / threatened to hand it over, even if it is only ten rupees is the point.

Yes, it felt like robbery. I actually asked the fake brahmin "Are you robbing me?"" He got really defensive and said I was offending the Hindu religion. Yikes! India has got to have the most convoluted scam artists in the world.

Is there any "real" ones (twice born)?????:confused:;) KK

Exactly! Call the pulis. Athough I heared one bad guy on the street saying it stands for Pretty UseLess In combating Scam, why not to try?

How does one detect a "fake" brahmin ? It not like a "fake" diamond :) I would think in a very caste conscious place like Pushkar (for that matter, any religious place in India, or elsewhere) a brahmin would never allow non-brahmins or shudras to perform and do rituals on behalf of others.

Exactly. Much of the idea of caste is centred around restrictive trade practices. Just because somebody rips you off doesn't mean they weren't "qualified" to do whatever job they did for you!

Interestingly, all dips are not the same. Not all priests are equally holy. So, what price would you - "the grandma" and "ma" place on holy baptismal ritual ? I can assure, it is more monies than you and I can count, be it in shekel or dollars :D

5000, wow...must have been newcomers. I had a real one, asked me for like 400 I gave him 80 and walked away. He even saw me later and was friendly with me, lol

This past Feb, just to indulge a fellow traveler, I had a pandit (known to a common friend from Jaipur) accompany us from the outskirts of the town , and stay with us for good 90 minutes. For this he asked, for Rs 50; and I paid him Rs 50+One Susan B Anthony. :D

I asked him about "fake brahmin" bizniz. He laughed so hard, it was not even funny. As I mentioned earlier, You can fake an O, but you cant fake being a brahmin in that small town for even a newyorkminute :D

The job of priests in any religion is to relieve you of your money. What would they live on otherwise? That doesn't make them fake priests, but rather absolutely normal priests, and so the above-described activities do not make anyone a fake Brahmin. Maybe an overpriced Brahmin, but otherwise typical.

Regarding "fake" brahmin priests, I've had a couple pull the sacred threads out of their shirts to show me! If they get really pushy, I just tell them it's bad karma for them to be so insistent. (which it is! :) )

80 Rs is a lot of money for 1 flower.