On top of the usual packing decisions tourists must make—this shirt or that one? a money pouch or a fanny pack? white tube socks or black tube socks?—our intrepid group of travelers from Columbia University had extra considerations to weigh for our recent visit to India.

When a two-week trip entails visits to a dozen holy places, each with different rules regarding appropriate attire of the devout pilgrim, the idea of sensible footwear acquires a new meaning.

From Mathura to Varanasi, almost every site of worship we visited required visitors to enter in a shoeless state as a sign of respect. So first and foremost, shoes must be easy to take off and put back on, a lesson that Ari Paul had learned the hard way from a previous trip to India.

“I’d been to India a year ago, and on that trip I was wearing Doc Martens,” the popular British boots, Paul said. But his boot laces ultimately took too much time to tie and untie.

“At temples, everyone had to wait for me every time and I really held up the group. I really regretted bringing the Doc Martens,” he said. “This time, I was wearing Pumas,” sneakers that Paul said, “you can just slip on really easily.”

At times there seemed to be a cottage industry centered around the protection of visitors’ shoes. Outside some temples and mosques there were stands where visitors could leave their belongings. At the Golden Temple in Armritsar, our group checked in our sandals and sneakers en masse, which attendants placed together in a large dusty jute bag and kept behind a counter.

Mariana Martinez Estens takes off her shoes outside a temple. Again. (Sophia Chang)

But at sites like the Jama Masjid in New Delhi, a couple of local residents sat on stools and kept watch over the assortment of shoes left on the steps outside the mosque. It was an ad-hoc arrangement that Maura Moynihan, daughter of former ambassador to India Sen. Daniel Moynihan, had warned us might result in a few pairs of stolen shoes, but luckily no one lost footwear on this trip.

The shoe guardians do not watch visitors’ belongings just for fun, of course, a fact that Michal Lumsden learned early in the trip while we were in New Delhi. There, she went with a group of students to visit the shrine of Nizamuddin Chishti, a Sufi saint.

“We took our shoes off and there were two little boys out front who were watching the shoes. I thought they were just making sure no one was going to steal them,” she said. “But they demanded that we pay them. I wasn’t going to pay them to get back my shoes. So we walked away and they started yelling at us.”

Like putting on a yarmulke or a headscarf, the simple act of shedding one’s shoes serves both as a sign of respect but also as a preparation to enter a sacred place, Paul noted.

“When you’re taking off your shoes it’s a real reminder that you’re entering another space, and it’s the defining moment between the outside and the holy,” he said. “For actual worshippers and for journalists like us, that moment of taking off your shoes really reiterates the fact that we’re entering a sacred space.”

Other rules were in play, especially for the 14 females in our group. The women had to cover our heads with scarves during trips to Muslim sites, such as our visit to the Darul Uloom Wakf madrassa in Deoband. At the Golden Temple, even the men had to cover their heads, with white cloths offered by temple officials. And at the Jain Temple in New Delhi, all visitors were asked to remove leather items in deference to the Jains, whose belief in nonviolence eschews the use of animal products.

Some of the prohibitions reflected not sacred dogma but modern reality. In Varanasi, we could not bring in electronic equipment to the Sankat Mochan Temple where a recent bomb explosion had killed several people, and we filed past metal detectors in Mathura on our way to Lord Krishna’s birthplace, Shri Krishna Janma Bhoomi.

During our sunrise visit to the Taj Mahal in Agra, tour guides offered visitors slipcovers that resembled shower caps for their shoes to protect the beautiful expanses of white marble. Erik Wander, who had already abandoned the notion of wearing socks with his sneakers earlier in the trip, chose to paddle around barefoot.

“Walking up on the marble with no shoes or socks on, it was nice and cool and smooth. That made me feel a little more in touch with the place,” Wander said.

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Two sikhs sit before the pool surrounding the Golden Temple. (Dikla Kadosh)

In a land of differences—religious, political, economic, and social—India’s history is in some ways defined by murderous conflict. Amritsar is the spiritual center for Sikhism as well as the staging ground for some of the country’s bloodiest battles, and our trip there highlighted the violent legacy borne of a billion people and centuries of colonial rule.

Last night we visited the Golden Temple, known as Sri Darbar Sahib in Sikhism. Though the religion shares many Hindu traditions such as rebirth and dharma, Sikhism was founded in the 15th century as a response to the caste system and focuses on equality. Despite comprising less than two percent of India’s population, Sikhs are known for their disproportionate influence on the nation’s politics and military. The temple is their holiest site.

At the temple, pilgrims performed rituals of purity outside the compound’s white marbled walls. We took off our shoes, washed our hands, covered our heads, and stepped through two shallow pools of water before we could enter the inner courtyards.

Inside, hundreds of Sikhs queued up to enter the Golden Temple, and some bathed in the water that surrounded the building. Nestled inside the protective white walls, the temple shined like the gleaming yolk of an egg.

The temple was built in 1589 in the spirit of unity, and worshippers flow through the doors in each wall. “The meaning of the four walls is people are welcomed from the four corners of the world,” said Jaswinder Singh, the temple’s assistant information official who greeted our delegation. “All are welcomed.”

But the walls of the Golden Temple have also invited bloodshed. In 1984, a Sikh separatist rallied outside the temple in the name of Khalistan, a secessionist campaign for an independent Sikh state. After the separatist locked himself inside the Golden Temple, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent military troops into the temple to kill him. The separatist’s martyrdom led directly to Indira Gandhi’s assassination later that year by two of her own Sikh bodyguards.

We saw another reminder this morning of the high cost of Indian freedom at the Jallianawalan Bagh, a public park in Amritsar where in 1919 a peaceful gathering of 3,000 Indian Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were massacred by British troops. The open field where the victims were gunned down is now a memorial, with potted flowers lining the sidewalks and pillars marking the spot where the soldiers took aim.

On one side of the park, tourists peered into a 20-foot-deep well that 120 desperate souls jumped into, seeking refuge from the gunfire but finding only death. General Dyer, who led the British troops, was later murdered by a Sikh who had witnessed the massacre as a boy.

The site is now a focal point for Sikh pride. “It’s a historical place, and I feel proud,” said Gurpreet Singh, a 23-year-old Sikh who had traveled 250 kilometers to visit Jallianawalan Bagh. “A lot of Indians have sacrificed here.”

Still, the spirit of unity lives on in Amritsar. At the Golden Temple, we watched Sikh men carry the holy book Guru Granth Sahib from the nightly prayer service back to its resting spot, in a ceremony marked by rhythmic song, prayer and reverence. Though women traditionally do not carry the holy text because of its weight, any Sikh man who is able to hustle his way into a prime spot can help transport the book in its golden carriage.

But the Sikh emphasis on "ek oankara"—the idea that God is one—was most apparent in the Golden Temple’s community kitchen, where every day 45,000 worshippers eat as part of the holy experience.

Inside the massive kitchen, we sat in rows on simple jute mats as volunteers slopped lentil stew onto our plates. We humbly cupped our hands to receive bread. At the Golden Temple, Mother India’s embrace was large enough to include 20 visitors from America, and we ate that night in unity.

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“One rule. Do not climb on top of the challah, only inside of it,” Mishi Harari said on a recent morning while standing in front of a 6-foot-long plastic loaf of bread at the Jewish Children’s Museum in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Her listeners, a dozen fourth-grade girls from nearby Yeshiva Flatbush, nodded obediently before clambering all over a huge mock-up of a Shabbat dinner table, one of the museum’s more popular exhibits. Three little girls took turns shimmying through the tunnel in the middle of the giant challah. Other students clustered around a Shabbat culinary video, broadcast on television monitors tucked inside plaster matzoh balls bigger than their heads.

The mission of the museum, located at 792 Eastern Parkway, is no less than to bring alive the traditions, legacy and culture of Judaism through exhibits and child-focused lessons. But to steer their young visitors to the meaning behind the flashy interactive games and activities, the museum relies on the aid of tour guides such as Harari, a 21-year-old Lubavitch Jew from southern California who moved to Crown Heights last fall.

Harari said she tailors her group tours to the visitors’ needs and their existing knowledge of Judaism. Because her current guests receive specialized religious instruction everyday at yeshiva, Harari chose not to dwell on basic knowledge and moved at a quick pace, leaving more time for the fun stuff.

As preparation for the Shabbas dinner table exhibit, Harari first ushered the girls into a darkened hallway for an exhibit called “6 Days of Creation.”

She asked the girls, “What did God create on the first day?”

“Night and day!” several of them replied together. “Good!” Harari said, and pressed a button on the wall that launched an interactive exhibit, showing a sun setting on a television screen.

The private museum, a project of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect, exists far from the raging national debates about creationism, intelligent design and the big bang. There is no question here about who created the world.

Harari and the group moved through the Lord’s creations briskly, in a hurry to get to the payoff of the day of rest.
“What about on the third day?” Harari asked, and pushed a button that launched dry ice mist over a waterfall poster. “Water!” the girls shrieked. “Uh-huh, and dry land and plants. You see those trees and flowers?” Harari said, pointing to a rock pile covered with artificial roses, tulips and carnations. “That means plants.”

As they walked through the hall, one girl looked down at her feet and noticed the stickers on the floor that counted down the days until the day of rest. Pausing over the last sticker that read, “1 day til Shabbat,” Harari pointed to the wall and said, “What do you see going on during the sixth day?”

Clued in by the exhibit’s statue of a large gray sample specimen, one girl in a red sweatshirt shrieked “Elephant!” while others said, “God made animals!”

At the last exhibit, the girls stared raptly at a television screen, where a video played of people moving in fast motion, going to school, work and playing. A zesty fiddle tune accompanied the action. “What are they doing?” Harari asked the students. “The people are living their lives,” one girl ventured.

“They’re working so quickly,” Harari said. In the video, the music slowed down, a calendar flipped to Friday, and a family lit candles and prepared for dinner. “See what’s happening? They’re not going so fast anymore. What do they get?” Harari replied. “A day of rest!” the girls said.

“On?” Harari prompted her charges.

“Shabbat!” the girls said together.

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