From Ian Strathcarron's "The Indian Equator":
The biggest difference between the Benares of the 1890s (and the 1970s) and the Varanasi of the 2010s is the sheer volume and density of the population and its newly manic activity. When Twain came here the population was well under half a million; by the time of my first visit it had rounded up to half a million; now, although no one is sure let alone counting, it is nearly a million and a half. It’s not just that the numbers have trebled but that their activity has trebled again, making them Mark Twain-era dense by a factor of nine. Twain may have thought it “as busy as an ant-hill” but the ants now have aroused ambition and internal combustion engines and have lost any semblance they might have had of ant-patience or ant-discipline. What was a sleepy town on a holy river, where the spirit and presence could walk in peace and reflect where they stood, has become a bustling, jangling city where any attempt to walk in peace will be met by a blare of furious horns from buses, cars, motor bikes or auto-rickshaws and any attempt to reflect where you stand will attract swarms of touts and hustlers selling you just about anything that you didn’t know you didn’t want. Varanasi now is just like the rest of India—only more so; an India without the high levels of organized predictability.

There is no opportunity for all these busy bustling horn-tooting newcomers and their attendant army of supplicants to spread out, even into shanties, as they have in every other city. Varanasi lies on only the west bank of the Ganges for the very sound reason that to have the misfortune to die on the east bank will hasten your return as a donkey. Twain thought this rather unfair on donkeys: “The Hindoo has a childish and unreasoning aversion to being turned into an ass. He would gain much—release from his slavery to two million gods and twenty million priests, fakirs, holy mendicants, and other sacred bacilli; he would escape the Hindoo hell; he would also escape the Hindoo heaven. These are advantages which the Hindoo ought to consider; then he would go over and die on the other side.” So far no Indians have taken Twain’s advice and the million and a half inhabitants are squeezed into the west bank and further squeezed because the agricultural land around the city is highly fertile and vote-buying farming subsidies mean it is worth more as farm land than shanty land, which would otherwise be its fate. The result is that the one million and a half plus souls crammed into the mythological wonderland of the Benares of old India spend all day, every day, as busy as those ants in an ant-hill in the economic chaosocracy of the Varanasi of new India.