Brahmin novices on their way to class in Varanasi. These boys wear a red tilaka (fig.) on their foreheads and are clothed in a saffron-coloured outer garment. This colour symbolizes renunciation and on the cloth of the boy on the right is a red sun-like circle with the ohm sign in its center.

On the back of their heads, at a place known as the bindu chakra, i.e. the ‘circle of drops’, they grow a small tuft of hair called codhumbi (fig.). Brahmins believe that there a fluid is produced, which can become either amrita, the elixir of immortality, or the poison of death.