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Published: January 8th 2010
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I love this guy. I would buy a thousand air tickets from him. I mean, the place has been charging into the modern age like a sacred bull in a tiffin shop for a decade or two now, and I wasn't entirely sure if I would find India to be a transformed nation, one of glittering shopping malls, orderly traffic, efficient service, and well-to-do locals.
I needn't have fretted - India is, indeed, timeless, and though the modern world has made a smallish dent in the country's character, it certainly hasn't altered its heart.
Yes, every one bar the beggars and poor farmers now has a mobile phone, but they seem to be more for show, than for talking into. You do see the odd unhelmeted gentleman, weaving through the insane traffic whilst shouting into his Nokia, but mostly people seem to be using them to download and play Hindi pop songs.
Yes, cyber technology has well and truly taken hold, but the internet connections are still the same speed and price that they were back in 2001. And even though the
Happy New Year
An auto-rickshaw driver wishes us all well for 2010. bus conductors now have nifty little computerised ticket machines, the buses are still as antiquated and uncomfortable as they ever were.
Yes, India now has about ten 24-hour cable news channels, devoted to subcontinental current affairs, but the hot topics are still the perennial favourites - cricket, corruption, Bollywood, and how crap the Pakistanis are. The only new addition is hysterical coverage of every Indian victim of Australian crime.
Yes, there is a burgeoning middle class, and the number of well-dressed, well-educated and well-monied Indians has definitely increased - but for every 50 million Indians who manage to clamber up a notch in the caste/class system, I would wager a 100 million more are born into the lower end of society - so India feels just as poor, as crowded, and as far from social equality as it did a decade ago.
As I said, India has a timeless quality. The country remains as bewildering, as frustrating, and as charming, as it did when I visited back in 1993, as a grumpy 14-year old, in 1998 as a naive 19-year old, and in 2001-2, as a cocky know-it-all on all matters subcontinental.
Suze and I decided
Pondicherry Sadhu
A holy man blesses me and my camera in exchange for some baksheesh. this time to focus on a place we had never visited before - the south-eastern state of Tamil Nadu, one of the more relaxed and less-crowded provinces of the country, but still home to around 70 million people, countless cows and buffaloes, and more temples, shrines, gopurams, mandirs and sacred linga than you can shake an effigy of Krishna at. Tamil Nadu (TN) is typically Indian in many ways - the fervent Hinduism, the spicy cuisine, the omnipresent moustaches - but is also refreshingly parochial in others. In most of India, you can find a cheap, all-you-can-eat meal known as a thali, served on a steel plate of the same name. Here in TN, the plate is replaced by a single banana leaf, and the food - all six or seven curries, dals, chutneys, breads and rice - is simple slopped onto the leaf in front of you. Sounds awful, but trust me, there is no better way to eat in the spicy south. Also, the language differs here - whereas the north speak predominantly Indo-Aryan languages, with most people using Hindi as the lingua franca, down here the languages are from the unrelated Dravidian group, with Tamil being the
Rock Fort Temple Pilgrimage
Red sari-clad pilgrims ascend the steps toTrichy's Rock Fort Temple main one. So my sixteen words of Hindi have been replaced by about four Tamil words, and plenty of hand gestures.
The trip began with a day or two in Kuala Lumpur, due to the fact that we had purchased the cheapest possible air tickets (with Air Asia) and this meant a sizeable layover in their Malaysian hub. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say, the roti canai was delicious, the Petronas Towers gigantic (although not a patch on Dubai's new monstrosity), and Suze was petrified when I paid for her to hold a hungry hornbill at the Bird Park.
Our entry point into India was the commercial city of Tiruchiripalli, known locally (for quite obvious reasons) as 'Trichy'. One of the joys of South Indian travel is trying, and failing, to pronounce the local place names, and eventually doing what the colonial rulers did during the Raj: settling for a rough, Anglicised approximation. So, Thanjavur becomes Tanjore, Pondicherry becomes Pondy, and Thiruvananthapuram (try saying that after a night on the Kingfishers) becomes the eminently pronounceable Trivandrum.
Trichy was a wonderfully Indian introduction to India after a long absence, with busy, garbage-strewn streets
Banana Leaf Thali
The traditional way to eat in south India...with your fingers, of course lined with chai sellers, tailors, paan-wallahs and tiny concrete stalls selling whatever else you may need for a Maximum Retail price of 10 rupees or thereabouts. On Day One we made a beeline for a dhaba (diner) for the South Indian speciality: whatever you're eating, served on a banana leaf. Just close your eyes as they slap the leaf down and rinse it with the local tap water, savour the dal and sambar and parotha and rice, and pray to Vishnu that the guy doing the serving washed his hands today.
The main highlight in Trichy is the aptly-named Rock Fort Temple, a fortish temple on top of a large rock. As I write this, I am becoming a little templed-out, as Tamil Nadu is very much the temple centre of India, but a week or two ago I found it all quite fabulous. Whatever the structure or history of the temple, or the god/s it is devoted to, there are several things they have in common. First, you have to stow your shoes with a guy out the front, and try to avoid paying for this advertised 'free' service; then you have to pay for your camera, a
Elephant Statue
An elephant and Hero bicycle stand sentinel over the entrance to the Rock Fort Temple nice sneaky way of getting snap-happy western tourists to pay an admission fee; then you have to walk past a tame elephant offering pachydermal blessings (as long as you put a few rupees in his trunk - he will pat you on the head and you will live the rest of your life under Ganesh's watchful and lucky eye). And then you join the throngs to wind through labyrinthine walkways and past shrines and statues, soaking up the ambience as the Hindu faithful complete their
puja and pray, chant and worship.
The Rock Fort Temple had a spectacular view over the city, and across the river you could see the other temple, known locally as Sri Ranganathaswamy, but which I call the 'big temple'. Apart from being quite large, it housed a sadhu (holy man) with the coolest mega-dreadlock I have seen for a while. (I couldn't see him from across the river, by the way, we did actually visit the other temple and saw him in the courtyard there.)
From Trichy we bussed our way to the former French "trading post" (read: colony which the Europeans imposed control over to get access to Indian spices), known once
Rock Fort Temple
The view up to the temple from one of Trichy's bazaars as Pondicherry, but now called Puducherry (as the vogue for eliminating colonial place names continues unabated). Pondy is a charming coastal city, as Indian as anywhere else, except with some beautiful old colonial architecture, and a rocky beach where crowds of Indian tourists flock to buy fairy floss, ice cream, and bhel puri. We hit town on New Year's Eve, so it was a hive of activity, packed with tourists from Chennai and further afield, as local folk painted New Year decorations on their doorsteps or the patch of road in front of their home. That night we ate some of the most delicious snapper we had ever tasted, nicely complemented by the worst wine we had ever drunk, before adjourning to a seafront bar for late night Kingfisher beers. The night just got better, as half a dozen extremely drunk Indian men treated the entire bar to a performance of Bollywood dancing on the main stage. The fact that they were trying to synchronise themselves with the large TV screen showing Indian pop videos did not exactly work in their favour, but they were certainly highly amusing.
We ended the night with some semi-pathetic fireworks on the promenade,
Ambassador
A Hindustan Ambassador, the Indian car still being produced from a Morris model developed over 50 years ago. before being wished 'Happy New Year!' by half the male population of Pondy, all in varying stages of drunkenness. So, a bit like home then...
After Pondy, we headed south to Tanjore, a dusty and bustling town whose main attraction was a very cool World Heritage-listed temple, known
locally as the 'Big Temple', but really called the Brihadishwara. The stunning design and plain sandstone construction made for quite a sight under the setting sun, and was definitely more appealing than the gaudily-painted temples that are more typical of India. I spent my 31st birthday in Tanjore, and what with TN's rather prohibitive attitude to alcohol, I had to make do with a single Kingfisher in a seedy, darkened bar, where every seat was facing toward the Bollywood movie being shown above the bar area.
Our final stop in TN was Madurai, a very hectic city of over a million people, and perhaps the south's most famous and ancient religious centre. The Sri Meenakshi Temple is Madurai's main drawcard, but we were rather disillusioned with the place, as it was neither as beautiful as the Big Temple, nor was it free: non-Hindus get hit with a variety of charges,
Gopuram
The main gopuram, or entrance gate, to Trichy's largest temple and are most definitely not allowed to enter the inner sanctum. Plus I had to dash off to find a piece of cloth to wrap around my offensively non-Hindu and pasty-white lower legs. So not as good as we expected, but still, well, very Indian in its beauty, its tackiness, and its ability to frustrate.
And so, it was on across the Western Ghat highlands, over the border to beautiful Kerala, to continue our short sojourn in southern India. The verdict so far? Same same, but different.
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hello sir
By Vishnu, I can't help but be overcome by flashbacks. You're so right that it doesn't change, and even more right about the nokias. you can almost touch the contradictions with the stick that they use to beat the pachyderms into line with. Nice blog bro, captures that strange damp rotting odour that seems to permeate everything but is somehow vaguely enticing very well. Hope it keeps going well.