Taking the piss

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In Europe, you can find plenty of information about India in up-market travel magazines or in glossy brochures in travel agents. They will invariably tell you that "Incredible India" is an assault on the senses: the light, the colours, the sounds, the tastes, above all the smells. The smells are an exotic blend of spices, temple incense, tropical fruit, and so on and so on. Well, it is perfectly true that India is an assault on the senses, but all those fancy magazines and brochures are being a bit economical with the truth. Especially when it comes to the smell: they are lying. In actual fact, after nearly 4 months of travelling in India, I regret to report that the dominant smell here is an exotic blend of excrement, open sewers, and stale urine. And of all these elements, it is the urine that really gets up your nose in the end - that pungent whiff of ammonia can be quite overpowering.

We were introduced to this phenomenon at an early stage, at our first hotel in Delhi. This hotel was situated in a relatively quiet cul-de sac, actually an alleyway. At the mouth of this cul-de-sac was an open public urinal where the large local male population would relieve themselves on a more-or-less continuous basis. Every time we entered or left the hotel, we had to run the gauntlet of this overpowering stink. No matter how long we held our breath, we could never get far enough past the thing before having to take a gulp of air laced with perhaps 100 parts per million of ammonia, which is a lot. Strangely enough, the local population seemed to be oblivious to this stench. This was illustrated by the fact that next to the urinal was a tea stall, and directly opposite, a street vendor selling grilled chicken. Despite being within 2 metres of the urinal, both establishments were doing a thriving trade, which created a crush of customers at the scene, thereby hindering our efforts to get past as quickly as possible. Inevitably there would be a motorbike or an autorickshaw coming the other way, so that we would sometimes be obliged to take a deep breath just at the most obnoxious location.

Maybe you will think that we were just unlucky with our choice of hotel. But this baptism of piss in Delhi turned out to be merely an appetiser to the main course of stale urine in the rest of Incredible India. Because it turns out that the large local male population does not confine itself to urinals - in fact it prides itself on spreading it about. The use of a urinal is the exception rather than the rule. No place is sacred. Every wall, every alley, every alcove, every doorway, every lamppost is a potential target, in the towns of Ajmer, Pushkar, Bikener, Jaipur, Bhuj, Ahmedabad, Varanasi - even the Disneyfied town of Udaipur is not safe. You can hardly turn a street corner in any of these cities without being confronted by the unwelcome spectacle of several men spraying it up the wall, sometimes just metres away from a proper public toilet facility. I tried to figure out the reason for this behaviour. Maybe is a territory thing - every male desperately trying to mark out his own territory in this overcrowded country. But one thing is for sure - those glossy magazines and brochures, when they talk about the sensuous and heady smells of Incredible India, they are just taking the piss.

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Comments

[maja]

What a reality check. I never imagined that it could be that bad. Thanks for the warning. But I am still planning to travel to India, nothing will stop, not even the piss. :-)

[anilbaree]

As far as pissing in India is concerned, I would like to inform you that even the metropolitan cities of India including the capital of the country is not spared. This uncanny behavior of pissing at public places is an age old phenomena increasing day by day. This is a blot of the face of tourism when travelers like you visit India. I guess that you might have stayed somewhere around Paharganj but there are other relatively better place at same budget range hotels. I wish that when you visit next time take care while selecting hotel. At last but not the least I would like to summerise India as "love it or hate it but you can not ignore it " Can you ???????