Again, an attempt at a magazine style story cut short by word limits and my wanting to show off my photos on the same page. No chance to even mildly give justice to the 2 and a half months I spent in the country, which I fell in love with.
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“Very nice place, very good,” says one of my pupils matter-of-factly, resorting to one of the innumerable catch-phrases that Indian people love so much. I was slightly wary, remembering that I had been told something similar about Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, a Bollywood blockbuster that had proved to be the most painful 3 hours of my life. Nonetheless, I rush over to the bus station with a friend, and get the next state bus out of town, onwards to one of the many spontaneous adventures of my time in India.
I claim it was spontaneous, but in many ways these odd weekend trips out of the city to random exciting locations were entirely predictable. Spend hours on a packed state bus with fascinated Indian people staring and mumbling in Gujarati or Hindi, stumble off to be assaulted by rickshaw drivers, and spend a couple of days getting hopelessly lost in one of the most overwhelming cultural experiences of my life.
This particular trip, to a ruined Muslim city about 50 kilometres northeast of where I was staying at Baroda, was yet another masterclass in unwitting cultural immersion. After reaching the town late at night, we didn’t stand a chance finding the only hotel, but found ourselves accidentally staying overnight in an incredible Jain temple after following an enthusiastic stranger down too many dark alleys. The next day was spent getting lost on a mist-covered mountain as ruined places of worship slowly revealed themselves through the cloud. And in the evening we bumbled our way back to Baroda, a feeling of travelling catharsis ensuring that I would sleep soundly despite the heat that I never quite got used to.
I had ended up in India after taking up an AIESEC internship on a whim. During the weekdays, I spent my time working on a cultural education project called Project One World in a school at Baroda, and while my work at the school was less than I expected, it proved a useful platform for travelling around the subcontinent. I always knew that I could return to free accommodation and food for a minimum of work, meaning I could spend my afternoons, weekends and occasional weeks off to explore to my hearts content.
Developing familiarity with one city also had definite upsides – shopkeepers got to know me and my workmates, rickshaw drivers didn’t try to rip me off as much after I told them that I lived there a few times, and I always had someone to show me something new in the crazy world of extremes that is a modern Indian city. I ate meals in luxurious all-you-can-eat restaurants, and had coffee with Islamic cloth merchants in the old town’s market, just after bombings had rocked the nearby city of Ahmedabad. “This is not Islam”, they repeated after bomb scares had been called in other cities around India. I’d been told not to visit the largely Muslim section of town following the blasts, but went anyway, and rather than militant clerics had found a community that was scaring itself into a self-imposed segregation.
This immersion was one of the most valuable parts of my trip. After the relatively sheltered and chaperoned couple of weeks, I picked up a smattering of Hindi, Gujarati and Arabic, allowing me to venture out and have broken conversations with any number of locals, many of whom seemed absolutely fascinated by my blonde hair and blue eyes. It also helped me understand the absolutely religious nature of India – after almost getting hit by an oncoming elephant following a dodgy overtake in a rickshaw, my driver turned round and grinned at me. “Al hamdu lill’ah”, he shouted back, somehow avoiding the hordes of traffic ahead while looking back at me – “If God wills it”. Every week there seemed to be another Hindu festival, from letting off firecrackers on the beaches of Goa to parading down the streets with giant statues of the elephant God Ganesh. In fact, it is easier to get around in India by temporarily adopting whatever religion you choose, than to attempt to explain that you don’t hold any God at all.
A word of warning though. Things in India don’t happen on time. They happen in time. I spent a significant amount of time in India wondering how anything got done in a country where trains were quite regularly 2 or 3 hours late. This obviously doesn’t lend itself to the well planned and regimented traveller – and any attempt to plan things in advance and to-the-minute were duly decimated by a rickshaw driver who had no idea where the destination was (but remained jovial and willing regardless). However, this can be a rewarding experience in itself, as it is in pressured conditions where the essential resourcefulness of the Indian people comes out. One of the most impressive spectacles I saw was the flooding of an entire city that seemed to carry on regardless. Indian businessmen would lean over the handlebars of the prolific 125cc Honda, and hit the throttle in an attempt to plough through miniature lakes 2 or 3 feet deep. Meanwhile, barely clothed street children sailed down temporary rivers on home-made rafts, and corn sellers on the major roads suddenly switch their commodity of choice to umbrellas. Contrast this with the panic in the UK when we have a couple of inches of snow, and you’ll know what I mean.
Any visit to India is likely to bring out a little of this resourcefulness in yourself. In fact, it’ll demand it. On the upside, when things finally figure themselves out, it always seems completely worth the effort. The key word for travelling in India is ‘yes’. Invited for tea? You might just end up reassuring a spear-toting Sikh that the Large Hadron Collider probably isn’t going to destroy the world when it’s switched on. Watching the fishermen bring in the catch? Give them a hand, and you’ll have friends for life. This way, it’s possible to begin peeling back the layers of tourism that cover India, discovering a culture and way of life that is absolutely dazzling in it’s depth and sophistication, far more than a day at the Taj Mahal could hope to reveal.
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