The Nano Diaries One car’s low-emission journey across the Indian Subcontinent

A lot can happen over coffee

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:56:38 +0200

THIS ENTRY IS PART OF A SERIES OF NOTES FROM MY UPCOMING BOOK THAT FORM A WORK IN PROGRESS....

About halfway along the SH17 (a State Highway not nearly as fearsome as some of its associates we had previously encountered) that runs the 150km between Bengaluru and Mysore, there appeared a vision. At first I didn’t quite believe it and drove straight past until, about 500 metres down the road, my brain caught up with my eyes and I pulled up onto the porridgy cement of the so-called (by me) hard shoulder, right behind a man fixing his motorbike. Crouching in a wife-beater and lungi and brandishing a wrench over his reclined motorcycle, he stared at us with a disbelief reserved only for those witnessing the landing of the Mothership while chewing on something that I reckoned would eventually end up on the side of the road in a red splat.

Abhilasha and I were beginning to grow accustomed to this type of unabashed ogling, though neither one could be entirely sure which of us the attention was directed at. I took some comfort in the fact that from a distance at least the glass of the windshield served to obscure my identity. That much was obvious from our experiences in city centres where I would often be on the receiving end of a volley of horns emanating from frustrated drivers who were unable to pass an imbecilic Nano dawdling in the middle of the road looking dumbfounded for a road sign, somewhere to pull a U-turn or the entrance to a wormhole that might instantly transport her to another, more less congested dimension. But when the aggressors drew closer to get a look through the windows at the cretin behind the wheel who was thumbing her iPhone with one hand and trying to read directions off a piece of paper in the other, the horns stopped and there was just eerie silence blanketed by a snowstorm of shock.

(I had once encountered a little girl of about seven hitching a lift from one of the villages that we stormed through during the rage of Kolhapur-gate. Her abject cuteness immediately vetoed my No Hitchhikers Rule, and I pulled up beside her. She came towards the car as I rolled down the passenger window to greet her. She looked up at my face, which, judging by her expression, might as well have been green, scaly and covered in festering warts, and stopped dead in her tracks. I extrapolated from the speed and urgency of her retreat towards the nearest building, during which she nearly forewent her satchel, that there might not be too many people matching my description passing through that village on a regular basis. Either that, or I bore striking resemblance to some local Baba Yaga legend of a witch who ate children and rode around in a yellow vehicle that may or may not have had chicken legs instead of button-sized tyres.)

This time on the SH17, however, I figured it was Abhilasha that was drawing the attention. She purred coquettishly as the motorbike man stood up and slowly paced around us at a distance that was borderline intrusive, according to my button-down English sensibilities.

‘You’re such a flirt,’ I berated her, then went back to the business of what it was that had brought us to an emergency stop here in Bumblefuck, Karnataka in the first place. Half a kilometre down the road behind us, I had spotted in a passing flash the unmistakable red-and-white logo of India’s leading coffee house chain, ‘A-lot-can-happen-over-coffee’ Café Coffee Day. For the first time in over 1,500 km of highway, branded coffee had made an appearance.

Now: on the surface of things and to the readers of my blog, I was an adventurer, a hardened thrill-seeker, an intrepid explorer blazing a trail where road trippers before had only tentatively tiptoed through. By all rights I should have, in the spirit of derring-do, been making my own coffee by boiling rainwater over a portable gas stove and using Abhilasha’s own weight to crush locally sourced Fairtrade coffee beans by driving over them. But the reality of my daredevil existence was actually a dull daily craving for creature comforts and habitual foodstuffs like coffee and toast. The procurement of coffee, usually a staple of road trips and a mandatory element in any protracted period of highway driving, had thus far proved a bit complicated. A child of the corporate coffee generation, I had in the last few years - I presume in exact accordance with the expansionist Machiavellian plans of Howard Schultz - developed quite a taste for milky caffeinated concoctions that were loaded with cream and ice cream and chocolate sauce and whose names contained several syllables and ending in ‘puccino’ or ‘chiato’.

This addiction to fancy coffee, it became very clear to me a few hours after landing in Mumbai, was not a situation that was going to sustain on the subcontinent. India is a nation of tea lovers that drinks almost ten times as much tea than coffee: Indian chai, boiled in milk and loaded with enough masala, cardamom and sugar to make the Gingerbread Man recoil in horror, could almost appear to be more ubiquitous than water. And although a growing number of Indians, especially students and urban yuppie types, have recently been turning to coffee as their preferred caffeine kick, as a whole the country still consumes about 70 times less coffee per capita than the US.

I heaved Abhilasha’s wheel as far round as it would go and, much to the dismay of her bike mechanic admirer, crossed over the road and headed back towards the promise of coffee with bells on.

Café Coffee Day’s stainless steel and whitewashed wooden façade stood out like a well-polished thumb among the other refreshment opportunities we had passed since Bengaluru: grocery stores, usually embedded in villages or on the outskirts of towns, sold things like long ribbons of sachet shampoo, hair dye and chewing pan, as well as grubby sun-warmed bottles of Thumbs Up, Limca or Mirinda and packets of Lays crisps caked in a layer of grime. Sometimes there was a chai-wallah nearby, stirring bubbling milk in a huge vat embedded into a cart, invariably with a small coffee stand on the go next to the chai on a contrasting scale of both size and price that spoke tomes about the Indian preference for tea over coffee. If the stand was anywhere near a ‘hotel’ (ie, a roadside doss-house that would make an excellent set piece in any Bollywood version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre) then there would also be the option of a stinking hole in the ground behind a decrepit wooden door on screaming hinges masquerading behind the misnomer ‘toilet’. The aforementioned latrine would then invariably reap horrible associative consequences on the already questionable sickly sweet shot of milk coffee served in a near-melting plastic thimble, as I struggled to try and open a blackened packet of Magic Masala Lays. Not a great combo.

But all of these images evaporated as I entered the cool, air-conditioned interior of Coffee Day and felt like I’d finally found my wormhole. I had left India and been transported to Miami Beach, where I was met by a menu that sounded more like a cocktail list at the Delano: Tropical Icebergs, Kappi Nirvanas, Iced Eskimos and Cold Sparkles danced before me in seductive girl-band formation, while cheese-corn and paneer tikka sandwiches beckoned me in earnest from under the glass of the counter. No matter that their snow white slabs of bread looked like they’d been cut from a hunk of kitchen sponge; no matter that their innate sogginess had been greatly enhanced by a stint in the microwave that left them less hot and more salmonella-tepid: they were the first sandwiches I’d eaten in over a month and they tasted like they were from Annapurna’s own kitchen. The subsequent Choco Frappe, chosen on the grounds of its claims of extra chocolate and extra ice cream, was equally satisfying, though I suspected that the combined fat and calorie intake might well cancel out the desired effects of the caffeine and leave me sleeping at Abhilasha’s wheel on the roadside for the viewing pleasure of every curious bike mechanic between here and Mysore.

The door of the café opened and a couple of guys in sunglasses, baseball caps, and white tees came swaggering in. They started ordering in very loud Hindi from the perplexed youth behind the counter who was already more than traumatized by the experience of me asking him whether today had been a good day for business. One of the men then switched to very loud English:

‘You don’t speak Hindi?’ the first man demanded of the boy in a voice that would have made a General stand to attention. The kid shook his head.

‘But you speak English?’

‘Yes,’ he squeaked. ‘A little.’

‘Well then hurry up and give us two cappuccinos, a chicken burger and a brownie. Be quick.’

The kid set about nervously banging various objects behind the counter and as something large and metallic clattered to the floor in an ear-splitting ring-down of clinks and clangs I heard the men discuss in louder tones of exaggerated lamentation the fact that Coffee Day employees in the state of Karnataka couldn’t speak Hindi.

I felt strange. On the one hand: blissfully at home in the cold, calorie-laden environment of processed food and beverages, and on the other like I was in the café equivalent of White’s Club, paying ten times over the odds for stuff the folk outside would most likely balk at, and in the company of over privileged twits.

But despite inflated prices, substandard sandwiches and occasional ratfink clientele, the coffee chain business was burgeoning in India. The first Starbucks had yet to open (and when it does it will be in partnership with none other than India’s Most Astute Businessman – who else?), although there were already a few coffee chains treading water in urban areas. Barista, Lavazzo, Gloria Jeans and Costa Coffee had all made incursions into the market, but the most successful so far had been the homegrown Café Coffee Day (or CCD to all you acronym fiends). Started by businessman VG Siddhartha (no relation to Buddha, I think), CCD opened its first branch in Bangalore back in 1996, when VG was already sitting on 10,000 acres of coffee plantations in Karnataka that had just recently been released into the private sector by a government bent on liberalizing its economy. This meant that VG was simultaneously the buyer, supplier and middleman of his own coffee beans, a multitasking feat that ensured CCD could undercut the foreign competition. Since its genesis, the brand had exploded into over 1,000 branches nationwide, including 30 roadside outlets that were a form of experiment to see how the highway coffee model would fare.

From the scene that was playing itself out before me, the future didn’t look too bright. The boy behind the counter had warmed up a chicken tikka sandwich instead of a burger and had only realized at the last moment that he was out of brownies. The botched delivery of his bumbling apology in broken English to the two men in hats and glasses was received with a reddening of faces and a shaking of heads, followed by a volley of verbal displeasure that ended in grudging acceptance of the sandwich and a cube of chocolate cake.

Deciding it was time to make an indignant exit, I made a quick dash for the stick-figure lady whose presence at the back of the café suggested tantalizingly that I might be in for a western-style loo. I was right. And I have to say that the experience of that particular pine-fresh porcelain throne, along with the supplied toilet roll, turbo hand drier and hand sanitiser that was offered in addition to soap, was probably the zenith of my CCD experience. That, and the glare I shot the two baseball caps on my way back out to the parking lot.

Not without my Nano

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 07:17:21 +0100

It took Reliable Cargo Movers and Packers exactly 8 days to transport Abhilasha from Delhi to Chennai, where she then sat for a further three days in the muddy parking lot of a Mr Sharma somewhere on the outskirts Chennai on the road to Bangalore.

After the car arrived in Chennai, frequent telephone calls were exchanged between the Hindi-speaking Sanjeev, myself, an English friend in Chennai by the name of Martin, his Tamil-speaking assistant Chitra and Mr Singh, owner of the transport company in Delhi.

The result was a promised delivery time that kept being put back by several hours each day, and a confused cacophony of orders and opinions that seemed to conclude with Mr Sharma asking for a further 500 rupees for delivering the Nano to my door. Though not a great deal of money (about $10 US) his proposal nonetheless irked me in the light of having signed a contract with Mr Singh in Delhi stating that included in the price of his transport service was the no-hassle bonus of door to door delivery.

According to the paperwork, there should have been no problem. But there was.

Chitra hung up the phone from one of several high-octane exchanges with Sanjeev and shook her head hopelessly. “I think you should go over there and secure the vehicle yourself. This man is not reliable.”

I drew a deep breath while Thor went outside to haggle a price with a rickshaw driver to take us what felt like halfway to Bangalore, actually 20km out from where we were. We settled on 400 rupees and drove for an hour before arriving at Papanchatram, an ugly industrial outskirt of one of India’s least attractive cities.

Mr Sharma greeted me with unexpected ebullience from behind his desk and began to apologize most profusely for not delivering the car. I asked the reason he was not able to get it to me, and he gave me none, just kept on repeating the words ‘SO sorry, SO sorrrrry’ with knotted eyebrows and puppy dog eyes.

I felt better when a pair of headlights flashed outside his office and went outside to find Abhilasha purring contentedly. Barring a filthy behind that must have resulted from muddy roads in heavy rain, she was in one piece and raring to go. Mr Sharma gave me the keys, I gave him the outstanding transportation fee, minus the 400 rupees I had paid the auto rickshaw to take me there.

He screwed up his face, ‘Nooooooo, madam, please, you pay me the full amount,’ exhibiting a sudden leap in his standard of English that had mysteriously failed him when I was trying to negotiate Nano delivery over the phone.

‘Please madam, I cannot this, I am small business... So sorry.’ I felt a pang in my heart at exactly the spot he had aimed to hit, but found myself unrelenting, somehow convinced of the rectitude of my position.

‘I’m sorry too,’ I replied, with a calm and confidence that took me by surprise, pointing out the bit in the agreement that stated the car was to be delivered to my address and explaining that since that had not happened for three days now, I had been forced to come and get the vehicle myself. The simple argument was, I should not be paying over the hefty agreed price for his -dare I use the oft-uttered Indian insult?- laziness.

The rationality of my argument bounced off him with impressive verve as he resumed his emotional line of defence, invoking the wrath of his boss, his wife, and other people who clearly make his life difficult.

All the while, Thor was sitting behind me brewing, his mouth zipped under my express instruction. In India, where I try to endorse the delicate Ming Vase of diplomacy, my other half has a tendency to resort to the raging bull reflex, threatening to destroy the fragile china of my negotiation. This was one situation that I wanted to play through to the end without creating a scene or raising any anger, and I could see poor Thor out of the corner of my eye, fuming and raring to take the money I had already handed over to Sanjeev and just leave.

Sanjeev was also quite acutely aware of ‘my husband’s’ rising temperature, and would cast him a nervous glance between verbal prostrations in my direction.

After about 20 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing apologies and explanations, as well as yelling down the phone at Mr Singh in Delhi, with who’s company Sanjeev puzzlingly denied all association, we tentatively settled on the deal that I was not going to pay the 400 rupees and if he wanted it, Sanjeev should petition Mr Singh (who, incidentally, earlier advised me, ‘Do not pay an extra penny to that man).

In a moment all argument stopped and it seemed that defeat had been conceded. I stood up to leave under the crushed gaze of Sanjeev who had tried to barter me down to 200 rupees as a last-ditch effort.

I went outside, waiting to be followed by the office staff, but no one did. Just as I was revving up the Nano, Sanjeev did emerge with another man. He came over to my side of the car. ‘This is my driver,’ he explained. ‘Will you give him 100 rupees baksheesh?’

I looked over at Thor then leant in towards Sanjay and whispered in conspiratorial tones, ‘If you ask me for money one more time, my husband is going to get very, very angry.’ Sanjay flashed me an understanding look that I couldn’t tell was more fearful for his own safety or for mine. He immediately relented and went back inside. I did a wheelspin in the mud and got back on the highway to Chennai, with a nasty sense of post-confrontational ickiness in my gut.

I kept reminding myself that Sanjeev had not kept up his side of the bargain, and that it was only fair that he take a cut for that, but each time I thought of him, I envisaged his tragic-comical pleas, imagined him taking an earful from an irate boss (who, let’s face it, probably doesn’t even exist) and felt a pang of sympathy for him and regret for my actions.

Still, I put my resolution there down to misplaced maternal outrage: for a moment, when Sanjeev seemed so far away in an unknown suburb of this unknown city, being slippery with negotiations, I realized that he had the power to whisk away Abhilasha, never to be seen again. The trip to Papanchatram had been a rescue mission of sorts, and I had come back with my prize, a bit like Liam Neeson in the film Taken. Screw with my Nano, screw with me, is what I ought to have said to Sanjeev before setting off a series of explosions and driving off in a cloud of smoke.

Auqaat and the Indian road power pyramid

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 07:46:19 +0100

In an essay entitled ‘Power: The Unexpected Triumph of Democracy’ that forms the second chapter of his book, ‘Being Indian’, Pavan K Varma puts forward some food for thought in the form of an insight into the power games at play in modern-day India. In a country for millennia in the grip of a rigid, and functioning, hierarchical caste system, ‘the mentality of a stratified society is very much in evidence in everyday life,’ he writes.

‘When two Indians meet as strangers,’ the author explains, ‘the encounter is often a duel to ascertain the auqaat of the other.’ The word auqaat apparently means something like ‘status’. However, Varma goes on to warn that ‘if a person has to be asked what their auqaat is, the question is already an insult.’ Complex stuff, especially to an outsider, a foreigner and an out-caste like myself. However, thanks to my indigenous yellow automobile, I have had the chance to experience India’s status games played out on a daily basis on its roads.

Just like in society where money, family and connections contribute to one’s standing, or auqaat, so on the roads there are certain rules that set road users apart and give some vehicles divine precedence over others. Well, actually, two rules: size and speed.

Since I sent Abhilasha packing on a truck trip across the country in the company of a gaggle of shiny new Marutis, I have been forced to interact with the bedlam that is public transport here in India. Yes, readers, life without a Nano means only one thing and that’s the dreary necessity of having to call cabs, haggle with rickshaw drivers and (horror of horrors) try and make head or tail of local train timetables.

Call me a bluff old traditionalist, a boring English fart, but what’s wrong with just switching on the meter? Why, every time before embarking upon a rickshaw journey do you have to stand there and play the game of halving the first quote you are given, then listening to drawn-out pleas of business is bad and I’m giving you the best price I possibly can, half-walking off, before finally being pulled back into a price that you’re nonetheless sure is twice what you’re supposed to be paying. It’s so very very tiresome, and all along the disenfranchised meter sits and stares at you from behind the drivers’ seat, gathering dust but suggesting hope of an alternative, smoother-run, sort of German-Swedish universe.

Alas, it’s not to be. I read about a recent uprising in Bengaluru where an online protest group came together in an attempt to defy meter-fiddling, penny-pinching rickshaw wallahs by staging a commuter strike and refusing to take a rickshaw for the whole day. Despite a 40,000 Facebook following (that’s just a few more than the Nano Diaries...) the initiative was not as successful as the organisers hoped, and in the end they got very little coverage. But it’s the thought that counts, the attempt to reset the scales of justice, to come forward and, according to the Meter Jam website, say No, ‘because they say No to you whenever they want.’

But then, riding in an auto, I begin to understand the notion of pecking orders. Like spiraling cycles of abuse in families, rickshaw drivers mistreat their customers as they themselves are vilified in turn at just about every opportunity.

A rickshaw’s auqaat is fairly low down on the power pyramid of Indian roads. There may be oodles of them about, but they are slow and small, and so are frequently overtaken, honked at and forced into sticky situations, sometimes being pushed off the road altogether. Still, they are higher than bicycles and cycle rickshaws, for sure, and will terrorize pedestrians, goats dogs and other foot-warriors of the road at the drop of a hat.

Then there’s the two-wheeler. Smaller than the rickshaw, but usually faster, especially when you start to upgrade from clunky Vespas. A few Abhilasha-less days in Pondicherry warranted the hire of a scooter, from which I certainly learned a few humble road manners I think I had forgotten within the relatively safer confines of the Nano.

It occurred to me suddenly just how exposed I felt perched atop a rickety, pock-marked scooter, and just how bonkers other two-wheelers on the road can be. From inside the Nano, I tyrranize the two wheelers, and happily weave around them on the road, turning in front of them and shooing them out of the way with a beep of the horn. But being one of their number, riding among the herd, is a different story altogether.

It’s a far more terrifying experience than driving a car for the simple reason that the ground and lots of other sharp, hard things are within inches of your bare skin and helmetless head. And if I thought hitting a pothole in the Nano was bad, holy lord above, I now have incentive to avoid them. Even crossing a minor speed bump is an experience akin to trying to hang on to an enraged bucking bronco.

Making a right turn that involves crossing a lane of oncoming traffic (of course, without an indicator) (not that the bike doesn’t have one, it’s just that if you use it, no one would really get what you were on about) (and as if to deter me from using mine altogether, the bike manufacturers actually installed an ear-piercing siren that sounded whenever I tried to activate my left or right blinkers) is a terrifying maneuvre that could be likened to running, floodlit and in a gazelle-meat dress, against a pride of hungry lions. You must use all your Space Invader / Mario Kart skills in the face of the approaching vehicles that are weaving willy nilly on their own agendas.

So then there’s the cars and they basically trump all the two and three-wheelers. Among the cars, the newer, shinier, jazzier ones are used to belittling smaller, older cars with a blow of the horn and an overtake that happens like a gust of wind in a dream.

Despite her size, Abhilasha has thus far enjoyed an anomalous status due to her cult standing in the country. Small, cheap and not so fast, she is nonetheless a proud symbol of India’s manufacturing clout and so her quirkiness and novelty factor save her from the kind of fate and road humiliation suffered by other entry-level cars.

How long her superstar status will last, however, is a good question. The Economist reported last month that sales for October had not been nearly as high as predicted, given that it was holiday season, and that the waiting list for the car was finally over. I’ve had comments from many middle-class Indians telling me they would never consider buying a Nano as, because of its price, its generally considered to be a poor person’s car. After all, who would want to reduce their auqaat for a car?

Gurpreet, a friend from Delhi took one look at Abhilasha and shook his head with a smile. ‘I would never buy this car,’ he said. When I asked him why, he explained that for 1-2 lakhs, you could buy a second-hand Maruti Zen or Tata Indica, or the like, on the assumption that the latter two would be far more reliable vehicles in the long run than the Nano.

‘But I’ve done over 16,000km in the Nano and it’s been fine,’ I protested, to which Gurpreet replied, ‘Yeah; let’s see how the next 16,000 go.’

Hum. Well, in any case, I’d like to think that I’d managed to jack up Abhilasha’s auqaat a few notches during the past few months. If road tactics and traffic agility stand for anything, that is. The fact is that I have left many an Indica and Maruti Zen in sprawling in the dust after a nifty overtake in the face of an oncoming lorry. I’ve swerved, dodged, accelerated through tiny gaps left between moving buses, leaving them in the sorry knowledge that maybe they aren’t the kings of the highway after all - that there is a wee orifice through which the proles and their 1-lakh cars can squeeze through.

The buses and trucks are, after all, notorious road hogs. You’ll frequently see them cruising the highways and b-roads, casually straddling two lanes (you almost imagine them carelessly whistling as they go) completely impervious to the desperate beeps of lines of cars stuck behind them. Many a time I’ve been red-faced and exasperated: ‘WHY the hell doesn’t he just move ONE meter to the left to let us though for GOD’s sake...’ etc, but the vexation is all for nowt in the end. In a world where size is key, they are the potentates, the rajas of the road.

You end up taking your foot off the accelerator, exhaling, and letting the mighty ones do what they will. As Pavan Varma says, ‘the projection of power and the recognition of status are intimately related,’, meaning that people are generally happy to kiss the ass of those more powerful than themselves, whilst in turn letting themselves be brown-nosed by upwardly mobile underlings. In road terms this means all hail the trucks, fast cars and armoured SUVs, and sucks to you cyclists and pedestrians. And dogs. Though not cows. Cows are a whole other story. And Nanos, the exceptional Nanos: middling but upwardly mobile, breaking caste barriers and pissing off lorry drivers. That’s my girl.

Abhilasha in the hands of the gods

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:28:39 +0100

Or more accurately, Abhilasha in the hands of Reliable Cargo Movers and Packers, a car transportation company I found online who offered to do - for the sum of 14,000 rupees - something that I no longer have the jones for: they are transporting her the 2,000-odd kilometres from Delhi to Chennai.

Call me lily-livered, Nano fans; call me faint-hearted, fearful, chicken, yellow-bellied and gutless. Pusillanimous, even. But I am now running on a carefully considered theory that everyone in this world has an optimum number of Indian road hours in them. Or at least an annual budget. And, Nano fans, I think I may have depleted mine. The idea of a 2,000km schlep from Delhi to Chennai via some ill-conditioned non-golden quadrilateral roads basically put the cold shivers up me, whereas a lovely comfy two-and-a-half-hour flight makes me feel warm and fuzzy and like a cup of warm milk.

Guessing that Abhilasha might not make the cut for excess luggage, I looked into other ways of transporting her from D to C. Just about everyone I asked pointed me towards the train station, assuring me that sending a car by train in India would be easy as π to the tenth decimal.

Of course, it wasn’t. After a confusing exchange with the station manager at Old Delhi train station, (where Thor and I caused a security scandal by entering through an unsanctioned side door on the day of the twice-weekly arrival of the dreaded Pakistan Train) we were redirected to New Delhi train station.

Which is a trip. Sixteen massive platforms connected by an overhead footbridge, absolutely rammed with commuters and travelers charging to get their trains. People carrying piles of luggage on their heads with small children swinging from their hips, side-stepping to avoid the sleeping families who choose to just lie where they fall. I thought a particularly remarkable sight the men who dropped down onto the train tracks to wash themselves from the faucets therein, with all the relaxed intimacy of being in their own bathrooms.

The postal section is right at the end of the station, next to platform 16, and it was here, among the mud and loose bricks behind the storage warehouse, that we found what we thought was the office of the postal manager. The man inside affirmed his position and gaily invited us to sit down. After a ten-or-so minute conversation during which we managed to only ascertain the fact that cars could be transported, it turned out that our friend was not at all the postal manager, but a dogsbody that was hanging around the place, masquerading as a person in a position of authority. Without so much as a hint of remorse in the light of us discovering his bare-faced trickery, he cheerily took us to the desk of the real postal manager.

There we gave the manager all our details before he - also smiling: perhaps it was payday at the station? - disclosed that the price of taking the Nano by train from Delhi to Chennai would be 88,000 rupees, just under 1 Lakh.

“But, but, but for that money I could just about buy a new Nano in Chennai,” I exclaimed. The postal manager wobbled his head, amused at the absurdity of the price he had just quoted us. He explained that the reason it was so expensive was that in order to transport the vehicle, we would need to hire the entire carriage. He then suggested offsetting the costs by bringing more cars on board. The carriage, he said, would hold up to 4 cars.

“But I don’t have four cars, I only have one,” I protested. He laughed, clearly enjoying the Kafka-esque nature of our exchange.

Thor interjected, suggesting we round up a number of people and have a party on the carriage for 36 hours. The postal manager’s face suddenly dropped. He intoned gravely that this would not be possible, that by no means would we even be allowed to ride with the car, let alone throw a party.

I left the train station a little downcast at the prospect of having to drive to Chennai after all, when it was suggested by Hans at our hotel that we use a trucking and removals company. Sure enough, within minutes I had a quote and a time estimate, and the next morning at 10am two men appeared at our hotel in Jangpura Extension armed with a bag full of forms to be filled out in triplicate and some packing tape.

After careful inspection of the car and a full inventory of all the junk in the back, some of which they had trouble finding official-type names for, the forms were signed, money was handed over, and Abhilasha’s keys were given to a complete stranger, with nothing to protect her honour but a dodgy-looking form headed ‘Reliable Cargo Movers and Packers’.

What else to do? I asked the man how I could be assured she would arrive (I said ‘safely’ but what I really meant was ‘at all’), and he said not to worry, she will be there in ten days. That she is being transported along with 8 spanking new Marutis to the south of the country.

So, that’s it. The die is cast, the leap of faith has been taken and now we play the waiting game. Abhilasha is at the mercy of the fates and I have nothing to prove it except a trio of rather easily forged documents. Fingers crossed, eh?

Deflated (again) in Delhi

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 10:03:28 +0100

Delhi was the first place I ever set foot in India. I have very vivid memories of one early morning in 1998, sitting on an airport bus with my backpack and looking nervously out of the window at the dawn mist rising to reveal what is now to me the commonplace madness of all of India’s urban areas, which back then seemed terrifying in their scraggyness. The usual stuff: people sleeping in the streets, kids with missing limbs chasing after you for a bit of baksheesh, the overpowering smell of urine and rotting trash, crowds, crowds, crowds... and cows.

That was 12 years ago. The Delhi of today is a completely different city to me. I already praised Ahmedabad a few weeks ago as having the best roads in India, but I was wrong, and how. I don’t know if the capital’s city planning committee had a gargantuan sock pull-up this last decade, or if it had anything to do with the Commonwealth Games, but driving on South Delhi’s wide, well thought-out avenues and highways was an incommensurate joy.

South Delhi appears to be where the posh people live. Tell any other Delhi-ite that you’re staying near GK1, Sunder Nagar or the auspicious Friends Colony and they’ll raise their eyebrows in the same way that a Londoner might if you told them you were bunking a few night around Mayfair way.

Still, it’s not Beverly Hills, by a long shot; though there is an echo of the LA model of town planning in the various ‘colonies’ - gated communities that function like villages - that are strung together by miles of highway in South Delhi. We stayed in a dirty, hideously overpriced guesthouse (that put fake photos online to entice dunces like me to pay up in advance) called the T-home (name and shame, name and shame!) in the Jangapura Extension neighborhood, before moving a few streets down to the much nicer Kumar guesthouse, whose proprietor, Hans, is yet another proud Nano owner - the CX model, she’s no Abhilasha.

This turned out to be a lucky turn of events, in fact, as he was able to offer up some mechanical advice one morning after the rear left tyre (that’s number three in as many weeks) completely deflated one night while we were driving back from a party at Sunder Nagar. I made the obstinate schoolgirl error of not stopping at the side of the highway at 2am to attempt a pit-stop style change, and instead chose to trundle a further 5km with one clunking airless wheel as far the as the hotel, and just deal with it the next day.

And indeed the next day I was somberly informed by several members of hotel staff that I had a flat tyre. Pulling up my sleeves, I decided (much to the offence of Hans and his workers) that this one was not going to be left to the men of India to change - it was my turn to jack, crank and fiddle with nuts and bolts. And actually it was really easy; it took about 10 minutes which was at least half the time it took Team Rickshaw back in Indore that fateful rainy night. I patted myself on the back then drove to the nearest tyre shop to just double check that I hadn’t put it on back to front.

When I handed over the damaged wheel to the lads at the tyre shop, there was a lot of shaking of heads and heated discussion that threw out the odd recognisable phrase like ‘Nano’ ‘tyre’ and ‘tube’. The hub cap was crow-barred off to reveal a pile of rubber shavings inside the tubeless tire that were shaken onto the floor, much to the shock of the workers and the small crowd of onlookers that had now gathered.

Wide-eyed, one friendly sikh fellow pulled me aside and whispered in shocked tones, “I think you must have driven at least 4 or 5km with this flat tyre,” as if he was willing me to deny the reprehensible accusation and restore his faith in the sanity of humanity.

“Um, actually... yeah I did,” I confessed, suddenly mortified at my laziness the night before. “I just, you know... couldn’t be bothered.” Gahhhhhhhh. I must have sounded like the most careless English sow. But I had no good excuse to hide behind. I was speaking the truth, and as I did, as I watched the consequences of my indolence play out before me: the inner metal part of the wheel was all bent out of shape, and was being hammered back into a perfect circle by the workmen. Then they refitted the tyre, but it refused to inflate. So they removed it again and banged at the wheel a bit more. Still no joy.

The frequency of the word ‘tube’ suddenly increased in the mechanics’ debate and within minutes the lad appeared with a brand new inner tube. “Really?” I exclaimed. “But shouldn’t tubeless tyres not have tubes? Isn’t that the point?” An expert on Nano wheels I am not, and nobody understood what I was saying anyway. Barely had I voiced my protests than the inner tube was fitted, the tyre replaced, inflated and the boy was bouncing Abhilasha’s back wheel up and down the tyre shop courtyard.

I was impressed. I figured there was no need to argue. The wheel looked good enough, and the lads were already enthusiastically fitting it back into the space where the spare tyre had served as a substitute. Reaching for my wallet, I was unexpectedly congratulated by the happy sikh interlocutor for what he perceived as my own pious devotion based on the Shiva/Krishna sticker combo I pasted onto my back windows in Hampi all those months ago.

“You are religious,” he told me, pointing at the kitschy Indian god stickers I put up for ironic effect on the back window. I didn’t quite know how to respond to his statement without causing too much offence and shaming myself further after the driving-5K-with-a-flat scandal, so I just nodded and mumbled something about the gods protecting me. He nodded in approval. “I am religious too,” he assured me, shaking my hand, then bargained a price of 300 rupees on my behalf, as some kind of reward for my apparent spiritual diligence, and as a token of devotional camaraderie.

A Diwali shelling in Udaipur

Mon, 8 Nov 2010 09:58:46 +0100

Someone once told me (actually, it was Thor; the other day), that it’s fortuitous for one’s karma to die on the day of Diwali, India’s most important festival. This somewhat shaky conjecture would go a long way to explaining to phenomena witnessed here in Udaipur the last couple of days over the course of the Diwali celebrations.

For anyone who has never experienced a celebration of the festival of light here in India, you can imagine a cross between Guy Fawkes night and a city-wide shelling on the day before the apocalypse where locals celebrate their impending doom by putting on their Sunday best and throwing firecrackers within an inch of each others’ lives.

Spellbound by Udaipur, easily my favourite city in India so far, we arrived to a rooftop hotel room with a view of the great lake and all its shoreside palaces, to be informed by the boy working at the hotel that tonight the family were planning a big firework display right outside our room. “There will be bombs!” he announced in his broken English, which I thought was a cutesy mistake in his naming of fireworks. What I was to discover, however, was that ‘bomb’ was in fact the closest word in the English language to describing the series of butt-clenching, ear-shattering explosions that were to rock us into the wee hours.

After dinner, Thor and I saw fit to take a stroll through the city streets, among the revelers, and the women dressed in their most beautiful saris. However, within a few paces of our hotel, I came within an inch of an exploding firework, and indeed, my life. It was a bit like a dream sequence in slow motion where I was suddenly aware of a flash and a loud bang followed by being engulfed by a lot of smoke. I felt the blast against my leg so strong that I thought it had ripped my jeans, and I was suddenly aware of a deafness and ringing in my right ear, a bit like that scene in Saving Private Ryan when they land on the Normandy beaches only to be shelled by Germans.

Shaken and a bit deaf, but pleased to see my face hadn’t melted off, I decided we should continue into the foray. As I cursed the irresponsible youths for placing a life-threatening explosive in my path, I soon realised that it was nothing to take personally. On the streets of Udaipur, at least, fireworks were being let off in the little narrow streets at a frequency of one every twenty metres or so.

They were mostly the work of young guys with flimsy matches who were lighting the short fuses with their faces right up close before casually stepping back and letting the force of the bang rip through the streets. Passers by seemed relatively unruffled by the proceedings, as roman candles and catherine wheels whizzed past their feet and into the gutters, throwing sparks in every direction.

The street was littered with fireworks debris that pedestrians were merrily stepping over and through, not for a minute sharing my own paranoid suspicion that some of the explosives might still be live. As far as this safety-conscious lass was concerned, the main market street around the temple had become a mine field.

Diwali this year fell on November 5th, exactly coinciding with the UK’s Guy Fawkes night. It gave me some pleasure to think that the same pyrotechnics were going off in my homeland, a thought which then inspired in me a memory of the weeks of government propaganda that preceded Bonfire Night every year with advertorials warning against the misuse of fireworks and the harsh consequences that lie therein.

Children, we were told, should not handle fireworks. A lit firework should never be returned to. They should always be lit at arms’ length. You should never stand over a firework. And the suggestions that were hammered into us were always accompanied by the terrifying images of the fools who disobeyed the guidelines - disfigured kids with melted faces and one eye, people missing fingers, thumbs, entire limbs. All these horrors I connect in my subconscious with anything but a very icy relationship to crackers, bangers, whizzers and the like, so to see the Indian kids on the street handling the explosives with such intimacy gripped my gut.

A little girl of about three stood on her front doorstep lighting sparklers one off the other. One kid lit a fountain of light right in the way of an oncoming motorcycle. Further down the street, someone else lit a banger wedged in a hole in a wall, presumably to see whether it would bring the brickwork down. Needless to say, he was unsuccessful.

Back at the hotel (and a little bit embarrassingly grateful to be there in one piece), tradition continued as it was the kids in charge of lighting the fireworks on the roof that danced among our feet as we were served whiskey and soda water by our most gracious hosts. Shakti, one of the brothers that manages the place - and, incidentally, also the owner of a bright yellow Nano LX, the first and possibly the only one of its kind in Udaipur - thought it very funny to point out to me that each ignited device that went off on his roof cost around ten dollars. He laughed, “Only in India do we burn money like this!” adding, “India is great!”

Indeed. Just be a bit more careful next year, OK kids?

Behind the scenes at the Nano factory

Sun, 7 Nov 2010 06:34:20 +0100

It’s an uncanny sight, imbued with the chilling edge of latent expectation that all good sci-fi horrors are made of. 300 (or so) Nanos, utterly homogenous but for their varying shades, crammed bumper to bumper in a giant lot, waiting to be deported and dispatched.

Hot off the press, these cars are the fruit of just one eight-hour shift at the new plant in Sanand whose production capacity has been projected at almost 1,200 vehicles per day. As I drive around the plant in the company of engineers Mr Siddarth Ray and a Mr Venkavesh, I’m wide-eyed at the sight of the sheer number of door frames, front bonnets and roof parts stacked in enormous shelving units like an IKEA warehouse, just waiting to be whisked up by the mechanical claws of the hi-tech robots who fit all the pieces together with surreal anthropomorphic dexterity.

Today is a big day for Abhilasha - a 45-minute drive out of western Ahmedabad to the town of Sanand and its outlying Tata facility, a plant solely devoted to the mass production of Nanos. We were treated to a regal welcome upon passing the main security gate when four assembled guards stamped their feet and shot a unified salute (in my direction or in the direction of the hallowed car, I’m not quite sure) before being met by Mr Ray who was driving none other than an exact replica of Abhilasha, but without a roof.

Amused by the excitement I expressed at the prospect of a roofless Nano, Siddharth explained that actually this was a model produced by engineering students at the facility, and indeed on closer inspection I saw that the Nano’s roof had as good as been lifted off with a can opener, the scars of the procedure sanded down, painted and even taped over in parts. It’s not a convertible, it’s a show car, and, according to Mr Ray, only for the service of visiting VIPs.

That would be us. Whisked into a conference room near the main entrance of the plant, I was surprised to be greeted by several engineers from the factory, as well as to see that we had all been issued with a detailed timetable for the day’s proceedings, carefully crafted on an Excel spreadsheet titled ‘Plant Visit Schedule: Ms Vanessa’. The list involved an extensive itinerary of activities including a safety presentation, a plant overview presentation, a plant visit and a closing meeting in the afternoon, with each event accompanied by a relevant employee responsible for its smooth running.

Not sure if I was in the capable hands of a well-oiled business or in the jaws of an overly neurotic bureaucratic consortium, I decided to sit back and be taken where it was intended for me to go. Within minutes I was issued with a hard hat and a baseball cap, both emblazoned with the Nano’s logo. The former, I presumed, was to protect me from the hazards of falling objects inside the plant, like errant bits of airborne exhaust pipe and the like, while the latter was just for yucks and to protect me from the sun, given our vehicle’s lack of roofage.

And so the tour began, leaving Abhilasha behind at the plant entrance. A little disappointed that she wouldn’t get to see the process of her origins, I later considered it a blessing. Accustomed to the princess treatment wherever she goes, and the surprises inherent in her perceived uniqueness, I think the realisation that she is merely one of thousands of machines burped out by a manufacturing line might spin her into some perverse existential crisis. If I was disturbed by the sight of the army of Nanos in the parking lot, I can only imagine how Abhilasha would feel.

And in fact, given her ripe old age (soon approaching a whole year old) Abhilasha is not in fact a Gujarati car. It’s a long story of politics and idealism, but there had actually been a previous Nano plant in the state of West Bengal, a couple of hours north of Kolkata. Tata had all but completed a manufacturing facility at a place called Singur in the summer of 2008, ready to start cranking out the much-coveted little cars, when they were forced to up and move by the vehement protests of up to 40,000 locals lead by Bengali politician and left-wing firebrand Mrs Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee had taken issue with Tata and the local government on account of the way the land was given to the company.

Some 1,000 acres had been forcibly bought off local farmers to accommodate the plant, under the Land Acquisition Act (of 1894 - yep, another great colonial hangover) which gives the government the right to buy any plot of land they wish to use for public purposes. The point of controversy in this particular case was that the legality of the land purchase was questioned, given that the land was handed over to an industrial company rather than a public outfit, and that many farmers had unwillingly been dragged into the transaction, and not compensated according to legal requirements.

Banerjee went all out, staging a 24-day hunger strike as well as a series of sit-in protests on the motorway that prevented workers from accessing the plant. (Might the vernacular for such behaviour be described as ‘going Gandhi on his ass?) Things occasionally got nasty when Tata workers were set upon, and crude explosives were used in attacks against the company and its employees.

After several weeks of failed negotiations, Ratan Tata decided to cut the company’s losses (setting up at Singur had cost around 15 billion rupees) and to move shop to the other side of the country, to a place where politicians appeared more welcoming: Gujurat.

The move was unprecedented: tens of thousands of components had to be dismantled and transported in trucks across the country. The factory at Sanand went up with amazing speed, and by February of this year, its first Nano rolled out onto the roads.

And as for Abhilasha: she and all other cars of her generation are mongrelized cross breeds who had a lot of their parts made at a temporary facility in Pune, and then assembled in Uttaranchal.

Having forsaken Abhilasha at the compound entrance for the VIP tour car, we began the tour of the factory floor with the press shop, the place where all the panels of the car are pressed into shape before being fitted together. The size and sheer scale of it all is overwhelming, but the one disappointment was the fact that on this particular day, one day before Diwali, the biggest festival in the Hindu calendar, the factory was having a rest day. All the machines were in sleep mode as a handful of employees pottered about the place making minor adjustments here and there, getting ready to resume work again after the weekend.

Giant electronic boards resembling sports scoreboards hung from the ceiling to keep track of the day’s achievements: though they were all at zero now, they are meant to keep the workers on their toes, announcing for all to see how many cars have passed through the manufacturing line so far that day, and keeping score for the various shifts.

“One shift at the plant lasts eight hours,” Siddharth told me from the front seat of our open air steed. “The workers here are expected to process their station on the line in no more than 58 seconds, then the belt moves on.” Less than a minute to do one’s job, no matter how small, seems like a miniscule amount of time, and the implied mindless repetition of the task makes my brain boggle. How often do they take breaks? I ask. No breaks for the first four hours, then half an hour for lunch and another ten minutes for tea in the second half of the shift.

Flummoxed by the obvious powers of concentration held by the production line engineers, I’m then taken to see the training in action: exactly how one turns a group of young engineering students into a manufacturing superforce. The training division - active despite the holiday season - was like a cross between Santa’s workshop and an army training camp in mechanic’s overalls.

A large warehouse space split into various stations for the students’ training, the kids (most of them looking a little wet behind the ears in their early twenties) were started off with the most basic principles of mechanics like learning the difference between flat-head and phillips-head screwdrivers and improving manual agility. One such exercise saw gloved students repeatedly extracting nuts and bolts from a series of boxes in order to improve their feel for the tiny objects. “Gripping training,” the floor manager told me. “Unless they can take out exactly the right number of items they need, they will be wasting time.” How much time? Only moments surely; but when you only have less than a minute to process your job, I suppose every second counts.

In another corner of the warehouse, a group of students were beginning their daily shift: lined up in rows, legs spread, arms spread out to the sides, they were copying the actions of a lad in front that was leading them through the motions of the daily workout that all employees are obliged to perform before singing the national anthem and settling down to a few minutes meditation. “We think it is very important that the workers are whole, rounded people,” the floor manager explains. “This is why we also implement self-development as part of the training.” So in addition to learning how to put engines together, spray painting skills and understanding the mechanics of ball-bearings, the students at the Nano academy also have a Karate Kid-style education with a little help from the principles of Rajyoga meditation.

Indeed, the plant is keen to promote all of its activities that are going towards making the world a better place, and I’m duly treated to a short presentation of Tata’s activities in the Sanand area that are contributing to the lives of the 40,000 people who live in the district. Projects include mobile health clinics, the installation of toilet facilities into villages that previously had none, reverse osmosis plants for safe drinking water, school desks and benches made from the recycled wood of crates used in putting up the plant, creating employment opportunities, etc.

And then there’s Kaizen. Kaizen, kaizen everywhere, on posters hung up on the factory floors, pinned to noticeboards: wherever there’s a moment there’s room for Kaizen. “Kaizen,” Siddharth explains to me, “is continuous improvement.” Derived from a Japanese principle of change for the better, it seems to have become the motto in the Nano factory. We pass by a group of mechanics repairing the floor of one of the production line stations. It had been to high to allow the workers to perform comfortably. So they were using their day off to fix the level. “This is worker initiative,” I am proudly told. “This is Kaizen.”

Thinking about it, I find it hard to see how one could improve on 300 cars an hour. I shudder a little to imagine all those hundreds of vehicles diffusing into India’s transport arteries on a daily basis. Where will they all go? And what’s the use of all this empowerment if there’s too much traffic to get anywhere anyway?

It’s why the parking lot is a frightening sight. It’s why the idea of an automated production line with humans trained to work at 58-second intervals is quite so alarming. We are already in 102 The Year of Our Ford, and the manufacturing revolution is still gathering pace. Here in Sanand at least, this seems to be the road ahead.

Ahmedabad - a model for India’s roads?

Sat, 6 Nov 2010 10:35:55 +0100

The Ahmedabad Mirror ran a story on Thursday - under the headline ‘City traffic, cattle surprise US cops’ - reporting the astonishment of two visiting American policemen at the state of the city’s roads. The paper wrote that the pair were ‘were “shocked” to see the way people drive on Ahmedabad roads, adding that they ‘were even surprised to see four-legged animals using the road extensively, adding to the traffic chaos’.

The story went on to disclose that one of the cops, James Waldron, had said, ‘The traffic sense is just deplorable. Even cows and dogs are found loitering on busy roads, causing inconvenience to commuters. Even kids being made to sit on motorbikes is dangerous.’

Waldron’s companion, a Mr Harry Phillps, was further quoted as saying, ‘You hardly have footpaths. That is the reason people pedestrians (sic) walk on the road and put their lives in danger. We are told that helmets are mandatory here, but we saw only six or seven people wearing helmet (sic) in these three days. Very few people were seen wearing seatbelts.’

Phillps was then reported to finish his session of finger-wagging with a final, devastating blow to Ahmedabad’s drivers and traffic authority alike, dourly laying down the fact that ‘In US, stern action is taken against law breakers.’

Harsh words from the lawman there. What Harry and Jim may not know, however, is that Ahmedabad’s roads are among the most organised and well-kept in the whole country, according at least to this particular driver. It was with great pleasure and much contentment that I cruised the 6km of wide avenues between Drive-in road and Gandhi’s Sabarmati ashram, happily passing through roundabouts and junctions, even pausing for reflection at the odd traffic light.

There’s something about Ahmedabad that sets it apart from other large Indian cities: you see girls in jeans on motorbikes, a profusion of shopping malls, significantly less street trash and a much higher incidence of the cafe branch Coffee Day. And although it was many many decades ago, it’s easy to see why Gujarat’s most famous son would have chosen to base his ashram here, on the banks of the Sabarmati river.

I parked Abhilasha in the ashram parking lot under a picture of Gandhiji himself and a sign that read “Forsake not truth even unto death” and went in for a wander in the ashram gardens, museum and library. Truly a refuge from the noise of the city, the place had a sort of American Campus University feel to it with manicured lawns and westerners lolling carelessly on the grass under the shade of the huge trees. Not too much to learn here about the man and his struggle itself, more just a collection of quotes and fact-ettes about Gandhi, his wife Kasturba, and the ashram.

After a quiet afternoon spent on Gandhi’s porch in the company of a dozen or so scurrying chipmunks, I headed back to Abhilasha, infused with the spirit of the place and filled with thoughts of brotherhood and non-violence. Elevated notions indeed, which seemed to dissipate into the ether just as soon as I reversed out of my parking space to be faced with a mini-bus blocking the exit to the car park. I decided not to relent, and advanced, facing him head-on, daring him to reverse back onto the main road to let me out.

He wasn’t having any of it, and neither were the small mob that had by now gathered in the lot, who were all gesturing to me to go back into my parking space to let the mini bus through. I grunted with defeated displeasure and crawled back where I came from, in the sorry admission that I was outnumbered as well as plain wrong.

Driving away, I examined my recent obstinacy on Gandhi’s own doorstep. Was I, exemplary polite British driver, losing my road manners? Was I becoming pushy and tenacious behind the wheel? I examined the evidence: less and less use of the indicator, more and more use of the horn. A red light ahead, and I accelerate. Crossing a lane on a dual carriageway, I move forward, knowing that the oncoming motorcycle will be forced to swerve around me. Perhaps officers Phillps and Waldron were right: Ahmedabad’s traffic was indeed lamentable and it was only months of desensitization in Abhilasha that has now familiarized me and my muscle memory to the madness of it all.

The deal was sealed a couple of days later when, speeding along the NH8 towards Udaipur, internally praising its flawlessly surfaced dual carriageway and my own performance of almost 100km/h, when I noticed a shadow on the road next to the yellow-and-black brickwork that marks the edge of the central reservation: there was a guy lying down having a nap in the fast lane of the highway, cuddled up against the wall and under the shade of the plants there. Beggars belief, I thought; sleeping on the motorway... does this man not understand the principle of fast-moving vehicles? You see road kill all the time: dogs, the odd goat, a monkey here and there - did he really want to add to their number?

I thought I had seen it all until a few minutes later when I spotted a woman in exactly the same spot, having a sit-down at the edge of the fast lane, except that this time she saw fit to actually stretch her legs into the middle of the road. It was all I could do to swerve in time, shrieking expletives along the lines of, ‘you got a death wish, lady?’. Now, if we were in the US, safe under the jurisdiction of the likes of officers Waldron and Phillps, not only would stern action be taken, but Miss Roadside Stretch My Legs would have been carried off in a straightjacket. In Ahmedabad, however, she’ll live to see another day.

Potholes and poosticks - the horrors of the NH59

Wed, 3 Nov 2010 09:16:59 +0100

The 400km Indore to Ahmedabad stretch was not one I was looking forward to. Which could go some way to explaining our holing ourselves up in a comfy hotel room at the Country Inn in Indore for three whole days, living on a comfort diet of (I never thought I’d say it -) McDonalds and Domino’s Pizza and spending an evening as the only clientele in the cinema regaled by the only English language option, the deplorable blood bath Pirhana.

And all the time I had the journey nagging in the back of my mind. The road that runs between the two cities, the NH59 (and that’s NH for National Highway, folks. I repeat, National Highway), appears as a wee yellow line on Google Maps; a path of no significance, with an estimated journey time of 8 hours to which I knew we could add at least another four. I think what gave me the biggest belly sink was the fact that we had actually ventured out onto the NH59 the night we took Olly to the airport and finished up with not one, but two flat tyres. Call it my spidey sense, call it three months’ intensive experience of driving in India, but something told me that this was going to be a toughie.

We set of to an inauspicious start: within 30 seconds of leaving the hotel and pulling out to the dusty construction site that is AB Road we encountered a nasty collision between three lads on a motorbike and a large white SUV that contained two businesslike Sikh gentlemen. The incident occurred literally meters in front of Abhilasha: the bike was turning to its right and, as is tradition, not looking at all to see about oncoming traffic, while the SUV pulled in behind them, the bike hit the car and the three lads sprung up into the air and onto the ground with surprising bounce.

It was an ooooooouuuuuuuucccccchhhhhhhhhhhh moment for all as we screeched to a halt and looked at the damage from behind my hands. Luckily the three lads were fine - they got up a little shaken, dusted themselves down then proceeded to have a war of words and gestures with the SUV driver who had nearly called curtains for them.

In addition to the streetside kerfuffle, I took the unfortunate fall to be some dark omen of the trip to come: with two flat tyres behind me and 400km of uncertain road ahead, it was with some trepidation that I followed Delilah’s instructions to get out of town.

Which, of course, took about two hours. Road works, closures, traffic jams, and getting caught in a network of backstreets, stuck behind a water truck and blocking the way for dozens of irate motorcyclists, all added up to hitting the NH59 around lunchtime.

And hit it we did. So many times within the first few minutes, in fact, that I knew I’d have to slow things down: that my anticipated speed of 50km/h was a pipe dream. Potholes, potholes everywhere and no end in sight. I can now say with quite some authority that this is the Worst Highway I Have Seen. With the exception of some deplorable stretched of the NH4A on the way from Goa to Hampi in Karnataka, this road takes the title by a long shot.

It was so consistently bad that the first 43.5km to the aptly named town of Lebad took three and a half hours to get to. I had tears in my eyes. But we had no choice: it was Ahmedabad or bust: I had spent a couple of hours the previous day perusing lodging options in towns in between the two cities and nothing was coming up. If the Lonely Planet is to be believed, the space between Indore and Ahmedabad is a cultural, touristic wasteland, and as unfair as this sounds, no upshot of my research seemed to suggest otherwise.

It was getting dark as we approached the halfway mark, just at the border of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. I winced as I contemplated another 7 hours driving in the dark, dodging potholes, eating truck dust, hearing the clatter of loose rocks rattling around the undercarriage... And now that I know Abhilasha is not as invincible as I once thought she was, I was just waiting for the inevitable bang and clunk of a burst tyre.

But then, there at the border with Gujarat - among India’s richest states and home to some of the most booming industries and successful economies in the world - a small miracle occurred. The road suddenly got better. With no warning, and no explanation, all the potholes, all the rocks, rubble and dust disappeared; the road widened and markings appeared. There were even safety railings and cats eyes. It was driving paradise. An average B-road by UK standards, I’m sure, but to the road-beaten Abhilasha it was like rolling across greased marble.

And as the road conditions changed, so did our attitudes. It struck me that in the dying light of the sunset, the landscape that we were now traversing through at breakneck speed, was among the Most Beautiful I Had Seen. Completely unspoiled for acres and acres around, the surrounding hills undulated around us, the low sun shining through the grasses and the branches of the roadside banyan trees. Rural, most rural India: not a scrap of trash in sight and an ocean of grassland that stretched off into the distance as far as I could see. Every so often we’d pass a tractor engulfed in a cloud of red evening dust, or a goatherd shooting the shit by the side of the road with a beautiful woman covered by a glittering sari. It was a dreamlike state of road trip gumption that not even the onset of darkness and the torture of full headlights and screaming horns could break (is it me or are Gujarati drivers marginally more polite than their fellow countrymen?)

We pulled into the Ginger Hotel, Ahmedabad at around 10pm to be greeted by bolshy staff and a lukewarm dinner buffet. Remind me to utterly cuss this glorified youth hostel when I have more time and venom; suffice to say its an overpriced disappointment compared with its sibling establishment in Bubhaneshwar that tickled me so. The best thing I can say about it is that Abhilasha has a covered parking spot and a very conscientious guard keeping an eye on her while she readies up for our next foray up into Rajastan.

Double blowout on a rainy night in Indore

Mon, 1 Nov 2010 17:27:04 +0100

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, didn’t it? Barely had we dropped Olly at Indore airport, minutes before his flight was due to close, after a run of derring-do across the pothole-strewn, half-built, murky roads that surround Indore’s tiny airstrip, than we were urgently waved down by a rickshaw driver at the airport exit gate. My heart sank. He was pointing at my front right wheel and I knew why.

I got out to look and the entire thing was deflated, so much so that the hubcap had also taken quite a beating and was well bent out of shape as a result. And then, as if the movie were being directed by some divine hand, a clap of thunder shot through the sky and we felt the first drops of rain fall on our heads and shoulders.

Excellent, I thought. Though, it could have been worse. At the very least we were surrounded by an enthusiastic and skilled group of rickshaw drivers who wanted nothing else but to help up change our tyre. So I popped open the front bonnet, provided them with all the necessary tools, then left them, running for the airport loos after a fresh wave of bladder jerks resulting from yesterday’s unmentionable girl problems.

Who said road trips by Nano weren’t glamorous? And sure enough, the tyre was replaced with lightning speed, as we stood around getting drizzled on. The volunteer mechanic wore a perma-smile as he ratcheted the bolts at the center of the wheel.

The old wheel that came off was in a sorry state, with a 2-inch slash straight through the middle of it. Thor and I agreed that we could determine the exact bump where it happened, a particularly nasty hole in the road that I took at a very bad angle.

Still, alls well that ends well and within thirty minutes we had been given a full formal rickshaw escort to our hotel, the Country Inn which mercifully features all the mod cons and none of the water/primate infestation we had undergone the night before in Omkareshwar.

However, the next morning, I received a polite phonecall from reception informing me that my car had a flat tyre. The other front one. I resigned myself in an instantaneous sigh to staying in Indore for the next ten days or so, long enough to find a Tata garage that would surely have to order fresh wheels from Gujarat which would probably take days and days to arrive.

But to my shock and deep, deep pleasure, the guys at the hotel told me they could have the wheels fixed and/or new ones bought within two hours. Huh?? And only 150 rupees to fix both of the slashed tyres? Double huh. Really? Was that all? It seemed too good to be true, especially on a Sunday. But sure enough, as I watched from the comfort of our hotel room, the car was duly serviced out in the parking lot, the bad wheel taken away, a new one put back on, and the Nano taken for a token spin around the parking lot by one of the bell boys.

Blimey, that was fast as lightning. And I barely raised a finger. The Nano got sick and fixed within the blink of an eye thanks to some hard to describe communal drive for just keeping things going. Who says this isn’t the land of possibility?

Monkey business and a right royal knees up

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 11:34:18 +0100

I first met the Maharajah of Omkareshwar (the name I knew him by) some ten years ago one backpacking summer away from art school, and though our meeting was brief, he remained in my memory as one of the most singular people I had ever met on my travels. He lived with his family in a decaying old house on the edge of the Narmada river opposite the sacred island of Omkareshwar which they had converted into a guest house whose cell-like rooms showcased fading photos of the Maharajah posing next to various dead animals including tigers from the hunting days of his youth.

We never exchanged emails or kept in touch or any of that malarkey, but I had one enduring memory of him waking me up one morning with the sound of his rifle blasting outside my bedroom door as he took pot shots at the monkeys that inhabit the trees encircling his property, shouting “Damn monkeys!” between blasts. I also recalled one afternoon’s drive in his old Ambassador car as he ploughed indiscriminately through the market crowd in town, narrowly missing the people in his path and casually bumping a dog and forcing from him a very loud squeal, before taking me to visit a rather bemused army colonel for tea.

The Maharajah seemed to be a vestige from a past time: the history that he espoused through his stories of hunting with army generals and communing with various Britisher civil servants in the last days of the Raj are of an India I can only imagine and that others would most likely rather forget.

Still, I had a yearning to go visit the old boy again. Finding him was not easy: his little guest house barely channels electricity into its walls, let alone the world wide web, and I was at pains to find him in any of the guide books available to me. After an extensive Google search, I was able to procure a phone number and sure enough after a few minutes I had him on the line.

“You are coming to stay?” he screamed down the phone, “That’s lovely! We will have a lovely cocktail party in your honour.”

And so it was that we pulled up into the main chowk at Omkareshwar and spotted the washed out sign to the Maharajah Guest House straddling some rickety stone stairs leading down to a house and a waiting gang of dogs.

As we descended the staircase amid a chorus of barks, dodging the intermittent bits of scattered trash, it occurred to me that the old place might have suffered some infrastructural decline in the last decade. Turning the corner of the house, we encountered the Maharajah and his daughter who welcomed us like prodigal children. The old boy hadn’t changed one bit, and though he had no recollection of me (why should he?!) he was still pleased as punch to have three new visitors in the fold.

We were shown our quarters which - I have to say without any intention to insult my hosts - were among the ickiest rooms I’ve ever seen. Olly pulled the long straw as the smaller bed happened to be in the best room in the house, the highly coveted Room Number One which the Maharajah later told us was rented by a Belgian fellow who stayed there for one whole year in the company of a curiously large Shiva Lingam.

High ceilings and arched doorways with a double door leading out onto a rocky precipice right above the river nonetheless failed to mask the decrepitude of a building the family told me was over 600 years old. Damp to the core, and with albeit rustically cool-looking peeling paintwork, the most striking feature of the room was its inhabitants: a cockroach scuttled away from the door as we went to open it, and once inside I heard the brief squeaks of a creature under the bed who went to make a run for it but was caught mid-flight in the unforgiving jaws of the largest member of the Maharajah’s pack of dogs.

Mortified at the kill that had taken place right before my eyes, what I thought was a mauled rat turned out to be a cute little chipmunk, and the body of the poor unfortunate was duly toyed with for the following two hours by the triumphant hound who saw it only appropriate to parade it to and fro across the main terrace of the house, much to his owners’ indifference.

Two other chipmunks raced out in the wake of their deceased brother, as a gecko shot past me, climbing up the nearest wall and into a crack by the doorframe. To compound the zoological theme, we also saw an enormous, what I would call zoo-sized, snake slither across the ground about two metres away from our bedroom doors.

I shivered. Thor sneezed, his chronically bad sinuses set off by the damp of ages. We decided that the only way to get through this was to take the Maharajah up on his offer of a peg of whiskey before dinner.

At 78, the Maharajah cuts a stout figure. Sat at the table on the front porch, he waited for us with a bottle of Royal Choice whiskey that was marked ‘for sale to military personnel only’. And so we passed an evening, glasses refilled at every opportunity, plates of extremely spicy food put in front of us, and all the time regaled by the Maharaja’s stories of tiger hunts (“I stood facing the beast with my rifle; it was my life or his…”) and other former glory days.

We actually caught a glimpse of his famed rifle, a rudimentary looking weapon, rested against the door of the family room. Though it seemed that these days, he was leaving the job of controlling errant primates to his pack of dogs. Mangy-looking, skinny and with a perennial itch, they were nonetheless clearly excellent guard dogs with a strong sense of the territory they were patrolling. Every so often an occasional canine intruder would come across the steps of the house to be met by stamping paws and enraged barks from the Maharaja’s hounds who would return to the dinner table seconds later with puppy eyes scrounging for food.

And indeed, the next day we were to discover that the Maharaja’s monkey paranoia was entirely justified. Shooting the breeze in Room Number One after a fitful night in a bed so damp it could almost pass for a paddling pool that included several rushed trips to a darkened squat toilet on account of too much spice or too many pegs of Royal Choice as well as a developing Urinary Tract Infection for my womanly sins. (Too much information?)

Suffice to say the next day, I was far from bright and breezy, and caught entirely off-guard by a cocksure primate who had breezed into Room Number One as the three of us draped ourselves over the furniture, vaguely planning how to leave and get to Indore that evening for Olly to catch a flight back to Mumbai.

Now there’s something about being in the presence of an animal about a third your size with whose genus you have very little hands on experience that can be quite disconcerting. The three of us immediately stood up and made threatening gestures towards the monkey who eyed us with the nonchalance of an unamused audience considering a mid-show exit. Instead of legging it back out of the door as we had anticipated he would, he instead turned to face us full on and opened his mouth to bear his teeth in a sort of terrifying yawn.

He looked to his right and we followed his eyes. I understood in a flash what he was after: we had a green plastic bag full of food bits sat on a chair in the corner of the room. The monkey had identified his target: a loaf of bread, some jam and a couple of blackened overripe bananas, and he was willing to risk life and limb to get it.

Disheartened by his obvious determination and indifference to our earlier defense tactics, we began to feel the trickle of a panic in the face of this daring, undeterred creature. Thor picked up an empty plastic bottle to lob at him while I decided it would be best to go for the bag itself, thus taking away his incentive. The monkey decided to go for the bag at exactly the same moment, and we both moved towards each other with duel-like intensity. I grabbed the bag and he shot back. Without giving it another thought I ran out of the back door and let the boys deal with the intruder as they saw fit, inwardly justifying my cowardice with the thought that, given their size, Thor and Olly would somehow be much better adept at scaring a monkey out of a room than I would be.

By the time I returned, our primate friend had left and we all resumed our positions of cool, lolling about the place and trying to pretend that a small monkey hadn’t just scared the bejeezus out of us.

A few moments later, however, we were treated to a primate spectacle of a more x-rated variety as another monkey picked the rocky outcrop just outside our room as the perfect spot for what we call back home a five-knuckle-shuffle. He didn’t seem in the least put off by our disbelieving stares as we uttered, “No, surely not, he’s not… is he? You don’t think he’ll actually-“ and before we had time to utter the inevitable, the monkey had climaxed, caught the sticky white liquid square in his own mouth, and was hungrily licking the residue off his fingers. We stood, spellbound by the sight. It seemed that now might be a good time to leave.

The Maharaja was most put out that we weren’t staying for longer. Not content with having emptied a litre of whiskey with us the previous night, he decided on a new tactic: “How about a peg of gin before you go?” We protested that we couldn’t possibly drink before hitting the road to which he replied in conspiratorial tones, “A colonel friend of mine once told me that a peg of gin before a journey keeps you focused on the road.”

I considered his advice but decided it was still a little too early in the day. The Maharajah twirled the upturned edges of his moustache and conceded our departure, before taking me to one side for a brief word.

“That car of yours,” he began.

“The Nano?”

“Yes, the Tata Nano... What will you do with it at the end of your trip? Will you sell it?”

Not even knowing the answer myself, I sort of nodded vaguely.

He smiled and stepped in closer. “If you do, then please call me, I would like to buy it from you.”

I tried to imagine the Maharaja behind the wheel of a Nano instead of his grand old Ambassador and the image was suddenly comical. I wondered how Abhilasha would feel about being passed on to the Maharaja. I figured we’d have to discuss it, and I promised the Maharaja that I would at least call him, should I ever be ready to sell the car.

Mob-handed, overloaded and A-listed: we’re back on the road

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:21:49 +0200

Welcome to the sequel. Well, actually it’s more of an epilogue than a continuation of what went before... after all, the challenge has been completed and the Nano Diaries in their original form are over. What goes on from now is a revisiting, a shorter trip of a more relaxed and less mission-like variety, driving wee Abhilasha up to Delhi via Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan, in the space of about 3 weeks. It’s actually the bit that I would like to have done as part of the Nano Diaries before, but wasn’t able to due to lack of funds, road fatigue, and the blistering temperatures of northern India in May.

The cast of characters has changed a bit too: brawn and testosterone in the form of my boyfriend Thor have been added to the terrible twosome that were myself and Abhilasha, and to boot we have been joined by me old mate Olly for a few days as he hotfoots a speedy week in India before heading back home to London.

And so started a new test for Abhilasha: that of space and weight capacity. Three people plus luggage (actually, my six-months-in-India baggage could easily count for 2-3 people) cut a whole new challenge for the car and for our own logistical skills. When all the bags were dumped outside the car in Akhil’s parking lot in Mumbai, Thor mournfully proclaimed that we’d have to leave at least one or two behind and pick them up on our return. I, on the other hand, had every faith that Abhilasha could pull off a Tardis-like coup, bending the rules of space-time to incorporate everything we had... and us.

We might not have done it were it not for the Houdini-esque skills of Mohan, Akhil’s ever-obliging cook, who shoe-horned every item from the parking lot floor into the rear storage space and the back seats, with all the expertise of a world Tetris champion.

As we left the last dregs of Mumbai traffic behind us (about 2 hours into the drive) I began to breathe deep with the pleasure of being back on the road. And having co-drivers makes all the difference. Olly made some very heavy handed hints about wanting to drive before I finally gave him the wheel somewhere after Nashik, and not without a little trepidation given the litre of beer he’d just consumed. Still, he took to the roads with aplomb, instantly diving into to the the twists, turns, swerves and pothole-bumps that lead us the remaining 150km to Aurangabad. Unaccustomed to stick shift and left-hand driving, Thor has yet to take the wheel though we have promised him a course in gear changes and hill starts in a car park somewhere before he takes to the roads.

On our way to Aurangabad, Indian Time became reliably manifest again, with its usual elastic quality pushing up Delilah’s prediction of two hours (that’s the GPS’ calculation, for the uninitiated) to a total journey time of 11 hours, door to door. Include in that a slight deviation somewhere in the backroads between Nashik and Aurangabad, after the sun had set and we were forgivably set off track by the burning headlights diffusing through clouds of dust that are village roads at night, as well as conflicting advice from villagers as to the best way to reach our destination.

Finally pulling up to the Lemon Tree Aurangabad, a chain concept of budget luxury that’s spread several branches throughout key cities in the country, we cast a quick and admiring glance at the pool (“the largest in Aurangabad,” we were proudly informed at the reception desk) and the bar that justified the several-thousand rupee splashout on this curious resort before limping like starving hyenas to the Citrus Cafe - or whatever it was called – to put their dinner buffet categorically out of business.

I woke up the next morning actually feeling like I was on vacay – an Indian-Continental breakfast hybrid followed by newspapers by the pool (suffice to say I was the only person to be seen late morning anywhere near Aurangabad’s Largest Pool) made it very difficult to move three asses back into Abhilasha and over to the area’s best-known attraction – the caves at Ellora.

But finally we did it and to much gladness. The caves were among the best things I have yet to see in India. There are basically a series of them that date back thousands of years and contain Buddhist, Hindu and Jain sculptures and temples. Some are more impressive than others, but they are all imbued with the unmistakeable wow factor of seeing a monument and wondering how the heck you never heard of it before. Mind you, it is a World Heritage Site, and the boys at UNESCO rarely get it wrong, in my opinion.

Our timing was lucky in that we were spared being stampeded by local tourists and school groups clamouring for group photos, though our luck didn’t stretch to visiting the Bibi-Ka Maqbara –also known as the Miniature Taj Mahal- the next day where myself, Thor and Olly were individually accosted by groups of excitable youths visiting the crumbling old monument. We were called to, giggled at, and in fact the boys were nearly ripped limb from limb by the enthusiasm of a group of young lads who were mesmerised by Thor’s command of Hindi.

Princess Di-style pics were taken at the monument’s entrance before we made a run from the fast gathering crowd. There are days when I can take the A-list celeb attention better than others and today was not one of them. I actually found myself putting a grumpy hand-up-to-the-lens to one particularly effusive young photographer who had been following me with his camera phone about 2 metres away from my face for several minutes. Roll on the press scrums, I’ll be punching photographers next...

Such, readers, is the cult of celebrity, a status that is no less for dear Abhilasha who is still followed by joyful cries of ‘Nano Nano Nano’ wherever we go. I thought the hype would have died down a little by now, now that the plant at Sanand is in full swing and India’s cities are decorated with posters advertising the incredible 2077 rupees a month financing scheme (that’s about $45 in US dollars, or 30 English Pounds – a little over the cost of a one-week tube pass or something similar). But, if pump attendants and village children are anything to go by, it appears that Nano mania is still in full swing and Abhilasha is as loved as she was on our maiden voyage back in February.

Reunited, and it feels so... damp

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:23:03 +0200

“Why are you going to Mumbai? It’s a horrible city,” muttered the bumptious neo-adolescent working the Emirates check-in desk at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport as he typed my details into the computer. Shocked at the gall of this lowly ticket boy and the nonchalance of his scathing attack on my choice of destination I nonetheless decided to play along in order to discover the source of his disquieting opinion. What’s wrong with Mumbai? I asked.

“It’s dirty, overcrowded, polluted and hot,” he listed, without taking his eyes off the screen in front of him. These were not the words I wanted to hear on day one of my return to India for what could be a six-month sejour. Ascertaining that this plucky whippersnapper had never even set foot on Indian soil, I dismissed his words as an example of the mindless prejudice conferred from the people of western Asian states onto their continental brothers to the east, and tried to ignore the nagging slideshow of images of India’s bleaker side that his words had inspired in me.

On taking my boarding pass from him, I suggested with exaggerated haughtiness that he dare to take a trip to India himself to enrich his information first-hand, to which he just smiled with an ‘I don’t think so’ shake of the head.

Cocky little upstart, I thought as I made my way to the boarding lounge, and soon put him out of my mind with the help of inflight movies and a three-hour stopover in the Disneyland of airports that is Dubai. But upon landing at Mumbai airport the next morning (my first daylight landing here) and seeing the swathes of slum land that creep to the very edge of the runway, his comments returned to me with fresh aplomb.

It struck me how, no matter how many times I come to India, I am still always a little shell shocked for the first few days by just about everything I encounter. Akhil, in his unfaltering courtesy and hospitality, sent a driver to come and pick me up from the airport and drive me to his new apartment in the Tardeo neighborhood, and all along the way I was taken in by the little details I have managed to forget in the last 5 months: a woman walking barefoot in a muddy gutter, a couple knocked off their scooter by a large truck, being accosted by an assertive magazine salesman in thick, thick traffic, the arachnoid scavengings of a scrawny four-legged beast that required several seconds of scrutiny before I could identify it as a dog...

All through the drive, however, I only had one thing on my mind: the whereabouts of Abhilasha. The driver and I had no common language, so it was useless asking him whether he had any clue as to where it was. All I knew is that Akhil had moved house since my last visit and I could only hope that the Nano had moved with him. I had memories handing over the keys to the guards at the car park in Breach Candy back in May, having inched the Nano into the tightest corner of the lot upon the request of another resident there who complained to me that the wee yellow peril had been blocking the way of his Rolls Royce.

But sure enough, there it was. Looking somewhat comical, nestled between a Nisan 250xl and a Hyundai i20, Abhilasha was waiting patiently for my arrival. Mohan, Akhil’s cook, ceremoniously handed me the keys that were waiting for me by my bed, and I went back down to the parking lot for a reunificatory spin.

Upon opening Abhilasha’s door, however, the smell that hit me in the face made it immediately apparent that the monsoon season which I had escaped and left it alone to deal with, had been hard on the Nano. It seemed that the constant dampness and humidity had rendered Abhilasha the perfect breeding ground for a colony of seasonal fungi that had mostly made their home around the leather encasing of the gear stick and down in the murky depths of the cup holders.

Inspecting the Nano’s insides, I looked for other clues as to its activities of the past few months. Barring a trip to Phoenix Mills shopping mall back in June, as demonstrated by a parking ticket left on the dashboard, there was little evidence of incident. The Nano now has a new security sticker for the parking lot and another, more mysterious label in the top left hand corner of the windscreen that simply says ‘shower test OK’. I mused that the car had undergone some sort of water trial in my absence, though I’m not sure the verdict ‘OK’ is entirely justified, given the proliferation of monsoon mushrooms in Abhilasha’s stick area.

Still, I revved up the engine and we set off with a couple of worrying and thus far absent squeaks of the brake. However, the most disastrous revelation of Abhilasha’s decline since May was only revealed to me as we pulled out of the parking lot and into the chaos of Tardeo. Hold onto your hats readers, for it’s a tough blow to befall us all: the AC is bust.

In abject denial for about the first ten minutes, I fiddled in vain with the temperature dial and the the AC’s on-off button. To no avail. All I was getting was a steady stream of lukewarm, humid air in the face. There was nothing for it but to open the windows. And with the touch of a (thankfully, still working) button, all of Mumbai and sundry came rushing into the car with us. The massive difference between driving cocooned in a lovely air-conditioned bubble and negotiating the city’s traffic exposed to the noise, fumes and startled stares of fellow road users became painfully apparent. I was open and vulnerable, and very sweaty.

And so starts a new chapter for the Nano Diaries. A shorter, less intensive trip up to Delhi through Gujarat and Rajasthan and possibly Madhya Pradesh, though I’m still working on the details. And all of this only after a bloody good spring clean and a trip to the doctor to see about that AC and them worrying squeaks.

It’s good to be back.

Coffee table book for sale!

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 21:45:55 +0200

For die-hard Nano Diaries fans wanting to hold on to a souvenir of the greatest journey completed by a small yellow car, then check out ‘India Coast to Coast’ a cutesy little coffee table book (7”x7”), a 142-page bonanza of photos and tales from the subcontinent, published by yours truly.

Perfect as a high-brow accessory to your bookshelf or as a gift to loved ones, family and friends, this wee book is a limited edition gem that you won’t find anywhere else; no, not even on Amazon. So head over to Blurb.com and fill your shopping trolleys! And tell your friends! And tell them to tell their friends!

The book has also been entered into the Blurb Photography Book Now competition, and if the Diaries happen to win a prize, you’ll be the first to know! 

Epilogue and many, many thanks

Sat, 29 May 2010 20:05:32 +0200

Since I got back from India, people have been asking me whether I have fallen victim to that old devil Culture Shock. Three and a half months away and on the road in Asia must surely leave some kind of mark in the immediate consciousness, if not the deeper corners of the psyche, I am told, and yet since touching down on British soil a couple of weeks ago now, I have felt nothing much but a vague sense of gumption at being surrounded by familiarity. I’ve eaten a lot of meat, splurged on unnecessary cosmetics in Boots and gotten a big kick out of being so cold at night I have to keep my socks on.

I do miss, however, miss Abhilasha. During the course of a day, my thoughts will often wander with maternal unease, to the parking lot in Mumbai and the security guard with whom I have entrusted the all-important key. Driving long distances on a near-daily basis can become quite a habit, and in the wake of that, stillness can be rather unsettling.

So it was with some excitement that yesterday, for the first time in three weeks, I picked up the keys to my Mum’s Audi A3 here in Jersey and set off on the well-trodden route from Grouville to St Helier. The best I can report about being back behind the wheel after a short hiatus was a sensation similar to what I imagine Vietnam vets felt upon returning home from the jungles. And with an Audi at my command in the quiet and law-abiding streets of Jersey, I was a bit like the battle-scarred war veteran with a hand-held nuclear pulverizer at an under-tens paintball meet.

Suffice to say some Indian habits appear to have stuck, and quite sub-consciously. I left a few red-faced islanders in my wake as I overtook with frightening the speed allowed me by the car’s automatic gear system, and even incurred an irate horn as, at the last minute, I wedged the Audi into a small space at the front of a very long and patient queue waiting to go into the tunnel.

What’s strange to see (and the contrast between the roads of Jersey with their virtuous 40 mph speed limit, courteous Filter in Turn systems and infamously compliant Green Lanes and the traffic maelstrom that is India could not be sharper) are the ordered lines, the politeness and patience with which drivers negotiate the roads in Jersey. Not one car appears to be going a foot over the speed limit; signs are obeyed; correct queueing lanes are adhered to; priority at junctions is decided justly; and with the exception of the odd, well handled horse, there are no other animals to compete with on the roads.

It’s all too easy, I thought, as I cut up my sixth victim of the day at a turning at Harve des Pas. I felt like a cat among the pigeons, a rookie profiteer taking advantage of people’s good driving will as I bypassed a five-minute line at a traffic light by taking the Wrong Lane and re-inserting myself into the flow at the front of the queue, much to the astonishment and anger of the other, more socially minded road users.

I think it’s a credit to Jersey that I won’t be here for too long, and a boon for me that within four months, god willing, I will be back behind Abhilasha’s non-power steering wheel and headed back north to the deserts of Rajasthan before driving westwards and to a more settled existence in Pondicherry for a few months. And from there the Nano Diaries will continue. So keep an eye out for much, much more...

At this point, I’d like to give thanks to everyone who has participated and helped financially, emotionally and practically in keeping this project going and promoting it to the rest of the world.

Thanks first and foremost to Akhil Gupta in Mumbai and his assistant Prasad without whom this absolutely would not have been possible. And an ongoing thanks to Akhil and his parents for providing me with a home away from home, delicious curry dinners, and refuge for Abhilasha for the coming months. And particularly to Prasad who never once let on a modicum of frustration despite the many phonecalls, some in the wee hours of the night, to ask his help in bailing me out of some situation or other that my own idiocy got me into time and time again.

Thanks to all my family and friends for their support, especially Mum who remarkably managed not to loose her sh*t during various, more hair-raising parts of the trip. Thanks to my two occasional co-pilots, Thor and Hadleigh who poured in the love and kept me sane.

Thanks to Jason for all your support, and more importantly, for giving Abhilasha its now legendary name. Stroke of genius, that.

Thanks to everyone in India. You truly deserve your title as the most hospitable nation on earth. It’s really humbling to be received time and time again with such warmness, respect and interest. Thank you for not making me feel like a stranger, for allowing me to feel that even though I am a foreigner in your country, that I nonetheless might have something to add to the gigantic melting pot. I think the world can really learn something from your openness and engagement.

Thank you to the individuals in India who softened the blows of long-distance travels and allowed me to share their homes and the delights of creature comforts. Special big ups to Reuben, Petra and Paul and your respective and very hallowed Nespresso machines.

To everyone who made a financial donation: Jon Meldrum, Dom Goodman, Jason Sanchez, Olly Lambert, Vesna Able, AOMAC, Charles Strasser, Robb Ellender, Ljilja Lainovic, Dijana and Dobrica Vukcevic, Mike and Jean Barnes, Dorothea Evans, Chris Gothard, Sacha Lainovic, Can Esenbel, Balamurugan Manoharan, Jan Pearse, Richard Norman, Steve and Hannah Shelswell and Vamsi Mohun. You guys rock. Together you have raised over £3,000, most of which will be going to Women’s World Banking. This is really an achievement, and I hope to be able to relay a report about the success of their schemes when I return to India.

(Lines are still open for another few weeks if anyone else wishes to donate!)

Finally, thanks to all of you readers and Facebook aficionados who have followed the blog and the updates. Your support and comments are what kept me going and propelled me to my laptop even after a hard day’s driving. Especially thanks to Nancy Nagwekar, Mangesh Karandikar, Rupesh Mandal and Temoris Grecko for their input and advice.

And I suppose I can’t really sign off here without thanking the car itself, faithful old Abhilasha. My wheels, my home, my air-conditioned refuge, my language-learning booth, my bubble, my best yellow mate. I thought much much less of you, little car - I really didn’t think we’d make the 10,000k with so little mechanical incident, but you held yourself together and showed yourself up for what you are: the best of Indian. Just don’t go catching fire, now...

Full circle to the end of my tether

Thu, 13 May 2010 14:48:52 +0200

200km from the outskirts of Mumbai, the effects of too much Red Bull on an empty stomach after 11 solid hours of driving began to kick in. At a neon-green garage, abandoned all but for a couple of attendants sitting expectantly by the pump on plastic chairs, I fell victim to the knock-on effects of excess caffeine and sugar. Tunnel vision, accelerated heart rate, difficulty breathing; I parked Abhilasha in the far corner of the plaza by the toilet block and sat with the A/C on full blast in my face as I struggled to breathe easy and calm the electric buzz in my arms and legs. Absolutely terrifying.

Like a marathon runner just minutes from the finish line, or a mountaineer within a few metres of the summit, I was so close. But this final push was proving to be the end of me. 10pm and only another 3 or so hours to go, but I felt beaten. Around me was pitch black, a void of unknown nothing punctuated by the searing lights of driving insanity. Disoriented, panicked, knackered, I was ready to throw in the towel.

I had been driving all day, since Udaipur; a 750km journey that I was planning on doing over two days, but decided to take advice from the black devil somewhere around Vadadora and go for the whole thing in one shot.

What the hell, I thought? It’s the last leg. Let’s make it glorious, triumphant! Let’s march in Mumbai for the final hurrah, our heads held high after a real challenge. After all, what’s the worst can happen?

Well, I could begin to get sleepy, for a start. So I reached over to the back seat and my stash of energy drink cans and cracked open the offending Red Bull. And downed it all in one.

Three hours later, shaking uncontrollably in the darkness of the neon-garage, I was ready to cry. The Fear began to wash over me. Irrational thoughts and other demons of the caffeine comedown started playing out grotesque dramas in front of my eyes. You’re in no fit state to drive, you’re going crazy; you need to stop, but where? Paranoia: those guys by the pump are watching you; they’re staring at you. They’re waiting for a moment of weakness to swoop in and rip you limb from limb. You can’t stay here; but you can’t go out on the road either; it’s a jungle out there, full of full-beam headlights, badly lit lanes and roadworks. You’ll die if you stay; you’ll die if you go...

Yes, readers; such are the effects of superfluous Red Bull, a day at the wheel, and the deep, deep darkness of the Indian night. For the first time in the Nano Diaries, just hours before the finish line, I began to lose my cool.

Anxiety and humiliation were further compounded by a phonecall from my mother, who must have sensed my plight though her trusty maternal sixth sense. On hearing her voice, the childish tears began to flow. Edmund Hillary might not have gotten a call from his Mum just before the summit, but had he, he might have taken a little more courage and bounce in his final steps.

“Come on,” she pep-talked me, “you’re so close. Just 200km - that’s like two hours!”

“Make that four,” I whined with the surly capitulation of a spoilt child. “It’s so far. I just -just can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can!” she insisted. “Just drink lots of water and keep going.” Mum’s answer to everything.

I wiped away the tears and set back out on the road, very slowly this time. I was no longer the brash, aggressive driver of earlier; the opportunist swiping and swaying through cracks between lorries, flying over speed bumps and potholes and jacking around crawling two- and three-wheelers. In those last three hours back to Mumbai, I sat perfectly passive, holding a steady 65kmph and locking my eyes to only what was dead ahead of me. I breathed deep, I relaxed my whole body, I held the wheel at its lowest point, barely tapping it with my fingers when we needed to budge a little to the left or the right. And when the cars coming from the other direction blinded me, I didn’t swear at them and curse the lack of road markings, praying to the God of Cat’s Eyes to send me a reflective sign - I simply steered on in the darkness, pushing Abhilasha on into the void with the blind faith of the deeply religious or the clinically insane, that somehow, just somehow, the powers of the NH8 would deliver us home.

It was a type of final surrender; I had tempted the fates by doubling our usual daily distance and by intoxicating myself with the evils of devil’s pee in a can. The stakes had been raised, and the drama was high for Abhilasha’s concluding run back to her city of origin.

The kilometres on the clock were moving with gut-wrenching sloth, but I continued with our monged-out pace, rejoicing in the waves of clarity that were sporadically washing over me, aided, I’m sure, by the massive amounts of water I was knocking back. It was midnight when my bladder was full enough to warrant another stop so, now irrationally terrified of godforsaken night-time gas stations, I opted instead for a stop at a ‘Hotel’.

Less a lodging of the Hilton - Hyatt variety and closer to a cross between Hotel California and a bar in the movie Deliverance, these cheerful roadside snack stops by day transform into sinister, foreboding truckkers hang outs by night. I pulled up Abhilasha in front of the giant, open-air cafeteria and suddenly several dozen pairs of eyes promptly stopped whatever they were doing to eye us up good and proper in that ‘you’re not from around here’ way.

Beyond caring, I locked up the Nano and made my way over to the ladies’ toilet block, immaculate on the inside, most probably due to the fact that this ‘hotel’ hadn’t seen a lady since as far back as any of its zombified clientele could remember. At least not one that wasn’t employed by the establishment, if you know what I mean... Whilst squatting over the hole in the ground, listening to the baleful sounds of truckkers banter outside, my cubicle was thrown into deep darkness by the onset of a power cut and I was left crouching, exposed, mid-pee and completely disoriented. Oh god, make it end; I prayed.

I mustered up the bravery to approach the counter for a bottle of water before setting off again and was treated to one of the sourest faces I have yet to see in India on the countenance of the man at the register. Where the smiles? Where the good Indian humour? Had I entered the jolliness vacuum? Was there some kind of Cinderella effect at work here whereby all good-natured roadies turned into gremlins at midnight and skulked under the mosquito-and-moth-ridden strip lighting at roadsides waiting for the sun to rise again? I had often thought how fun it might be to compare road stories with a truck driver here in India - to swap anecdotes about errant rickshaws, exchange sage wisdom on the quickest routes, ruminate together on the psycho-neurotic effects of the phrase ‘Horn OK Please’ and discuss remedies for the burning discomfort of truckdrivers’ arm and cheek (from which I had been suffering terribly these last few days heading south). Great conversations waiting to happen, I’m sure, but now was not the time.

I picked my way back to Abhilasha through a sea of stares and got the hell out in a cloud of dust. The upside of my brush with the Lost Boys was that it had brought me back to my senses and out of the cloud of Red Bull-induced Fear, and I was finally ready for the last 50km stretch back to Mumbai.

I had imagined something like a ticker-tape parade while crossing the Bandra-Worli sealink on our way back to Breach Candy, and so to Akhil’s house, but instead, we sped through the deserted roads of a sleeping Mumbai and were soon back on familiar territory, where I was able to shut off Delilah and enjoy the last few minutes of the Nano Diaries drive in peace.

There was no denying the heavy sense of melancholy in the car. Both Abhilasha and I knew our time was up. A strange feeling of emptiness after a job done loomed over us those last few kilometres, and when we finally pulled into Akhil’s parking lot and had the guards there (all four of them) jump up and guide us into the tiny parking space, I switched off the engine and was rattled by the silence.

We made it. We bloody made it. Both Abhilasha and I were, by dint of some miracle, in one piece and intact. Three months earlier, I had imagined this day, trundling back into Mumbai with half of her bodywork missing and a dent the size of an Eicher truck’s front bumper in her rear. But here we were, fighting fit, with just a couple of scratches and close to 12,000 km on the clock to show for our adventures. An uncanny feeling of bathos washed over me. What now?

That question was soon answered with aplomb when, upon checking my messages an hour later before collapsing into bed, I received the following missive from the Jaiwana Haveli hotel in Udaipur where I’d stayed the previous night.

Subject: Your Passport, Jaiwana haveli

We assume you are Ms. Vanessa who stayed in Udaipur last night at our hotel. You have forgotten your Passport at the hotel. Let us know your contact address so that we can have it sent.

Regards
Yash

Ignore if you are not the person.

My heart stopped and I internally uttered a wretched ‘NOOOOOOOOOO!’ in the direction of the godless heavens. My flight out was in 35 hours. I had already looked into changing it, and knew that it was too costly a transaction to be workable. I had to be on that plane. I had to get my passport from Udaipur. The place I had just driven from... I did the maths. It had taken me 15 hours. So if I left now, I could go there and back and JUST make the...

It was nonsense. I was in despair. It was 3am; there was nothing I could do but wait till morning and then call Akhil’s long-suffering (on my account) PA Prasad to ask, yet again, for bail-me-out advice.

And in fact, after 4 hours sleep, everything looked just a shade brighter. Prasad assured me that Blue Dart couriers could have the passport with me by first light tomorrow, but Yash at the Jaiwana Haveli called one better and actually sent my precious little red book with a friend who was flying to Mumbai that evening.

So the Nano and I had one last mission left - a night drive to the domestic terminal of Chhartapati Shivaji airport to meet the angel in human form that had come to right my act of ridiculous stupidity. It was a smooth and harmonious journey, through the streets and only moderate traffic of nighttime Mumbai, enjoyable to the core, not least because of the contrast in mood to last night’s frazzled nerves. As we cruised back under the floodlit suspension lines of the Bandra-Worli sealink and saw the outline of Mumbai’s skyscrapers on the horizon, I shed a little tear of nostalgia.

Abhilasha will now wait a few months till I summon the wherewithal and the paperwork to return and drive her once more to pastures new. But neither she nor I will ever forget our virgin romp around India, the massive distance we went together every last inch.

It ain’t over yet - or is it?

Sat, 8 May 2010 21:17:07 +0200

At 4:42pm last Wednesday, just outside Rajapur on the NH1, the old Grand Trunk Road, the Nano Diaries clocked its target 10,000km.

It was an emotional moment; a strange mixture of sadness and joy. On the one hand, we achieved what we set out to do - we drove this enormous distance in the Nano’s motherland, taking the country’s most coveted little new car and turning it into an unlikely road hero. We proved, against all odds and expectations, that an English girl and an Indian car, the cheapest in the world, can indeed circle India and emerge unscathed.

We have negotiated batty city traffic, spent hours sitting in gridlocks, crossed mountains, forests, plains; we have laughed, cried, honked our horn and sworn at negligent truckies; we have gotten lost, found the dead ends of motorways, been attacked by an elephant and on several occasions very nearly run out of petrol; we have seen farmers, road workers, naked guys, jetset tourists, soldiers, spiritual leaders and literally hundreds of pump attendants; we’ve sped, stalled, braked, screeched, swerved, overtaken, been sworn at, gestured at, stared at, gawped at, pointed at and smiled at.

We’ve been lonely, we’ve had company; we’ve been in the moment, we’ve reflected; we’ve thought a lot, we’ve written a blog and we’ve listened to an inordinate amount of Alan Watts.

And when the clock finally turned to 10,000 km, despite the fact that we still have another 1,500km to go back to Mumbai, a knell sounded somewhere in the distance that I knew marked the beginning of the end.

I stopped Abhilasha and took a photo exactly where we were at the 10,000 mark: on a completely unremarkable road near a dhaba, just past a bridge. I took a picture of the distance gauge that’s been guarded since Puttaparthi by the rotund, cross-legged Ganesha. It actually reads 10,650, since there was already 650 on the clock when we left Mumbai all those weeks ago.

I sighed and sat back down in Abhilasha. I turned the key in the ignition. What now? The party’s over, my friend. Where do we go from here?

Into the lap of luxury, that’s where. Delhi was calling, and so a welcome break from the reality of the road, in an oasis of calm western-style living at a journo-friend’s house in the shiga-shee nabe of Sundar Nagar.

We arrived there at around 8 in the evening, and Abhilasha put up no protest whatsoever to being parked outside what was probably the nicest building we’ve seen on our entire journey thus far. She was in good company, surrounded by classy cars who all boasted drivers like A-listers boast PAs. As I unbundled my stuff from the backseat and made my way through the large security gates of my friend’s house, I looked back at her with a rush of pride. She looked so funny: sort of squat and comically rural in the company of a fleet of large SUVs and other VIP wheels, but she nonetheless held her own, a car comfortable in her own bodywork.

And so passed the last 3 days in Delhi with very little to recount other than hours spent at aforementioned mate’s house, basking in every luxury of the new world that I had more or less forgotten. Wireless internet, air-conditioning, a Nespresso machine, a drinks cabinet, bookcases stacked to the rafters with all manner of reading material, flatscreen TVs, a washing machine with a separate tumble dryer, a treadmill and a staff count of three.

The dusty baking hot plains of the north, the crowded streets and highways, the sweaty nights spent under sporadically functional fans and the makeshift landfills and slum housing were a world away. They were a world that lay way beyond the gates of this most peaceful and elegant housing enclosure. This was a side of India we had not yet seen and only hours after completing our 10K mission, Abhilasha and I melted into it and let it eat us for dinner.

I was a bad, bad travel writer. With the exception of a lovely and leisurely late-afternoon stroll through the Lodi Gardens, I didn’t see a single sight in three days. Instead I went shopping (FabIndia again, folks, as well as the city’s upscale Khan market...) and I went to the newly-opened Aman Hotel where I spent the entire day laid flat on my back, soaking up the sun and swimming in their hipper-than-chic 50-metre minimalist-east-meets-west pool. I read OK! magazine cover to cover and back again. I ate a 550-rupee chicken tikka sandwich and relished the accompanying french fries. I spent an evening at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club where I saw my first iPad and met all manner of gregarious journalists, including one scottish hack who regaled me with consolatory tales of his own driving experiences in the city.

“The thing about driving in Delhi,” he rightly pointed out, “is that you always arrive at your destination feeling different from how you did when you left home.” Driving here always leaves an emotional mark in some way or another, he said, and went on to catalogue a series of everyday stress-inducers invariably involving horns and irate SUV chauffers.

I also took Abhilasha for her 10,000 km service. I speculated that there was the chance that she might well be the first Nano in India to do so. I left her in what didn’t seem like the overly-capable hands of a Mr Bedi at Bedi Motors on the Racecourse Road. However, three hours and 850 rupees later, she emerged glowing; cleaned and preened like a Delhi princess after a day at the spa.

I even gave her (and me) a break and took my friend’s driver around on some errands I had to do. We spent a couple of hours looking for an iStore or somesuch where I could get a new power cable for my laptop (the second one I’ve had to buy on the trip - both previous ones having been fried by power surges) and the driver was quite vocal about his opinions on my faithful steed.

“Nobody is buying this Tata Nano,” he said with confidence. “Driving it on the highways is very dangerous. If you crash on the highways in the Tata Nano, you will not be going to hospital. You will be going straight to heaven.” I glared at him and thanked him for the vote of confidence to which he just cooly replied that I was very brave.

I also booked my ticket home. I now have a matter of days to return to Mumbai and get on a Blighty-bound plane. The diaries will continue for a little while longer as there is still plenty of material I’ve been meaning to post, and they will in fact take another mini-round come September when we will return for an encore post-summer, post-monsoon tour of Rajasthan.

Now, however, there’s just one and a half-thousand km between Abhilasha and Mumbai. These last few days are to be the most challenging and most driving-intensive of any on the trip so far. So stay tuned - it ain’t over till the Yellow Peril parks back up in Breach Candy.

From the Golden Temple to the Ministry of Silly Walks

Thu, 6 May 2010 13:01:39 +0200

Leaving McLeod Ganj is no mean feat. There’s something about this fair-weathered little town tucked into the foothills of the Himalayas with its quiet Tibetan community, pleasant mountain breezes and hip little coffee shops that makes it an incredibly enticing place to spend, say, six or so months. No further proof is needed than a little settlement just up the hill in a place called Bhagsu that’s absolutely packed to the rafters with Israelis who look like they’ve been there so long they’re beginning to blend with the rocks.

And so it was with a sigh that I packed up Abhilasha and set off back down the hill to Dharamsala, Pathankot and across to Amritsar, feeling the temperature and dustiness levels slowly rise as the road descended and eventually flattened back into India, a prospect that I considered with a hint of trepidation after the cool climes and generally more chilled atmosphere of the time out spent in Little Tibet. But, with the Nano Diaries clock having well passed the 9,000 km mark, we could only go onwards. I crossed the border into Punjab somewhere in the riper hours of the afternoon and drove the long, straight, dusty, tree-lined NH15 all the way to the Sikh holy city.

Amritsar is basically known for the stunning Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple at it’s centre, Sikhism’s most important place of worship, and home to the sacred holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, also referred to as the 11th Guru.

People who have visited the Golden Temple tend to extol its virtues in all manner of hyperbole, comparing it to the Taj Mahal and proclaiming it one of the most astonishing pieces of architecture on Indian soil. I mean, how can you not be at least a little bit aroused at the prospect?

Abhilasha and my first impressions of Amritsar were, however, not of the sublime gold and marble forms of the sacred temple, but of the maze of roads inside an army cantonment where Google maps had erroneously marked the location of Mrs Bhanderi’s Guest House that were to be our lodgings. After ten minutes or so of passing signs to the likes of the Officer’s Mess, the Army School and the Panther Club (?) I decided that the Jedi mind trick I pulled on the guard at the gate when he seemed perplexed at the idea of a hotel on the army grounds (“No, really, there is!” I insisted. “Google maps don’t lie!”) and so didn’t want to let me in, might not have been necessary after all. Perhaps we can reflect a little later on what the implications of such easy access into a top-notch military base actually means for India’s homeland security... (or is it just that, as my friend Rupert said, the Nano has some inexplicable talismanic qualities?)

After a grudging phonecall to the guest house (I’m still obstinately proud about admitting to being lost), I was directed out of the centre of the army grounds and onto their very edge to the guest house that was started up in the private home of a Mrs Bhanderi, (mother of the current owner of the same name), who lived to see the ripe old age of 101 in 2007. An obituary hanging on the wall outside the breakfast area attests to the fact that this adventurous lady may well have been the first woman in India to own and run her own car. A chick after my own heart.

The guest house itself is probably one of the quirkiest places the Nano Diaries has had the pleasure to lay its weary bones. Although it was never a part of the adjacent cantonment, somehow the blocky brick buildings still carry an air of the military, despite the creepers that now stretch over their surface and the manicured gardens that have sprung up in the surrounding grounds. I was thrilled to smell a heavy air of honeysuckle in the walk to my little out-house room as well as the sight of grape vines hanging from the arbors. I felt like Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty. A no-frills swimming pool sits to the side of the grounds painted a burgundy colour and bearing the words DEEP END at one of its extremities. Mrs Bhanderi told me they get a few school groups here too, which goes to explain the slides, seesaw and climbing frame in the garden, again all painted a militaristic black and white.

But the best part of the guest house was the kitchen - with no restaurants anywhere near walking distance from this remote army area, I was left with the option of dining at the behest of Mrs Bhanderi and her staff who prepared delicious Indian veg dishes (about three times more than a very hungry person could eat) in the most amazing kitchen that Mrs B claims has barely been touched or modified since her mother’s time.

China tea cups hang in rows from hooks along the bottom of shelves while two large tea kettles sit on the AGA stovetop opposite a row of variously labelled chutney and pickle jars. Dinner and breakfast were served respectively at a melancholy-looking single space inside the family dining room and outside in the garden in a way that made me feel something between a complete Billy No Mates and the Maharaja of Punjab.

On good advice that the streets of the bazaar around the Golden Temple were too intense to take the Nano as well as it being difficult to park, I opted for a rickshaw, one of the very few I have taken this whole trip. Whilst the rickshaw puttered along between and over potholes, weaving through traffic and blasting its horn every inch of the way, I exhaled and leaned against the back seat. Such a joy to be driven, for a change. To be able to sit back and look out at the traffic beast from a horizontal, passenger’s perspective, and not to have to be reacting to, swerving around and overtaking everything that comes across your path. I almost felt guilty for having these feelings, with Abhilasha locked inside the car park of Mrs Bhanderi’s guest house, but I figured even the best of relationships need to take a break from one another from time to time.

Finally, we came to the Golden Temple. I might have missed the afternoon crowds by arriving before midday, but the place was by no means deserted. I let myself get swept up in the flow of people that begins with a line to hand over shoes at a kiosk (that must contain literally thousands of items of footwear), before moving to the entrance of the temple that was bordered by a sort of a foot bath. It immediately brought to mind a similar basin from childhood that one used to have to pass through before going into swimming pools that would invariably contain rogue floating plasters and other less identifiable objects. As kids we mythologized these pools as a thing ten times more likely to give you verrucas than to protect you from them, and it was always the challenge to jump over them rather than to dip an inch of skin into their murky depths. The association churned my stomach a bit and made me try to sneakily sidestep the pool, so as to enter the temple with dry feet, but a massive Sikh guard with a large pointy spear and bright orange turban caught me in the act and sternly pointed me to the back of the line to enter the temple wet-footed as the law dictated. He then further motioned me to cover my head with my scarf, and looking around I noticed that indeed every man, woman and child in the vicinity wore some kind of head covering, be it a turban or a sari, or a special orange temple-issue hankie to tie around the head.

A spark of maybe quite facile and irrational respect suddenly ignited in me in the face of the notion that here was a religion that required both sexes, and in fact more strictly men, to cop a headscarf. Indeed, one of the first tenets of Sikhism is that men and women are to be considered equals, and one of the major aspects that separates the faith from Hinduism is its general adherence to equality of all people and rejection of the caste system.

The temple itself operates an open-door system where literally anyone from any religion can come in and hang out, eat and even sleep for free. And it makes for a nice atmosphere. When you enter through the main arch into the massive marble courtyard that borders that large square lake called the Lotus Pool, the first thing that hits you is the glowing gold building at the centre of the lake, the Golden Temple itself. It was much smaller than I had expected it to be, but the sunlight shining off its intensely sparkly surface gives it a presence and a gravitas that goes way beyond its modest size.

The whole place has a very relaxed feel to it. An atmosphere quite unlike the school-trip excitement of Hindu temples or the hushed reverence surrounding churches and mosques. The large perimeter of the Lotus Pool is laid with white marble and bordered with a colonnaded corridor in which people sit in the shade facing the lake and the temple in quiet contemplation and meditation, prostrating themselves on the ground or even just having a little sleep. You can sit there undisturbed for as long as you like, or, if you prefer, start up a conversation with other sitters that might be in a talkative mood.

The highlight of the temple day is an evening ceremony when the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, is taken from the Golden Temple in a hand-held golden chariot across the walkway that spans the lake and into a building on the other side where it spends the night until it’s taken back again in the morning. The whole shebang takes place around 10pm, and I went back especially to see the spectacle.

Having decided not to take on the immensely long queue during the day time that went inside the temple itself, I profited from the smaller nighttime crowds and got into the little temple a few minutes before the ceremony of wrapping the book in white sheets to prepare it for transport began.

Inside the temple, I was even more astounded by how very small it was, but how much detail and really beautiful features had been compacted into such a tiny space. The gilded surface of the walls is just stunning as are the flower patterns that are worked into the marble at everything below eye level. All around the perimeter of the building are a number of alcoves where people just sit quietly, eyeing the proceedings, reading or meditating.

The whole place has such an overwhelming feeling of a sincere and open place of worship, then kind of place you can come to with no obligation or scrutiny and just hang and do your thing, whatever that might be.

Just down the road from the temple is a less appealing monument, but one that is nonetheless important, especially for visiting Brits that want to get a better idea of the actions of their ancestry. Jallianwalla Bagh is the spot where, back in 1919, the British Indian Army opened fire on a crowd of unarmed civilians and killed anything between 350 and 1,000 people. The place is now a garden with various monuments and preserved pieces of architecture that still show the bullet holes from the soldiers’ guns. One particularly heart-rending sight is that of a very deep and narrow well down which people flung themselves to escape the gunfire. A plaque next to it says that 120 bodies were pulled out of this well after the massacre.

Sobering stuff. So what better way to get back into the holiday mood and to remind oneself that an element of humour can be found in all bonds of warring nations, than a quick trip to Wagah, a village divided by the partition of India and Pakistan back in 1947 that is today the venue of one of the most amusing spectacles in international relations.

Literally thousands of people come to Wagah every day in full party mode to indulge in wholehearted audience participation of the famous evening Flag Ceremony, when the gates between India and Pakistan open for a brief moment and officials and soldiers on either side perform a ritual of the lowering of their country’s flags before stomping off in the other direction and closing the gates. (I saw with delight a chipmunk take advantage of the open barrier and in a flash leg it from India over Pakistan, while I cheered it on in my mind. No gunshots were fires, so I presume he made it.) The flag ceremony is an act that’s not so remarkable in itself, as the real entertainment lies in the ridiculous childish pomp that surrounds the event.

Before the action even kicks off, there’s a crowd warm-up session that involves having women race up and down the border road carrying the Indian flag; this is then followed by a massive dance party at the bottom of the stands where the mostly female crowd let loose and dance in emphatic Bollywood style, arms waving and glowing smiles aplenty. A guy with a microphone then passes along the bottom of the stands and starts a chant of “Hindustan, Hindustan, Hindustan!” and some other words in Hindi I couldn’t understand. By this point, the previously ebullient crowd are now on the verge of hysteria, spurred on morally by the low turn out on the Pakistan side of the border, whose stands were clearly visible from where we were sitting.

Having said that, the Pakistanis made up for their lower numbers with increased lung power. For every time the Indians chanted ‘Hindustan!’, the Pakistanis in turn would scream ‘Pakistan!’ and try and make their chant sustain longer than the Indians, a tactic which enraged their neighbours when they realised what was happening and resulted in sending them into a louder and more incensed chant themselves.

There followed a parade from a handful of border soldiers that has been referred to by many spectators (and really can’t be likened to anything more similar than) the Ministry of Silly Walks. Ten or so Indian soldiers dressed in army uniform with red turbans and large red fans poking out of the top, march in step kicking their legs in a comic and exaggerated fashion to the height of their heads, and some even higher.

This is just before the soldiers were lined up and obliged to undergo a screaming competition with the Pakistani side. One soldier on each side of the border starts to holler at the same time into the microphone in a sustained shout on the crest of a single breath and holds it for as long as they can. Obviously the winner is the one that can hold the shout the longest, and the crowds on either side of the fence go wild when their side wins.

Just insane. I returned to Mrs Bhanderi’s dusty, sweaty and generally quite taken aback. She looked me up and down. “Did you enjoy the border ceremony?” she asked. I replied in the affirmative, adding that is was by far one of the strangest things I had ever seen in my life. She nodded. “It’s important that it continues like that,” she said. “As long as the Flag Ceremony goes on like that every day, we know that we have peace with Pakistan.”

And she’s right. This football-crowd simulation of stern officialdom mocked through silly marches and shouting competitions is probably the best, most good-humoured approach to neighbourly spats I can think of. 

The Dalai Lama and 50 years of refuge in Little Tibet

Sun, 2 May 2010 07:24:23 +0200

Who’d have thunk it? Against all odds, the Nano Diaries rocked into McLeod Ganj at exactly the same time as the Dalai Lama himself. A not so unlikely occurrence given that McLeod Ganj is his home, but improbable nevertheless given that the Dalai Lama is possibly the only person in the world with itchier feet that Abhilasha (check out his travel schedule here if you don’t believe me). So when the Tibetan woman at the cafe of the Green Hotel where I’m staying suggested, nay ordered, that I go to the temple to hear him speak yesterday morning, I knew right off that a strange and timely confluence of cosmic events and stellar alignments had taken place.

Indeed, the Nano Diaries appear to have happened upon McLeod Ganj 50 years to the day after the first arrival of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-exile back in 1960. They came here from the nearby hill station of Mussorie which was the first place they fled to upon leaving China after a failed uprising in 1959. And here, sadly, they have stayed.

So the special puja (in the words of the Tibetan waitress) was being held in in honor of the not-so-happy anniversary of the Tibetans’ mass exile, but in true sanguine Tibetan style the event was given a most positive spin the form of a massive public ‘thank you’ to the state of Himachal Pradesh for being such gracious hosts for a whole five decades.

And when you think about it (my cogs have been whirring overtime, not that you can tell), it was quite an unprecedented situation. That India not only accepted 80,000 refugees across their border (the number that came in 1959; there are now around 150,000 Tibetans living in India), but also set them up in one of the sweetest spots in the whole country. An expert of political history I am not, but whatever the reasons and diplomatic connivances, it still seems to me an incredibly nice thing to do.

By the same token, there’s little doubt that the Tibetans have become an asset for India. The region is beautifully maintained, attracts a great deal of tourism and promotes a wonderfully earth-loving, fuzzy, PC picture of life in the Himalayas that’s perfect for global export. After all, the Tibetans are a bit like the Irish aren’t they? It’s hard to find a person who won’t fawn over what an incredibly nice lot they are.

The timing of my arrival to the Dalai Lama’s temple was immaculate. I reached the front gate just as a convoy of vehicles bedecked in flowers and Indian flags carrying government officials and other assorted VIPs whizzed past at quite inappropriate speed and dropped off its passengers at the podium outside the main building. As the cars pulled away, the space they left behind was filled with an influx of audience members, a crowd of Tibetan lay people, monks, nuns and a handful of foreigners, in which I was caught up and before I could get my bearings, realized that I was sat on the floor about 20 metres dead ahead of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

He was sat centre-stage next to a rotund government official dressed in a Nehru suit and box hat who, from what I could understand, had come all the way from Delhi especially for the occasion. The Dalai Lama was wearing his trademark maroon robes, with his hands folded expectantly in front of him and his feet crossed at the ankles. His face was steeped in a vague sense of amusement as he watched assistants and officials buzz around him, putting finishing touches to the seating and doing last-minute sound-checks on the microphones.

I’m not going to play this cool: I’ll admit that my first reaction upon seeing him was a flash-flood of tears. Completely unexpected, and soon dispersed by the quite comic nature of what came next.

The crowd finally settled, on came a troupe of entertainers who regaled their spiritual leader with an all-singing all-dancing kitsch-fest of some kind of ersatz-eighties rendition of a song that as far as I could tell said something like ‘Thank you very much, Himachal Pradesh’. The sentiment was echoed in prayer flags strung around the temple as well as in an abundance of publicity posters and banners posted around the streets of McLeod Ganj.

The dancers and singers were all Tibetan and wore perma-smiles for the entire duration of their performance. On one side were the guys and on the other the gals, all of them clad in varying takes on traditional Tibetan dress and brandishing, for symbolic effect, wee Indian flags.

It was the stuff Eurovision Song Contest clangers are made from. But the Dalai Lama was an amazing sport: he watched with unyielding interest and perhaps a touch of bewilderment, as the dancers wobbled and gestured in front of him, all the while he swayed very gently from side to side in time to the music. And his buoyant mood didn’t let up in the slightest for the following two hours that involved long speeches from both Indian and Tibetan officials, though he did seem to lose interest a couple of times and chose instead to scan the audience and the people around him for anyone that would share a smile or answer to a quick wave. A couple of times he just plain giggled, though at what I have no idea.

When he finally got up to speak, you could have heard a pin drop. The crowd stood to attention, hanging off his every word. Everyone that is, with the very visible exception of some of the Indian contingent. The government envoy made absolutely no effort to hide the fact that he was fast asleep in his chair next to the Dalai Lama, and a couple of officials in the wings were slumped suspiciously still in their seats, their eyes concealed by unnecessarily large sunglasses. But Tenzin Gyatso was undeterred. He spoke in musical Tibetan, switching from a leveled tone of sincerity to more animated moments of laughter and chuckles.

A translator, placed in the crowd upon the orders of the Dalai Lama who immediately clocked the large amount of foreigners there, told us that he was talking about the story of how he came to India and his feelings upon first coming to Dharamsala and meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister at the time and the person responsible for extending the invitation of asylum to the Tibetans.

Despite the dry pedestrian officialdom of the event, it was nevertheless a boon to have such unexpected proximity to, let’s face it, one of the world’s most incredible people. It struck me how different his energy appeared in person than I had perceived it through the media. Yes, he’s always smiling in pictures, but in the flesh that smile is coupled with an incredible lightness of presence that seems endlessly amused by anything that comes under its radar. Quite something.

After the end of the ceremony, I once again ended up in the Right Place entirely by accident, and that was outside the gates to his residence, just as he was making his way around. As he walked forward with his entourage, people went down on their knees, put out their hands, and if he offered his in return they would clutch it with a lover’s desperation and kiss it and hold it to their foreheads. And all the while, he kept up the manner of a man meeting old friends. At one point I was only a couple of metres away from him and I thrust out my hand for a moment of brief contact, but just missed him as he went to embrace a woman just a few feet to my right.

Maybe in my next life, then...

Cameras were not allowed into the event, but you can see press pictures at the link below.
http://www.dalailama.com/gallery/album/0/59

Ghandi’s revenge breaks the Bonds of cool

Sat, 1 May 2010 05:49:10 +0200

There’s something about driving along mountain roads, rounding the hairpin bends and speeding the curves under the shadows of enormous mountains that always makes me feel a bit like James Bond. Or the guy in the car ad, speeding his Audi home at sunset to the opening refrain of Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’. Pad-da-pad-da-pad-da-bowwwwwwww da-da-da-da-daaaaaa.... Yeaaaahhhhh rock it from second into third, swerve around the goat, honk at the group of kids at the roadside screaming “Naaannnnnooooo!”
Pad-da-pad-da-pad-da-bowwwwwwww da-da-da-da-daaaaaa.... From third back into second, rounding an uphill corner whilst overtaking a bus - alllllriggghhhhtttt! Turning a left and having an entire bottomless valley open up before my eyes, dodging a pile of fallen rocks from a landslide, straining to see through the dust left in the wake of the lorry ahead of me, aaaaand cut to “DANCE into the fi-ire...”; I reach for my phone: “Yes, Moneypenny, I should be at HQ in a couple of hours...” sharp shimmy into the hard shoulder to let a particularly wide and uncompromising truck go past. “That fatal kiiissss is all we neeeeddddd....” etc.

But the drive from Shimla up to McLeod Ganj on Thursday was a little different. The minute I sat in the driver’s seat I began to feel the first pangs of a bout of Gandhi’s Revenge rumbling through my guts. Coupled with a headcold and an impending sense of all over muscle ache, I knew the eight hour drive through the mountains was going to be less 007 sophistication and more L00 stops and bellyaches. And so it went: a few kilometres and grrrruuuummmmbbbblllle in the tummy, screech to a halt at the nearest gas station,head for the outhouse, hold your nose, squat yourself down aaaannndddd...... let it rip. Lovely.

Indeed, the winding roads that had previously been the setting for my own private blockbuster epic of cool were now just nausea-inducing turns and bends that made me want to gag with every new corner and each new metre ascended. By the fourth hour, passing through Mandi and only halfway to Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj, I had had enough. In fact I had passed enough somewhere a few hours before and was now in the realm of total exhaustion that I worried would actually make me a danger to myself and others on the road.

Luckily, I was blessed with a gift in the passenger seat. Mr Hadleigh Averill, long-standing friend from New Zealand, now retreated to a life of contemplation or cult initiation in the hills around Dharamsala, but who decided nonetheless to come join the great Nano adventure for a few of the most recent legs. And thank god for it, as I think had he not been there to take over from me, I might have spent the night drooling and shivering in a layby at 2,000 metres.

It was a tough call, handing over the charge of Abhilasha to someone else. I have prided myself on driving every last kilometre of the Nano Diaries voyage myself, and yet these last 130 to Dharamsala appeared to me at that moment to be a task beyond Hercules himself. It became clear, about an hour after Mandi, when we stopped at a viewpoint and Hadleigh got out to take pictures while I collapsed onto the passenger seat and lost consciousness within about 2 minutes, that I was no longer in a state to drive. So I put Mr Ego to bed and gave H the keys.

Once I was the driver; now it was my turn to be the passenger.

And in fact it wasn’t so bad. I lay my head on the seatbelt and watched the hills and mountains go by, the layered plateaus that climb down the steep slopes, the wheat fields and flour factories, as well as the tea plantations, sidelit as the sun went down.

The bulk of my effort, however, went into pacifying the backseat driver and control freak in me. Every time there was a truck coming, or we were poised to overtake a bus, I felt myself exert the same effort of concentration to steer to the side, as though there was a phantom wheel and gear stick right there in front of me. As though Hadleigh had never driven a car before, I felt compelled to irritate him with instructions as to Abhilasha’s performance on uphill stretches (“No, don’t overstretch second gear,” “you should be sliding into 4th at 60, unless you’re on an incline,” “no need to honk at oncoming traffic, Had,” “ignore that traffic light,” etc etc). It’s a wonder he didn’t stop the car and tell me to get out and walk.

I can’t imagine James Bond getting a fit of Delhi Belly and having to pass over care of his Aston Martin to a mere mortal. Hardly supercool secret agent material, am I? The vision of the sports car racing through the mountains at sunset died with the last stop at an Indian Oil restroom that I was expected to share with a host of insects and an irate monkey whom I had to interrupt from a session’s drinking the flush water that I may deposit my watery droppings into the porcelain throne.

But relief came with entry into McLeod Ganj, 10km or so up the hill from Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama, the entire Tibetan Government in exile, and seemingly a thriving community of barefoot and bedraggled western hippie-types who must have also fled to the hills from the giant tandoor that it the northern plains. And so where there are western hippie-types, there are vegetarian cafes, coffee shops, wifi access, tailors and tinkers, monks and beggarmen. It was a relief to suddenly be surrounded by a community specifically designed to cater to my western coffee-drinking, internet-using, jewelry-buying ways.

And it was also a sort of a homecoming, but with much more direct cultural appeal than the mere architecture of Shimla: hippies or not, in need of a good bath or not, here were my countrymen. At last, after three months of driving around this massive and endless country, I could just open my ears in the street and hear England English spoken with northern, southern, west country and east London accents.

Though not a hint of Bond-style Received Pronunciation. But then again, Daniel Craig is probably the last person I would want to see me sniveling, sneezing and clutching my stomach, settling into bed with a lemon, honey and ginger tea.

Where the Cotswolds meet the Himalayas

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 07:22:12 +0200

“For all I know you could be going round and round the M25 and making this all up,” wrote my waggish friend Ed in a Facebook message a week or so ago. And if the last few days in the hill station and capital of Himachal Pradesh, Shimla, are anything to go by, he’d be right on the money.

Shimla, former summertime bolthole of the Raj for whom the sweltering heat of the plains from Delhi to Calcutta was just one discomfort too many (and who could blame them?) is without a doubt the most uncanny place I’ve thus far encountered in India. No joke, the place is basically a twee British hilltown complete with village church, a central square and enough Tudor and Gothic architecture to make you feel like you tripped down the rabbit hole.

The town has a vaguely confusing history that put it as the capital of the Punjab back before the Gurkha War of 1815 when it was annexed by the British and eventually made the summertime administrative centre from the mid-19th century onward.

It must be the cold climes here that put a tear in the eye of the Raj and made them think of England as they lay back in the verdant forests and looked up at the chilly mountains and clouds in the sky. So touched were they in fact, that they decided to throw caution to the wind and for all intents and purposes recreate little England right there in the foothills of the Himalayas.

It all started with a holiday home erected by Scotsman Charles Pratt Kennedy, and the summer houses snowballed from there. And it’s clear that whoever was doing the building spared absolutely no expense or imagination in creating grand town halls, theatres, schools and residences, just like home, but on the back of a profitable exchange rate of the rupee, you could get so much more for your sterling. Shimla became a kind of high-society hang-out, with clubs and societies popping up left, right and centre, frequented by fair-weather diplomats and wives and families of those who were compelled to stay down south and miss the party.

Naturally, infamy and transgression bred like wildfire in this most potent and fertile summer camp petri dish. In the main town square there’s actually an area called Scandal Point, named after an infamous incident when the King of Patiala made off with the daughter of the Viceroy, much to the shock and outrage of social onlookers.

Today, Indian tourists and a large population of monkeys have reclaimed the town, though I can’t comment on how much scandal Shimla still manages to produce. Hotels are nestled into the hills around the busy town centre crowned with the floodlit Christ Church whose unassuming protestant air gave me a fair heady pang of homesickness.

Carry on up the Ganges

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:19:47 +0200

Rishikesh is the bit of India that the Beatles made famous, god love ‘em. This was their spiritual destination of choice in 1968 when they went all psychadelic on the tail of taking a lot of hallucinogens and spent a few weeks practicing transcendental meditation under the instruction of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It wasn’t long before they decided that as far as they were concerned it was all a crock of poo and that the great guru was in fact a mere human with a heady sexual appetite and penchant for cash and private jets. “We were wrong. What could be more simple?” John Lennon famously announced.

The Fab Four might have been mistaken, but the spiritual tank in which they dipped their superstar toes is still full to the brim with thousands of people coming from far and wide to lock themselves into ashram life and stay for anything from a matter of days to a number of years. Maharishi’s Rishikesh ashram, which Ringo Starr described as comparative to Butlin’s Holiday Camp, might have been abandoned in 1997, now standing deserted and overgrown, but the rest of the town is a hive of yogic activity.

Rishikesh, holy city and kingdom of ashrams. If yoga is your thing, then come, come and bring your mats and loose clothing and bits of rope and whatever else it is you need for your myriad contortions. Come and be in Rishikesh, for you can’t throw a stick here and not have it land on the head of some sadhu or guru or yoga ashram.

In order to get here from Corbett Park, I had to steer Abhilasha through Haridwar, a town 30km downriver and host to this year’s manifestation of the Kumbh Mela, the great Hindu pilgrimage that is the largest religious gathering of people anywhere in the world. It kicked off in January and officially ends tomorrow though the streets of the town already have that oddly exhausted post-Glastonbury feel. Around the town are acres of flattened fields where hundreds of tents are being taken down in sequence and life is returning to normal after the population of the place swelled from its usual 1.5 million, to 40 million for the duration of the festival. On April 14th alone, there were something like 10 million devotees there participating in the Main Royal Bath, one of the highlights of the event.

Upriver, things are a lot more peaceful. The High Bank Peasant’s Cottage Guest House sits on a hill way above the river and its surrounding ashrams and affords a peaceful God’s-eye view of the goings-on below. At ground level, the pace is stepped up a notch or two. A town for pedestrians, the two banks of Rishikesh are held together by two suspension foot bridges that are closed to traffic, (except of course motorbikes which in India suffer from the identity crisis of always asserting themselves to be honorary pedestrians) Lakshman Jhula and Ram Jhula.

Each of the bridges lead to several ashram compounds, most of which are signposted in Hindi and a bit confusing to the Western eye unable to discern any written instruction bar those pictorial commands not to smoke or take photos. An American man dressed entirely in white with a long greying beard spotted my confusion and advised that I go to the ghats of the Swarg ashram at sunset to witness the ganga aarti ceremony which takes place at sunset.

A nightly tradition in Rishikesh, and attended by hundreds of Hindu devotees, the ganga aarti is an offering of light and fire to the holy river which Hindus believe is an incarnate goddess. The spectacle is really something to behold. I got there around half an hour before sunset to secure a spot on top of a marble platform near a cross-legged Sadhu who I’ll swear winked at me through the concentrated chanting of his bhajans.

Within minutes the spot outside the ashram on the banks of the river became overrun with devotees and Indian tourists, brandishing bowls of chrysanthemums and candles made from ghee as well as video recorders and mobile phone cameras. A fire at the centre of the action was lit and what looked like a special ceremony for a group of visiting Koreans in matching t-shirts was underway, aided at the wings by a throng of pre-teen boys dressed in identical yellow robes, all with yellow tikka powder markings on their foreheads. They appeared to be serving the function of choirboys, as, when the Koreans moved out of the way and into the back seats, the boys came forward and sat around the fire, chanting vigorously with their eyes closed and swaying from side to side as they followed the words of a single Brahmin seated before a large microphone that was belting out the bhajans that the crowd followed with great enthusiasm. Often, and without warning, everybody’s hands would rocket into the air, and people would jump up from their seated positions and move closer in towards the fire.

Other people seated right at the edge of the river would light their candles and move them in circular motions over the water of the Ganges whilst mouthing silent prayers. Then they would bend down, dip their fingers in the water and let the candles float downstream and off into the rapids.

Mesmerised by the sight, I picked my way through the crowd at the water’s edge, shoving my intrusively large lens into people’s faces as they performed their religious ceremonies. And yet no one seemed to mind. I didn’t get so much as a nudge or a ‘get the hell out of my puja, cheeky’, from one single person. Instead there was the subtle exchange of looks, raised eyebrows, smiles and permissive nods that in fact I could just stampede in and document these rather private moments.

All the while I was teetering on the slippery marble steps, the bottom of my long skirt soaked in Ganges water. A blessing by Hindu standards, and not a disaster as far as I was concerned, since I figured we were far enough upstream of the great river for the microcultures spawned from its many dead, especially in Varanasi, to be a thing of last week. Though one guy right next to me was not so lucky, tripping on a chain and falling right in to the water, soaking his jeans all the way up to his waist. He took the fall with extreme good humour and continued his puja in this sitting position, splashing his face and head with more water from this jokester river.

About an hour later, the Brahmin on the microphone called it a day, and as quickly as they came, the devotional audience dispersed leaving a bunch of soggy red rugs and a host of profiteer flies that were feasting on the micro-droppings of the brief, transient masses. The Ram Jhula bridge literally shuddered with the weight of the people crossing back over just after sunset, dizzy from the clapping, chanting and prayers thrown into the river. Below the bridge, the rapids of the Ganges swirled in the direction of Haridwar, taking with it the myriad flowers, candles and blessings. And thank god for the speed, I thought; the hasty flow that cleans the slate for it all to be repeated again tomorrow, and the next day and the next. Up on the swaying bridge, among the hurrying crowds and rudely in the way of an irate and vocal motorcyclist, I experienced the giddy rush of that very particular Indian vertigo.

Corbett Tiger Reserve: not a puddy cat in sight

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:09:37 +0200

I should have known I was in for a bummer from the outset. From Nainital, I realised I was spitting distance (make that two hours drive) from the Jim Corbett National Park, one of India’s most renowned on account of its heady population of wildlife, including a community of tigers.

I’d never been on a safari before and rather fancied the image of myself dressed in khaki and armed with camera and binoculars taking a (digital celluloid) pot shot at a bunch of ferocious moggies.

But the alarm bells went off when, upon generating some local opinion as to my chances of seeing an actual tiger, I was repeatedly faced with the phrase, “It’s your luck.”

It’s just not a phrase I’ve heard in India before and I should have known it spelt a cocktail of trouble and disappointment. I’ve heard If God Wills, and I’ve had notions of karma bandied about, and all sorts of talk of external influences and just pure principles of patience, but luck... this was definitely a new one.

I pulled up at the (really lovely and highly recommended) Corbett Camp, located a few kilometres from Ramnagar, a dusty old gateway town to the park, to a welcoming committee of Raj the hotel manager and a number of waiters and other general cast and crew. The hotel comprises of a number of cottages set among some pretty manicured gardens, and offers packages of 4WD safaris through the park. They don’t come cheap: you’re looking at upward of 3,000 rupees for a 3-hour drive, but I figured, hey, if I get to jump down and knuckle-head a large cat, it’ll all be worth it.

But when I asked Raj about the chances of seeing a tiger on the trip, his face tightened. “It’s your luck,” he said in a downcast manner that was plainly code for “Don’t take the safari, it’s a total rip-off.” Bless him.

Still, I persevered. Had I a little more information at that point about the dimensions of the park and the distribution of the tigers, I might have had second thoughts: 500 square kilometres, 144 tigers. Make that one for every 3 square kilometres. Make that a needle in a friggin haystack.

So we drove and we drove and we drove and finally we hit the entrance of the park and a jaunty guide by the name of Lalit jumped in and we drove and drove and drove some more, this time the road getting a little bumpier and my butt and back completely soaked against the pleather upholstery of the car seat.

Suddenly the driver screeched the jeep to a halt and everything, including my own body, camera and contents of my handbag, went flying into the crossbar. Out of politeness to the nice man, I tried to disguise the fact that I had been severely winded. “Monkey!” shouted Lalit with the kind of enthusiasm that should only really be reserved for yeti and alien sightings. I sighed. Yes, monkey. A group of monkeys, in fact, black-faced monkeys exactly like the dozens of other black-faced monkeys I passed and narrowly avoided killing on the road here from Nainital. Next...

A few minutes down the road, we stopped again, this time with a more gentle action, to watch a peacock cross over up ahead. I tried taking a picture, but it was a mere speck in the distance on my screen. Then a spotted deer, for all the world like a living breathing Bambi, popped its head out of the shrubbery, clocked the jeep and legged it in the opposite direction as fast as its little spindly legs would carry it.

Awwww. Very cute. Very touching. But I wanted more. I wanted something’s flesh. I wanted to see a 300-pound tiger chase after the cutesy Bambi baby and rip it limb from spindly limb, like in them BBC wildlife shows. But no. The highlight of the tour from that point on was when we stopped again crossing a parched riverbed, which Lalit told me would be completely flooded come the monsoon in a couple of months, and saw some tiger paw prints in the sand.

Lalit immediately took on the confident air of an Crocodile-Hunter-style animal tracker and cocked his head almost as though he was sniffing the wind. “Look,” he intoned with a grave note of mystery, “tiger tracks. Though they are not fresh.” Sure enough, there they were. And I can’t say they weren’t impressive and actually quite terrifying. It was at that point that I had my first little inkling of well perhaps it is better that we don’t see a tiger after all. Sitting on the back seat of a completely open jeep, I’d be very easy pickings for an evening snack.

Needless to say, we left the park just before sunset without a single sighting. The guide sat silently at the front and passed pleasantries in Hindi with the driver. I lay down on the back seat and went to sleep. I figured a tiger sighting at the Corbett Park was probably a very rare thing, and if there are any readers who can tell me otherwise, then I’d be glad to hear. I felt a bit duped, but then on reflection, sadder still. Only 144 tigers in the whole park, and in fact only 1411 remaining in the whole of India, thanks to folk who like to go out there, shoot them and sell their dead bodies to anyone who’ll pay the price - usually the Chinese, apparently.

144 ain’t too many. But the good news is that come the monsoon, the park will be closed for three months. This is partly because the rivers will be flooded with water making getting around rather difficult, but also, and more importantly, because it is tiger mating season - alllllrrriiiggghhhttttt (cue the Barry White soundtrack). So the tigers get the whole 500 square kms to themselves for three months for what will basically amount to a massive feline shag fest. You go, boys and girls; crack open the bolly and go forth and make beautiful love to each other. Go for it and procreate and get those numbers up so we mere humans at least have a fighting chance of getting a glimpse of one of you at some point down the line.

Erm... is this still in India?

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:01:42 +0200

Good lord. In the space of a two hour drive, Abhilasha and I went from slow-roast on the northern plains to it’s-a-bit-chilly-did-you-bring-a-sweater in the hills of Uttarakhand.

At 2,000 metres above sea level, the former colonial hill station of Nainital is now an extremely popular holiday spot for the vacationing Indian middle classes. Coming here was a bit of a random event, as the name of the town stood out on a map as the best option in terms of distance from Lucknow on the way up north.

But with the drop in temperature and the sudden mountainous landscape, I could be forgiven for thinking that the India of yesterday morning, a mad dusty street in Lucknow, had all but disappeared into a heat wave. Nainital is small, quaint and clean. A pear-shaped lake surrounded by towering vertical mountains, it’s the place where my Mumbai friend Mangesh brought his wife for their honeymoon and you can see why.

Not a scrap of rubbish in the streets, an easy-going atmosphere where you don’t get stared at even if you are white and sprinting around the lake in fashion-crime leggings and baggy t-shirt (wasn’t me!). My room at the Krishna Hotel has floor-to-ceiling windows skirted with wooden panelling and a view out onto the lake and the sunset.

With Abhilasha safely planted among dozens of other cars near the cricket ground next to the mosque whose doorway reads in English ‘There is but one God and Mohammad is his prophet’, I am taking a couple of days to soak in the sensation of not soaking in my own sweat. These are the foothills of the Himalayas and they are so close you can almost smell them. Nainital has a cable car that runs to the top of the adjacent hill, and I rode up there today in the hope of seeing a series of snow-capped peaks. But visibility let me down and all I could see was a vague mist, a bunch of food and pop stands, a makeshift fairground and a bunch of shooting galleries. The flip side of the local tourist industry, I guess.

It’s Friday night, so the weekend crowd moved in somewhere around mid-afternoon. I took afternoon iced coffee and two bites of a deplorable sandwich at the local Coffee Day before being bombarded by a squadron of youths who came in by the dozen to sit large groups around small tables, a couple of frappuccinos and a brownie to share.

Like I said. A world away from the Varanasi of three days ago. I reflected for a moment. What if all of India became like this? Is Nainital leading the way with its clean streets and unspoiled natural beauty? With a burgeoning middle class who like to vacation in the beautiful parts of their own country, is this the template for a future India?

Horn OK Please

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:37:24 +0200

As is evident from looking deep into the eyes of any long-distance truckkie, hours upon hours spent at the wheel can accumulate in some rather strange and ethereal effects on the mind. The rhythms and repetitions of the road often amount to a form of hypnosis where the driver can be lifted into a sort of trance-like meditative state. In these situations, it is not uncommon to have an object of one’s concentration or meditation - something upon which to rest the mind and chew upon as the riddle of existence plays itself out in the background.

For me, during the long, relentless hours on the road during the Nano Diaries, this koan has been the verbal trinity, ‘Horn OK Please’.

As often as not, especially on smaller, winding roads, I’ll find myself stuck behind a slow-moving truck that’s very difficult to overtake, and so I’ll give up the game for a while and zone in on the trippy decorations that cover its rear, which come to think of it, might well be there for exactly the purpose of entertaining drivers stuck behind. Alongside brightly coloured designs and portraits of Krishna, Shiva, Kali, etc, are usually also painted words and phrases. These range from ‘Use dippers’ (as though lowering one’s lights at night were an option rather than a necessity) or ‘Good luck’ or ‘I love India’. But most frequently, they are horn-related and usually take the form of the bewildering phrase, ‘Horn OK Please’.

At first sight, you get the gist. Please horn, OK? For the enormous trucks that rarely make use of their rear-view mirrors, it’s a must to let them know you are behind them and would like to pass. However, I have found myself pondering, especially after several hours of chevron hypnosis, that there might in fact be more than one way of viewing this curious assemblage of words.

Horn. OK. Please. What does that really mean? That to use the horn is OK? Then why the Please? It’s a request? A polite invitation telling you that honking your horn is quite alright and further inviting you to do so? (Which is ironic given the large amount of truckkies who receive my request and don’t move an inch, continuing a steady 30kmph in the fast lane as though it were their god-given right.)

What about if you read it as Horn Please OK? This is a very possible interpretation as the OK is usually painted below the Horn and Please to form a sort of triumvirate of increasing senselessness. How does it change then? Horn Please, and then an added OK right at the end just to check that you got the message? Like a kind of a thumbs up?

Either way, it’s a brain twister. A koan that has followed me all the way from Mumbai and around the country. There are points when I have stared so long at those three words that they lose all significance and spiral into a state of existential meaninglessness. Such is the nature of the apparent non-sequitur.

And all this while I have actually been learning the nature of horns and hornspeak. It is an indispensable language that any visitor wishing to take to the roads in India (even if they are on foot, in fact) needs to learn.

Forget your indicators, forget the hazard lights, forget looking in your rearview, or side mirrors and executing all those usual moves you learned as a nervous teenager from behind the excuses of your L-plates. Throw the rule book in the bin: really, all you need in India is your horn.

And I’m learning. The first time I decided to try and use it in Mumbai, about a day after Abhilasha’s maiden voyage, I felt something akin to very wrong indeed, holding down the claxon, even though the air was already a thick cacophony of car horns.

Back in polite little England you only ever sound your horn if someone is about to commit an act of total reckless annihilation upon your vehicle and person; a sort of death-march battle-cry to accompany you to the grave. Either that, or you use it in a moment of complete and unleashed anger when a vehicle near to you is guilty of some unspeakable road crime involving jumping their turn at a roundabout or taking a parking space you were about to go for. To resort to the horn implies intense displeasure and a ‘do you want to take this outside, mate?’ approach.

So coming from the land of the deferential horn users into another land of the horn aficionados is a fair culture shock. The most important preconception to tackle is that horns might imply aggression. Someone honks behind you to let you know that they are coming in at high speed to your left and you immediately turn defensive: “What? Whaaat? What the hell do you want?!” Tut, sigh. “Just chill the hell out, OK?”

But in fact the horn here in India covers most forms of road communication that might in other cultures be transmitted through indicator lights, glances in the side and rearview mirrors and various other more subtle forms of road etiquette. So if you are about to overtake someone, give them a little beep to know you’re there. It’s that simple. And it works.

Perhaps someone is crossing lanes right in front of you. Triple honk to give them a sense of their space to maneuver. Another car might be blocking a lane large enough for you to pass at a traffic light; a well-mannered beep at the right moment will usually grant you access.

And there are many different types of horn. Trucks and buses seem to like to go down the novelty road the way that kids have different ring tones on their phones. An ear-piercing musical horn coming at you from behind with alarming intensity of doppler shift is extremely efficient in making you move, as you can usually infer that the sound is attached to a large and merciless lorry on a suicide mission. Such vehicles are wont to drive remarkably long distances with the horn in a state of constant depression in order to just clear a lane for their own cruising pleasure.

I often think that the Nano’s horn is not quite as powerful as it could be - and indeed, recently it has started to give a little quiver and shake. Perhaps people who can’t see the source of it’s wee hoot think they are dealing with a two-wheeler, as that’s usually the amount of space they allot for passing. Or sometimes they just don’t move at all. Which usually then brings out in me what I call The Spirit of Braveheart.

The Braveheart tactic involves in some way emulating at least the attitude (if not the terrifying volume) of a cross between a fearless, warmongering William Wallace leading his armies into battle, and the king-of-the-road stance of the larger trucks on the road by keeping the horn pressed down and driving very close to the bumper in front. Then, if the vehicle ahead gives you so much as an inch to work with, you go postal with the blasts, shooting them out with rapid machine gun fire so that the vehicle in question can know exactly what kind of psycho they are dealing with.

As I pass in bloodthirsty Braveheart mode, I keep the horn going all the way till the end of the overtake, in the pose of a battle cry. If Abhilasha had a face, it’d be red by this point.

And of course, this is all hugely satisfying. Once you get over the initial hurdle of weirdness in the face of making so much noise publicly, you actually start to enjoy it. Old lady crossing the street ahead :“BEEEEEEEEPPPPPP!” Dog sauntering happily in the fast lane of the highway: “BEEEEEEEPPPP!” Cow about to lay itself at perpendicular angles to the oncoming Nano: “BBBBBeeeeepppppppBLOODY Beeeeepppppppp!!!” etc. In fact, it occurred to me that it is such second nature for me now to beep at anything out of the ordinary or that impedes my progress (a slow motorcycle, a puttering rickshaw, a red light, etc) that I might get myself in a spot of trouble when I finally return to the land of the considerate and discerning honkers.

Or perhaps there’s a chance that we could import this really rather effective method of road communications like we did curry and tea. Could be an election swinger for Gordon and the boys, no?

45 in the shade

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:11:22 +0200

I can’t say I wasn’t told. Setting out on the Nano Diaries voyage back in February, people would ask me about my itinerary, and I’d tell them and they’d look at me like I was clinically insane or just very stupid.

Which I clearly am.

I don’t know which part of ‘temperatures in the north of India during April and May are usually between 40 and 50 degrees celsius’ I didn’t quite process, but I decided nonetheless to steer Abhilasha through the burning mire. I somehow conceived the plan in the spirit that the more hardship we faced as a team, the more character-building the experience would be and the more stories we’d have to tell at the end of the day.

If I knew that those stories would be tedious sweaty tales of lying under a fan in a hotel room covered with a wet towel and groaning sporadically as I tried to muster the will to go out into the streets and do anything, I might have rethought my strategy. Sweat-drenched clothing and heat-induced lethargy do not glamorous tales of the road make.

So the mercury hit 45 (that’s 113 to those on the other side of the Atlantic) the day before yesterday as I trudged through the maze-like medieval streets of Varanasi, with a bag on my back, a bag on my front, and another hanging from my arm. One thing that traveling by car does not teach you is economy of luggage, and when I made the decision to leave Abhilasha at a hotel car park by the far-flung cantonment area of the city (as cars, and even cycle rickshaws cannot make it into the narrow lanes of the old city), I didn’t think my decision through in terms of lightening my load, and leaving all non-essentials hidden behind too.

And believe me, with every step in the blazing heat, I became more and more painfully aware of each gram of every single non-essential item in my many bags. I was following two very fast-walking guys who were right on hand as the rickshaw driver dropped me outside the entrance to the old city. I later discovered that the route to the hotel was a very simple L-shape along two of the old city’s main arteries, but for some reason they saw fit to take the most squiggeldy route through the back streets; up stairs, down stairs, skipping over cow dung and taking lefts and rights like they were going out of fashion.

Anyone who’s ever been to Varanasi will know what an incredible slap in the face arriving to the city is. In my humble opinion, it’s singularly the most intense urban experience to be had on Indian soil. Situated on the holy river the Ganges, it’s an ancient place that dates back about 3,000 years and is thought to be the oldest continually inhabited city in India. Being a sacred site, it’s a popular place for pilgrims and it’s believed by Hindus that if you die here, you get a fast-track ticket to Nirvana and out of the cycle of life and death.

Something like 1 million pilgrims come here every year to bathe in the river and perform ceremonies along the ghats, which are special steps made to go down the shoreline and into the river. A couple of the ghats are used for burning bodies of the dead, another sacred ritual that gives the soul of the deceased a VIP sendoff.

The cremations are no covert affair: the bodies are carried to the ghats laid out on stretchers and wrapped in cloth along the narrow streets of the city, with a procession of the male relatives in tow (I heard it said that women are not allowed to witness the ceremony due to their emotional sensitivity - I think the exact phrase was “women are weak” - and that their tears would impede the soul’s onward journey). Once at the waterside, they are placed on top of a pile of wood and set to burn while the relatives look on solemnly and the rest of Varanasi blares in the background, going about its business.

Stepping over a particularly large cow dung about the size of a family-size pizza, I was struck by the smells emanating from the streets. A heady mix of excrement, rotting food and incense, present in a lot of India, but particularly pungent here in the close quarters of the city lanes. I was struggling to keep up with the guides (who, much to my disappointment, chose not to be gentlemen and offer to carry my bags) and was wet through with sweat, being elbowed and shouldered by passers by for whom I was good for pretty much nothing.

It turned out that my hotel, the Scindhia Guest House, was just metres away from the burning ghat, and to get there, I only had to pass the massive pile of firewood and groups of bereaved relatives, and to struggle up the large stone steps and through the mist of a particularly strong strain of pissy odour.

My room looked out onto the Ganges and admittedly was pretty fly. But not cool. Not in the least bit. The ceiling fan whirred overhead as I collapsed onto the bed and contemplated my options. It was AC or bust, there were no two ways about it. I went back downstairs and demanded to upgrade my room. The luxury of a big clunky 80’s style unit meant a 400% hike in price, but it seemed worthwhile. The manager was away, but his assistant was there and thus ensued one of the strangest exchanges I’ve had for a long time, worthy of a Monty Python script.

“Hi. I’m hot. I’d like to take a room with Air Conditioning please.”

“Of course, madam. You like to see it, or you want to take it?”

“Well, I suppose I’d like to see it please.”

“Yes, madam. But, there is no electricity now.”

“Right. So?”

“So room will be hot.”

“OK. Well, the electricity will be back on later, right?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Sometimes coming, sometimes not coming.”

“I’m willing to take that risk.”

“Government is cutting our power. Look.” (Points to a piece of A4 stuck to the wall that says there are many power cuts in Varanasi and only to expect up to 8 hours of electricity a day.)

“I see.”

“Room is very expensive, madam.”

“Right. Well, why is it so expensive then?”

“Because it has air-condition.”

“Right. Look, can I just see it?”

“Not possible now.”

“Why not?”

“Manager is not here.”

“Okayyyyy. So what time does he come back?”

“Maybe ten minutes, maybe thirty.”

“So, which? Ten or thirty?”

“Better you coming one hour after.”

“One hour? Will he be back by then?”

“Yes, he will pass by your door.”

“So he’ll come and see me?”

“No.”

“Will he knock on the door?”

“No, madam.”

“So how the heck will I know when he’s here?”

“You come down in two hours?”

“TWO hours now?”

“Yes madam.”

“So the manager will be back in 2 hours?”

“Maybe one hour, two hours. I inform you when he comes.”

“Excellent. So you’ll come and tell me when he’s here.”

“Yes. Maybe.”

Dead parrot, anyone?

It turned out that he was right, the lack of electricity made paying four times the price for a room a ridiculous option. So I stayed sweating on the bed, hypnotised by the spinning fan blades à la Martin Sheen, and eventually worked up the energy to leave at nightfall, mostly due to the demands of an unfed empty stomach.

The power cut continued and as I picked my way back up through the lanes looking for a suitable dinner venue with only my iPhone for light, I had a rush of newfound respect for the 21-year-old girl who came here on her own 12 years ago to be romanced by the city. As I kept looking over my shoulder in the pitch darkness whilst praying not to put my foot in the middle of a pat of cow poo, I took my hat off to the younger me who stomached this culture shock with such hardiness the first time round.

The next morning however, things shifted and acclimatisation began to set in. A boat ride at 5:30am along the river to see devotees come down to the waterside was absolutely jaw-dropping; again, something to do before you die. The early morning temperature had dropped and could even be described as balmy, making the entire experience that much more blissful. I was rowed for an hour up and down the ghats by a young lad with the demeanour, teeth, and gravelly of someone twice his age. Men, women and children, some of whom had slept the night on the concrete ground at the Ganges’ edge, were praying, bathing, swimming in the murky river, some of them sending off little arrangements of flowers and candles to float off into the distance.

The kid let out boat float slowly past the burning ghats. “3,000 rupees to burn a body,” he told me, adding that this main ghat worked 24 hours a day and turned over about 50 or 60 cremations in that time. There were four simultaneous ones going on as we passed, all the fires at different stages of incineration. If you look closely you can see the outline of a human form in and among the wood. It’s a chilling, but also very touching sight.

At 7:30 I was back on dry land and spent the rest of the morning training my camera on the city’s backstreets and colorful inhabitants. At midday, as the temperature rose back up to slow bake setting, I decided enough was enough, and to leave on a high.

Bags back on, all camelled-up, I set off back up the street towards the place where the rickshaws lie in wait. I had barely been going a couple of minutes when I heard a rhythmic chanting behind me that grew louder and louder at a heady pace. I turned around to see a crowd of men stampeding towards me carrying a colourful stretcher which I realised as they approached was actually holding an enshrouded body. I wedged myself in a doorway to let them pass and respectfully bowed my head as the corpse proceeded to the burning ghat. A cow that was standing nearby let out a long, mournful groan and a dog sleeping in the adjacent doorway stirred.

In the shade of the bodhi tree...

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:44:20 +0200

“Whatever you do,” I was told by a concerned friend a few weeks ago as I was leaving Hyderabad, “Don’t try anything cute in Naxalite country.”

I asked him exactly what he meant by cute, but he was out of the door before he could answer and before I could cut in with my second and third questions, ‘exactly what and where is Naxalite country?’

Two days later, on the 6th of April, the Naxalites had hit the headlines. 47 army officers were massacred in an ambush attack carried out by this group who espouse a Maoist ideology and control a great deal of territory in India. The conflict took place in the district of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, near the border with Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, and in fact not so many kilometers away from the Nano Diaries’ route.

Now I had a much better idea as to why one doesn’t try anything cute with the Naxals. The massacre sounded just horrific and was their most deadly to date. They are known for a continuing campaign of violence which has allegedly claimed the lives of 6,000 people in the last 20 years, while the very mention of their name seems to incite a shiver of fear and disdain in their countrymen.

I took another look at the Nano Diaries’ route and compared it with a map of India highlighting prime ‘severely affected districts’ of Naxalite activity. Ironically enough, Hyderabad is actually at the centre of an area called the Red Corridor, a rash of Naxalite-impacted territories that drops down from West Bengal all the way to Kerala. So I had already been in the thick of these badlands that also moved through Chhattisgarh and Orissa, and more importantly, my next destination, Bodhgaya in Bihar.

Bihar and Jharkhand have a reputation for being fairly lawless places in which a lot of activity that just wouldn’t fly in other states, somehow sticks to the wall here. The lonely planet groups them together as one chapter and kind of glosses over them in a “there are some nice Buddhist sites here, but really, you’d be best off elsewhere”-type-way. Tales of kidnappings and extortion through the years have not made it the most desirable of tourist destinations, however, Bihar in particular does receive a good amount of annual visitors due to one of its most special features; a tree.

In the centre of Bodhgaya is a temple called the Mahabodhi Temple and at the heart of that complex is a bodhi tree, or a peepul tree, that is claimed to be a direct descendant of the one under which the Buddha sat and attained enlightenment around two-and-a-half millennia ago.

It’s one of the most important sites of Buddhist pilgrimage in the world, and it’s obvious upon pulling up into its hot sandy streets and seeing the various Tibetan, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Bhutanese flags and symbols that it’s a great gathering point for all the world’s buddhists.

I personally felt a huge sigh of relief upon pulling up outside the Tibetan flags of the Hotel Kirti, and for reasons less noble and more based in the realm of fantasy. The 470km drive from Kolkata to here was probably the stretch I was dreading the most on the trip. All this talk of insurgent activity and Red Corridors had really put the willies up me, as indeed had the sight of three dead army boys on the front cover of The Hindu just days earlier. The night before leaving, I slept fitfully, imagining and dreaming up all manner of kidnap scenario and lefty torture like being water-boarded whilst forced to listen to high-volume readings of the Little Red Book.

Setting out the next day, however, I was thrilled to find that Jharkhand, despite -from a Nano’s eye view- being as seemingly impoverished as the guides say it is, is actually naturally beautiful state with a breathtakingly rugged landscape. The sun was beginning to lower down as I crossed the border into Bihar and the hues of the jagged hills took on a deeper shade of red-brown as the spindly shrubs that lined the hillsides appeared increasingly fuzz-like.

Arriving in Bodhgaya just after sunset, I had trouble steering Abhilasha through the streets (and there’s only about two of them, as the place is so small) that were crowded with worshippers and people visiting the shrines who come out at night since the daytimes are so damn hot here. Lots of Buddhist monks too, in orange robes and massive smiles. More relief. There’s something so calming about seeing a buddhist mendicant after quite so many thousands of kilometres of full-on Hindu and Muslim culture.

I made it to the Mahabodhi temple the following afternoon at around 3pm when the sun is at its hottest (temps are now well into the 40s) and it appeared to be the perfect time to visit as the place was empty as a sinking ship. I took a guide, as is my new habit now at tourist spots to avoid the hassle of other touts along the way, and he pointed out to me various artefacts in the garden, all of which appeared to be either exactly 300, 1,000, or 2,300 years old. Either things were put there by Ashoka, or they were destroyed by the Mughals: not the most enlightening tour (pardon the pun) but he was a sweet man nonetheless.

The temple complex and its surrounding gardens (including a special meditation garden) were absolutely beautiful. With only a handful of orange-robed monks wandering around the place, it was peaceful and empty, with large swathes of tree-shaded lawn serving up ripe little meditation spots. Among the trees and flowers sit a series of stupas erected by various Buddhist groups from around the world and it was among these that I made friends with Le Van Chung, a monk from Vietnam.

With not a single common word between us, we initially bonded over cameras as I helped him take a group photo of himself with some other monks with his point and shoot. Then he brought me over to the little encampment he had made under a tree and proceeded to take out his passport. He showed me the photo page and suggested I take a picture of it, and I did. Then I showed him my drivers’ licence and he was thrilled. Then he went back into his bag and after a long rummage produced a handful of dried fruit which he gave to me. In return I gave him an ‘in silence’ badge that I had bought at the Osho ashram. He looked at it and his face lit up.

“Zen!”

I nodded. Zen.

“This, Vietnam?”

I nodded again. Yes, he could take it to Vietnam. The friendship was sealed. When I sat down for some meditation time later, he hurried across to where I was and dropped a cushion by my side before walking away. Then, when I was done and went to return to him his cushion, he produced some prayer beads and put them around my wrist. It was very touched.

“This, England?”

“Yes, England!” he beamed.

Kali, Paul and Victoria - or - Not a good day for goats - or - Back in the game!

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:37:10 +0200

It was 8:30am and I was looking on in horror at the convulsing bodies of three headless goats writhing in a pool of their own crimson blood. Bapi, my brahmin tour guide at Kolkata’s Kalighat temple, bid me look away as each animal was dragged kicking and screaming to the block and their heads were lopped off in one fail swoop to the sound of a crescendo drum beat. It was like a scene from Indiana Jones, without a smidgeon of the sex appeal.

Kali is easily the most terrifying figure in Hindu cosmology. The consort of Shiva, she is a dark and violent figure, often associated with annihilation. Popular illustrations of her show her with black skin and her bright red tongue sticking out as she dances in front of a jumping flames holding a severed head in her left hand.

Quite a lady. And in order to appease her endless rage and will to wreak havoc and destrction, it is apparently necessary to sacrifice up to 20 goats a day to her here at this temple. Seems rather an odd tradition to have lasted so long in a vegetarian society, but there you go. The goats were none to pleased. “Only male goats,” Bapi explained to me, “because they have the horns. And the horns are the sign of the devil.” So there is indeed considered method in the madness....

There was an additional moment of weirdness when we were by the adjacent bathing ghat (he’d led me there barefoot through goatblood-stained floors and muddy market streets, all the time me internally eeeeuuuuuuwwwwing) and another brahmin appeared and whipped out an enormous book listing the names of hundreds of foreigners and next to them all, extraordinary sums of money from 2,000 to 5,000 rupees apiece. Both men looked at me expectantly. It was donations for food for the poor, they said. A small bag of rice cost 500 rupees, they added. I was about to suggest they change suppliers, but I thought it kinder to leave a hundred and told them in no uncertain terms that was all they were getting. They requested I write 1,000 in the book. I told them, but that would be a lie. They looked at me blankly.

So, I thought, as I took my camera around the adjacent streets, getting grinned at and given a little flower by two adorable children, I’m back! After two days hibernating in my hotel room, I had the extraordinary good sense to ask the manager whether he had any rooms with AC. He obliged and suddenly my whole life, outlook, mood and gumption factor went through the roof. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it seems like a big part of the Kolkata blues, aside from Abhilasha separation anxiety, was due to the simple fact of the heat.

I was on a roll. That afternoon, I decided on more sights. This time it was to be St Paul’s Cathedral and the Victoria Memorial. Icons of the raj, these two buildings are really a sight to behold. The former, a white-stone gothic cathedral erected in the 1840s looks like it might be straight out of Westminster, while you can imagine the Victoria Memorial and its surrounding gardens wedged in an imaginary space between St James Park and Buckingham Palace. The grounds are open to the public, though surrounded by barbed wire, which I thought made a poignant shot.

Refreshed, revitalised, I decided it was time to hit the road. I informed the hotel manager that I would be going to his house the next day to pick up Abhilasha and we’d be heading out. Where to? Bodhgaya, Bihar; place of the Buddha’s enlightement and one of India’s more notorious and dodgy states. Elmolak let out a long, vaguely astonished sigh.

The Diaries in hiding

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:48:17 +0200

There comes a point in every travel writer’s life when they (I) realize that they’re (I’m) just not that into it. It’s a deflatory moment of unease, coupled with the realization in a hot, un air-conditioned hotel room in Calcutta that the last thing they (I) really feel like doing is going out into the world and seeing the so-called sights. The streets, the temples, the markets, the museums, the monuments: they just all blur into one endless generic photo op after a while.

It was during one such moment that Nick Kitchen, a former travel buddy of mine, popped up on Skype and I complained to him of my predicament. He immediately diagnosed my condition as ‘India Fatigue’, a very common ailment to befall travelers in the country, especially after many accumulated weeks.

He describes it as “when you can’t even muster the energy to leave your room because of the sheer effort of walking down a street.”

Tell me about it. The effort in Calcutta seems particularly Herculean, due to the sheer density of the city and the ardor of street life here. A typical foray into the world outside my hotel door usually consists of a combination of the following:

-Being am hit by the smell of pee due to the fact that the a particular, unmarked corner of the road serves as a makeshift Gents;
-Being gestured at by a rickshaw-wallah (the guys that just run on the street and pull the carts behind them);
-Being accosted by a small child with help me eyes asking for small change;
-Being set upon by a bangle-wallah and not being able to shake him, even after telling him his bangles are ugly and I wouldn’t take them if he paid me;
-Having a pirated copy of The God of Small Things shoved into my face by a street book-seller;
-Having a conversation with a well-dressed guy in his mid-thirties before he asks for money for his hungry children;
-Being deafened by car horns;
-Dodging angry traffic and rickshaws that would mow you down in a second;
-Seeing a guy with stick-thin legs pedaling a customized bicycle with his hands;
-Wading head-on through the horde of people rushing to and from Park Street metro at rush hour;
-Getting bruised shoulders and ribs from pedestrians who violently elbow past;
Smelling the piles and piles of stinking rubbish on the pavement and seeing people sift through it with their bare hands, or fast asleep right in the midst of it;
-Seeing a small baby no more than 3 months old lying unmonitored on a piece of cardboard in the middle of the street;
- Circumventing a little boy taking a leak into the gutter;
- Being spat at by a woman with one hideously deformed leg at whom I must have gawped at with such horrified incredulity that she saw fit to react as she did.
-Laughing out loud at the guy who walked past several times shouting at the top of his voice, “Don’t worry, be happy!”

You get my point: if it’s a quiet stroll you’re after, Calcutta is not the place to be doing it.

“You need to order yourself a beer, turn on the TV, forget work, forget Calcutta, and just relax,” advised Nick, and I knew he was right. It’s just so hard when you’re away not to succumb to tourism guilt. Shut up in your hotel room with the curtains closed can feel so peaceful and womb-like compared with the hullaballoo outside, and sometimes trawling through Facebook can be so much more appealing than the prospect of any effort to go sightseeing…

And I know that at least part of the reason has to do with the fact that I am suffering from Abhilasha separation anxiety. Parked at a location unknown to me (I didn’t think to note the address when I left it there), I am at the mercy of the hotel owner to lead me back to the Nano when and if I ever desire to leave. Which in turn has left me at the mercy of city cabbies, a completely different experience to the cool, air-conditioned calm of the car and the (relatively) soothing voice of Delilah and her driving directions. At least she knows where she’s going most of the time, which is more than can be said for the majority of cabs I’ve taken so far in the city.

Sigh>>> so that’s where I’m at – a little despondent, tired, sleepy, hot as all hell (this summer weather is taking heat to new extremes. Even the fan-cooled rooms don’t cut the mustard any more; I’m dousing myself in cold water every two hours here) and with a takeout from KFC for my dinner. Yes, even Indian food is getting too much. Thank god for the Colonel.

Oh! Calcutta...

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:42:50 +0200

The space between Bhubaneshwar and Kolkata seemed like a pretty empty one, at least as far as the maps were concerned. A straight 450km stretch up to the north-eastern most point the Nano Diaries will be going seemed like it was going to be a slog yesterday morning. The sinking feeling of doom was compounded by Delilah’s insistence that we not take the NH5, but rather a series of secondary roads which amounted to 550km and a 13-hour drive. Cursing her name, I switched her off and turned to the iPhone, which also gave me strange advice concerning a whole bunch of peripheral roads.

I looked instead to Old Faithful, Indian road signs that so far, when present, have never let us down, and had in fact proudly been announcing the kilometers to Kolkata ever since Chennai. Still, something about Delilah and Google’s insistence on not taking the motorway made me uneasy. What did they know? Something I didn’t? A massive meteor crater in the road up ahead? A big piece of Bengal broken off and swam to Bangladesh?

So it was with trepidation that we set out, anxiety that turned out to be completely unnecessary. The road signs were right: Kolkata was indeed 450km away and the great majority of that road was highway in excellent nick. The NH5 turned into the NH60, what seemed like a relatively new road, and then merged into the NH6, which took us all the way into Kolkata.

We got in at around 6, just as it was getting dark, and approached from Howrah, crossing the Vidyasagar Setu suspension bridge that opened up the most remarkable nighttime view of a skyline peppered with skyscraper buildings and a St Paul’s-size dome at its centre.

I felt strangely at home.

The trees on the streets of Kolkata grow in integrated chaos rather than lines and serve to immediately give a soft green edge to what at first appearance seems like a hardcore, though vibrant and beautifully laid out, organically growing city. I felt instant love for the place and it’s living, breathing city centre and unmistakeable cosmopolitan feel (“watch out,” I was told before coming here, “those Calcuttans are like the Indian Parisians...”), but it became instantly obvious that Kolkata had very little love for Abhilasha.

“You cannot park the Nano on the street,” said Elmolak, owner of the Sunshine Guest House, my current digs in the city. “If somebody comes to take it, then you will blame me.”

“I won’t,” I assured him. “I really won’t. If someone steals the Nano, I definitely won’t think it was your fault.”

But my protests, born mostly out of exhaustion and the unwillingness to exert an iota of energy into finding another parking solution, fell on indifferent ears. “You will go with the boy to talk to the man at the garage.” I had been told.

And that was that. The boy, also known as Gokul, proceeded to frog-march me down the street at an unsustainable pace, always a careful couple of steps ahead of me. Our first stop was a petrol station just around the corner from the hotel. Gokul approached the owner and said something to him, to which he shook his head and walked away.

The same thing happened at another two petrol stations, and I even heard Gokul, bless him, emphatically playing the Nano card, hoping that once the garage guys knew which car it was that they were turning down board to, they might change their minds. No such luck.

We finally found a government garage over a kilometer away that wanted 800 rupees for three days. I said I’d mull it over, but by the time we got back to the hotel, sweaty and disgruntled after Gokul’s psychotic city workout, the owner had had a little rethink.

“You can park it at my house!” he announced with glee. “It’s just a little way from here,” he explained, vaguely waving into the air behind him, “and you will save yourself 800 rupees!

Too tired to think any more, I decided to take him up on his offer, and so we set out, in convoy, with Elmolak and his Maruti Swift heading up the procession, and the Nano close in tow, with Gokul sitting upright in the passenger seat and only speaking when spoken to.

Half an hour later we were snarled up in traffic somewhere on Bidhan Sarani and I elicited conversation from Gokul by gently asking, “Are we there soon?” Of course, what I meant was, “Are we frigging there yet, why is it taking so long and why the hell was there nowhere closer to the hotel to park the effing car?!?” but I managed to calmly re-channel my frustration.

“It is close by,” he responded, politely.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, I tailed Elmolak down a very crowded side street and even picked up a couple of tips from him as to how to deal in such situations. Answer: keep the horn engaged without letting up and always keep moving forward, no matter what is in front of you: rickshaw, man, woman or child. It was a method that brought him a great deal of success in terms of road hierarchy and speed, though there were a couple of times when I embarrassedly plodded through his wake, eyes to the ground in a bashful ‘I’m not with him’ type of way.

Elmolak’s house is part of a great old apartment building painted bright red, somewhere in an old and atmospheric part of the city. We pulled into a courtyard dotted with various marble statues ranging from Buddha to more classical female forms, and he and the security guard immeditatly opened up a stationary car and began to push it out from its space in order to make prided place for the Nano.

As I pulled into the allotted area, Elmolak was contentedly watching my manoeuvres with an enormous grin. I wound down the window. “Are you sure this is OK?”

He nodded most definitely. Then he tapped Abhilasha lovingly. “Nano!” He peered in. “It has AC?” I showed him the hallowed dial. “What is the maximum speed?” I answered 90. “Does it make noise when it runs?” What kind of noise, I asked. Noise like problems, I was told, and so ensued a very concentrated impression of the sound of a car engine in trouble.

“No,” I replied, trying not to laugh. “No, it doesn’t make noises like that. It’s actually quite quiet.”

So Elmolak was off to bed, and he told me the boy would help me get a taxi back to the hotel, assuring me that he would strike the relevant 50 rupees off my bill for the inconvenience. Nano love, in India’s most impossible parking city. What more could I ask for (other than a 24-hour webcam, just so I can monitor it’s OK, you know, without being paranoid or anything, you know....)?

With Abhilasha dormant in a parking space far, far away, I’m having to let someone else do the driving for a change...

Off the beaten track, into the gutter, then back up to the sun

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:20:59 +0200

When exactly was it that in the world of tourism, going somewhere unfrequented by the masses began to imply a desirable state of affairs? The travel industry today seems to be jigging under the illusion that there is still some kind of undiscovered encounter out there that will provide parachute ‘adventurers’ (myself included) with a form of authentic and original experience worthy of an eighteenth century explorer. This ever-elusive holy grail is generally referred to as going ‘off the beaten track’, and it’s generally accepted that going somewhere where others fear to tread is somehow a superior experience.

Except now I’m going to opine, in the spirit of democracy, that sometimes the masses can be right.

Let’s take Orissa for example: with less than 6 million domestic and foreign tourists per year, it’s arguably one of India’s lesser-visited states. Which makes it, as far as those wanting to sell it to gullible punters, a hidden gem, a diamond in the over-subscribed rough of the rest of the country (compare, for example with Andhra Pradesh that turns over 133 million visitors per annum). Yes, Orissa is indeed off the beaten track, but you could also put it another way and posit quite frankly that perhaps there’s a reason no one would want to be seen dead there.

What is that reason?

That was my question as I set out from the Ginger hotel yesterday morning, car loaded up with bags and headed for the beach town of Puri, which, according to the perjured Lonely Planet (increasingly my worst enemy of the trip) would attract two types of visitors, the ‘spiritual’, and those after ‘earthly pleasures’. Having a penchant for a bit of each, I thought this would be just the place for me: a small coastal settlement and a one-time favourite stop on the 70s hippie-trail. I imagined an unsullied Goa...

Winding my way through the country roads for the hour and a half drive from Bhubaneshwar to Puri, I was lost in reverie once again inwardly praising the magic of the Indian countryside as I passed villages of grass huts, haystacks and cows lowing in the fields.

Turning a bend, a strange shape out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. It was a white dome peering out from a nearby hilltop that looked a bit like a large flower with giant white sepals sticking out from the center, or even an alien head with a host of antennae. I exclaimed a nerdy “cool!” just as I saw a sign pointing to a side road that read Dhauli Peace Pagoda, and immediately swung a right.

How’s this for off the beaten track, I thought, mentally patting myself on the back as I ascended the winding road up the hill, only to have my excitement washed right out by the sight of no less that five tourist buses parked in the small car park at the top. I was motioned to place Abhilasha in a corner of the lot, and as i locked up the Nano, I was treated to the sight of an old-ish lady squatted behind one of the buses, peeing freely onto the road with her sari hitched up to her knees and not a care in the world.

I averted my eyes in a bashful English manner and waded through a sea of stares as I climbed the baking hot stairs to the summit. There was a hindu shrine at the top, to which I ran for shade as my delicate girlie feet seared on the burning marble, where there was a young brahmin kid lying in wait to catch me at my moment of weakness.

“Good morning madam,” he said, pushing a flower into my hand. “Would you like to make puja?”

I only really half heard what he said through the scorching pain of my now smarting plates of meat. “Oh OK, sure,” I blurted, and without really noticing what I was doing, I was shaking his hand and following him round the back of the temple building.

There there was a little outhouse type shrine and another brahmin to greet me, smelling of marijuana from 20 feet, with his mouth full of some unknown substance. I asked him what it was, but he was rendered speechless and just dribbled a bit. What ensued was some ridiculous theatrics of a blessing ceremony where he frog-marched me through a rigmarole of puja manouevres, rubbing all matter of substance onto my forehead and eyelids, pouring water over my hands and chucking some petals about the place. At one point I stopped to look into his eyes. The guy was utterly away with the fairies, and barely conscious of what we were doing.

At the end of the show, he thrust a wad of 100 and 500 rupee notes in my direction, in a gesture suggesting that I add to it. I giggled and pulled out a 10 from my wallet, knowing full well what his reaction would be. Predictably, he entered into some sort of unconvincing stoner’s stab at a hissy fit at the grave insult of 10 rupees as compensation for his incredibly generous and sanctimonious blessing. A passing tourist noticed the kerfuffle and came over, scolding the guy in no uncertain terms and telling me to not even consider giving him more than a tenner.

Which of course I didn’t. Instead, I bounded back across the burning marble and down the stairs to Abhilasha. Next to whom there was another guy taking a leak. Peace Pagoda my arse, I thought. This place was giving me the heebies. I revved up the Nano and sped back down the hill, cursing the hypocrisy of religion and all those who use it as a front for extortion. I had been puja’ed. And though I had been wise enough to escape the brahmin’s two-faced clutches, the principle pissed me off nonetheless.

Puja’ed and pissed.

Abhilasha and I continued on to Puri, and all the while I comforted myself with the prospect of an evening spent overlooking the sea from the sanctum of my terraced room at the old colonial hotel I’d reserved a room at for the night.

Puri, however, turned out not to be the ‘undiscovered’ seaside paradise I had envisioned. It was something closer to the scene of a recent natural disaster, a horror movie set, and a building site in one. Quite a blessed trinity for a hybrid, wouldn’t you say?

My first sour taste of the place came from a wild-eyed youth on a motorbike who gave me directions on the outskirts of town (not a signpost in sight and my entourage of technology was failing me, presumably crawling back into their shells out of sheer trepidation) who then proceeded to tail me for the following few kilometres, all the while speeding up to tap on my window (as we were driving) to shout inane questions like where was I staying. Did he think I was going to chuck him my room keys while I was at it?

I managed to lose him with a warlike scowl just before the main road and all its horrors began to unfurl before my eyes. Now Puri is a popular holiday spot with local tourists, especially, so I read, from Calcutta, and I won’t be one to cast aspersions on their choice of vacay destination. However, I am buggered if I know why, out of the miles and miles of beautiful coastline India can boast, why on earth someone would want to hole themselves up here.

I can entertain the notion that Puri is currently in an in-between state. A popular local resort, it’s doing its best to put up a few more hotels and what have you in order to push the boat out and capitalise on what’s already there. The main road and home to the main run of non-resort hotels, Chakra Tirtha Road, is about three blocks in from the sea, and taking Abhilasha from there to the edge of the beach for a glimpse at the Bay of Bengal proved to be an impossible task. Every one of the small side roads I could take it down ended in a huge pile of sand or bricks or both and gave views of some rather frightening alleyways. I passed a westerner, a French-looking lad, walking through one of these passages and looking like he was dealing with a very bad smell. We made momentary eye contact and looked away immediately as though any kind of camaraderie in this rotten hell hole would amount to lesser chances of saving oneself.

Puri: one block from the beach and round the corner from my would-be hotel. Hardly St Tropez, is it?

The most obvious, shining advantage of having a car came into its own yesterday afternoon. “This place has bad juju, Abs,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out.”

And with that, we hit the road again. Back to Bhubaneshwar. But first, one small detour: to Konark and the Sun Temple, probably Orissa’s most fascinating archaeological site and tourist draw. And should I say now, saving grace...

I pulled the Nano into a space among a long row of cars on a dusty road just before the gated entrance to a long bazaar that lead up to the monument. Our arrival immediately attracted the attention of a group of youths, one of whom - much to my shock - opened the driver’s door while I was still in the car, a gesture not intended as an expression of chivalry, rather as a means to checking out the interior, as he barely glanced at me during his cheeky act and instead peered curiously at the steering wheel and ignition. A guide called Suryamani made himself known to me, and I took him under the condition that his friend keep an eye on Abhilasha who had now officially become a leaning post for the gang.

“Don’t worry,” he said with a dismissive ‘boys will be boys’ laugh; “they are not wanting to take the car, only to touch it and look. Is very new and exciting, you know.” Yeah I know, but the maternal urge in me was exacerbated to see such flippant manhandling of its bodywork. Had they washed their hands?

Suryamani turned out to be tour guide gold. 15 years on the job here at the Sun Temple, he had the spiel down to a fine art. The building is a truly impressive and magnificently preserved temple that dates back to the 13th century and was dedicated to his namesake in fact, Surya, the god of the sun. It’s aligned along perfect directions for solstice and equinox wow factors and is actually based on the shape of a chariot, with twelve pairs of stone wheels adorning the outside and seven bucking horses supposedly pulling it from the front, towards the sunrise.

We started with an introductory stroll around the pillared remains of the dance hall, where Suryamani pointed out various animal carvings in the stone and for some reason proceeded to carefully spell out the names of several of them too, like “sheep - S-H-E-E-P; bull - B-U-L-L; elephant - E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T” etc. when it appeared we were done with spelling 101 and found ourselves at the foot of the main temple building, Suryamani got down to business and cut to the chase. “Can I talk about the Kama Sutra?” he asked in a conspiratorial whisper, to which I answered in the affirmative, and thank god I did, otherwise our tour would have been cut short right there.

Because, as it emerged, almost the entire perimeter of the temple is covered with sexually explicit carvings. And wowee what an imaginations these boys had. “This,” said Suryamani in businesslike tones pointing at a 12-inch man in a compromising position with two members of the fairer sex, “is bigamy. B-I-G-A-M-Y. Two women and one man. They are having intercourse together.”

B-I-G-A-M-Y

“Gosh,” I said, not knowing quite how else to react.

We moved on. “Three women together,” he continued, pointing at the relevant carving. “One woman giving one man oralsex - O-R-A-L-S-E-X.”

I got closer and squinted. “Good lord!” We kept walking and the sculptures kept on. At one point, the guide threw a furtive glance over his shoulder. “This,” he said in a hushed voice, “is doggy-style. And these are two elephants doing doggy style.” And indeed they were.

A very special form of canine love...

We turned a corner and you could tell we’d come to Suryamani’s favourite bit. “Look you,” he pointed at the figure of a woman riding some kind of animal. “One woman with dog - D-O-G!” I simultaneously feigned incredulity but as I widened my eyes in over-acted shock, I realized that I was actually quite stunned by all of this. A holy building, a religious temple built by the very regal sounding King Narasemhadeva the First, head of the Eastern Ganga Dynasty, and here it was plastered with all manner of hardcore pornography, from girl on girl to threesomes and even a bit of bestiality.

I’ve heard it said by people better culturally educated than I that India was a bit pruded-out by the British. That before the arrival of the colonial rulers, Indian culture was much more sexually charged, vibrant and open. Driving through villages in Orissa I was shocked to see women wearing saris with no blouse underneath, for example, openly revealing their breasts on the street for all to see. And yet, apparently, this was the order of the the day prior to the advent of the conservative Britisher ladies who first took to wearing something under their fabric wraps in order to protect their modesty. In the same way, if the artistic evidence of this temple was anything to go by, it’s a wonder empires were built at all, what with all the hanky panky with which 13th century Indians ostensibly filled their time.

Suryamani also added another element into the mix - the wild imaginations and fantasies of the craftsmen themselves. He emphasized that hundreds of men would have been brought from far and wide for months on end to work on this structure, leaving their wives and womenfolk at home. And so, like army boys away on duty, they became lonesome and horny and so the handiwork we see around the outer walls of the temple could be in fact the elaborate graffitied musings of a labour force denied their rightful oats for a few weeks too long. Like the historical equivalent of the sexy pin-up girls depicted in the nose art of WWII planes, or the scratchings of schoolboys into wooden desks in endless detention periods. The timeless art of pornography.

That’s P-O-R-N-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y.

Endnote:
Since returning from my trip to the Peace Pagoda, I since looked it up online and discovered something hilarious: I never actually went to the Peace Pagoda! The dodgy Hindu temple that tried to take my cash is in fact an adjacent building. The real stupa with beautiful white painted Buddhas, and I imagine, some nice monks who are not fried out of their brains and wanting to rip you off down to the clothes off your back, is next door. It occurred to me to wonder how the hell I didn’t notice, when I looked up at the temple, that it didn’t have that crazy new-age space antenna dome I had seen from below. My only explanation is that I was too distracted by the boiling floor and the deceitful brahmins and too concerned about Abhilasha being used as a public toilet to really care. Incredible.

If the Nano was a hotel...

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 21:10:52 +0200

What’s this? A vision from the Peripherique in Paris? A hallucination from the outskirts of Bordeaux? A mirage from the banks of Brussels? A night of Euro-dreaming in the eye of Rotterdam?

No, readers, it’s Bhubaneshwar in Orissa. And what you’re looking at here in fact is one of a chain of basic business hotels that go by the name of Ginger. And guess who’s idea that was?

Really, is there anything Tata doesn’t own in India? So there are the cars, the buses, lorries and trucks, there is Tata Indicom the telephone company. You can buy Tata salt, Tata tea, Tata satellite TV, Tata water, Tata ceramics, Tata jewelry and watches. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg - the group own dozens and dozens more information and communications companies, housing development, life insurance, manufacturing, engineering, chemicals and drug companies.

Talk about multitasking. Talk about having a finger in every pie.

So anyway, I tripped over the Ginger here in Bhubaneshwar, the capital city of Orissa. It’s a new -ish concept hotel, a kind of mid-range budget joint that reminds me of the Etape chain in France with its boxy minimalism and functionality.

And (drum roll....) it’s owned by Tata. Applause. Really, actually, applause. It’s the first hotel chain of its kind that I’ve seen here in India: weighing in at around £25 a night, it’s kind of like a glorified youth hostel, but with just enough trimmings to make it worthwhile.

Ginger is quite different from most Indian hotels in the same price range, where the first thing you see as you walk in through the doors is a kitsch framed picture of some English country garden, some fading 70s business lounge chairs and a gang of clueless looking guys who all rush to come and bring your bags a metre closer to the elevator. Ginger is just way cooler: in fact, the quirks start before you even walk in, as there’s a bunch of airport trolleys waiting outside to load your bags on to from the car.

The lobby has the feel of a renovated youth club, with a branch of the hip Indian coffee chain Coffee Day open 24 hours in one corner, and a buffet-style restaurant in the other, but with good lighting and arrangements of sequins placed under glass tables.

The guys at reception are dressed in primary-coloured shirts and have been trained to be more on the ball than your average bell boy, though they do seem to be chronically understaffed, as every time I pass by I see two lad sweating it out behind the desk, faced with an angry mob of customers waiting to check in or out or get a hairdryer (that was me).

There’s a gym (read: a room with a treadmill, a cycling machine and some dumbbells) as well as a special room where you can get drinking water and do your ironing. There’s a snack vending machine by the front entrance and a rack of business newspapers right opposite for your perusal. There’s Tata wireless internet in all the rooms. And by far my favourite touch, the corridors and rooms all smell of ginger. Like it.

I see it a bit like the hotel equivalent of the Nano - a very bottom-mid-range, no frills deal that nonetheless provides a cut above the average, and leagues ahead of what’s already out there for the members of India’s burgeoning new middle class.

Nice one Ratan, son: keep up the good work.

The NH5 and the great road romance

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 05:29:55 +0200

According to The Story of India by Michael Wood (this week’s audiobook accompanying us on the epic journey up the east coast) what is now the NH5, the virtually unbroken stretch of two-lane highway that runs the 1,728km from Chennai all the way up to Kolkata, is one of the oldest roads in India. A former trade route, it has connected the north to the south and vice versa for millennia and then some.

I reconnected with the NH5 somewhere just south of Vijayawada, where I spent a lavish night in the Quality Inn to nurse my insect bites and generally recover from the traumas of the Nagarjuna Resort. To be honest though I didn’t have much choice in my lodgings: every place listed in the Lonely Planet as well as the results of a rough Google search was full, due to the fact, according to the lad at the Quality Inn front desk, that it was wedding season.

Indeed, looking around me in the reception area of this really quite plush hotel (though I’m not sure whether my impressions were due to the simple effects of relativity...) it appeared that my fellow guests had something of a festive zeal about them. Well, there were women there for a start, unusual to see in urban, business-oriented hotels, and they were fairly well scrubbed up, in quite ornate, bejeweled saris that were certainly a notch or two above the norm.

Can someone tell me why there are so many enormous Hanuman statues in Andhra Pradesh?

Probably the biggest perk of the stay here was the presence of an in-house gym. After two months spent with my ass on Abhilasha’s driver’s seat, it was a pure joy to get on the treadmill and give it some welly for a whole 40 minutes, surprised with every step that I hadn’t yet collapsed into an asthmatic fit. And though the hotel might have featured an above average head count of women, the gym, sadly, was the usual boys’ club of furtive looks and badly concealed stares. So when, about 20 minutes into my run, I was joined on the adjacent machine by a woman in full salwar kameez and sneakers, I nearly jumped off to reward her with hearty embrace.

I left Vijayawada with a bang after losing my rag with the valet parking guys who had me wait in the hotel reception for at least 15 minutes with the usual, “Please sit, car coming” line until I actually took myself down to the garage to see first hand what was up with the delay. What happened was that someone had put a rickety wooden ladder bang over the middle of the entrance to the parking lot and were in the process of constructing some kind of bamboo scaffolding there. It did not look like a quick-fix job.

I was bid to wait with a flourish of waves and the hand-opening-out movement that is code for 5 minutes. So I sat in Abhilasha, but still nothing. Finally, a wave of impatience directed my hand to the ignition and I found myself driving slowly towards the ladder. At a distance of a couple of feet, I realised that there was enough room - just - to squeeze the Nano between the ladder and the wall, out of the parking lot and so to freedom. I edged forward to a chorus of terrified protests from the over-abundant garage personnel, and, with a three-point-turn worthy of Schumacher, edged her out to liberty. For a fleeting, triumphant moment, I dared hope that my demonstration of initiative in the face of an obstacle might have proved a valuable lesson to the gathered staff, but a glance back in the rearview showed me that within seconds of my hot-headed escape, they had all resumed their positions of general indifference.

From Vijayawada we headed north towards Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh’s second largest city. The road was smooth and relatively uneventful, though a couple of hours into the drive I became acutely aware of a growing pain in my back. Presumably a result of three unbroken full-day drives, sitting in the car seat is taking its toll.

It’s a bit embarrassing to complain of ailments sustained from driving. A gash in the leg as a result of tiger bite is a story to tell, as is a nose lost to frost bite after a three-week trek to the south pole. A sore back and slightly stiff hip from too much sitting down is not cool. When I stopped for petrol at a roadside station, my quasi-yogic stretches provided great entertainment for the pump attendants as well as for the gathered group of workers who were taking their lunch under the shade of a tree several feet away.

In fact, it was at this garage that I was asked for my autograph. Inspired by the sight of my creaky downward dog, or just plain excited by the Nano, the pump attendant whipped out a small pocket notebook and a pen. “Please, autograph,” he asked. At first I was sure I had misheard. My autograph? It was a first; often people ask for foreign coins or a photo op, but for a signature in a book? he repeated, “Autograph!”

“You want me to sign my name?” I was triple-checking, waiting for Jeremy Beadle to pop out from behind the toilet block (erm, if he was alive, that is). “Yes, yes, signature, please,” he enthused. Glancing around sheepishly I took his little book and signed my name. He was over the moon and thanked me with gusto. Extremely weirded out, I rolled up the window and sped out, leaving my one and only fan waving eagerly from inside a Nano-generated dust cloud.

Visakhapatnam, a seaside city, came and went without much fuss over a night spent at the mildewed Hotel Supreme. With a parking lot edged with tropical bird cages, the hotel is a ‘maturing’ place opposite the city’s boardwalk that fills up at night with promenading families. The only thing that struck me as I drove out the next morning was the giant submarine parked menacingly at the water’s edge.

I scowled as I took a look at the map before leaving. Still another 1,000km to Kolkata, which I have sort-of randomly set as my next goal to get to as soon as possible. Time is moving fast and the Nano Diaries have but another seven and a half weeks to get all the way around the rest of India and back to Mumbai. 1,000km is at least another 2 to 3 days driving, but as I plopped my tush into the drivers seat I realised that a further series of 8-hour drives might well render my back unusable if I wasn’t careful.

So, consulting the oracle that is the Lonely Plant Guide to India, I was advised that a few days in Orissa might not be a bad idea. Chilika Lake, the great Sun temple, perhaps even a jaunt out to a national park or some tribal areas. With an eye on the calendar, the latter two seem unlikely, with the added factor of the inland hill areas being under a travel advisory due to a horrific massacre on Tuesday of 76 Indian soldiers by Naxalite insurgents in neighboring Chhattisgarh, just kilometres from the inland Orissan border.

So sticking to the coast feels like a plan for now at least. I decided to set the GPS for Bhubaneshawar, the state capital and make a stop at Chilika Lake along the way. The largest brackish lagoon in Asia, (not a geographical category that has held any particular interest for me in the past) the lake is actually quite stunning: I got to its shore from the village of Barkul and worked my way through the typical fencing and barbed wire before getting to the body of water itself, vast and greying in the dusk light, and punctuated by bamboo rods sticking up from its bed set against the rolling hills to the north.

A boatman in scraggy stained shirt and pants approached me for a ride in a motor boat. We gestured at each other for a few minutes before settling upon a 45 minute trip for 100 rupees (I didn’t even haggle).

When we got to the boat, the motor was out of action and appeared to have been for several years. Most probably a blessing, due to the startling shallowness of the lake and the abundance of algae and weed. Instead, the boatman and a colleague punted the long wooden boat out towards the centre of the lake, in what looked like tremendous effort against the current.

It was a sublime moment and for the duration of the trip I forgot about my smarting back and the aching mundanity of the hours spent on the straight road; the sun was setting, the flocks of Chiliki’s famous birds were coming in for the night, flying overhead and around the boat, and the waters were so calm, the silence only sporadically broken by the splash of the poles that were pushing us along. In the distance a group of girls had hired their own vessel and were busy taking shots of each other striking most convivial poses on deck.

We got back to the shore just before dark and I paid up the boat guys, acquiescing to their parting request for baksheesh. Back on the road, I was refreshed. Within minutes of leaving Barkul, I was jammed up at a railway crossing, and then inside a nearby village who’s tiny road has been charged with the task of taking through traffic from a section of the NH5 that is undergoing roadworks. A diversion city, if you will, that didn’t seem to mind in the least that every vehicle passing from north to south and south to north, was made to crawl down their main street and squeeze past one another and the oblivious cows. But I too was oblivious. The night driving is becoming second nature to me now, and more so a very intense form of meditation that requires all my being, all my concentration to be placed on the little area a few metres in front of the car illuminated by headlights.

Soon we were spat back on to the highway, the NH5 that just keeps running. Overcome by a sudden feeling of road-trip romance, I succumbed to the sentiment and put Dire Straits (people who know me well will be amazed it took this long to get the Knopf out) to play over the speakers. The road kept rolling under my front tyres as the chevrons and roadside signs and gas stations passed by in quick and partially illuminated succession. To my right, I could see stars in the sky out of the passenger window, as well as the slow-moving tail lights of the trucks ahead.

A series of lights, of quick impressions coming out of the darkness - it was irrepressibly exhilarating and bewitching. The road, the highway, the old north-south route that has moved generations of travelers up and down the Bay of Bengal, the concrete pathway rolling under our headlights that could really be anywhere in the world. I was struck by the unity of purpose, by the common human urge to get in a car and get the hell out, for no particular reason other than yucks.

These are the feelings road trips are made of.

The dammed Buddha isle

Wed, 7 Apr 2010 16:40:59 +0200

Can someone please explain to me how a 160km car journey can take 7 hours? Well, maybe if it’s through snowy mountains, or on sand, or even on water. Perhaps the car is one of the Fred Flintstone varieties that runs on footwork rather than an engine? What if you did the whole thing in reverse, uphill? Or blindfolded? Or it could be that you have to stop for 30 minutes after every 30 kilometres on the clock? Or that you switched off the engine and left the car’s momentum to dragged along the roads by a group of marathon-running sloths?

The answer is none of the above. The answer is I frankly don’t have a frigging clue, but what I did have was tears in my eyes when I finally made it to the Nagarjuna Sagar dam at 10:30pm, having kicked off from Hyderabad mid-afternoon. I’ll save you reaching for your calculators: it’s less that 23kmph, apparently, and yet I know that’s just not true as most of the time I was speeding on dual carriageways and back country lanes.

So there was traffic in Hyderabad. In fact, it took me 2 and a half hours to leave its limits. There was a lot of congestion in the previously closed off Old City, and we were literally inching our way out. And there was a bit when Delilah took me off the main road and into some country lanes that became increasingly smaller and unpaved until I was forced to switch off her ramblings and turn to Google maps on the iPhone.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the exceptional circumstances. The rest was just slaloming around potholes and overtaking trucks. The driving at night bit is not so bad any more; I’m definitely getting a handle on driving with 10% visibility. The tough part, however, is arriving to some utterly deserted village in the boondocks an hour after everyone’s gone to bed where all the signs are written in forrin and the only person to ask directions to is a drunken lorry driver contemplating the stars from under his front wheel.

Nighttime in India is darker than anywhere else I know. It’s hard to explain, but there’s something so menacing to me about the nights here, especially in the countryside. A murk that descends that you want to find you at home and not out somewhere lost and clueless and on the verge of crying and calling your mum. That is, if you had reception.

Finally, after about half an hour spent driving up and down roads that didn’t feature on the GPS and I couldn’t see on the trusty iPhone due to no signal in the area, I came across a sadhu-type guy and a group of five or so tribal women. It was a very strange sight in the headlights of the Nano, these intricately ordained ladies with hats and beaded flaps hanging down the sides of their faces. Hilarity ensued as I rolled down the window and asked for the nearest hotel. “No English” was the best answer I could get from them, and I continued driving in the hope that they meant to communicate their ineptitude with the language and not some dark local prohibition of my countrymen.

At last, and to the sound of a chorus of angels, I saw the drab concrete block that is the Nagarjuna Resort appear from behind a cluster of trees and signs. I pulled up and thankfully the reception guys and a small dog named Puppy were still awake. I wanted to embrace them all, restraining myself at the last minute out of a sense of social decorum and a desire not to contract fleas.

One of the lads proudly showed me to a room that I can unequivocally say is the nastiest den of nastiness I have witnessed in the last 6 weeks. Little ant-like bugs crawling in the bed, mysterious clumps of hair in the bathroom floor, the constant sound of running water and all manner of stains suggesting rogue bodily fluids over the curtains and other furniture. My stomach turned for a second, but I soon came to. This was a one-village dam and a one-hotel village. My choice was this or to sleep in the sweltering car with one hand on my keys and the other wrapped around my protective can of hairspray.

“I’ll take it,” I announced and handed over the 600 rupees that completed the act of moonlight robbery.

The next morning I arose to a profound sense of grumpiness due to a perturbed night spent half-reliving nightmares from the road that night and the other scratching at the little pricks I could feel on my arms and legs from my diminutive bedfellows. I cursed myself for having chosen Nagarjuna Sagar, a dam in Andhra Pradesh located vaguely between Hyderabad and Vijayawada as a stop on the Great Nano Route. What tempted me here was the Lonely Planet’s somewhat overblown description of it as a place with stupas and temples that ‘defy impermanence’. The story goes that where the dam is now used to be the Nagarjuna valley, named after one of its most famous residents and an important Buddhist patriarch. The valley contained a whole bunch of ruins left over from Buddhist civilisations in around the 2nd century, and when it was announced that the area would be flooded, archaeologists excavated all that they could and put the finds and relics on an island in the middle of the lake, called Nagarjunakonda.

The boat out was due to leave at 9:30am , so an hour earlier, I was right there munching on a puri made on a makeshift deep-frier on a blackened wooden cart on the streetside. However, the boat was 2 hours late leaving, and when we finally got out onto the lake and onto the barren and rock-strewn island, it was near midday. Scorching. The upside was that I was sharing my trip with a very chatty group of Tibetan pilgrims who had come from their home in Mysore to offer their respects to the Buddha relics supposedly housed on the island. (“They will be making puja,” one Indian man told me, eyeing them from the side as we waited for the boat. “They live in India, you know?”)

Once on the island, the Tibetans made a fast and efficient sightseeing group, despite the great heat and total lack of shade. The women wrapped scarves around their heads as they made their way through the barren rocky paths towards the reconstructed remains of temples at the center of the island.

Once there, and faced with a statue of a standing Buddha missing one arm, they immediately, and with great gusto, threw themselves to the ground and began prostrations, while others among the group approached the statue itself and began to lay beads at its feet, despite the repeated, though admittedly rather half-arsed reprimands from a group of three guards who watched them from under the distant shade of what might have been Nagarjunakonda’s one Tree.

With utter disregard for the guards’ shouts, the pilgrims moved around the back of the statues and began to pray from there and perform all manner of ceremony unknown to me.
It was a sight to behold and actually quite touching. As disappointing as the ruins on the island were and as excrutiating the heat of the sun pounding my skull, sharing my morning with the Tibetans was worth the candle, and their enthusiasm was contagious.

The Taj of all business schools

Tue, 6 Apr 2010 18:15:12 +0200

Homeless in a foreign country, you tend to pinball off the kindness of strangers, and so it was through a slightly complicated bounce manoeuvre (that I won’t go in to right now) that I ended up with the email address of one Professor Reuben Abraham at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

“You really should come down to ISB to see what the future of education looks like,” he wrote to me after I sent him the awkward ‘you don’t know me, but...’ mail.

The future of education, eh? Sounded intriguing. Sounded like a very bold statement (though after meeting Reuben and consequently staying a few days with him and his lovely wife Petra, I know now that he’s not one to shy from spirited declarations).

So off Abhilasha and I puttered to a neighbourhood way in the outskirts to the west of Hyderabad called, rather thrillingly, Hi-tech city. I half-expected something like the set of Bladerunner with swirling, interlocking monorail flyovers and airborne jetskis, but then I remembered where I was and as the tricksy GPS Delilah counted down the distance to the gates of the ISB, (with just 500 metres to go we passed an oblivious strolling camel) it became clear to me that Hi-Tech City was still very much a future in the making. This despite the fact that some IT heavyweights, the likes of Infosys, Microsoft and Amazon, have already staked their claims in the New Hyderabad.

Finally allowed in through the gates of ISB after mild security kerfuffle (it’s always a performance to explain to guards that the nano doesn’t have a boot; no you can’t open it; no, there’s no handle; I don’t know why, mate, it’s just the way it is...), I sped up their winding driveway, past the ‘Mind the Peacocks’ signs to the building pictured above, the academic block of the college.

And wow. What a building. Designed by architect John Portman, it’s like a pared-down desert fortress with an enormous open-air atrium at its core, a library that spirals up like the Guggenheim and a system of natural air-conditioning that gets wind blowing around the bridges and walkways. Original artworks casually adorn the walls of faculty corridors while outside the perfectly manicured grounds stretch for acres of green lawn and the waft of frangipanni trees floats among the buildings of campus housing as far as the on-site hotel. Oooh - and there’s an outdoor pool surrounded by sunbeds worthy of the Hilton just waiting to relax the students after a hard day’s work.

And it all seems to be doing the trick: this year, the financial times ranked the ISB the 12th best MBA in the world, four places higher than in 2009, way above the likes of Ivy League Yale and Cambridge in the UK.

Make you want to go back to school?

I had met a 2008 alum of the college the day before who had told me of the pain of having to leave. ISB students get furnished with top notch serviced living spaces and enjoy such a high standard of living that post-college life is invariably a bit of a let down. “It was tough having to go back to cleaning my own apartment,” the graduate confided with a wink.

Reuben Abraham is a professor at ISB. He came back to India from the States in order to take up the post of Executive Director of the Center for Emerging Market Solutions at the college and from the gleam in his eye when he talks about the energy in India and the potential of its unfolding growth, you can tell he’s happy with his decision.

An enthused speaker on the subject of free markets, he can make even the most clueless and otherwise disinterested subject (ie, yours truly) involved in raging debate within minutes. Some of his assertions initially set my teeth on edge, like his conviction that India should be more urbanised and that rural and village life is something that needs to be abandoned rather than subsidized by the state.

“But, but, but villages are... nice.” I protested weakly. “Aren’t they?”

He dismissively accused me of urban bourgeois romanticism and moved on.

A skeptic of charities, NGOs and do-gooders in general, Reuben, one of last year’s recipients of the World Economic Forum Young Global Leader award, sums up his stance thus: People tend to forget that the single greatest remover of poverty in the world has been the economic growth of China and India (to a lesser extent); over 700 million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty in 20 years, and this is almost entirely due to the functioning of free markets and liberal economic policies.

The future, he told me, is in India. And the future of India is places like here: Hi-Tech City and the ISB.

At 2am that same night I found myself in the midst of a crowd of students throwing out some Bollywood-style moves on the dancefloor. The venue was an open-air garden-turned-party-spot that was left as a legacy by the class of 2008, whose names are immortalised on a plaque just behind the DJ booth.

Yours truly with a bunch of ne’er do wells from the ISB. That’s the Professor on the left.

The students were in high spirits: two days from their graduation ceremony, they were poised to be ejected into the world with a postgraduate degree from the hippest and most successful business school in the country. Arms were waving and hips were swinging. The party didn’t start till midnight and was set to go on till dawn. Me, I was feeling my ripe old thirty-something age and decide to hit the sack.

Driving back to my hotel, I passed a bunch of billboards with ads for primary schools, secondary schools, colleges, courses, exchange programs, all of them with the over-arching theme of the (desperate?) pursuit of success, some of them adorned with pictures of angelic little supposedly overachieving white children. It was weird. I was wondering if it was true that the ISB is a model for the future of India, or whether it’s just a very impressive anomaly in the midst of a highly ambitious segment of society.

One thing’s for sure, when these kids walk out with their ISB MBAs this week, they’ll be looking at earning an average of around $140,000 as a kick-off wage (that’s Purchasing Power Parity, the equivalent of dollars); and that ranks them 9th in the world for MBA alumni salaries.

So... who’s buying the drinks then?

Forbidden city

Sat, 3 Apr 2010 16:27:42 +0200

Upon arriving at the Taj Mahal - a dignified but slightly tatty colonial hangover of a hotel on Abids Road in Hyderabad, I was handed a leaflet of the city’s sights by a man behind reception whose business card read ‘R. Janardhan’. The triple-folded paper boasted all manner of inviting monument - from the city’s signature Charminar, the four-minarets square, as well as the surrounding Laad Bazaar and the enormous central mosque, the Mecca Masjid. The booklet then also went on to extoll the virtues of a visit to the Salar Jung art museum, the Nizam’s Museum and the stately Chowmahalla Palace.

No sooner was I mentally outlining a day’s sightseeing in Hyderabad than my friend R. took a pen from his chest pocket and began - with an alarming sense of urgency - to successively cross out almost every place listed in the booklet. I was perplexed.

“Closed.” he announced. “Here, not possible,” he said again, running his hand over 90% of the attractions in the leaflet. “Fighting. Police. No good. Closed.”

Of course, the riots. My befuddled brain, delirious after the gazillion-hour drive from Nellore, had forgotten that I had read this morning that swathes of Hyderabad’s Old City were under a police curfew due to rioting that had occurred there over the past few days. And in fact the faint image of a road block I had passed on my way to the hotel re-appeared as a thin chimera through which I stared blankly at Mr Janardhan.

(Days later, after reading several editions of the Hindu and having a few conversations with locals, I’m still really at pains to discover exactly why these riots are taking place. Something to do with religion and the great regional Hindu-Muslim kerfuffle, but beyond that, everyone, including the press, appears loathed to go into details, as though the story were old as the hills and they were point-blank bored of telling it.)

“So where can I go then?” I asked from behind the haze of my road cloud.

R. jabbed his finger at three places on the paper headed ‘We wish you a happy site seeing’: Golconda Fort, the Qutb Shahi Tombs and Snow World. There was also the fourth option of Ramoji Film City, the self-proclaimed largest film studio in the world, but I’ve been there before and frankly it doesn’t deserve a second visit.

And so it came to pass the day after next that I readied myself up to see a bit of Hyderabad. I punched Golconda Fort into the GPS and drove the 10km out of town to this hillside fortress that was previously the centre of Hyderabad and home to the Qutb Shah Kings sometime around the 16th century.

Abhilasha and a young lad on a bike at the Qutb Shahi Tombs

In the spirit of earnest tourism, I arrived at the gate having fought off a crowd of children pleading for foreign coins, and purchased my entry pass next to a sign that read ‘Golconda Fort Tickets: Indians: 5rs; Foreigners: 100rs. I was in such good spirits that even the 1,900% markup on account of my nationality seemed fair, as did the insistence of the guide that 500 rupees was a decent price to take me around. In the end we settled for 300, and soon I was climbing the ramparts of Golconda under the scorching 3pm sun a few feet behind the sprightly Mohammad who was negotiating them with the ease of a mountain goat.

With not a cloud in the sky and temperatures somewhere in their late 30s, it was a tough slog up the 360 steps to the top and back down the other side, but Mohammad nonetheless eased the exertion by regaling me with all manner of colorful tale from the fortress’ history (one of which being that it was the mining place of t famoushe Koh-i Noor Diamond,nicked by the Brits and now embedded inside the Queen’s favourite crown, all locked up nice and safe in the Tower of London), backing up the rear of each story with a head-shaking lament as to the slide downward from former glories to the Current State of Things. We peered down into a water tank littered with plastic bags and empty water bottles.

“This is India,” he sighed and continued on.

Mohammad

The view from the top of Golconda Fort, however, was worth every one of the 360 steps. Situated at the south-western edge of the sprawl of modern Hyderabad and adjacent Secunderabad, the land out towards the setting sun is an unbroken stretch of desert scrub, punctuated by the domes of the nearby Qutb Shahi tombs, the next stop on my three-point sightseeing list.

The tombs were built to enshrine the dynasty of kings that ruled the old kingdom of Golconda from the citadel, and they are currently in the process of getting spruced up to meet the standards of a World Heritage site. Initially intending to just pop my head around the door, take a few shots and leave, I soon found myself wandering mesmerised around the complex, pushing on to see the next tomb and the next one, and the next.

Mid-afternoon, turning evening, the air felt like an oven. I was sweating that kind of sweat that makes you understand what sweating is for - not just an irritating function of the body that necessitates daily deodorant application and a whiff under the armpits, but the kind of sweat when the body kicks into cool-down mode, turns on the sprinklers and drenches you from head to toe in an (actually quite refreshing) film of perspiration.

The Qutb Shahi Tombs

Abhilasha was parked in the shade, but still her interior was hot enough to slow roast a chicken. If I had any doubt as to the wisdom of visiting Snow World at this juncture, I was now sold. What better remedy for this than an evening spent on ice?

Located near the eastern shore of Hyderabad’s central lake, Hussein Sagar, home to a giant monolithic standing Buddha that has to be one of the most martial and stern depictions of the man that I have ever seen, Snow World is marketed as a theme park and sits in a giant boxy building with its name hoisted above the roof and a solitary palm tree guarding the main gate.

Used wellies at Snow World

Admission to the attraction runs in one-hour stints and the next session didn’t begin for another hour. The ticket seller suggested I fill my time by purchasing a ticket to the House of Horrors but somehow even 50 rupees didn’t seem to justify seeing what lay beyond the sorry-looking faded velvet curtain that shrouded the entrance to a little wooden portacabin.

At half-past seven, 30 minutes before our session was due to begin, the waiting crowd (there were about 40 of us) were called in to get suited and booted and prepared for the experience of transitioning from 35ºC to -5ºC. A series of counters in the entrance hall distributed thick green army socks, red wellies, weird plastic mittens and hooded blue and red snow jackets.

I excitedly pulled on all the clothing then sat and sweltered for the next 20 minutes as we all waited for the heavy industrial door to open and let us loose on what I imagined would be some kind of indoor magical Lapland. Indeed, boots on and hoods up, we all looked like a battalion of Santa’s elves, waiting to enter the workshop.

When the door finally opened, there was a near-stampede as revelers threw themselves into the cold cold room with shouts of glee. I kept up the rearguard and strolled in at the end to find that the anticipated Lapland was in fact a slightly disappointing warehouse space with crap plastic snowmen and igloos and a toboggan slide in the corner.

I looked down; there was no denying it. Snow. This was surreal. Just a few hours ago I had been sweating up a storm in the ramparts of Golconda and now I was dodging airborne snowballs in a glorified oversized fridge freezer. What to do now?

It appeared to me that my companions in the snow depot were having a similar crisis of activity. After the excitement of getting dressed up and the anticipation of waiting behind a closed door, the hour that loomed before us suddenly seemed painfully long. A few families went straight for the jugular in an attempt to get into the spirit of things by gathering around the plastic yeti snowman for a group photo while others grabbed toboggans and laboriously climbed the wooden flight of stairs to launch themselves down the slide at speeds that would allow for a short nap along the way. Some shot balls into baskets, a couple tried to crawl into the igloo, and everyone else just kind of moseyed around, occasionally stooping to pick up a handful of snow and throw it at a passerby.

The chilly monotony was soon broken by the rumbling into life of a giant machine in the corner of the space that began to spout out what I can only presume was intended to be snow. Far from a bunch of pretty flakes, however, what came shooting out from the device was more akin to a misty rain, that irritating miasmic drizzle for which London is so famous. Afraid for my camera, I ran and took shelter under the toboggan stairwell and waited for the torture to end.

Five minutes later the drizzle stopped, giving way to a crackly rendering of the Macarena by way of lamentable audio quality speakers and accompanied by a series of disco lights. My fellow snow leprechauns started dancing with great enthusiasm and exuberant Bollywood spirit, and it was at this point that I decided it might be the right moment to cut my hour short and get the hell out.

The day ended with a visit to one of Hyderabad’s latest, slickest, chicest malls, GVK One on the curiously named Road Number One in the Banjara Hills neighbourhood. As I arrived, the mall itself was closing, but there was a crowd outside the adjacent Hard Rock Cafe that was large enough to perk my interest.

“There’s a special event tonight,” the be-badged, be-hatted Hard Rock door guy told me. “It’s a one-night only live performance by a band called Ocean Colour Scene, and it’s for charity.” For 150 rupees, I couldn’t refuse, and even more for the faint tingle of homesickness that the mention of this Where Are They Now outfit from the 90s stirred in me.

Ocean Colour Scene: where are they now? Hard Rockin Hyderabad, that’s where.

Sure enough, there were a few Brits inside the bar, and I sat down to a plate of chicken wings and fries and watched a shaggy looking Englishman by the name of James Walsh (Starsailor?) belt out some romantic acoustic numbers that turned my stirring into a deeper longing. The presenter of the whole gig was a local celebrity by the name of Luke Kenny who is a VJ and a music critic and a clear favorite with the local ladies.

So no Charminar, no Mecca Mosque, but still plenty more besides in Hyderabad. And I’ve not even started on the phenomena of High-tech City, the tentative future of Indian living...

The long slog

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:15:16 +0200

I don’t know what got into me, but somewhere around Guntur City, 240km north of Nellore on the NH5, I had the absolutely bonkers idea of continuing the extra 300km to Hyderabad, effectively driving almost 600km in one shot. It was set to be the longest journey Abhilasha and I had ever done.

It worried me not that the GPS was in fervent protest, warning me that, should I choose to make this ill-considered decision, it would be another 7 hours until I reached Hyderabad. I immediately switched her off. Mendacious whore, Delilah; you’ve fooled me one time too many. Hush you now.

In retrospect, I can put my temporary madness down to the combination speed of the NH5, lack of sleep, and the rush of stimulants that three coffees and a red bull had produced in me. Having spent the previous few hours cruising at an average of something like 75-80kmph along the two-lane highway, with my eyes wide open and an iTunes genius playlist based on Madonna’s Borderline blaring through my portable speakers, I mistakenly calculated that if things carried on in this vein, I’d be kicking back in Hyderabad by sunset.

What I failed to acknowledge, and I should have known better here, was that the NH9, which breaks off from the NH5 at Vijayawada, is one of those ‘highways’ with a lane in each direction that’s a favourite with truckers, rickshaws and goats. Upon making that right turn, I was promptly engulfed in a cloud of black smoke coming from the rattling exhaust pipe of an ancient lorry right in front of me moving at 30 kmph, and I knew it was going to be a slog.

3 hours and just over 100km later, I was ready to cry. My average speed was about 40 kmph and the entire road that I had thus far driven consisted of a game of overtake of an endless line of heavy goods vehicles that apparently had no end. I fell victim to driver’s folly, the mistaken notion that there was somehow an end to this chain of trucks and buses and all I had to do was overtake the next one and I’d be home free. Not so.

Meanwhile, the stream of 80s music changed to a rather appropriate audiobook: Tom Vanderbilt’s book about the ins and outs of driving culture called ‘Traffic’. It was almost surreal to be executing these hair-raising manouevres along this tiny road, all the while being told about the psychology and perceptions behind the moves I was making.

From 500 feet, it’s very difficult to make out the speed of an oncoming car, the narrator told me, as I pulled out from behind the brightly painted backside of an enormous milk tanker to see a bus on the horizon in the opposite lane. I realised then that one of the saving graces of Indian driving is exactly the thing that was frustrating me the most at that moment: speed.

The fact is that most of the traffic on these smaller in-roads (buses, lorries, rickshaws, combine harvesters, tractors, bullock carts, two-wheelers) move at a very slow pace, some of them no faster than 30-40kmph. So when you go to attempt what seem like crazy and suicidal passing moves, the traffic ahead actually gets a very good look at you from a distance and a lot more time to clock you due to the low speeds. And vice versa.

I’ve watched from behind my hands at many an overtake where lorries pass each other within inches without so much as a flinch. In fact I’ve even seen moments when an overtake was undertaken too late and the vehicle in the oncoming lane simple deferred to the truck that was driving in his rightful lane by pulling up into the hard shoulder and letting them pass. Again, without even a honk.

This high-octane style of driving, rife with contradictions as it is and with twists of the rules at every turn keeps you on your toes, but is also frankly exhausting. I turned Delilah on for an update to be told that despite the remaining 150 km to Hyderabad, the journey was nonetheless still going to take us over four hours. That bitch.

It was about an hour after this, when the batteries in the speakers finally died and I had drained the last drops of coffee from the thermos flask, that the fairies began to visit. I had been 10 hours on the road already, with only a couple of pee stops to give me a break from the constant vigilance of the game of speed up, slow down, overtake, and something was beginning to happen to my mind. I noticed in one moment that I had slipped into a state of mechanical reactions that no longer required my conscious brain.

Then I saw it. A sign by the roadside. A giant number 7 with a picture of a young man serving up some salad-buffet type food from behind a counter. ‘Highway Rest Stop’ it read. ‘Refresh, Relax, Recharge’. These must be the hallucinations, I thought. The inevitable onset of unreal visions. An ad for a Little Chef-style motorway restaurant? The first I had seen in almost 5,000km? On this tiny chaotic road from Vijayawada to Hyderabad? Get out.

But the signs were insistent. They counted down the kilometres until finally, on the left hand sign, there emerged from the foliage and the fields a bright orange building with flags and parking and all the features of a truly modern road rest stop. I rubbed my eyes; either the illusions were going to a whole new level, or God himself had decided to show me a miraculous token of His grace and mercy through this chimera of food, coffee and clean toilets.

I was lead to a parking space by way of guidance from a series of whistles emanating from a rather hubristic guard, and hobbled from the car to the inside the food court, my legs and whole body in fact reeling from the vibrations of the road and the trauma of the thousand close calls including the most recent near-collision with a wandering roadside goat.

Inside was a different world. About 8-10 different food counters, from South Indian to North Indian to sandwiches and even a Baskin Robbins. A cornucopia of snacks and meals and possibilities to choose from, that all fell on the very disappointing realisation that I wasn’t in the least bit hungry. Still, I got a vegetable puff just for the sake of it, and perplexed the waiters (yes, waiters, this is still very much Indian in its style) by preferring to stand while waiting for my food, citing the fact that I’d been sitting on my arse for well over 10 hours now and fancied stretching my legs. Just a bit.

Back in the car, it was back to the stream of traffic, as the sky was darkening and I found myself behind a large pink bus that I had overtaken a couple of hours ago. I sighed and locked back in to the driving mode. I knew that if I was to make it to Hyderabad sane, I had not to think of the goal, but only of what was right in front of me. The present moment. All other thoughts were put on hold, or transferred to the call centre in Bangalore.

It wasn’t sleepiness; that’s something entirely different. This was a very alert state, but one that seemed to be happening almost on an unconscious level, like breathing or chewing. I realised that I was automatically making a series of minutely complex decisions about the road and Abhilasha’s performance thereupon without really having any thoughts. I straightened my back, pushed my head against the headrest and let the scenes in front of me unfurl in front of my eyes.

Inspired by the idea of Hunter S Thomson driving through the American desert, feeding his thoughts into a dictaphone, I reached for my iPhone and began to speak:

“I’ve spent the last 45 minutes or so following a small van that was going at a pretty decent speed. I’m not really able to think any more, so the advantage is that I’ve let this little van do all the thinking and judging for me. Every time he overtook, I just overtook behind him, and like this we have made good progress.

“Unfortunately I just lost him a few minutes ago when, after making an overtake, he failed to rejoin the proper lane and continued driving on the wrong side of the road at what appeared to be a completely routine constant speed. I could see in the darkness there were headlights approaching him from the other direction, but still he failed to come back into the correct lane. As the headlights came even closer and he still didn’t move, I actually screamed out, in vain, as I knew he couldn’t hear me; “Dude! MOVE!!!!!”

“At literally the very last second, he swerved back in to the space in front of me as though someone had hit him with a cattle prod. He then immediately drove off the road on the hard shoulder and came to a stop. A nap needed there, perhaps. And to think I put my life in his hands...”

About thirty minutes after this entry, things began to take a turn for the mystical:

“So I was just thinking... I was behind a Tata Indigo car that was behind a Tata truck that was behind a Tata bus. I suddenly realised: hey man, we’re all Tata. At heart, we’re all Tata, maaaan. We’re brothers, all one family, made by the same Creator. Tata. Which in Serbian and other languages too I’m sure actually means father. Tata is our father. Not only does He create cars, he also creates telecommunications systems, salt, water... and other things that I can’t even think of right now. Maybe fridges.

“I imagine some kind of ‘Book of Dave’* post-apocalyptic scenario where people in the future who have lost all touch with the history of our present day might come to think that Tata as some kind of father figure or some kind of god, maybe. Tata made all these things - who was this Tata?

“This is a question I have to put to Ratan Tata, should I ever be granted an interview with him.”

Finally pulling in to Hyderabad at 9:30pm, 13 hours after setting out from Nellore, I was no longer Vanessa. I was some sort of Nano-driver hybrid with no thoughts other than kilometers and left and right turns. Driving into the center of the city, I noticed there were a number of roads that were shut off to traffic, the routes leading in to the old city. They were blocked with police lines and guarded by several armed officers.

Then I remembered another little detail I had chosen to overlook that morning while perusing the Deccan Chronicle and munching on a puri breakfast at the government tourist home that morning in Nellore. Splashed over the front page was a headline that read Old City Under Curfew - Riots Shut Down Hyderabad. One person dead and dozens injured in the past few days in the city in street clashes that have come up as a result of I know not what as that particular information was not provided by the newspaper.

Signing off, with tears of an endurance accomplished, from the eye of the storm.

*Book by Will Self

The blind blinding the blind

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:04:01 +0200

Nellore. 150km from Chennai on the reasonably smooth N5 - should have been an easy two or two-and-a-half hour stretch but like always ended up being more. Make that almost double, in fact due to slow traffic coming out of Chennai. Which brought me to Nellore, a pure and simple non-entity motorway stop on the way to Hyderabad, at night.

Yep, been driving in the dark again. It’s happened a few times since that first nightmarish trip from Mumbai to Nagaon when I saw my life flash before me in the glaring searchlights of oncoming trucks’ front beamers, and none have managed to match that fledgling experience in terms of pure terror or close calls. Tonight’s trip, for example was actually quite pleasant. The sun dipped under the horizon, orange and massively swollen, and the landscape flattened into a plain all around. To my right, a full moon rose and as the sky darkened, I began to play the headlights game.

The game starts somewhere around 6:45pm when, aware that you are having increasing trouble picking out the two wheelers up ahead, you think about turning your lights on. At least half beam, in any case. Experience has taught me that any earlier lighting up than this invariably results in near-outraged flashes and gestures from fellow drivers who for some very mysterious reason appear to take grave offence to premature headlight activation.

For the past month I have been trying to stick to my guns on the full beams issue. I just think it’s wrong, plain wrong, to drive with your lights up in the face of oncoming traffic. Period. It’s wrong like teasing disabled people is wrong, or like peeing in a room with no toilet is wrong. No matter how hard I’ve tried, I’ve just not been able to do it. The closest I’ve got in the past weeks has been flicking them on for a second when, blinded by another Close-Encounters-of-the-Third-Kind effulgence, I was aware that I was unable to see the pedestrians, cyclists and other non-lit vehicles on my side of the road. It was just for a brief moment, and I made a point of making it look like I was flashing the passing offender to teach them a lesson in consideration towards fellow road users.

In fact, with the best of intentions, and a cocked colonial air, I have been entertaining the fantasy that, through compelling example, I might somehow teach India better driving manners. I have been making a point of approaching other road users from behind with my lights dipped and then after overtaking them, deliberately switching them back to full, to send the message that the gesture of not blinding them via their rear-view mirror was intentional, compassionate and pre-meditated. But my lessons in road comportment repeatedly seem to fall on deaf ears as, instead of following my considerate example, the cars that were left behind continued to keep their heads on full, thus scorching my retina in the rear view mirror and forcing me to lean forward and out of its reflection until they were far enough away for the lights not to have any effect.

Tonight, however, was different. There occurred an incident earlier on in the drive that might have been the last straw in terms of my transformation into a reckless, self-centered driver: a heavy goods vehicle with a hulking load of logs as big as tree trunks decided to position itself at a perfect perpendicular angle to the NH5 motorway, and so covering both lanes, whilst attempting a turn to feed itself into traffic moving in the opposite direction. Because of visual limitations, I didn’t see it until I was pretty close and had just enough time to slam on the brakes (yes, the tyres howled) and send everything in the car, including my bags in the back, flying forward into the front. I had a passing second of waiting for an airbag to explode in my face until I remembered that 2-lakh Abhilasha is fully gelded of such handy safety features. The near miss extended to stopping literally centimetres behind an SUV in front which turned out to be a vehicle belonging to one of Tamil Nadu’s many political parties. So not only was the Nano nearly log jam, it also had a very close brush with local politics.

The incident sent a little jolt up my spine, marking the end of polite, conscientious road user Vanessa and the dawn of the evil bitch I don’t care if I cut you up and squish you to a pulp, this road is mine, damn you, and I’ll fight your granny for it if I have to. As the SUV and I caught our breaths and waited for the HGV to trundle off and reopen our lanes, all the time nervously checking in the rearview that the cars behind us would have as effective brakes, I made a landmark gesture. I reached forward with my right hand and felt for the headlight control stick. I flicked it forward. Now let’s see who’s boss...

And so followed an hour or so of frightening motorcyclists and rickshaws with my full beams, and giving menacing stares back to the offending trucks who’s bright lights from across the central reservation still managed to sear my eyeballs, despite the scrubby hedge and bushes that have been put there to buffer the effect. And I though they were there to make the road look pretty by day. How utterly naive.

I have to say, the irresponsible use of full headlights definitely made my journey better. I could see the full road (which despite being a toll road and a national highway, still didn’t even have chevrons for most of the way, a feature you are so painfully aware of when your eyes are straining for something -anything- reflective to give you some idea which direction the road’s going in) and the signs and even the distance markers that counted me down to Nellore. I could see motorcyclists, rickshaws, bicycles and pedestrians. I could see confused-looking bullock carts coming up the slow lane in the wrong direction. Finally, my eyes were open; granted, to the expense of all other road users, but when in Rome, blind thy neighbour, as they say.

It occurred to me what an inspired idea it would be to run a campaign or something to try and encourage the use of dipped lights; of how many lives and how much money in written-off vehicles and hospital bills it would save. It’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon, after all. If you blind me, I’m forced to blind you back in order that I can see. Have I coined a principle here? I think I’ll call it Able’s Myopic Deadlock.

Paradise pending

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:15:50 +0100

The neighbourhoods of Certitude, Transformation, Revelation and Discipline lie in a galaxy-spiral formation around the heart of one of India’s most famous attempted social experiments and spiritual communes: Auroville.

The vision of a woman called Mirra Alfassa, better known as ‘The Mother’, Auroville is located just north of the town of Pondicherry (now officially Puducherry) (don’t ask me why), a former French colony 150km south of Madras on the Indian Ocean. The town itself has a bit of an idyllic air about it, with a French quarter that smacks of a European coastal village, with shady colonial houses, art galleries, art cafes, art shops, art everything in fact, and almost-French restaurants at every corner. Also at every corner lies a double take at the street names which are rectangular and blue and weirdly read Rue Dumas and Rue Bazaar St Laurent.

So like just about everything else cool and edgy in ‘Pondy’ (as you start to call it after a couple of days, if you’re cool), ‘The Mother’ was also French. She travelled to India before the Second World War and met the guru Sri Aurobindo to whom she became a follower and then a kind of spiritual partner. She helped found his ashram in Pondicherry and continued to run the organisation after his death, expanding the community and the concept of the ashram to Auroville in the late 1960s.

Driving through the collected lands of Auroville today, you get the feeling that despite the undeniable red dust and drying trees of India, you are in a place that’s a little bit different. Catch a glimpse of the Matramandir, the centre of the community, from a distance a gilded golf-ball, and from up close a curious flattened sphere covered with layers of golden discs, and you might think you’ve wandered onto the set of a ‘seventies sci-fi flick.

Today there are about 2,000 people living in Auroville. Not everybody comes out of a spiritual imperative, but all residents of the community are required to fit the rather vague bill of having ‘good will’. Land is apportioned to newcomers by the collective (in the past this real estate was given free of charge whereas today a small fee is required) and the settlers are expected to build their own houses on their given plots. These houses can be inherited by the residents’ children but can never be sold: they are an immutable asset of Auroville.

The idea behind this social experiment was to create an area, a community that was truly international. For its opening ceremony in 1968, a massive urn placed inside a large amphitheatre next to the Matrimandir was filled with a combination of soils from a number of different countries around the world. And so the charter was drawn up. It reads:

1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress and youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.

Well, good stuff, eh? Hear, hear, one is urged to utter and add an earnest ‘Live Long and Prosper’. But somehow, steering Abhilasha through the dusty trails that run between Fertile Windmill and Two Banyans, I wasn’t exactly hit in the face by the lusty idealism of it all. The youth that never ages looked a bit more like a few leathery frenchmenriding around on mopeds, while the actual youth, one presumes the new generation that was actually born there, looks slightly less leathery, and slightly more disgruntled. Or is that just the red dust in their eyes?

The area around the Matrimandir, a building intended for meditation and union with the Divine Mother of Hindu legend, began construction in the late ‘60s and is still a bit of a building site. I actually visited here 10 years ago and have the feeling that not too much progress has been made since, with the exception of the completion of the outside of the Matrimandir’s sphere. Where’s the ardent work effort, the armies of the faithful pitching in to complete this picture of paradise once and for all?

A fleeting visit to Auroville does not an expert on the subject make, and yet as far as first impressions go, it didn’t seem like too prosperous a living embodiment of Human Unity to me. I met with Radhika Khanna, a professor of Mass Media at the University of Pondicherry and she brushed over the subject of the so-called utopia that lies just kilometres outside the university grounds.

Originally a Delhi-ite, Radhika came to Pondicherry in the ‘90s while pregnant and preparing for life as a single mother with hopes of settling into Auroville and carving out a place for herself and her daughter there. But things didn’t quite work out the way she hoped.

“I was naive,” she said, “to think I could arrive at a community like this and immediately fit in. It really takes a lot of time to find your place there,” she added. “You have this impression from afar that any kind of ideal-based colony like this one will share a common direction. In reality, things are much more splintered.”

Radhika is one impressive lady. Ballsy and vivacious, she’s clearly a workaholic (“sometimes I sleep on the floor of my office on campus and have my students do the same.”) with an air of single-mindedness that’s rare to find. She had me give her MA media students an impromptu talk (and thank god it was unplanned as public speaking comes somewhere near sticking my head into a basket of cobras on the list of things I’d really rather not do, thanks) about the Nano Diaries, but also about the experiences of traveling alone as a woman in India. She told me that some of her female students are even afraid to catch the bus alone at night, an attitude she worries will restrict them in their future careers.

Radhika then told me stories that made my jaw drop about her own adventures traveling in India when her daughter was young. “I would pack my backpack, put my daughter at the front and we would get on a bus or a train and just go.”

“Many times people would approach me and tell me what I was doing was wrong and that I should go back to my family. But,” she added, “I think I got that attitude just because I am Indian.”

Indeed, it hasn’t happened to me yet that I’ve been asked about my family or husband, or that I’ve been scolded for being away from home alone. Might I be on the right side of a double standard? Or is all of India just that much more utopian if you come from abroad, whoever you are?

AFS, CFS, SBHS and other physio-neurological hazards of the road trip

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 06:09:40 +0100

I’ve discovered a new medical condition: it’s called Accelerator Foot Strain and occurs somewhere in the region of around the seventh hour of unbroken driving of a Tata Nano, with especial high occurrence on busy rural roads. The symptoms are an uncanny stiffness down the front of the shinbone and a dull ache in the calf muscle leading to a cramping of the ankle area and instep that requires sporadic squeezing of the toes and quick circular movements of the foot between gas bursts to get the foot feeling again.

Accelerator Foot Strain, or AFS, is closely related to another hazard of long periods spent on inner roads, speeding and slowing, dodging oncoming trucks and negotiating potholes: Clutch Foot Strain. Constant pumping of the clutch, taking the car from four down to three, down to two, back up to three, then a jump to one after a sudden stop in front of a series of three concealed speed breakers.

After a few rattling jolts over the better hidden of aforementioned psychotically placed road bumps, I have made it my utmost priority to keep the peepers well peeled for future such obstacles, with a growing level of success. They usually appear just at the start of village limits with a couple placed in the centre to keep speed down among the sleepy houses and shops where children play on the street expecting to see nothing moving faster than a limping bullock or a fuming tractor.

But sometimes, just sometimes, the speed bumps are placed where you least expect them. Along a straight, unbroken country road, so clear and well-paved that the Nano can really stretch its wheels and push out 70 or even 80kmph. Unpainted and so well camouflaged with the road, they just sit there in wait until you are but metres away and suddenly, and so very dangerously, have to slam on the brakes. All the while, I’m half-hearing a smug Indian Alistair Stewart narrating my motoring misdeed to a pixelated hidden-camera recording of the treacherous skid.

Another favourite place I’ve seen speed breakers is bang slap in the middle of highways. Sometimes near zebra crossings which are an equal safety riddle in my mind, they lie in wait for the lone car to come shooting by and not see them until they are 6 inches in the air, flying freely from the trajectory of the invisible take-off ramp and waiting for the inevitable impact with concrete and the effects that will have on the car’s suspension.

So traumatised have Abhilasha and I been by the surprise appearance of these road demons that I have worked to train my eyes to spot them. The problem with this is that such unremitting concentration on the shapes and forms of the tarmac passing under the car gives rise to another condition that I call Speed Bump Hallucination Syndrome, or SBHS. Like AFS and CFS, SBHS tends to manifest after several hours behind the wheel staring at the concrete and suddenly the aching AFS-afflicted right foot will be going for the brakes before the SBHS-riddled brain can catch up with what’s going on. I slow down to sheepishly realise that I just came to a complete stop before the shadow of a tree, or a patch of grit fallen off the back of a passing lorry.

And I haven’t even started with RHWS (Right Hand Wrist Strain), a phenomena that arises from lazy handling of the wheel where the left hand is just sleeping somewhere on my knee while the right hand keeps watch until a sudden obstacle ahead requires a swerve too quick for the left hand to step up to the plate, leaving the right hand to take full charge of the life-saving emergency situation. This also usually involves the double task of honking hard on the Nano’s horn, placed at the centre of the steering wheel, putting the wrist at such an angle in its juggling act so as to cause minor strain and a shooting pain all the way to the elbow.

The list above is just the beginning of a catalogue of the physical hazards involved in driving the Nano long distances. Just when I feel that perhaps the Nano Diaries should have an on-board physician, I start to wonder whether a resident shrink or neurologist might be more appropriate in the face of certain situations that occur that are so harrowing as to possibly give rise to long-term damage.

I’m going to cite an episode from Saturday’s journey from Kanyakumari to Tiruchirapalli as an example. According to Google maps and an image on the National Highways of India website, there is an extension of the great north-south highway, the NH7 that connects Kanyakumari to Madurai, thus expediting a large chunk of this 380km journey.

And all began well. I left Kanyakumari via a surreal landscape of windmills that stretched on for miles before the road finally connected with the dual carriageway highway that is the NH7. Driving bliss. After the hours spent plodding down the west coast, cursing the rural roads and the vast number of towns and villages that lie along the NH17, finally Abhilasha was in her element, cruising at an. euphoric 90kmph on a road devoid of any major traffic where all vehicles were in the correct lane and moving in the direction they were supposed to be.

I considered the motorway debate: The road was large and many times it mercilessly sliced through villages and verdant countryside leaving nothing but a big concrete obstruction for farmers that were plagued with the task of getting their herds of goats/cows across from one side to the other. But the cleanliness, the simplicity of this high-speed thoroughfare is hard to deny. You can cover 300km in 4 hours, a distance that would take at least double the time on auxiliary roads, and lets not mention avoiding clogging the arteries of small towns and villages who’s very cores these main roads cut through, thus bringing all through traffic into the already choked streets of these urban areas.

There appeared to be little argument in my mind: a few well-placed highways between strategic locations and cities in India would do wonders to alleviate congestion on the smaller roads and in the cities that themselves act as urban speed breakers to hordes of long-distance traffic. And, as if to affirm my feeling, every few kilometres Sonia Gandhi beamed down at me from a banner at the side of the highway, a massive piece of literature penned in the vernacular language (I was going too fast to differentiate Tamil from Hindi) and placed there by the NHIA, presumably attesting to the same lofty progressive ideals I was turning over in my head.

So engrossed was I in what had by now grown into a full-fledged fantasy of a traffic-less India, lead by the construction of speedy, accident-free highways (I was even imagining a couple of Little Chefs placed at intervals along the way, alongside picnic spots and multiplex cinemas) that I must have missed the sign that directed traffic off the motorway and in a diversion route to Madurai.

Well I presume I must have missed it, as within a few minutes I was subject to the eerie recognition that I was in fact the only car on the road. In either direction. I slowed down a bit but kept driving, due to the lack of any turning or exit options. After a while, I saw a truck appear on the horizon, coming in the other direction, and relaxed a little. The truck passed me in the opposite lane and I noticed that it was a cement truck, probably being used for construction. I felt a pang in my belly again.

After another couple of kilometres there was an opportunity to exit which I swiftly did and found myself at a busy crossroads where a ton of traffic was moving in a perpendicular direction to the highway on a road I figured was being used as an alternative thoroughfare as there were clearly works on the NH7 up ahead. My instinct here was to turn right, but, recalling the consequences of previous ill-judged ‘instinctive’ moves, I decided to ask before turning. There were a couple of rickshaw drivers and a traffic cop on the corner, so I rolled down my window.

“Hello there. Madurai?”

Silence and stares.

“Madurai? Mad-u-rai?”

Ice on rock.

“Mad-rai?”

Recognition. A sweep of three hands pointed me back at the motorway to continue the route I was on.

“Ah. Are you sure? There don’t seem to be any cars on that road. Perhaps there are roadworks up ahead...?”

A round of head wobbles and repeated gestures to get back on the motorway soon put a stop to my protests.

So I rejoined the motorway, accompanied by a couple of two-wheelers and a rickshaw, initially to my relief, but then to a mounting sense of horror as they too disappeared I know not where within a few kilometres.

Driving on a completely abandoned motorway in broad daylight has something of the dark shivers of the apocalypse about it. It’s hard to explain exactly the feeling of isolation and fear, but it’s a bit like being in a huge public building like a museum or a school after hours. There is the uncanny sense that you are completely alone and so ultimately free to break the rules and do whatever you want, but a little Big Brother inside your head continues to keep you within accepted boundaries. I kept to the left and pressed on and was thankfully soon relieved of my anxiety by a gigantic pile of rubble dumped on the middle of the road. This forced me to slow down as I circumvented it and praise be for it, as within a few dozen metres, the motorway ahead simply stopped.

Yes, it stopped. Like in movies, like in cartoons. Like Road Runner. A trusty highway that has delivered you safely under the smiles of Sonia Gandhi (who, now I came to think of it, I hadn’t seen in a good while), just cuts, ceases, disappears. I slammed on Abhilasha’s brakes and we skidded to a halt a few metres before the precipice, to the mild and fleeting alarm of a group of female road-labourers that were taking their lunch by the side of the road.

The smell of burning rubber wafting in through Abhilasha’s AC vent, I stopped to catch my breath and squeedgie my eyes to ascertain if what I was seeing was really true. Yes, the road just stopped. Only for a few metres, mind. Then there was a half-constructed concrete bridge up ahead that would one day continue the trajectory of the NH7, presumably all the way up to Madurai. One day; just not today. I felt mislead, betrayed, downright stupid. I didn’t know what all the other vehicles knew, and that was that the unbroken NH7 was still just a dream, and one that was being constructed, stone by stone, by the team of four skinny women to my right that were now heading towards me with a small child in tow.

They surrounded the car with shady smiles and began to put their hands out and point to their mouths. They had clearly picked the wrong benefactor. If ever I was in a generous mood, it was not towards the passive audience, the only humans, in fact, privvy to one of the Nano Diaries’ most humiliating moves. I shook my head, locked the car doors, spun a dust-raising U-turn and got the hell back to the intersection of the mendacious rickshaw drivers and traffic cop, who, by the time I returned to their spot, had vanished without a trace.

Teetering on the edge of a subcontinent

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:29:32 +0100

Well, we made it. At about 4pm Abhilasha and I rolled into India’s southernmost town of Kanyakumari, following in the footsteps of the great 19th century guru Vivekananda who made it here too in 1892 after traversing the entire country. Though to give him his dues, he did do it on foot. Then he threw himself to the mercy of the waves, washed up on a nearby rock and sat still for three days until he was enlightened and shown his divine purpose on this earth, and that, according to the ashram museum, was to invigorate India through it’s spiritual heartlines.

Me, I rocked up with a bit of a sore back after a 4 and a half hour drive from Varkala, disgruntled that the journey had taken longer than anticipated due to the fact that the road here passes through a village like every ten minutes and so doesn’t allow for any build up of speed over an average of 30 or 40 kmph. Then when I got here, I parked the car in a no-parking zone with its back to the sea for an impromptu photo session that soon involved all the nearby vendors who were predictably interested in the price of the Nano and its performance per litre.

Then I bought a chai off a guy on a bicycle and realised it was too late to take the ferry over to the temple that now stands on Vivekananda’s rock (and was rather grateful for it, given the strong winds and slightly choppy look of the sea). Hardly the noble pilgrimage made to the country’s furthest limit by one of its most dedicated citizens, but I’m nonetheless paying Vivekananda homage by staying the night in his ashram here that also functions as a hotel (at 250 rupees -$5- a night, it’s the record budget stay thus far...)

Kanyakumari is quite the Indian tourist destination, the kind of place where schoolchildren roam in herds rear-guarded by fraught teachers and guardians, throwing out sanguine greetings to anyone who’ll listen and drawing around my camera lens like a swarm of hornets to honey. Groups of young men are also a frequent sight at such places where they move in packs and point their cellphone cameras to anything that moves and shines including the pretty girls who stand in lines, holding hands at the waters edge on the gritty little beach at the end of India, squealing and flinching every time a wave comes in and soaks them and all their clothing up to the tops of their legs.

Looking at the route map thus far, I’ll have to admit a wee tingle of pride when I see where we are and how far from Mumbai that looks on paper. And then a kind of vertiginous churn of the gut when I look up to everything north of Mumbai and just how much distance there still is to cover. Still, tonight I made the discovery of NHAI.org, the website of India’s national highways association, and was privvy to a small map depicting the (somewhat scant) extent of highways in the country. Basically it’s a quadrangle (now I know what people refer to when they talk about the ‘golden quadrangle’, which I previously assumed was either some kind of ancient navigation tool or an episode of Harry Potter) that runs almost the whole length of each of the coasts with the NH7 dropping straight down the middle and some lateral highways in the north and around Delhi.

Seeing that there’s a highway that runs straight or straight-ish from Chennai to Kolkata, I have decided to make that my route north rather than going up to the west of the country first and so getting to Rajastan and the plains before the May heat on the plains really kicks in. Hellish heat it’ll have to be; I have every faith in the powers of Abhilasha’s cooling systems. This way, we’ll make a neat and perfect circle around India by the beginning to June, and will have the glory of riding back, victorious, into Mumbai on the same road from which we left.

Baiting the devil

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:55:05 +0100

Anthony, the owner of the Spice Tours Hotel in Fort Kochin’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when I told him that I had driven the Nano from Mysore that day.

“I always thought the Nano was a city car, not very powerful,” he said. “That you might drive it around Fort Kochin to do your business, but not even take it to Ernakulam (the next city, just a few kilometres away). But all the way from Mysore? In one day?”

Yep, and then some. I have to admit that I am waiting for the other shoe to drop here with the Nano. So far it’s clocked up nearly 3,000NDkm (Nano Diaries Kilometres) and is still ticking over strong without so much as a worry or a rattle. So much so in fact that I’m beginning to worry I might not have enough dramatic tales of woe to relate by the end of the trip. Almost one third into our mission, I was anticipating a roadside blowout at the very least by now, or even a flash of the engine overheating light.

Which I hope doesn’t mean that all my karmic debtors will bear down on me at once in an apocalyptic moment of doom. I was rather more hoping for a steady stream of crises. In fact sometimes I can almost feel myself subconsciously trying to force an incident, by letting myself drive those extra few kilometres when the petrol light is flashing or letting myself get that little bit more lost before asking for directions...

As if the devil in India needed tempting.

The 430km drive from Mysore to Kochi followed the NH212 down to the National Parks of Bandipur and Mudumalai that mark the intersection of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala states. Pictures of tigers and elephants are hung from the trees with a sombre warning not to disturb the wild animals or make any sudden noises to alarm them. Needless to say, passing rickshaws were horns ablazing as usual, apparently oblivious to the fact that their honking might earn them an untimely death by tiger maul or elephant stampede.

Barring a couple of wild elephants spotted between the branches of roadside bushes, the most wildlife Abhilasha and I saw were roaming tribes of the ubiquitous Langur monkeys who hang by the side of the road in menacing groups as though daring you to slow down enough to warrant nicking a windscreen wiper, or waiting for an opportune open backseat window.

Once out of the national parks, the highland landscape of the western ghats opens out onto swathes of gleaming-green tea plantations and teak forests in the Nilambur area (leaving me with the uncanny feeling that I had been teleported to the Swiss Alps). From here the NH67 descends back down to the coast via the town of Malappuram, and rejoins the trusty N17 that has been tracing the coast all the way from Goa and beyond.

The 10-hour journey was fairly exhausting, and the last hour and a half was spent squinting into the irritating high-beams of oncoming buses and trucks as I tried in vain to set a good example by demonstrating, at first patiently, but with increasing urgency, how headlights could be alternately dimmed and then re-ignited when passing another vehicle. But my lessons fell on deaf ears, or you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, or something of the sort, as the full headlights remained resolutely on, thus endangering the life of any cyclist or pedestrian, child or animal ahead of me on the roadside that wasn’t lit up to match the all-encompassing glare of the psychotic full beams.

Arriving in Fort Kochin, a port town with a mix of colonial influences over the years including Portuguese, Dutch and Jewish, was a fair relief, though most of its newly-burgeoning number of hotels and guest houses were full, nonetheless, the hoteliers all seemed most enthused by the idea of collectively finding me a room and, more importantly, a parking space for Abhilasha.

We ended up within feet of one another on Burgar street: Abhilasha wedged between two doorways on a platform just above an open drain, and me, inside the Spice Tours guest house at the receiving end of some Christian-style hospitality.

“That’s the first Tata Nano in Jew Town,” said a cafe owner who came down to inspect Abhilasha the next morning as we made an excursion to the curious bluntly named neighbourhood who’s narrow little old-school streets serve as a centre for the spice trade in town. The Nano was given prided place of parking by Jew Town’s very own security guards outside a shop that was shuttered up when I arrived, but by the time I returned to the car, a couple of hours later, had opened and pushed its fare of statues and souvenirs out onto the pavement in an arrangement that patiently accommodated Abhilasha and in no way appeared to resent the fact that the Nano was completely blocking access to the shop. I apologised profusely, citing the fact that I had been told to park here by that policeman over there. But the shopkeeper seemed nonplussed, almost happy that I had chosen to block his store and bless it with a yellow Nano for the morning. And he still didn’t complain even after I reversed into and almost floored his display of dancing Shivas.

The way back to Fort Kochin from Jew Town is a series of winding roads bordered by old wooden buidlings with fading hand-painted signs advertising the likes of “Shah Popatlal Dayabhai and Co, Cochin. Metro Trading Syndicate VII/594 Jew Town, Cochin.” A place is given to absurd traffic jams and road blockages, I was caught in one such clog myself. Passing through a stretch lined with a group of large trucks parked up on the right hand side, I could see a bus ahead that was coming in the opposite direction that I knew I had no hope of passing as long as the trucks were parked to my right. I figured if I accelerated to try and escape the trucks before the onset of the bus, I’d make it through unscathed. But the bus anticipated my crafty idea and, being in a bamboozling kind of mood, decided to do everything in its power not to let me pass. It entered the narrow lane cut off by the trucks before i had time to exit and just stood, steadfast and unmoving, staring me down as I realised that this was more a battle of size than it was of will.

From nowhere, half a dozen or so ersatz traffic wardens appeared from neighbouring shops and decided to take the matter into their own hands by getting me to reverse all the way back and finally jamming me in between two lorries outside a rice and onion store. I got out of the car and proceeded to join the now numerous gathered audience (mostly there because they too could not pass on account of the bus) in watching the laborious spectacle of the bus trying to squeeze its way between the shops and the lorries.

When this was finally done, attention turned back to the Nano and so ensued a photo session with a couple of local shopkeepers most keen to be pictured with Jew Town’s first, infamous, jam-causing Nano.

Nano vs Bajaj - clash of the economy clunkers

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:41:45 +0100

Sometimes Abhilasha thinks it’s a rickshaw. Not all the time. Most of the time, in fact, the wee Nano rolls about with the cocky air of the sensational traffic-stopper it knows it is. A self-respecting car in every sense of the word, and what it loses in sparse design, it definitely gains in IT-factor. But I think it also gets a little kick out of playing the underdog from time to time too: and in urban situations, that means acting the two- and three-wheeler and hitting the left lane. That space on the inside of slow-moving buses where, if you are small enough and can work up sufficient welly, you can speed through like you’re on tracks and overtake in a glorious and shocking left-hand squiggle.

These sly maneouvres are usually the domain of the rickshaw, the little three wheeler dominated by the company Bajaj, with whom Abhilasha has a remarkable affinity. And this rapport is by no means unfounded, due to the one clanger of a similarity between the two vehicles, namely the price. Bajaj 4-stroke autorickshaws start at 90,000 rupees, only 10,000 short of the shelf-price of a standard Nano. That pretty much puts them on a level in the eyes of someone looking to invest in a family vehicle and begs the question, will we be seeing rickshaw drivers across India trading in their four-wheelers for a covered, air-conditioned Nano that’s by far more pleasant in the heat, not to mention drier in the monsoon.

So, looking at the individual specs, what exactly is the difference between a Nano and an autorickshaw? What would make you want to shell out that extra 0.1 lakh ($220) for India’s most coveted car? Bodywork aside, there’s something to be said for the pleasant sensation of trundling along in an open three-wheeler with the wind in your hair. And that starter lever on the left-hand-side that seems to need cranking at just about every traffic light is also enormously endearing.

One of the advantages of the missing wheel is a much tighter turning radius - 2.34m for the rickshaw as compared with the Nano’s 4m; quite a deal breaker when a sudden u-turn is required on a busy or narrow road. The Bajaj comes in 20cm thinner than the Nano and even has an additional 2cm ground clearance which can mean the difference between a spotless undercarriage and a rock wedged in your exhaust pipe.

Another perk of owning a three-wheeler is the increased fuel efficiency: with an ideal level of 31kmpl, it’s maximum highway performance is quoted at 28kmpl, on paper at least. My rough calculations have deduced an average highway fuel efficiency of something like 20kmpl, which is less than is claimed on paper, but I might not necessarily be the most efficient driver or patient revver in the world either. And you can get 15 litres of front-loading fuel into the Nano, which is around double the capacity of the Bajaj.

Both vehicles have an equal number of gears (can the rickshaw reverse?), but the Nano is leagues ahead for maximum speed: Abhilasha can comfortably cruise the highway at 90kmph, sometimes even licking 100 with an adrenalin-fueled shudder, while the wee Bajaj can only sputter up to 55kmph. Hardly a speed demon. The Nano has double the amount of cylinders (read two, rather than one) and more than 3 times the cc, whatever that is.

So there you have it. You be the judge. The Bajaj rickshaws might be slightly cheaper, more fuel-efficient and with natural air-conditioning, but in more extreme, non-urban conditions, the Nano takes it: shelter from monsoon rains, air-con in the melting desert heat, and endurance on an extended highway trip, 10,000km around the country. We hope.

And do rickshaw drivers really get the same kick of superstar status each time they hit the road? Do children in villages run after them shouting, “Rickshaw! Rickshaw! Rickshaw!”? I think not...

Trials in triplicate

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:15:55 +0100

In June of last year, a company based out of Hong Kong called the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy declared India the worst of all Asian bureaucracies. The results of this survey, conducted with 1,274 expats working across Asia, concluded that of the 12 countries included in the study, India came rock-bottom of the pile for pain-in-the-bum pen-pushing and the ‘suffocating’ atmosphere of its inefficient civil service.

Now, I don’t claim to be a political or economic expert, nor am I an expat working in the country with daily exposure to the frustrations of overblown bureaucracy, and yet I think I might have gotten the gist of what they’re getting at here.

My own personal battle with Indian bureaucracy started at the Visa Office in London where I went to apply for my entry permit back in January. I got there about 10 minutes after opening to discover I was already something like number 238 in the queue and had a two-hour wait ahead of me. Had I phoned ahead and asked for a ‘special appointment’ I was then told, my wait might have been halved, but as it stood, dull and lacking initiative as I was, I was doomed to wait with the other morons and reflect on my own shortcomings from the discomfort of a metal seat in an overcrowded waiting room in the building on Wilton Road in Victoria.

But instead of wallowing in my own imbecility, I chose to reflect on how remarkable it was that India had managed to import its lines and paper protocols as far as our shores in such a way. (But then after a morning spent at the Post Office in Hammersmith, I realised who had in fact imported what where...)

Chapter Two began at Bangkok airport when I was refused a seat on the plane back to Mumbai on account of the fact that I was trying to re-enter India within two months of having left. Nine days later, to be precise. I went to the embassy there the next day to plead for leniency, which was granted to me on the condition that I register my good name at the FRRO (Foreigners Registration R-something-else Office) within two weeks of arriving back in the country.

Now, almost a month since my return, I have accrued a total of six attempts to secure aforementioned documents and still don’t have the sacred paper in my possession. Below is a chronicle of my attempts that I hope will bore you senseless and drill your skull with the frustration, incredulousness and often amusment that I have witnessed at the hands of a Kafka-esque bureaucracy.

1) Mumbai - After two hours of searching for the office and following a bunch of frankly wrong directions, I climbed to the third floor of the office there to be drilled for all the details of my application by a girl behind the reception counter who then coldly informed me that the office was closed and I would have to come back another day. Due to drive to Alibag that afternoon, I declined her kind offer.

1) Panaji - A lot more hopeful, this one. An FRRO located inside the High Commissioner’s Office. I got there at 9:15, a quarter of an hour before the officer himself and smugly waited in a chair already patting myself on the back for a job well done. When the officer arrived however, he presented me with a long list of requirements for registration, including multiple copies of my passport, mugshots and a letter and utility bill from my host. But but but I’m staying in a hotel, I protested. He shook his head, well then a personal letter from the hotel manager will do just fine. Just as my eyes were about to complete full roll, he added that once all the documents were submitted, it would still take 2 days to process. Abhilasha was packed and ready to go for a long drive to Hampi, so I muttered something about being right back, left the police station and skipped town in a hurry.

1) Bangalore Part 1 - Drove to the Office of the High Commissioner on Infantry Road and the guards outside wouldn’t let me within sniffing distance of the entrance. I rolled down the window to ask as to where I could park and was met with a rapid arm gesture that pointed nowhere in particular and a grumpy, “right side” that injected me into a heavy flow of traffic around the block once more. And again. The third time round, I turned into a hotel car park across the road from the police station requesting 20-minute Nano asylum in exchange for a wee back-hander, but the uniformed security guard wasn’t having any of it. I looked at my watch - it was rapidly approaching 1pm, the time when the office shuts for the day, so I figured I’d come back tomorrow, in a rickshaw.

1) Bangalore Part 2 - Got to the FRRO by rickshaw to see a crowd of people waiting impatiently outside. I appealed for instructions from a gruff man with a moustache who seemed to be conducting the rabble and he directed me to a side office where I was to pick up my application forms. A dingy, forgotten wing of the complex, this office housed a lone man behind a counter so high he couldn’t see out from behind it while seated. He handed me an application form and a list of required documents that was identical to the one I received in Panaji with the exception that it also called for “a letter of request.”

“What’s this?” I asked. “A letter of request,” he answered matter-of-factly, “is a letter you must write addressed to the High Commissioner of Police, requesting for foreigner’s registration.”

“So it’s not enough that I submit this application form? I mean, surely this gives sufficient implication as to what I’m after here?”

He shook his head in the negative. No, a letter would be required.

1) Bangalore Part 3 - With renewed enthusiasm and confident in the knowledge that all my papers were in order, nestled behind the facetiously scrawled cover letter (I just couldn’t help myself), I returned to the FRRO at 9:40 the next morning, to find a line that went around the block. And this line was just to collect a token from the grumpy guard at the the front which would then ensure an appointment with an officer later on in the morning. I got number 46 which wasn’t bad going, but an hour and a half later, I was still sat in the dust. perched on a low wall (no indoor waiting here and all the seats outdoors were covered in birdshit) straining to hear the guard call out the relevant numbers.

The gathered foreigners, clearly as unaccustomed as I to being made to wait in such uncertain and uncomfortable circumstances, were making quite bold and vocal attempts to ascertain how long the wait would be. They received in turn a stern growl from the guard who intermittently came to herd the waiting applicants from the relative comfort of sitting on the low wall, to the assigned waiting area to the left were all feces-coated seats lay in wait. One more plucky Korean guy was removed from the grounds altogether for a crime I couldn’t exactly ascertain.

After a two-hour wait, my number came up and I was ushered inside and made to face a very stern man sat behind a table.

“Number, please.” I handed over the precious 46. He tossed it aside.

“Papers.”

I gave him everything I had.

“Flight confirmation?” I looked at the list of required documents I had been handed by his colleague the day before. Flight confirmation, number 6 in the list, had clearly been crossed out.

“But, your colleague told me this was not necessary...”

The officer shot a glare at me. “Of course it’s necessary,” he barked. I think this was the point when he decided that this little bird was not getting through. Not today, at any rate. “And where is your police report?”

“Police report?” I was stunned.

“Yes, police report. Like this.” and he thrust an example of a very complex-looking computerised document into my hands.

“Why would I need a police report? I’m just a tourist trying to register...”

“Please you get your flight confirmation and police report and come back tomorrow.”

“And wait in line, again?” The last bit was whispered as I could barely get the words out. Go through another two hours being yelled at and shooed off the wall by Mr Attitude outside?

Trying very hard to maintain equanimity, I walked in a forced plod over to the police reports counter, all the time breathing deep into the bottom of my ribcage and reciting a silent mantra that I would play the game and not call the farce. After all, not one single player in this game would ever admit to its ludicrous nature.

“You don’t need a police report,” the officer told me, glancing over my papers. “That is only needed for people requiring an exit visa. For registration, you do not need.” He handed the bundle of documents back to me.

“But your colleague just told me it was necessary...”

He cast his eyes to the floor. “No, madam, not necessary.”

Right. Not bleeding necessary. So one person tells me one thing and the other another and they are working only metres away from each other and I think what we have here, Nano fans, is a classic case of the left hand doesn’t know that the right is hiding up its own bum.

I left, fried and fatigued.

1) Ernakulam - Nothing, but nothing was going to stop me today. I was ready and prepared. Photocopies of just about every page possible from my passport, 5 photographs, a letter of request, flight itinerary, hotel registration documents and a wad of cash should I need it.

I set out this morning with the Nano and we took a ferry from Fort Kochin across the Vembanad lake to Vypeen, providing warm tickles to the ticket vendor who actually sighed upon first catching a glimpse of Abhilasha. “Ahhhhhh, a Nano,” he purred without a hint of irony. “It is the first one I have seen,” and he actually lifted himself out from the seat of his tiny caged booth to get a better look.

Three bridges and a few kilometres later and we’re in the heart of Ernakulam, right by the High Court and the Police Commissioner’s Office. A piece of paper with the words ‘Foreigner’s Section’ was pasted to a door through which I entered and was solemnly invited to sit in a chair uncomfortably close to the only desk in the room. A fan overhead whirred with diligence and ruffled the corners of the piles of paper all around the lone seated officer in a kind of rustling symphony. He studied me for a moment then asked, “So what has happened to you?”

“Erm, nothing has happened, per se. I’m just here to register as a foreigner.”

He studied the stamp from Bangkok in my passport. “It says here you have to register within fourteen days.” He started counting on his fingers and I stopped him before he could get too far.

“Yes, yes I know. I’m late. I’m terribly sorry.” Then, lapsing into my weird Merchant-Ivory English alter-ego that rears its head during moments of pressure, “it’s just that I’ve had some terrible luck in three different places so far.”

Then, to appease him further: “I understand I need to pay a fine for my oversight. Officer.”

He pushed an application form in my direction and I began to fill it out in immaculate handwriting. One field required I state the flight number on which I entered the country and so I pulled out my iPhone to verify. My officer friend unexpectedly lit up at the sight of the little white gadget.

“An iPhone!” he exclaimed, and so began a bonding conversation over the various social, economic and technical advantages of ownership of the device.

Ice broken, we were able to get back down to business. He handed me a form printed on flimsy jotting paper. “You must take this to the Soptrishry.”

“I’m sorry, where?”

“The Soptrishry.”

“Sop-trish-ry?”

“Yes, Sob-trez-reee”

“Sub-treash-ree? Sub-treasureee? ah-hah! Sub-treasury!”

“Yes, Soptrishry,” he continued, completely unruffled. “And there you will get a number. From there you will then go to the KTDC complex and to the State Bank of India and make this payment.” He pointed to a figure he had hand-written on the form: 1,400 rupees. Ouch. Still, the ball felt like it was rolling, I was not complaining.

The Sop-trishry was a few minutes drive from the police station and when I got there it was not entirely apparent which of the myriad office buidlings it was. But a few enquiries later (“Excuse me, where is the Sub-treasury? The Sop-treasuree? The Soptrishry?) and I was at the counter, filling out the required form in triplicate, with my name, address, date, the amount in words, signature, etc etc. Finally the man behind the counter stamped all three versions and gave them back to me.

The bank was less easy to find due to a cluster of branches of the State Bank of India near the KTDC complex, and it wasn’t until my third attempt that I finally got the right building, then the right counter. Stamp, stamp, scribble, stamp, rrripppppp, hand back the form. All paid, and ready to go.

Back at the FRRO, my officer was involved in some serious business. As I entered and sat back in the too-close seat to give him the receipt for my payment, he swiveled his computer monitor in my direction. On it was the image of a Nikon D3000 SLR camera.

“I am thinking of buying a camera,” he announced squarely. “Do you know anything about the specifications of this particular model?”

I replied in the negative, that I had a D200, but knew little about the other options available, though I did have a friend with a D90 who was very happy with it, though I supposed at the end of the day, a lot of his decision rested on his budget...

I handed over the receipt. I gave him a copy of my passport. I gave him 4 photos. I gave him the completed application form. And that was it. He stapled them all together and told me to return tomorrow at 4pm.

Really, that was it? I was suspicious, disbelieving, incredulous that it could all be so (relatively) simple. He didn’t want police reports? Flight itineraries? A letter from my hotel manager? A letter from me? I left him a phone number in any case. “Please, please. Just call me if there are any problems. For god’s sake, call...”

“Have no worries, madam, your registration will be processed tomorrow.”

So I left him to it, left the office riding a wave of elation, but also deep in thought. Why here? Why was it a nigh-on impossible task in Bangalore, and so easy here in Ernakulam? The reasons were forthcoming: a smaller office; one-on-one contact; no other pesky foreigners trying to process business visas and the like; and a mutual interest in photography... Is it Kerala’s communist principles that have actually increased efficiency in the civil service, or did I just get lucky? Or was I just unlucky to see bureaucracy at its very worse in Bangalore?

The only thing that’s certain is that nothing, but nothing, is certain until 4 o’clock tomorrow.

Bangalore: from IT-guys to market gals and everything in between

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 06:45:02 +0100

I read someone recently describe Bangalore as how you’d imagine the wild west to have looked more than a century ago in the dusty plains of the fledgling US. No cowboys, Injuns or gunfights at dawn, but tons of construction, for the most part enabled by the trickle-down effects of the gold rush that was the IT boom of the last decade.

They call Bangalore India’s Silicon Valley. They could also call it India’s blueprint for the future, a city in full swing of updating its look and lifestyle according to the best American and European models. In the centre of town, workers are putting the finishing touches on UB City, the latest high-end shopping complex to open out to the wallets of the young and upwardly mobile who have the desire and spending power to kit themselves out to the styles of Louis Vuitton and Ermenegildo Zegna. And on the roof of UB City is a veritable post-spree playground of restaurants, cafes and bars, including the in-vogue Shiro, a restaurant resembling the Buddha Bar in everything from decor to aura and (relative) price.

I walk in before the evening rush to find its congregation of staff gathered for a photo under the centrepiece suspended Buddha head and clustered around a framed certificate proclaiming the restaurant recipient of the Times of India Best Pan-Asian restaurant award. Operations Manager Dhiren Pawar is ebullient: “We just won another award,” he says, “so I’m giving the staff a little party.”

Later, sitting out on the terrace, Dhiren tells me business is good. Friday and Saturday nights are so popular here that they need to organise two sittings, and their outdoor standing bar also gets packed at weekends with everyone from the young upstart crowd to the older 30- and 40-something businessmen and expats who come to revel in a taste of high-life, elevated and so separated from the chaos of Bangalore that lives at street level.

I had spent the same morning training my camera around Bangalore’s KR market, a local fruit and veg bazaar that spills out from one central hall to the surrounding streets as far as you want to walk, or have the patience to queue behind unloading lorries in the Nano. Here, I snapped a woman, an exhausted chilli vendor, fast asleep using one of her own sacks as a pillow, while other stallholders around her petitioned to have their own portrait taken with a Victorian sense of poise and solemnity. A wandering cow gets a slap from a grain-wallah who’s stock he just munched, while the lads at the chai stand enthusiastically thrust a cup of the brown brew in my direction.

After the mandatory photo session, the lads ask if I can send them some photos, but it turns out that no one has en email address. In a city with the highest number of engineering schools in the world, as well as over 300 software companies, this can be considered at least a bit of a shock. Much of India’s fast-growing middle-class is located here in Bangalore, and yet the city simultaneously houses a population of 2,000,000 urban poor.

This mind-boggling number is the focus of an office in the outerlying Kormangala district, the centre of operations for a microfinance company called Ujivan. Of those 2 million people, Ujivan is targeting an estimated 500,000; a demographic that only includes women working in a very low wage bracket and with a household income of between 2,000 and 8,000 rupees ($44-176) per month. These women apply to Ujivan for low-cost loans that initially start between 6,000 to 10,000 rupees ($132-220) in order to boost their businesses or cover the costs of education for their children.

Ujivan’s Training and Development Officer, a beautiful girl called Navitha, takes me through the steps of the company’s activities via a personalised power point presentation in their conference room. “The average customer that we would provide a loan to is a working urban woman who wants to further her business,” she explains. “So perhaps she is a flower vendor at the market and she wants to buy more stock in preparation for Wedding season or Festival season in order to secure more profit from the increased demand.” And indeed, Ujivan even offer a specialised loan called the Festival Loan for exactly these circumstances.

Microloans and sustainable development are something of a buzzword in the non-profit sectors nowdays as folk involved with philanthropic efforts in developing countries are increasingly turning towards the idea of encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit in people rather than just providing handouts.

I asked local journalist and current Time Out Bengaluru editor Jaideep Giridhar about his thoughts on the microloan system over a coke at a no-frills local favourite, Koshy’s, and he immediately put his finger on the crux of the issue: that even the microloan system in itself cannot be sufficient in making real change unless there is an accompanying infrastructure of support and education, both in urban and rural areas.

A couple of days later, I’m falling into old habits, stuck in the changing rooms of FabIndia - officially my new clothing outlet of choice in India - pulling on and off a stack of punjabi-style dresses and trousers and scrutinizing the mirror for the least sign of frumpiness. Brainchild of John Bissell, an American businessman who saw vast potential in the Indian village craft industry as far back as the 1960s, the company is today run by his son William Nanda Bissell, and has dozens of branches all over the country as well as a massive export base. The idea is that all of their products, which range from organic herbs and spices to carpets, furniture, jewelry and clothes, are sourced from within India and subject to rigorous quality control but with a view to maintaining the standards and traditions of village crafts in rural areas.

Bissell has just released a book on the subject of harnessing India’s rural technologies called ‘Making India Work’, now in my book bag.

So from the very very rich to the very very poor, I also found some centre ground here in Bangalore through an evening spent in a Chinese restaurant with Arunsai, a senior software engineer at IBM. 28-years old, Arunsai came to Bangalore from his home village of Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu five years ago to come and pan for his own gold in the midst of the IT rush.

But it wasn’t so easy: after many weeks applying for jobs and sifting through rejections, he eventually took an internship from Compuserve - and even had to pay for the privilege - and then live off the meagre five thousand rupees his father was able to send him each month. But, Arunsai gradually scaled up the chain (through a snakes-and-ladders story that saw him working for IBM in Pune, then being misled into traveling to the States in search of work “I dreamed of America and a Honda Civic,” he confided with a self-mocking grin, “everyone in India does.”) to his current job which has afforded him a moped and a three-bedroom apartment with security, private parking, two balconies, but not a scrap of furniture.

Nonetheless, he is cheery, for the good reason that he is to be engaged at the end of this month to a beautiful girl in Chennai (whom he has seen once in the flesh but never spoken to, though he shows me a picture on his laptop) who will eventually come and live with him and furnish the stark apartment with wedding gifts from her family. Until then, Arunsai is happy to cook from a gas cylinder and sleep on a lone mattress, knowing that family life is just around the corner.

Meanwhile the roadworks continue and as Abhilasha sits patiently outside the Ashley Inn, the little Nano is turning a shade of grey-brown as dust from the city’s seemingly endless construction falls like a rain onto its bodywork. After 6 days’ city traffic, I think it’s ready to get back out on the road. Next stop: Mysore.

Just call him MG

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:32:44 +0100

One Indian tradition I find myself really warming to, especially here in Bangalore, is the local penchant for making acronyms of street names, a convention made in heaven for English speakers. If an English person were to take a quick glance at a map of Bangalore, they might initially be forgiven for thinking they were looking at a warped map of their nation’s own capital: Victoria, Dickinson and Clapham roads are marked near Wellington, Alfred and Commercial streets in a plan that you can imagine was drawn up by some monocled Brigadier General with a huge moustache nursing a G&T. Ergo, there is also a Brigade Road, Artillery Road, Infantry Road and ah-ha! a Colonel Hill Road. Whoever he was.

It all makes navigating the streets of Bangalore, with their copious one-way systems and restless-looking traffic cops on what feels like almost every street corner (yes, since I jinxed that little number, I even see them in my sleep), that little bit easier. At least for a Londoner. There’s something about reading the words Primrose, Trinity and Richmond written on road signs that gives one a little patriotic tingle in the belly to the tune of Rule Britannia.

And then there’s all the other streets that are not in English. Try getting your Anglo-American tongue (let alone your wee Nano) around Jayachamaraja Wodeyar Road, Krishna Rajendra Road or even Hazrat Kambal Posh Road when you’re in a hurry. Take into account that most people in India are completely merciless when it comes to pronouncing names in any other accent than the vernacular. The r’s must be sharpened, the t’s softened and sometimes even the head wobbled in order to really get across a direction request.

So having a shot a completely foreign road name with what feels like an altogether disrespectful impression of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from the Simpsons, through an open window at a busy traffic intersection, to the noisy dismay of an army of motorcyclists stuck behind you, is not a situation you want to be stuck in.

And so India has come up with the solution: the acronym. And thank god for them. Bangalore is full of abbreviations - JC Road, KR road, HKP Road... even the main road in the whole city, named after the venerable Mahatma Gandhi, is casually referred to as MG Road on street signs across the city. A bit like you’d refer to a wacky department manager, ‘Hey, JP, you photocopied your bum again?’-type thing.

OK, so the tradition of the acronym probably wasn’t only invented for foreign girls sashaying their way around town while simultaneously battling with GPSs and Google maps, and in fact it’s a national tradition that goes way beyond street names. Click here for an amusing Reuters article on the subject that posits that its not just English but India’s entire melting pot of languages that has called for a simplified version of popular names and phrases.

TAFN, folks. BRB. VA.

Happy Motoring

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 13:47:57 +0100

With 1,800 Nano Diaries kilometres on the clock, I figured it was time to take Abhilasha for a check-up. Also because the steering was slightly off, a fact that somewhere in the recesses of my mechanics knowledge I knew might lead to an untimely wearing down of the tyres or spontaneous wildfire or something equally awful.

And Bangalore seems like the right place to do it. India’s third largest city, as well as its fastest growing metropolis, it has more recently garnered a reputation for being at the centre of India’s IT boom, earning itself the title, India’s Silicon Valley. What better place than this city full of computer geeks and engineers, I thought, to trust with the precious health of wee Abhilasha?

Using my now well-honed juggling-act combo of Google maps, the GPS, pre-planning and common sense, I set out for the nearest Tata dealership, a place called Prerana motors on Lalbagh Road.

On the way there, I battled with my inadequate pre-planning as the GPS yet again tied me up in knots trying to send me the wrong way down one-way streets, and so completely off the trail. In an attempt to right myself, I pulled a rookie right turn at a red light and was immediately flagged down by a cop who materialised from nowhere on a street corner.

So I take back what I said about the lawlessness of Indian traffic. Or do I...?

The cop, now joined by another one, proceeded to outline the gravity of my offence, and then repeat it several times, just to really hammer home the fact that there was absolutely no way that I should have made a free right turn on that red light.

I did my best puppy dog eyes set into the face of a maiden in distress, perched atop the body of a gormless tourist. “I’m so terribly sorry officer.”

He didn’t flinch. “License, please.” I passed it over. He looked at the little grey booklet, issued by the States of Jersey and the parish of Grouville with some suspicion before handing it over to his friend, I assume for laughs.

Leaning back into the car, he broke into a half-smile. “No problem, madam. Only 100 rupees fine.”

“One hundred rupees?” I exclaimed, admittedly with a hint of facetiousness, considering that translates to roughly $2.

The traffic cop suddenly took on the air of a market seller. “Yes, OK, very cheap fine; only 100 rupees.”

I reflected for a second then decided to employ an old trick I had learned in Mexico.

“Okay,” I said, “fine. Excellent. One hundred rupees it is. Now, I presume you will write me a receipt?”

He looked at me, perplexed.

“A fine? Can you write out a fine? An official receipt? And actually as luck would have it, I’m just on my way to the police station now. Would you care to accompany me and we can do all the paperwork in an official capacity there?”

He called over to his friend who leaned down into the window.

“Yes, madam. Only one hundred rupees fine.”

I repeated again what an enormous stroke of luck it was that they had stopped me here as we were (and actually, we were) only one block away from the Police Commissioner’s Office. I once again suggested we all go together and finish off the nasty business over a chai.

The two cops consulted in hushed tones and then turned to me, thrusting my license back into my hand and waving their arms in a forward motion. “OK, OK, go.”

“Go?” I exclaimed. “But what about the fine?”

“OK, OK, no problem.”

“But it’s really no bother to go to the station together, it’s just down the road...”

They had already lost interest and walked away. It made me suspect that the 100 rupee fine was not so much an official procedure as tea-break money for the boys.

I arrived at the Prerana garage to discover that it was not in fact a garage, but a show room, and was duly re-directed to the Old Madras Road, 14 or so kilometres away, where an immaculately-dressed mechanic in a white shirt took my keys, got into Abhilasha and drove off into the dust.

Half an hour later, still sitting in the waiting room, I was beginning to wonder that he might not have reached Madras right now by way of its namesake road, when I took a step outside to see Abhilasha set upon by a pit-crew washing and polishing the bodywork with an urgency decreed by the man in the white shirt standing in their midst and shouting out instructions while passionately gesturing.

I approached him nervously with the air of someone approaching a surgeon who just performed major heart surgery on a dear one. So, was everything all right then?

“Yes, yes everything is done.”

“You, um, fixed the steering?” I asked tentatively, having already decided that fixing the steering would probably involve several days as an in-patient and parts being ordered from the Himalayas and delivered by rickshaw.

He nodded. Yes, the steering was fixed, they had checked the whole car, topped up the oil and water and were now cleaning it, inside and out. I was speechless, painfully aware of how drawn out and complicated I had expected this process to be.

“So, I’ll just settle the bill while you guys finish off...”

“No madam, please, no money!”

“No money?” What was this? Was Jeremy Beadle about to pop out from behind one of the cars?

“No, free service madam.”

I turned those two, beautiful words over in my head as I watched the team of washer-driers clean every inch of the Nano. And in fact I almost didn’t believe him until, ten minutes later, he was handing me back the keys and walking away.

“Thank you,” I called out, a bit choked. He turned back, so I tried to think of something else to say. “I’m really very happy,” I blurted, and got in the car to find the steering wheel perfectly aligned and the floor covered with large pieces of paper that simply read “Happy Motoring”.

The original Avatar

Sun, 7 Mar 2010 12:01:50 +0100

Approaching the town of Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were en route to a wacky amusement park or the movie set of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. To your left is an epic Indo-Saracenic structure, like a giant Brighton Pavillion in shocking pink: the Sri Sathya Sai Hospital. Just beyond it is the Sri Sathya Sai Airport and a couple of kilometres further along the road you’ll see the Sri Sathya Sai Space Theatre, the Sri Sathya Sai Hill View Stadium, the Sri Sathya Sai High School for Boys, the Sri Sathya Sai University and finally the Sri Sathya Sai Sports Centre. Signs by the roadside offer all manner of useful mantras including “Haste makes waste, waste makes worry, do not be in a hurry”, and all this before you’ve even passed the gates of Puttaparthi and approached the main door to the residence and ashram of Sathya Sai Baba.

You know Sai Baba; you’ll have seen a picture of him at least once in your life - his unique appearance is hard to forget: the wild black afro and long orange robe that have become his trademark look. He is an Avatar, which is to say, he is a god manifest in human form. And I write that with the utmost sincerity, knowing that for us lot out west it’s a very difficult concept to get our rationally hard-wired heads around.

The story goes that Sathya Sai Baba realised that he was a bit different from the other boys at a very young age, when he started to produce bits of candy from thin air and recognised that he was actually a reincarnation of a very popular previous Hindu saint by the name of Sai Baba who died in 1918.

From that point on started a process which has culminated in the phenomena you can see in Puttaparthi today (and in over 1,000 Sai Baba centres around the world): an enormous ashram complex that’s like a town in itself with banks, canteens, libraries and row after row of accommodation blocks. The Mandir, the main hall where Sai Baba comes out twice a day to bless his devotees, has a capacity of 30,000, and it’s said that Sai Baba has at least 10 million followers worldwide. That’s like the whole population of Hungary. And among them are big global figures like Hard Rock co-founder Isaac Tigrett, the Duchess of York, cricket hero Sachin Tendulkar and former Indian president A.P.J, Abdul Kalam. Not forgetting the Nano Diaries’ very own Mr Ratan Tata, who last met with Sai Baba in December of 2009.

I came to Puttaparthi along the sometimes rocky, sometimes smooth road from Hampi in the north of Karnataka. Hampi had disappointed me; I had remembered a place from more than a decade ago that was a quiet temple town with beautiful outlying rock formations and more ruins than you could shake a stick at. But the inevitable has happened and tourism has caught up with Hampi in its usual detrimental and careless way. Where there was once a couple of guesthouses on the outskirts of town there is now a crowd, complete with rooftop restaurants, adjacent shops, stalls and cafes affectedly blasting out recordings of bhajans.

The Karnatakan landscape gets sharply more arid as you proceed east from Goa, though the bouldered hills around Hospet and Hampi are really something to behold. Passing in to Andhra Pradesh, things really began to feel scorched until I finally turned off the NH7 and onto the country road that wound for 30km before reaching Puttaparthi.

I was apprehensive. I had heard and read all sorts of things about Sai Baba prior to coming here. Like any popular religious figure outside of the mainstream, he is plagued by a backlog of controversies, ranging from sexual abuse to accusations of fraud and trickery. His detractors view him as nothing more than a talented magician with an immense power for holding sway over human psyche. But the strength of the belief in his powers on the part of his devotees, a couple of them respected and trusted friends of mine, is hard to disregard. So it was with a head full of confused ideas that I drove through the gates of Puttaparthi on Friday night and parked up outside the Sri Sathya Sai Towers hotel.

“You should have stayed in the ashram,” a woman told me the next morning as we sat waiting in the girls’ line to be among the first allowed into the morning Darshan (which roughly translates as an encounter between devotee and guru). “The energy is so much stronger on the inside.”

I explained to the woman, a cheerful soul from Bavaria, that it was my first time here and she was most excited. “It’ll be your first Darshan with Baba!” she exclaimed, to which I replied, “What’s a darshan?” She seemed puzzled that I didn’t know. “I mean, what should I do? What happens?”

“You sit there and you let Baba’s energy enter you,” she told me, going on to trace an invisible map of the Mandir on the floor and advising me where to try for the best seats in the house, when the gates finally opened. “You have to be quick and smart,” she counseled. “There are a lot of women here who will happily elbow past you to get to the front.”

And indeed, when the gates opened, it was all the attendants could do to keep the scene from becoming like a pirhana tank at feeding time. Some more enthused, unruly women were literally pushed back as the tide surged forward and towards the front of the hall where Sai Baba was due to pass during the course of the proceedings.

I managed to put down my cushion third row in the front, but my triumph was soon shattered by a school-mistress-like woman who ripped off my scarf and sent me packing on account of my sleeveless dress. “This is not acceptable. Go change!” she barked and sent me, literally, running back to my hotel for a t-shirt. I made it back in time before kick off and miraculously managed to retrieve my cushion which had saved my prime up-front spot before the path where Sai Baba was due to pass.

Then there was a long wait, during which I had time to really build up the anticipation of seeing Sai Baba. I was possibly about to experience something quite extra-ordinary, if some accounts of encounters with Sai Baba are to be believed, I might see him levitating, emitting white light, or even materialising a ring, necklace or sacred ash in front of my eyes.

When he finally emerged, it was not the sight I had been expecting to see. Four attendants clad in white walked behind a wheelchair that carried an thinning old man in an orange robe. The crowd went wild, or as wild as they could under the collective efforts of the attendants to keep them in place and sitting. A couple of people sat in the front rows jumped up as he passed to touch his legs, kiss his feet, or give him a personal letter.

Led by a group of male singers at the front of the hall, the bhajans continued for what felt like about an hour as Sai Baba disappeared into a room at the back and then reappeared later on to sit under a giant chandelier and face the crowd, sometimes holding the palms of his hands up in a blessing gesture, sometimes wiping his eyes and face with the towels draped over the armrests of his wheelchair.

I can’t deny I wasn’t transfixed by the spectacle. Illuminated by enough crystals to make Swarovski blush, he sat quiet and motionless; whether it was because the power of his presence or the sheer hysteria and rock-concert flavour of the event, I was at pains to tell, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the man.

Although most adherents there at the ashram in Puttaparthi are Hindu, it’s true that Sai Baba has no particular religious leaning. His message is that people from all denominations can come to him and he will strengthen and reinforce their faith and practice. His theory is one of one God in many manifestations, a kind of universal Avatar ready to connect with faith in any form. And talking to devotees at the ashram, you’ll never get a lukewarm opinion of the man.

“Swami saved my life,” one American woman told me over breakfast in the ashram Westerners’ canteen. This Chicago native had formerly been an alcoholic and drug user and had undergone a big transformation in her life a decade or so ago, aided by Sai Baba. She told me he appeared to her one day while she was bathing in a hot spring in New Mexico and showed her the path she needed to take. She went on to tell me about a friend of hers to whom Sai Baba had appeared in a dream before she even knew who she was. When she finally saw a picture of him and recognised him as the person from her vision, she of course felt compelled to come to the ashram and to see the man in the flesh.

Indeed there are thousands of stories like these, reports of communications with Sai Baba by people who have never even met him, some of them never even heard of him. And this for me was the intellectual stumbling block. I asked my now sober American friend how exactly she communicates with Sai Baba, given that she has never actually spoken to him face to face, and she explained that it was a form of connection that required tuning. This can be done through prayer or meditation, but once one is tuned to this particular ‘higher’ frequency, then it is possible to be in some form of conversation with the Avatar. This can be done from anywhere in the world, but being in his presence makes it stronger. And even if you’re not talking to him, being in his presence is enough of a blessing.

Gosh. This was touching areas of my brain I didn’t even know existed.

That night I went to visit a friend of a friend, a frenchman living in a beautifully furnished apartment on a crumbling dusty backstreet in the town. An aficionado of Indian spirituality in general, he told me the story of how it was the Keralan ‘Hugging Mother’ Amma that initially directed him towards Sai Baba, and he hasn’t looked back since. So how can I tap into this? I asked him. How can I really experience what all these people around me are feeling? A spiritual tourist, I didn’t have a hope of understanding anything in two days...

But my French friend disagreed. “One darshan can be enough,” he said, “if you engage in it wholeheartedly.” So should I sing bhajans, should I meditate, what should I do? “Just feel. Whatever comes naturally.”

The next morning, with enthusiasm high and a 50-rupee meditation cushion under my arm, I made my way back to the Mandir and this time, instead of jostling with the crowds for the coveted front-row seats, I took a place at the back instead where there was a lot of space, plonked my bum down on the cushion and closed my eyes. Around me was the chaos of women coming and going, looking for good spots, chattering, coughing, scolding their children. Hardly the most conducive meditative conditions but somehow I still managed to focus and be still.

About 20 minutes later Sai Baba pulled up, but this time in a gleaming Tata car (not a Nano, though! - this one was specially adapted to fit his wheelchair), which deposited him at the podium at the front from where he once again resided over the Darshan.

Did I feel something? Absolutely. What was the source of this sensation? It’s hard to identify after such a short time. In a hall with tens of thousands of highly-charge devotees, some of them moved to tears, it’s hard not to be moved yourself. But I can definitely report leaving the ashram with an unmistakeable sensation of pure gooey happy-clappy love. There was no outlet for this sensation other than the little Nano, which I drove with a new sense of loving consideration the three hours to Bangalore, promising, in my new-found blissed-out state of goodwill, that I would take it to a garage at the first opportunity to have its steering straightened and for some general check-up affection.

And Sai Baba? I keep thinking of him. I think he’ll continue to be a mystery. Perhaps the first step is to take heed of one of his pearls of wisdom (found on Wikipedia!) “Do not attempt to know me through external eyes,” he says. Boy, have I got a long way to go...

Zen and the Art of the Nano Maintenance

Fri, 5 Mar 2010 18:08:42 +0100

Ask anyone who’s had to concentrate on the road in India for any prolonged period and they’ll tell you it’s just exhausting; that it takes every ounce of your being to stay present and alert. A friend once described the roads here as being like Wacky Races, a cartoon-like mish-mash of vehicles that follow the rule of no-rules, negotiating their way through streets brimming with pedestrians, rickshaws, dogs, cows, bullock-drawn carts, tractors, buses, coaches, lorries, pick-ups, Marutis, Tatas, mopeds, motorbikes, old Ambassador cars, little three wheeler trucks, pigs, hogs, camels, elephants, goats, dogs, bicycles, milk vans, rubbish trucks, big oil delivery vehicles, SUVs, police jeeps and strange motorised hybrids built from ingenious bits of scrap from all of the aforementioned.

But despite the apparent chaos, Indian road users are incredibly involved drivers. For all the horn-honking, overtaking, driving in the wrong lane, and disregard of red lights, there is a tangible system at work here, a method in the madness that’s only really perceptible when you’re inside it and interacting with it.

People generally look at me in wide-eyed horror when I tell them I’m taking little Abhilasha all the way around the country. The first question is usually, “And you’re driving yourself?” as it’s quite common in India for a lady such as yours truly to have a driver. To be honest, if I didn’t enjoy the driving so much, I might even consider the expense: they charge about $200 per month, and to some they’re worth every penny: for the road knowledge, logistics of parking, and most importantly, to negotiate the Great Traffic Beast on their behalf.

And it is a beast. It’s one giant organic life form with a complete, integrated system and set of algorithms that follows some kind of dynamic rule of the moment rather than a pre-ordained infrastructure of lanes, lights and politeness. The sense of freedom is almost overwhelming, as you can do just about anything you want. You might cause chaos and be on the receiving end of a few shouts and gestures, but in general, the beast will adapt to move around what ever obstacle blocks its path. You’ll never see a tow-truck, and only rarely glimpse the odd traffic warden or police cop, who usually seem more occupied with just watching the spectacle of the traffic go by that attempting to do anything to control it.

At first glance, the swerving, swarming antics of two-wheelers, especially in the cities, may appear like suicide runs. As can the kamikaze over-takes of the giant, perilously piled lorries along the blind bends of country roads. But in fact, what I’m now beginning to suspect is that the vehicles are all vibrating on a different, imperceptible frequency with one another. And after some time spent bobbing around this erratic current, you begin to get the drift also. You think less, and go with the flow more. Awareness is key, constant, unbroken cognizance of every moving part around you (for example, drivers here seem to be very conscientious about not using their phones while driving, and you’ll often see them pulled up at the side of the road making calls), and unwavering concentration.

It’s absolutely a spiritual exercise. Don’t think, the old zen master would tell you; feel. Thinking leads to hesitation and takes you out of the flow, and that’s what’s dangerous. We are one, I thought, on a particularly Delphic afternoon, passing through Hospet at dusk after many consecutive hours behind the wheel that had begun to make my head spin. It’s that time of day when traffic in towns appears to reach fever pitch: people are knocking off work, trying to get home before dark, I suppose, when the driving shit really hits the fan. The pace ups a few notches and being caught in the middle of it is exhilarating to say the least. And the method I am developing in order to get through these moments of insanity is one of non-resistance and integration. No deliberation, just navigate forward: we are one body moving in unison. I will not react to the horns, I will not get stressed at the bikes passing me within a hair’s breadth; I will breathe.

And it works. Most of the time...

The last two days’ drives have been long and time-consuming so I’ve had a series of Alan Watts lectures to keep me stimulated along the way. A kind of driving-as-meditation. On the road to Hampi from Goa, I had been long stuck on a series of uphill bends behind an irritatingly slow lorry (that I feared the Nano would not have the acceleration power to pass in time before another equally large vehicle came rushing round the next bend and squished us both to a yellow-red pulp), when Alan Watts started to talk about the main principle in Eugene Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery. There cannot be a moment’s thought, he said, between aiming the arrow and firing it. They have to be one and the same motion, thinking and doing.

A little bell went ping somewhere in the distance, and right on the next bend, when I had mere seconds of road in front of me, I felt my foot lock down on the gas and I took the Nano on a surge forward. The move was so smooth, so fast and incredibly graceful that I almost let out a little triumphant whoop as I watched the lorry recede in the rearview mirror.

The same thing has started happening in the more challenging urban areas, where I’ll find myself suddenly moving, unperturbed by the dozens of motorcyclists flocking the car, knowing that somehow they too are aware of me and we seem to move forward as an entity.

And then there was the NH7 yesterday, the road that took me from Gooty towards Bangalore. It’s a motorway still under construction, so there are some parts that are beautifully finished and others that still have a lot of work to be done on them. The upshot of all of this was that traffic kept being transferred from one side of the highway to the other, and finally, it appeared that each had his own lane and one direction. Until, driving in what I thought was the fast lane, I saw a lorry appear on the horizon. I pulled in to the left, and he whizzed past my ears, having flashed his lights angrily as though it was me that had made the horrible incursion.

You just have to keep on your game - you don’t know what’s coming next, but unless you want to join the tragic ranks of the tens of thousands of road users killed every year in India, you must remain alert and stay focused. Enjoy the trip and accept that even though you might have fast stretches, with speeds of up to 90 km/h (yeeaaahhhh, watch us go!), there’s no escaping the fact that the average speed for any long distance journey is 50km/h.

To expound the ying-yang principle: where there is black, there will always be white and vice versa. Then for every well-paved scenic road, there will be excruciatingly long stretches of rocky red sand, unconstructed dirt tracks littered with holes, crags and uneven surfaces, and a long line of hay-laden tractors -moving at walking speed- to overtake. The trick is not to get too happy at the good bits because the fall is then so much harder when you inevitably hit a bad patch. And vice versa. There is no such thing as a good road, there is no such thing as a bad road. Which would be an inspired insignia for India’s state highway authority...

Goa - hippies in retirement (but do they ever die?)

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 11:00:19 +0100

With the exception of a handful of hardcore city slums, the last place I have ever been tempted to visit in India has been Goa. Call me the supercilious traveler, put it down to backpackers’ arrogance or accuse me of holiday snobbery, but the cold fact is that the legend of Goa, (or at least the one that is transmitted through travelers’ Chinese whispers) has always appealed to me about as much as a smack in the chops.

Talk of full moon parties, aging hippies, fire juggling, dancing with crystals, chakra therapies, ayurvedic healing, krishna rising hypnosis, past life regression, tarot, yoga, and enough weed to get so out of your mind that all of the above become a mere blur, just somehow doesn’t appeal to me. Wait, I’m being coy here. What I really mean is, my idea of spending precious days of my life on a beach full of soap-dodgers looking like someone successively blow-torched them, beat them, then vomited over their clothing comes somewhere on my list of things I want to do between wrestling a recently cuckolded rhino and and drinking a glass of Ganges water freshly bailed from a Varanasi ghat.

Still, the Nano Diaries do not discriminate. They are after a snapshot of India as it is and if that means peering into its affected flower child underbelly, then so be it. Goa it was, and I referred to the Lonely Planet India for advice as to which might be the most fertile area for my socio-anthropological investigations / bigoted rage to really blossom. I settled upon the place where the “hippy ‘60s knew it had finally found its Never Never Land”. Straight into the fiery jaws of hell, my first stop was Arambol.

Within 2 minutes of steering Abhilasha down the crowded narrow main street lined on both sides with a curtain of tie-dyed clothing and ethnic patterns, I felt my worst nightmares begin to materialise. Internet cafes, stalls passing off faded and dirty rags as clothing, drum sellers, flute sellers, crappy religious statue sellers, sun-burned and scantily clad foreigners with hair you’d want to put a comb through and feet like hobbits due to the ostensible trend for walking around barefoot.

Tired and annoyed from my long drive that day, I settled for the first hotel I saw that had some kind of adjacent parking space. The room resembled a prison cell but I was beyond caring. As long as the Nano was safely parked, and it was, down a backstreet wedged between two Marutis in a parking manoeuvre that involved the combined effort of the owners of the other two cars and every other bystander.

I have to admit, with a glimmer of pride, that Abhilasha was quite a hit with the locals, and garnered me a bit of respect in turn. When I came to check on her the next morning, there was already a waiting crowd.

“Nano girl!” one of the guys shouted out, and I was stunned as to how he knew. I mean, he wasn’t there the night before and there must be hundreds of girls in Arambol that match my description.

The crowd tightened as I went to open the door. Another guy came forward. “You selling this car?”

I replied yes, probably, eventually. But first I was going to drive it all the way around the country. There was a round of sage nods, but the guy was persistent. Would I come to Goa when I was done and sell it to him?

“But will you still want it after 10,000 km?” I asked. He brightened. Of course! Up to 10,000 km was considered a new car. (I made a mental note to maybe try and flog it at 9,900.) He went on to tell me that he had been wanting to trade in his Maruti Zen for the 1 lakh model. He asked me if he could take it for a drive, and might as well have asked me if he could borrow my liver for a few minutes. I turned him down, politely and continued down the road to breakfast.

At the beachside restaurant someone was playing the flute. On another table sat a bunch of brightly coloured Germans about my parents age who were sporadically jumping up and hallooing acquaintances on the beach with massively exaggerated gestures of greeting.

So I ordered a milk coffee and sat and mulled my surroundings. The sound of the sea: beautiful. The state of the beach: absolutely horrible. The sand is a murky dark brown colour and has the muddy consistency of a bog. At the back of the beach, there is an area of more stagnant water that filters in from the sea, I presume at high tide, then kind of stays there the whole day as the sea goes back out about its business. There was a thick layer of a skaggy, pukey-like substance around the edges of this little makeshift lake that nearly made a waiter from one of the cafes nearly faint when I went to photograph it.

So far so nasty. So what the heck? Why is Arambol so damn popular? I spoke to an older French man with piercing blue eyes. “There are some amazing events here,” he explained and described to me a crystal dancing bash from the night before as well as a supposedly excellent guitarist that had been playing at some nearby venue.

OK, so it has some level of cultural appeal to ripening beatniks in their twilight years. But if these people are all so right on and in tune with nature and whatnot, then why is this place still so damn ugly and neglected? Where are the eco-hotels, the bio-degradable shacks? Why skag on the beach? I took a stroll along the cliff path that ran north, thinking there might be some respite from the concrete monstrosities and tatter-stalls at the centre of Arambol, and though they petered out somewhat, they still stood there, boxy and synthetic like badly-painted warts sprouting out of the rocks.

Is it just that everyone here is still so out of it that they don’t even realise the massive turd they are laying on what was probably once a gorgeous coastline? Compounding my disbelief was my next stop, a beach just south of Arambol called Mandrem. Just gorgeous. Small, low key, with just a few hotels with shacks along the beach. I checked in to one of aforementioned shacks at the Riverside Hotel, grabbed a sandwich at their rickety restaurant on stilts that looms over the sea and promptly passed out for two whole hours in direct sunlight on one of the beds on the sand below.

So this was pretty close to paradise. Of course, it’s that way because no one’s here. So that’s a good thing. But it does beg the question what the hell are all those people doing 4 km up the beach from here? My outrage (which is getting a little boring now, so I’ll change the subject soon) was then augmented even further by a visit down to Vagator and Anjuna beaches which were like slightly smaller clones of Arambol cluttered with crap and concrete, and rocky beaches that just ran into murky sand. Hardly Baywatch, is it?

Though there are a few visiting ladies that would have you think otherwise: walking along Mandrem beach the next morning, I saw a sight that made my jaw drop.

Nipples.

Two of the buggers. Perched atop the exposed breasts of a lone carelessly sunbathing girl. Then another two, attached to the wilting mammaries of a blonde fifty-something.

The puritan in me awakened and began to throw a tantrum. I was shocked, pure and simple. And here I had been, worrying that stripping down to my swimsuit was a little risque and disrespectful to the more conservatively attired residents.

I found a couple of local guys who had just come back from a morning fishing expedition, to try and help me make sense of my reaction. I asked them first if it was normal to see topless women around here and they nodded and laughed. “Further down the beach, they are completely naked,” one of them told me. So what did they, virile males with red blood pumping through their veins, make of all of this?

“Well, they are mostly Russian women...” one of them began to explain shyly as though it was an excuse. “They think they are free. That taking off your clothes means to be free.”

Freedom through nudity? A but like spiritual salvation through frying your circuits on drugs, I imagine. Am I being judgmental? You bet I am.

“But what do you think of it?” I insisted.

“Some people like, some people don’t like. I don’t like, but... I think it depends if you already have a woman. If you have, then you are not looking!”

He laughed.

My next stop on the Great Puritanical Tour of Goa was Panjim, the state capital. It was the moment when I started to warm to Goa. In fact I knew I’d love it when, as I was leaving the beach in Mandrem, another leathery Boho with - this time, irritatingly - piercing eyes asked me where I was headed and grimaced when I told him, airily announcing announcing that he hated big crowded cities and planned to spend the next 2 weeks not moving from this beach. Good, I thought: one less pestilent berk to annoy me in Panjim.

Panjim rocks. As far as colonisers go, the Portuguese have left a pretty good record, architecturally at least. Looking at places like Rio de Janeiro, you get the sense of a culture imported that really had staying power and strong local appeal. It’s the same in Panjim - there’s little bits of Portugal everywhere, in the signatures of the buildings, the terraces, doorways, windows. I stayed at a heritage hotel called the Panjim Pousada, a residence set in a series of historical buildings, with intricate tiling and courtyards and rooms with stained-glass windows and big old wooden four-poster beds.

That day, I took Abhilasha on its bonniest drive through India yet - the road that goes from Panjim to Old Goa. It starts with a narrow causeway that crosses the Mandovi River, then follows a winding coast road dotted with all manner of sleepy colonial buildings. People acquainted with Istanbul can compare it to the Sahil Yolu that runs by the Bosphorus, or at least as quiet as it would have been a century ago. Old Goa itself is spectacular - it consists of a series of enormous old buildings, cathedrals and basilicas surrounded by manicured gardens, all put up by the Portuguese from the 16th century onwards.

It was here that the Nano was subject to its first act of admiration by a westerner. I had parked it at the roadside while I popped out to photograph some amazing buttresses on the side of the museum of Christianity, when an SUV drove past me and promptly screeched to a halt next to Abhilasha. I expected to see the usual outpouring of an Indian family, asking how much I paid for it, did I drive it all the way from Mumbai, etc, but instead there disembarked an English gentleman, one of the old school variety you might have seen taking tea on the front verandah. Think Denholm Elliott in his Merchant Ivory guise, dressed from head to toe in off-white.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he excused himself, “but I just had to get a picture of the one-lakh car.”

So starstruck was I by the sudden apparition of my genteel countryman that I just nodded and failed to ask him any questions about who he was or what he was doing here, riding about in an SUV. He snapped a picture of Abhilasha, got back in his car and bid his driver carry him off out of sight while I just stood on the spot gawping. One thing was for sure, he was not going to Arambol.