flickering pictures

I’ve been posting my notes from India, scribbled and scrawled all around the country last summer, while I get things up and running around here. Now that things are humming nicely, I’m spending less time fixing things, leaving me more time to post tasty content. But although I’m not quite so desperate for filler anymore, I’m honoured to see that some of you actually seem to like these, so I’ll keep posting them sporadically until they’re all up. If you like, you can keep track of them on a brand spanking new dispatches page.

Thanks for reading!

-mark

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12:00pm Wednesday, Jul 25

First things first - I thought it would be a good idea to stay in touch, and so decided to activate my new mobile phone here. It doesn’t cost much, and it’s nice to have in this crazy unpredictable place. My number in India is: 9916897209. I believe that India’s country code is 91, so I think that means that if you need to reach me from Canada, you can get me at 011-91-991-689-7209. Can somebody please verify/correct this? Thanks!

So I’m in Bangalore, a bustling metropolis of 5.6 million people and the focal point of India’s concerted thrust into the developed world. The city is all Sony signs, office towers and American fast food, and boasts an IT park that rivals Silicon Valley. That said, if office buildings aren’t your thing, there isn’t a whole lot to see here. My Lonely Planet nails it: “You don’t come to Bangalore for its sights; you come here to eat (and drink and shop).

While there aren’t any jaw-dropping temples here, it’s really interesting to walk around and people-watch in India’s most progressive city. Along with the wealth and the growing upwardly-mobile class that India’s IT boom has created, social norms here have changed dramatically and it’s not uncommon to see men with their arms around women, scantily-clad billboard models, and other taboos that I haven’t seen anywhere else in India — not even Delhi. Yuppies are everywhere, shopping for designer jeans and sipping lattes in trendy cafes. This is not to say that the city is rich — it has its awful slums like any other Indian city, and many in Bangalore are wondering when the promised wealth will trickle down the food chain. But it’s cleaner and feels safer than other cities I’ve visited, and the general air is one of optimism, growth, success and surprising worldliness.

Also striking: it isn’t impossibly rare to see a white person, especially around the main drags. I notice that I’ve developed a strange habit: when I see one, we exchange knowing smiles, maybe a nod, and move on. We’re both happy to have seen someone who looks like us, and for just a moment we forget that we’re completely and totally out of our comfort zones. This place has given me an inkling of what it must be like to be a visible minority in a strange country — the urge to seek out your own, to build communities around your similarities even… I never would have thought I’d hear myself say that it feels great to see another white person, but there it is.

I’m staying at the Citizen Lodge, a quiet little inn just north of the main thoroughfare, Mahatma Gandhi Road. I’m paying 660 rupees a night for a 750-rupee room, because of a little red spider I spotted crawling around on the bedsheets when the owner showed me the room. Hope he doesn’t bite. The place is as clean as low-to-mid-range hotels get in India, which is to say the sheets have been changed and the toilet (a full ceramic western one) doesn’t need flushing when I arrive.

Craving western food yesterday, and looking for something relatively safe to put in my still-queasy stomach, I head for the first McDonald’s I’ve seen in the country. The Chicken MaharajaMac is delicious, and the service is better than most sit-down restaurants back home. Sadly, labour costs nothing here, but the upside is that every shop, restaurant and business you walk into has 47 employees waiting on you hand and foot.

I end up chatting with another traveller - a Scot who’s come to spend a few weeks working in Bangalore’s slums. She’s been here just a few weeks as well, and leaves for home a few hours before I’m set to head to Varanasi (6am Jul 26). We grab a bite and find ourselves at the Scottish Pub — so named, apparently, because of the fellow in the kilt on the menu. They serve house wine, Indian Kingfisher beer, and nothing else to drink — certainly no scotch. When we ask what makes the place Scottish, the waiter grins a happy little boy grin and replies simply, “yes.” He has no idea what we’ve just asked him, but somehow that just adds to the charm of the place. We laugh and the beer really isn’t bad - good old alcohol kills bacteria, so beer is on the safe list. Amen to that, because the safe list is bloody short.

The next day — this morning — we meet up again to head to Leela’s Palace, a 7-star hotel that Sumi says offers the finest all-you-can-eat Western-style breakfast anywhere. It’s all safe to eat, and this will be my one ridiculous indulgence in this country. I didn’t even know a hotel could have seven stars, but this is the most opulent, shamelessly extravagant hotel I have ever laid eyes on. It ends up costing 700 rupees ($20-ish) each — enough to feed me for 3-4 days here — but sweet God is it ever worth it. Have you ever gone without any of the foods you know for a few weeks, then been told you could have as much as you wanted? We ripped through that buffet like ravenous little whirlwinds, leaving only rubble and exhausted waiters in our paths. I had two omelettes, a side of bacon, a side of sausages, hash browns, a bowl of fresh pineapple, 4 pieces of toast, two cups of coffee and four tall wonderful glasses of juice: orange, pineapple, watermelon and guava…. Fruit juice is at the top of the danger list in this country — almost all of it is diluted with unsafe water — and I can’t express how good it felt to drink sweet delicious juice. I’m sure the waiters thought these two insatiable foreigners were nuts, taking such insane pleasure from such a silly thing. But there it is. Stuffed to the gills, my stomach rebels, shocked by this new influx of food, but I happily pay the price and lurch around for the rest of the day, because today I drank juice! (It really was that big of a deal.)

Sorry for the non-sequitur, but there’s something else striking about this place: nowhere (except Bangalore, where it’s still rare) have I seen men and women holding hands in this country. It’s just not done, and scandalizes in even the more westernized touristy areas. Same-sex romance is even more taboo. But everywhere here there are men holding hands, arms around each other, massaging the napes of each other’s necks, arms around waists, hands in each other’s back pockets… Intellectually I know that, in India, this is just male bonding — a perfectly normal way of expressing friendship. But I can’t help thinking that it’s a bit odd to allow same-sex friends to get really pretty intimate, but prevent opposite-sex couples from getting too close on the bus…

Another thing: the smog here rivals Delhi’s perpetual haze. It’s gray-brown, and it’s everywhere, choking you as you walk down the street. Spend too much time in rush-hour traffic and you get sleepy from the carbon monoxide fumes. Ruth — my new Scottish friend — tells me that walking down the street in Bangalore for a day is equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes, and I have no trouble believing it. Also, the touts, merchants, taxi-wallahs and all the rest seem less insistent and in-your-face than elsewhere. Or maybe I’m just getting acclimatized…. I see the odd tourist walking down the street, wandering around with a deer-in-the-headlights look in their eyes, and I wonder if I look like that too. Probably I do — or at least I did two weeks ago. No, probably I still do. No wonder the merchants smelled fresh meat when I got off the plane — certainly that’s what these poor unsuspecting folks look like. I like to think that I’m getting better at the brush-off, the haggling, the street sense… But then, walking down the road with my guidebook in my hand, I think to myself that I ought to put it away, that it identifies me as a vulnerable tourist and makes me stick out like a sore thumb. It takes only a second for me to realize how ridiculous that is, given that I’m already the only white person for twenty blocks in any direction….

One last thing for this note: as Ruth and I sit with the yuppies, sipping our own fancy coffees, we remark how used to India we’ve become — how after just a few weeks, we bat nary an eyelash at the hair-raising daily realities of living here. The buses that whiz by six inches from your face, the death-defying dance through a typical intersection, the constant smell of sweat and smog, the filth and grime in every hotel’s bathrooms, bedsheets, pillows…. All of it. It’s amazing what versatile animals we are — how quickly and deftly we adapt to an entirely new society, a new world. Not because we’re exceptional individuals, but because it so quickly becomes natural, because our ability to adapt may well be our finest defence mechanism. Try as you might to avoid the open-pit outhouses, there comes a point at which you just have to go, simple as that. And so you adapt, you grow, and a week later nothing could be more normal. If a goal of this little adventure was to step outside of my comfort zone, then this has been a smashing success so far. But the comfort zone is growing, and I’m growing with it. I like that.

When I land in Varanasi, I’ll have a room booked and waiting for me — the first time since I landed in India that I made any preparations for arrival into a city. Adventure is all good and well, but all this flying around by the seat of my pants has left me with a bit of a sore bum and less rupees than I would have liked.

By this time tomorrow I’ll be sitting on the ghats of the Ganges, in arguably the oldest city in the world…

Take care everyone!
Mark

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