Escape from planet India
Trip Start
Oct 01, 2005
1
15
158
Trip End
Jul 21, 2007
Sunauli,
India
Monday, November 7, 2005
The whole country seems to be totally unwilling to pull itself out of the quagmire of filth and hypocrisy. Imagine washing every morning in a holy river that is constantly being polluted with X number of sewage outflows and rotting corpses. It seems that people have a complete lack of care about their environment. Every thing is a botch job, there are power cuts daily, buildings are crumbling or falling down, seemingly all because they couldn't be arsed to do a proper job in the first place. Safety procedures are nothing more than a sick joke; people sit both outdoors and indoors amidst a sea of wires and seem, to be blunt, happy as pigs in shit. We came to the conclusion that all this shoddiness is engineered to keep people in work. If a task can be made more convoluted and onerous then it will be, simply so that more workers can be employed. Also the problem with being essentially a tourist is that a lot of the time you are kind of in the tourist "track" and therefore more or less all the Indian people you meet are either out to sell you their merchandise, their brothers merchandise, sell you a trip or rickshaw ride or hotel room or piece of fabric to go round your wrist so that you are free to roam the banks of the holy lake unhindered by poor karma! Getting off a train and exiting the station is literally like entering a rugby game as you scrum through all the rickshaw drivers frantically scrambling for your custom. Unfortunately all this rather tends to jade your opinion of Indian people.
(rant over)
Saying that however, we still managed to fall completely in love with India. Even with all the trials of patience, dirty hotel rooms, and legions of rip off merchants. It's a truly fascinating country mainly because it is completely opposite in every way to the Western world and challenges on a daily basis all our ideas and accepted beliefs. In the conception of Robert Anton Wilson, it forces you out of the narrow 'reality tunnel' you inhabit every day and makes you think differently. It's also the diversity of the landscape, flora and fauna here that is so compelling. One day we were sailing down the peaceful backwaters, the next up in the cool mountains surrounded by a shit load of tea. The next in the malestrom of a mad, humid, polluted metropolis, and the next in a desert fort from Lawrence of Arabia.
The people change with the landscape as well. The Keralans carry out their daily duties in a chilled out, calm manner and are on the whole more educated and rich than their North India counterparts who seem to be more stressed out and steam about in a more hectic fashion. But with this they seem all the more vibrant and in particular the Rajasthani natives, the Rajputs, who are really colourful characters, the blokes with flamboyant moustaches and turbans, the women in dazzling saris and massive nose rings. The few people you meet who are not on the make are absolutely lovely, warm, open and genuinely friendly. They have all the time in the world to just talk to you and explain something of their life. Our yoga teacher Sunil in particular was a diamond fella, not a bit of an edge to him and such a good laugh (literally). In fact, come to think of it we met a load of folk like this, and it made the experience really interesting and beautiful. Any time spent in the bazarrs we always enjoyed, the colours and smells and sunlight stabbing through the fabric roof as you walk down the narrow alleyways never knowing what you are going to come across next. I think that's one way to sum India up. It's so multi-faceted and chaotic moment by moment that absolutely anything can happen and probably will. It translates into a super exciting experience but we definitely breathed a sigh of relief when we entered Nepal.
