Thursday, May 19, 2005

Assertive action

The hotter is gets, the more inclined I am spend to spend greater amounts on transport. With the promise of air-conditioning, a reclining cushioned seat and ample legroom, I purchased a ticket with Messieurs Sri Balaji Travels and promised to return at eight o'clock the following morning to take seat number 11a on the Bangalore-Chennai express-deluxe coach.

I arrived at the appointed place just twenty minutes late, after a couple of cups of sweet milky tea. There is no point arriving on time for anything in this country. Except trains, which have the habit of departing on time but arriving late. After forty-five minutes more and a few more teas, I was fidgeting. Mr Balaji sensed my concern.

'Bus one hour late.'

'Umm, yep, I figured as much.'

'You want breakfast?'

After the hour had passed, I stood up, took my nose out of my new novel and went over for question time.

'When is bus coming?' [I possess the ludicrous habit of speaking in broken English to Indians].

'Soon.'

'What time?'

'You want breakfast?'

At some point a young urchin brushed past me and handed a crumpled ticket to Mr Balaji. The latter inspected it, returned it, and promptly asked to see my own. This he did not return. He told me to follow the grubby kid who would escort me to my bus.

'You told me to come here. Bus pick up from here, no?'

'You follow him now.'

'I don't have a ticket. You have it.'

'Possible. You follow him.'

Something was wrong. I didn't like this.

As we crossed the street and into the bowels of the bus station, I worked out what was going on. I took the ticket out of the urchin's hands, and asked him where my bus was.

'Ten o'clock.'

'This is my ticket? I had bus for eight o'clock. Where is bus?'

He pointed, as all Indians do in response to such a question, in a general direction away from both of us. Briefly, I imagined what would happened if I pummelled his head into the nearby concrete pylon until he was but a bleeding pulp. Then I imagined life inside an Indian prison. I'm sure the food's not that good.

Examining the ticket, I noticed that it was issued by the State Transit Authority, was for a different bus number and seat number. At least it appeared to be bound for Chennai.

The price marked on this ticket was one third what I had passed over to Mr Balaji. Too tired to argue with the kid, I sent him off with a disparaging look and peered around for the bus that would take me to my destination. When I evenutally discovered it, and its delapidated state, I immediately found the resolve to pay a quick return visit to Balaji and Co.

I wanted a cushioned luxury-express experience and I was getting rust and battered metal.
I stayed calm. Very Zen.

'What the ...?'

'Bus cancelled.'

'Why didn't you tell me that? I was sitting here for almost two hours.'

'Bus will leave at ten.'

'Ummm, look at price.'He glanced, though he was about to learn something new, and smiled, like this was acceptable and ordinary behaviour when dealing with people.

'No problem, bus at ten.' My patience expired.

I requested that he return the difference of the cost of the two tickets, since the vehicle I was to travel on did not resemble the one on the poster on the office wall, the one I had expected.
Mr Balaji gave me a big white smile. I gave him a dark withering scowl with a vague hint of menace.

Along came the 'others'. Indians involved in the tourism industry speak bad English until there's a discussion over cash. Suddenly they become fluent. They operate in groups.

Laughing at the pettiness of it all, and with a slight mania in my tone, I peppered my insults with good humour and told them that they would all burn in Hell if they didn't return my cash now. It was comic. I shouted 'You criminals, you bad people' a few times at the top of my voice from the front of the store, until they were throwing banknotes at me to move on.

Can you believe it? I made a profit. In India.

I cross the street, gave the excess cash to a beggar who must have thought I was the nicest young man in town, and hopped on the next bus to Madras.

Monday, May 16, 2005

Natalie Portman is crap.

There's money in Bangalore. A thriving metropolis in the south of the country, this place is home to India's IT industry and feels like a boomtown. With a population of about six million, all out on the street at any given time, the difference to other major cities is striking.

I stayed in the area near the bus stands, railway station, and city market - you're always bound to see a lot more in these parts of any town.

The Volga restaurant was across the road from my hotel, though I searched in vain on the menu and walls for a hint of Russia. No cabbage and no pictures of Catherine the Great. With the piped tunes of Enya swimming through the place, I settled on a briyani and for the first time in a while I got to eat with my fingers. Love that.

A pure delight. Coming from a culture that actively discourages eating with your hands and feet and instead invented three stupid implements that require you to put metal in your mouth, I admit to loving nothing more than feeding my face with my hands. Of course, it does take some getting used to; rice is the hardest of any foodstuff to get in your gob, whether you use knife and fork, spoon or chopsticks. Once you've tried eating with your hands, you get addicted, it's a liberating experience. Remember trying to balance potato and peas on the back of your fork? Stupid. Or maybe that was just me.

Anyway, being left-handed, I'm sensitive to guidebooks that warble on during opening chapters about local customs. Indians, like Bangladeshis and possibly Pakistanis, use the right hand for eating and the left for ablutions. Since I can accomplish very little with my right hand, I searched around, worried that I might be attracting attention of other diners who noticed my eating with my pooing hand. The only diner who caught my eye let out a belch so loud and spat a small chicken bone onto his plate: he obviously had other things to concern himself with than my failure to observe riutal.

I washed down dinner with a coffee, only my second since I left Australia almost three months ago. The buzz was fantastic. I was transported immediately back to my daily ritual to the cafe across from where I worked, chatting away with my mate as we grabbed a fat sugar-laden latte and dodged traffic to cross the madness of the Pacific Highway and up the lift to my workplace. I felt an iota of homesickness. But then I got over that.

I left Enya to carry on nonsensically in Gaelic and stepped out into the heat of the city. With my propensity to hanker on about the weather, I'll try to keep it short.

WHERE IS THE MONSOON?

Resisting the desire to strip completely and hope the Times of India would skillfully act as both reading material and underpants to my nether parts, I remained stoic and, after two months of this, I really should be a little more used to temperatures that are more at home with Miele kitchen appliances than with supple human flesh.

Bangalore had footpaths. One of them allowed me to walk fifty-three consecutive steps without once having to adjust my sandals, increase or decrease the width of my gait, or even look down to check that I was not going to step on animal, vegetable or mineral. Traffic lights are operational, and more surprisingly, there appears to be some sort of order to the traffic. Streets are lined with shady trees ... it all helped me to withstand the heat a bit more.

But of course, perhaps in the process of modernisation, other things had fallen by the wayside. MG Road, the middle class shopping strip, could be any bland mall in the world. Thousands of people busily consuming more useless crap to fill their wardrobes, closets and garages. Western brands are prominent here, though why buy the real thing when fake is available (in a larger number of colours) around the corner, and at a fraction of the cost?

I found a couple of very well stocked bookstores. Brilliant. After the trial of a second reading of 'The monk who sold his Ferrari' (yep, I'm still working on it), it was very exciting to lose myself among the shelves. Picked up a couple of travel novels and selection of books by a south Indian writer, R.K. Narayan. He wrote in the 1930s and a couple of Indians I've met have recommended his novels. Looking forward to a couple of days sitting in a hammock somewhere ...

Bu the highlight of the day was yet to arrive ...

Star Wars has just been released! I was very, very excited and couldn't believe my luck; the next session was commencing in twenty minutes. I purchased my ticket, a couple of spicy samosas and something claiming to be a cocktail fruit juice, and worked my way up five flights of stairs to the auditorium.

As a child, I was the first and only in my neighborhood to have Star Wars wallpaper, though my mother refused to allow it on all four walls of the room. Now I was going to be one of the first (but not only) in India to see Anakin head over to the Dark side.

George, you did another great job (Lucas, not Bush). Thank God Senator Palapatine turned out to be the Lord of the Siths. Quite frankly that ridiculous affected speech impediment was more than I could handle. Yoda provided me with a number of laughs; watching a two foot green critter battle using his light-sabre against Sen Palp/Lord Sith in the Imperial Senate was a huge giggle. Special effects, as always, astounding.

And at least we know why Anakin eventually moved to the Dark Side. Not sure if it was the script or simply the poorest, most unconvincing acting performance the world's witnessed in some time. I'd definitely choose a life of swanning about the Death Star, Imperial Storm Troopers and a double-ended light sabre over the rest of my time spent with that wet blanket of a woman.

Never, ever give Natalie Portman another acting role. She is rubbish.

Monday, May 09, 2005

Physical activity

After a gruelling train ride through the hazy heat of the plains, I returned to Mumbai with both the expectation of finding my new credit card and with the hope of gaining a ticket to catch up with Nick and Leah in Goa before they left the country.

I was exhausted. When the attendant at the Mumbai Central Station Ticket Reservation Centre delivered the sad news that the foreign tourist quota was full for the next four days, I gave up immediately on feeling sand between my toes. I returned to the Salvation Army Hostel and slept almost soundly while taxis drove by as though as the foot of my bed.

When I awoke I met Kurt, a Dutch traveller who shared valuable information about travelling to Pakistan and Iran. He laughed at my prospects of entering Iran; according to him Australians are not currently welcome. But he couldn't answer my next obvious question. Why? All he knew was that the Australian with whom he travelled through Yemen had been unable to obtain an Iranian visa.

Acknowledging an Australian is probably persona non grata in the eyes of various Muslim bureaucrats across the planet, I fail to see what Iran in particular would have against our government. I'm hoping that the refusal of the visa was just an isolated incident that is common in this part of the world where the same question to the same person twice within thirty seconds yields a different response.

Bureaucracy in the Third World can crush a man and leave him weeping. Sure, it's also irritating in the Western World, but without the mind-achingly number of ludicrously ill-printed forms that hinder your every move. Entering a hotel in India on a tourist visa is akin to writing a novella.

When you arrive at any hotel in the world, all you want is to be taken to your room. Here you must twice complete a recent autobiography. And the question that annoys me the most? 'What is your next destination?' Leading not to temptation and thus the response 'None of your goddamn business', I usually opt for a planet in the solar system. 'Mars' or 'Saturn' draw as scant attention as if I wrote 'Calcutta'. So I remain optimistic about the visa. I will simply take a pen, photos and some extra cash for bribes.

Anyway, Kurt had a map of Mumbai. North of the city was marked in large letters 'Go Karting'. Well, sure, I felt like a bit of go-karting. I've already complained of my inability to stay fit while travelling. And if go-karting can't offer the cardiovascular improvements of a run through Sydney's Eastern suburbs, it might provide the adrenalin rush I wanted.

We took a bus from the hostel to Churchgate station and then a train for an hour. Suburban train rides in Mumbai provide their own heart-racing palpitations, and when we arrived I wasn't sure that go-karting was going to be able to compete with the feeling that you have when you alight a suburban train wagon. Happy to be alive. And let's face it, if Mumbai's sixteen million residents can cope with travelling in an amount of space normally reserved for a small rodent, then so can I.

We took the obligatory auto-rickshaw ride to the Go-Karting stadium, a short tour through affluent suburbs of the worst taste. India now has money, but with it has come tasteless and crass materialism, the distinct impression that they're spending their cash only on what glitters. Colossal apartment buildings erupt from the foothills - some over forty stories in height and topped with the most ridiculous expressions of neo-classicism. Imagine the Governor Phillip Tower in Sydney with large pseudo-Corinthian columns and perhaps a Byzantine dome topping the structure. Maybe a stylised Acropolis atop the new World Tower in George St? Think Las Vegas casino architects recreating Elizabeth Bay high-density housing, and you have some idea of what is being constructed here.

The waiver we needed to sign before donning our helmet had some interesting clauses. To note: any part of a Sikh's hair, which may become entangled with either the motor or any other part of the go-kart, may be permanently cut in the instance where damage either to the person or the vehicle or both is to be avoided. Permanently cut? It also required any Sikh to remove his turban before being allowed to drive a go-kart (I imagine the helmet is otherwise impossible to wear), and this would lead to arguments in a country that loves to bicker as much as India.
On the circuit and loving every second of it, Kust overtook me twice. Those of you who have played passenger to my driver will fully appreciate that this was of no concern to me. I'm happy just to remember where to find the ignition switch and to discover that I don't accelerate when I mean to depress the clutch. Kurt thought my dubious driving skills hilarious, and when we received the print-out of our individual performances after completing the laps, I admit to feeling a little pathetic.

I've always been a crap driver. I don't enjoy it and don't see why I should have to do it when someone else always has a car. You can't read when you drive - eating, talking and sleeping are generally discouraged. It's just another activity designed to complicate our life and keep us from doing something constructive. You hear people complain all the time about being stuck in traffic jams. Use public transport and read a book. It's not like anyone has ever said to you 'I had a really interesting drive to work yesterday morning, the brakes worked like a charm'.
Still, it was quite humiliating to find that I was the slowest driver on the course all day ...

Monday, May 02, 2005

Sex. Not that I'm getting any of it.

The temples of Khajuraho were constructed some time during the tenth to twelth centuries, and of the orignal eighty-odd structures, twenty two survive today. Scholars claim that the excellent condition of the temples is the result of being built far from anywhere (yep, I got that feeling from the bus ride). As such, when the Islamic marauders came, they didn't spot the temples and thus couldn't destroy the sculptures. So now I get to see them too.

The sculptured details in stone cover every conceivable surface of the temples. People going about their everyday business - bathing, talking, caressing, reading a letter, fornicating with a horse. That kind of thing.

Sure, sex isn't the only sculptural theme on the temples. But it is certainly the one that attracts the most attention (well, most of my attention). There appear to be two theories regarding the erotica. One is that this was part of daily life, and that in a less repressed time the temples would been a life's mode d'emploi for pilgrims and visitors. The second theory is that the temples were consecrated for a deity whose name now escapes me, but who was a sleazy type and would never allow the temples to be destroyed and so remove his source of pleasure.

I cannot imagine a time when Indians weren't sexually repressed, so theory one is out the door. But all Indian men are sleazy and obsessed with sex - like a thirteen year old who has just discovered the Internet. My vote's for theory number two.

Khajuraho is astounding, and beyond my crassness I really wish I had the kind of faith that could make me believe that God exists. The dedication that goes into Indian temples (like European cathedrals) takes a understanding or acceptance of the unknown that I cannot possess. But I've had my dose of temples and forts.

Time for a return journey. Really looking forward to that ...