Life and death in Mumbai

Apologies for a delayed entry. It's been an... interesting week or so, so I've had to take a little time to think about quite how to document it here.

We're still in Bombay - as things are shaping up, we may be here for a bit longer, although everything is kinda up in the air at the moment. We've spent the last few days as spokes in the vast, swirling wheel of people that's formed around Shantaram writer Greg Roberts. He seems to have an unparallelled talent for accumulating people - people seek him out, and often stick around once they do. I suspect this is because his book has clearly touched many people on some fundamental level - people feel a real affinity for both book and writer - and in person he does the same thing.

This was demonstrated by a dinner we attended the other night at Salt Water Grill, one of Bombay's posher restaurants. The restaurant itself is a surreal enough experience - beach shack decor, tripped-out techno and gourmet food, a haven for the city's up-and-coming bright young things that's a world away for the relentless sea of people and poverty outisde. Anyway, Greg invited us for dinner - his agent was going back to New York, and they were having dinner to celebrate his last night in town.

We'd envisaged it as being a quiet affair, but as it turned out, more and more people kept arriving over the course of the night. In the end, about 30-40 people turned up - mostly an assortment of bon vivants from the Bombay entertainment scene, a mix of Bollywood starlets, writers, producers, publishers, models, DJs, VJs... and us. It was all quite overwhelming at first, and we didn't get the chance to speak to Greg himself much, but we did meet a heap of other people, most of whom were faultlessly friendly and outgoing. We left having made a whole bunch of new friends, so all in all, it was a very pleasant and productive evening.

Over the last couple of days, we've also made the acquaintance of a fascinating lady called Dolly Thakore, renaissance woman par excellence - she's been in the Bombay entertainment industry for nigh on 40 years, and seems to do anything and everything (her website describes her modestly as a "communications consultant, media relations manager, publisher, TV and radio commentator and interviewer, presenter, casting director, columnist, film and theatre reviewer, compere, auctioneer, stage actress, and social worker" - phew!)

As you'd expect, she has seemingly boundless energy - I'd be happy to be able to do any one of those things, let alone all of them - and fingers in just about every pie in the city. She was also very good company - generous enough to entertain us at her house, even though she didn't know us from the proverbial bar of soap, and full of anecdotes about her life, the people she's met, and the host of things she's done over the years. Her website (at www.dollythakore.com) makes for some interesting reading.

All this, then, has been the upside of our experience. It's been quite a strange contrast - living the high life, then trundling home to our little budget hotel, traipsing up four flights of stairs and opening all the windows and turning on the fan to try to cool the place down. In any case, it's all been put into perspective by yesterday morning's events, when a British tourist died in the room down the corridor.

I debated whether it was appropriate to write about this here, and in the end I decided to - after all, it did happen, no-one he knew will read this, and it's something we saw that may perhaps have resonance for others. So, this is what went on: apparently the guy been out the night before, and when the morning came his friends tried to wake him up and found that he wasn't breathing. The first we heard of it was when his distraught travelling companion came running down the corridor shouting for an ambulance. It's strange - it takes a while for the gravity of a situation to kick in, because at first everyone just sort of stood about, then someone called an ambulance, and we went in to his room to try to help.

It was much too late, though - one look at the poor bugger and you could see that he was already dead: he was cold, and stiff, and a horrible colour. Still, we tried CPR as best we could - not very well, it must be said, and the whole experience has certainly convinced me that first aid training is a must for everyone, because of all the people in the hotel, no-one knew how to do it properly, and you do hear of these miracle stories where people get revived after being clinically dead.

In this case, though, it wouldn't have made any difference. Eventually, the ambulance arrived, and the ambulance guys refused to take him, saying that they couldn't do anything without a doctor's verdict - at first, it appeared to be heartless stickling for bureaucracy, but in retrospect, I guess they knew that he was dead, and that they couldn't take a dead body to hospital. Anyway, I dashed off to Nasir's place to fetch a doctor (there's an Australian doctor who lives across the road), who came and eventually confirmed what I think everyone already knew but didn't want to admit to his friends. Apparently he'd died in the night - the doctor thought that he might have overdosed on something, although I guess we'll never really know.

The rest of the morning was spent with the police, the ambulance, the hotel owner, etc. The worst part of it all was seeing his friends so distraught, and thinking of his parents etc - after all, he was only 28, and was apparently on the trip of a lifetime, a motorcycle journey from Britain down to India. The rest of the day passed in a bit of a daze - you always wonder quite how you'd react in such a situation, but you never really know until it happens. It's not an experience I'd care to repeat in a hurry.

Without meaning to get too "smell the flowers" about it, it does focus your mind on living your life, as one morning you might just not wake up. A sobering conclusion to a good week.

From the ridiculous to the sublime...

...and back again. It's been quite a few days here.

Reading over my my last post, I realised that I got carried away with political ramblings and forgot to narrate the story of our trip back to Mumbai. It was quite a trek, to say the least. The train from Varanasi to Mumbai was supposed to take about 24-26 hours, but when it took us 6 hours to get from Varanasi to Allahabad (all of 120km away), we sensed that we might be in for a marathon. The full scale of what awaited didn't really hit us, though, until we waited for an hour at Allahabad (for nothing in particular, it seemed), and then started going backwards toward Varanasi.

Thankfully, darkness soon rescued us from looking out the window and seeing how slowly we were going. The next morning, though, we woke to the cheery news that we were running at least 6 hours late, and that since we were so late, we'd been bumped down to the bottom of the train scheduling totem pole, meaning that we had to sit and wait at every other station so that we didn't disrupt everyone else's schedules. Yay. All in all, it took us just over 33 hours to get to Mumbai - and even then we didn't get to the station we'd paid for, as the train got about halfway into the city and gave up. Not even Connex was quite that bad.

Still, the trip was worth it - it's nice to be back here, and we've been hanging out with a good bunch of people. Last night we had dinner at Leopold's with Nasir, Gregory Roberts (of Shantaram fame), Greg's literary agent Joe (a lovely chap), and a European princess of some description (didn't say much, eventually went shopping). Greg's clearly incredibly busy, so I was impressed (and rather flattered, to be honest) that he took the time to be so accomodating and spend time with us. As anyone who's read Shantaram would no doubt expect, he's a truly fascinating fellow - wise, genuine, generous and also really good fun to talk to, as was his agent (the princess was regally silent most of the time).

It was interesting watching how people reacted to him, too - he's a recognisable figure with his long hair and imposing :) physique, and in any case half the people in Leopold's were probably there because they read about it in Shantaram, so it didn't take long for the autograph requests etc to start. I've never spent time with yer genuine celebrity, and yeah, it's interesting how people react: lots of whispers and furtive pointing ("That's him! That's the author!"), a shy approach, giggles, then a hasty retreat. Of course, I'd probably do exactly the same if I met Iggy Pop or Richey Edwards, but still... Greg handled it all with characteristic grace and generosity, happily signing a pile of books and chatting to people for a lot longer than a lot of 'stars' would do, but it must be difficult to deal with. I don't envy him in that respect, and I left glad that it's not me who has to contend with that sort of attention every day.

Anyway, we spent today conquering Mumbai's public transport system in order to take a trip to the Nehru centre, which is home to the fantastic Nehru planetarium - we spent the afternoon watching a universe-trotting show spanning everything from the birth of the universe to the formation of the solar system and its eventual fate. I felt like I was about 10 years old again, gawping happily at sweeping computer-generated panoramas of stars, planets, galaxies, the works.

And now, after all that, we're composing a letter to Centrelink arguing about some money they want to extort from Leila. From Europrincesses and the international literati to New Start... well, life's never dull. Til next time....

Politics

Sitting this morning in Basilico, Mumbai's premier Italian restaurant and only the second place we've found in India where you can get a really good coffee, I read in the "International" section of The Times of India that George Bush's pre-State of the Union address approval rating is the lowest for a serving president since Nixon was caught authorising a burgulary.

With the degree of incompetence the Bush administration has demonstrated in both domestic and foreign policy, of course, this is hardly surprising. But the point I want to make is how distant and irrelevant the travails of the US president are when viewed from a country like India. In Australia, such news is important - it might not have a direct impact upon our lives, but we're a prominent ally of the US, and its English-speaking democracy is similar enough to our own for us to feel a certain cultural camaraderie with the US, even if we don't actually like it or its government. So whether or not we approve of what the US is up to, what it's up to matters to us.

To a significant proportion of the rest of the world, though, the US is appearing increasingly to be a busted flush. It's still an important player in the affairs of world politics, but there's a real sense that power is shifting. From this distance, the US looks faintly ridiculous, like a dishevelled pisshead at a dinner party, still ranting and raving at a table that's looking to slowly and discreetly excuse itself from the room.

Much of this is to do with the Bush adminstration, of course. In Australia, there's still a debate about whether the invasion of Iraq was a morally or legally justifiable venture. That debate seems to be well and truly over in the rest of the world, if it ever really got going. Whether left- or right-wing, all the Indian papers are unanimous in their opinion on Iraq - it's seen as an ill-conceived and illegal imperialist crusade, and the consensus seems to be that the current situation is America's comeuppance. And this in a country that's ostensibly an American ally - I can only imagine what the papers in Lahore, or Dubai, or Marrakesh have to say.

More interestingly, though, no-one seems to care a lot. Sure, there's an empathy with the suffering of the unfortunate Iraqis who are innocent victims of the whole fiasco, but that's as far as it goes. But that's it. On the whole, India is more interested in its own status as an emergent power. Its economy is booming - growth is high, and in terms of per capita GDP, the economy is expected to grow fourfold by 2020. Sure, GDP isn't necessarily the best indicator of prosperity, but still, such growth would put India right up there with China as an economic power, and both countries will be much larger economies than the US.

Even now, the US's old economic might is certainly not what it was. It only really retains superiority in military terms, but even this isn't nearly as much use as it might appear. I'm reminded of the episode of Yes Prime Minister, where Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker are discussing the use of the nuclear deterrent. Hacker is adamant that he would use nuclear weapons, but only as a last resort. Sir Humphrey produces a number of increasingly dire scenarios, asking each time whether Hacker would break out the nukes - in each case, the answer is no. It eventually turns out that he'd never dare to use them, a fact that Humphrey seizes on gleefully: "So what is the last resort, Piccadilly? Botford Gap Service Station? The Reform Club?"

Even better is the following bit of dialogue:

Jim: It's a bluff, I probably wouldn't use it.
Sir Humphrey: Yes but they don't know that you probably wouldn't.
Jim: They probably do.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know you probably wouldn't but they can't be certain.
Jim: They probably, certainly know that I probably wouldn't.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they're probably certain you know you probably wouldn't they don't certainly know that although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would.
Jim: What?

As usual, the show was spot on (has there ever been a better politcal satire?)

The point is, of course, that overwhelming military superiority is only overwhelming if you never actually use it. When you do actually resort to force, you often find that your advantage isn't quite what it seems (Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam etc etc) - especially if your electorate isn't particuarly enamoured of its citizens dying in large numbers. And anyway, as the collapse of the Soviet Union showed, all the weapons in the world aren't a lot of use if the enemy is within - you can't nuke a failing economy. At present, the US's economy is built on a frozen lake of debt and the social inequity that Bush's favour-the-rich brand of capitalism has created. It can't go on this way indefinitely, so for all that India is hardly a shining example of social justice and economic benefits for all, perhaps it's still correct to be viewing the US increasingly as yesterday's news.

Time will tell, of course, but it's interesting to see things from a perspective other that the North American / British / Australian one.

More photos!

Back in Mumbai, so it seems like a good time to post the remainder of the photos from our first stay here, nearly two months ago. Still trying to extricate newer photos from the CD that they're stored on, and there are a shitload more still on the camera, but in the meantime...

A boat on Mumbai harbour, seen from Haji Ali's mosque (see below).

Haji Ali's mosque at sunset. The eponymous Haji Ali was apparently a Muslim saint who died en route to Mecca. His body was washed ashore on a breakwater, and the mosque was built there in his honour. At high tide, the narrow little path that connects the mosque to the mainland is completely submerged in the sea, and for the rest of the time it's nearly submerged under a flood of people. Apparently the mosque is one of the four holy sites that is said to protect Mumbai from flooding - with the globe heating at the rate it is, they'll certainly have their work cut out.

Another view of the mosque, along with people on the rocks. This is on the opposite side to the path, so behind the photographer, there's only the sea. It's a very peaceful place to spend time, and attracts all sorts of people - mainly Muslims, but also Hindus, Sikhs, gangsters and the occasional interested tourist.

More local kids from Nasir's lane. The minute they see the camera, they're lining up to have their photo taken!
Oops - anyone who's been to Mumbai could tell you that this is in fact the unfeasibly palatial Taj Hotel, not Victoria Terminus as I said at first.

Another view of the breakwater from Haji Ali's mosque.

Kids selling fish on the path to the mosque. No, I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.

Me looking respectable. I look even more clean-cut now, with my specs and side-parting. I'm undertaking a one-man crusade to popularise the nerd look. It's a lonely undertaking.

Lucky last - another portrait of yet more photogenic Indian children!

People-watching

Quiet times here. Still in Varanasi, which has proven a very pleasant and interesting place to hang out. We're still here for several reasons - mostly because we like it, but also because we've been uncertain of our next move until today. I've discussed Varanasi a little in my last post, so I won't go on about it too much here, but it's been pointed out that I've tended to focus on places in this blog at the expense of people (a fair point - there are so many new places and things to see that it's easy to overlook the people who populate said places), so I want to write a little about that aspect of this town.

In general, India is a fantastic place for people-watching. This is in part due to the fact that there are *so* many people here - there are no quiet places, really. Any street you walk down will be filled with an assortment of people going about their business - children going to school, various hawkers selling an assortment of things useful and useless, businessmen, beggars, monks, and average people just hanging out. There seems to be a lot of hanging out done in India, incidentally - no-one's ever in a hurry to do anything much, and people are happy to spend hours on end mooching about drinking chai, chatting to their friends, etc. So in general, there are always interesting people to look at and talk to.

Having said that, Varanasi excels as a people-watching venue, especially down on the banks of the Ganges. Apart from the hordes of people having their ritual dip or washing their clothes, there's every walk of life hanging around down there. The nice thing about it is how no-one takes any notice of anything anyone else is doing - if there are people pissing in a corner, or playing cricket in the middle of the road, or collecting the cowshit, or whatever, no-one else minds in the least. The unfazedness of the Indians with just about everything continues to amaze, amuse and humble me.

The only people who rather impinge on this, to be honest, are our fellow travellers. We've certainly met plenty of locals, who've been almost exclusively lovely (even the ones who are robbing you blind are unfailingly polite about it). Westerners, by contrast, are an unfriendly bunch in general - there's none of the camaraderie that I've encountered elsewhere. There are, of course, exceptions to this - we've made some lovely acquaintances thus far, some of whom are hopefully reading this - but such people aside, Westerners can be an embarrassing lot.

It never ceases to amaze me how people can rabbit on about how meditating on Om has awakened them to the universal consciousness and the fact that we're all one, maaan, and the next minute bitch and moan about how a rickshaw-wallah has cheated them out of 10 rupees. I'm not exaggerating, by the way - just last night at dinner, we listened in awe to three British girls spitting invective about how a chai-wallah had charged them 10 rupees instead of 3 for a cup of tea (that's 10 pence versus 3 for the Brits):

Brit A - They're just nasty, sad little people for doing that.
Brit B - I just don't understand it. How can they look at themselves in the mirror?
Brit C - Don't worry, it's all karma, y'know? We're all one, so it'll come back to them.
Brit B - Absolutely. Anyway, I read this great book by Bill Bryson...

I bit my tongue and refrained from suggesting that 7 rupees is the square-root of fuck-all to them, but a vaguely relevant sum of money in a country where the poorest get by on all of 50 rupees a day. Getting a cup of tea for 10p is still a decent deal in my book. And if they weren't such ghastly obnoxious bints, the chai-wallah mightn't have overcharged them. *sigh*

Anyway, that'll have to do for tonight. Last day in Varanasi tomorrow - after that we board a 30-hour train back to Mumbai in order to hook up with a friend of Leila's mother's who's only in town until the end of Jan.

Finally...

...some photos. This is a total pain in the arse to do, so these might have to do for a while - but I'll try to do one more post after this (Blogger only seems to want to upload them a few at a time). These are all from the time we spent in Mumbai, so they're from very early in our trip - we do have more recent ones, but the computer doesn't seem to like the CD that they're on.

Anyway, without further ado...


The photographer herself, captured in the mirror at the lovely Ascot Hotel


Me making a twat of myself at the first birthday party we attended


Colaba Causeway


A young chap in front of the gate they erected for the birthday party


A local girl poking her head up the stairway to Nasir's place


A couple of kids playing in the street outside Nasir's house

Religious strangeness

And the award for The Most Bizarre Expression of Religious Devotion goes to...

The sadhu who we saw in the paper the other day, who has not put his right hand down for 22 years. Yes, he's been sitting somewhere for the last 22 years with his right hand in the air. How does he sleep? How does he tie his shoelaces? Which hand does he wave if he catches sight of one of his mates? Who knows?

India is a strange, strange place.

Kite surfing

The latest leg of our trip has taken us away from Agra (thankfully) and via an interminable train journey to Varanasi, city of Shiva and one of Hinduism's holiest sites. After a false start on our first day here, when we endured a drawn-out battle with the local rickshaw drivers (which included Leila throwing a spectacularly impressive strop at one chastened autorickshaw-wallah) and ended up staying in a fairly shitful hotel close to the train station, we gathered up our things and dived deep into the labyrithine area around the riverbank.

This has proven to be an excellent move, as Varanasi's a really fascinating place. It's certainly the most palpably Indian and Hindu city we've been to thus far - religion seems to play a large part in virtually every aspect of life here. Along with the usual assortment of people, rickshaws and livestock, the narrow streets fairly groan under the weight of temples and shrines - everywhere you look there seems to be an idol of some description, or a congregation of chanting pilgrims.

The Ganges is everything you've probably heard - vast, beautiful and improbably filthy. This doesn't seem to deter the hordes of Indians who go down for a dip every morning, but I've not been game enough to go anywhere near it (although we did take a boat trip, which was a very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours). Along with people washing clothes, bathing, praying, etc etc, a couple of the ghats (quays, basically) are used for the ritual cremation of dead bodies. This is, well, quite a sight.

There are gigantic stacks of wood piled high against the walls, and fires burning all day and night. It's not uncommon to see bodies being carried down the street in funeral processions, and there's apparently an intricate hierarchy governing who can be burnt where and how - higher castes get burnt higher up the ghat, and there are different types of wood that can be used, depending on how much the relatives are prepared to shell out. In a typically Indian concession to free enterprise and necessity, there's also an electric crematorium, which is the budget option.

We've been loath to get to close to any of this - after all, a funeral is a funeral, and I wouldn't particuarly like any tourists crashing mine - but we were able to see from afar during our boat trip. Watching in fascination, it took a moment to realise that the round object dangling off the end of the pyre we were looking at was in fact the burning body's head. Wow. You just don't see that at Caulfield cemetery.

Burning bodies aside, our visit has also coincided with Kumbh Mela, a relgious festival that happens once every six years. Apparently the "real" Kumbh Mela actually only really happens every 12 years, but there's a "half" Kumbh held in the intervening sixth year, which is what's taking place this year. The festival also doesn't actually take place here - from what I can gather, it rotates between four locations, and this year's is being held in Allahabad (about 100km back up the Ganges, located where the Ganges and its similarly holy tributary the Varuna), but because Varanasi is so religiously significant, a heap of people still celebrate it here. The scale of it is certainly impressive - since this year's festival is the smaller one, just the 5 million pilgrims showed up in Allahabad. The mind boggles at how big the 12-year festival would be.

Anyway, we had a wander along the banks of the Ganges last night and happened across a heap of festival-related religious rituals, which seemed to involve ringing lots of bells and waving flaming braziers around. It's fascinating to watch, but also kinda frustrating because, as with many things in India, the exact significance of and motivation for the ceremony evaded us. Regardless, the thing that struck me was just how different the Hindu religion is to the terminally dull, pontificating, church-bound, declining Judeo-Christian religions of the West. The temples and ceremonies burst with colour and life, giving a real sense that this is a living, breathing religion that is hugely significant a massive number of people. Equally, though, there's a vaguely ominous, primal quality about it all that kinda unnerves me.

It's difficult to describe, and it may just reflect my ambivalence about religion, but I find it both admirable and disconcerting that religious ecstasy (in the most literal sense of the word - ie. the mind escaping the body) is such a... such a normal thing here. I'm all for liberation of the mind etc, but I find the complete surrender of control a foreign concept. Perhaps this is my loss. I don't know.

Anyway, I've been doing my best to read up about what's going on, but the intricacies of it all are hard to grasp. In any case, the celebration seems to involve two things: a) swimming in the Ganges, and b) flying kites.

It's b) that you notice the most. Everyone here seems to have a kite, or two, or three. It makes walking about something of a hazardous exercise - you're constantly trying to dodge near-invisible kite strings, and everyone seems to think it's a great joke if you get tangled up in one. I'm constantly impressed with the Indians' ability to take nearly everything in good humour, but to my enduring shame I'm not always able to emulate it. Still, I'm doing my best.

Until next time...

Taj fatigue

So, just under six weeks after arriving in India, we've finally made our way to Agra to see the famed Taj Mahal.

It was a strange experience. It's kinda like seeing the Mona Lisa in real life - you've seen so many photos etc that the real thing is... not anti-climactic, but perhaps shorn of the impact it might have had if you just wandered up having never seen it before. In any case, the Taj is rightly famed for its beauty, and the one thing that the photos don't capture is just how *huge* it is. It must be a good 30 metres high, a graceful sweep of gentle curves carved in translucent pearl-white marble and set in perfectly kept gardens.

But it's a strange place. It's almost *too* perfect. The icy beauty has nothing to do with life or nature - it's as coldly perfect and distant as the night sky. After all, at the end of the day it's a tomb, and it's as much a monument to a king's pride and folly as it is to love and grief. The king in question - the Mughal emperor Shah Jehal - had 20,000 workers working on the bloody thing for 22 years, and his plan to build an identical monument in black marble across the river finally tipped the populace against him - his own son overthrew him and turfed him in prison at the Agra fort, where he whiled away his final years looking across the river at the edifice that ruined him.

The rest of the historical "sights" here are equally impressive, and equally strange. The fort, which we visited yesterday, feels as much like a mausoleum as the Taj does. It's full of buildings built in broadly the same era as the Taj, some in a similar white marble and some in red sandstone. Again, the craftsmanship is exquisite, but the whole thing feels vast, empty and lifeless. It's almost impossible to imagine that people might have once lived there. Walking through it, you feel only the weight of cold stone all around you. I found it amusingly ironic that the only living things that now inhabit this masterpiece of human construction are animals - monkeys, pigeons and the occasional miserable-looking dog.

Forts from which to fight their wars and tombs to house them when they're dead - these are the things that seem to preoccupy the minds of kings. A strange way to approach life.

As for the rest of Agra, well, even in the country of extremes that is India, Agra is a study in contrasts. Outside of the cold perfection of its historical monuments, the city is... well, it's a shithole, basically. It's by far the poorest city we've visited, the first place that I've seen kids with the swollen bellies that are a sure sign of malnutrition.

So I got to wondering. The Taj charges 750 rupees for admission. This equates to A$25 - not a small sum even in our terms, and a whopping great fee by Indian standards. The Fort charges another 300, and the rest of the monuments - of which there are plenty - charge upwards of 100 each. When you multiply this by the amount of handicam-clutching gimps who are bundled through the turnstiles each day, it means that a shitload of money is coming into Agra, all day, every day. And yet the roads are full of potholes, there are no jobs, the people are poor... only the cows and goats look happy.

It all begs the question of exactly where the money goes. Sure, some of it goes to paying the people who polish the marble, cut the grass, etc etc. But there must be a heap left over, and in a country as systematically corrupt as India, I don't have a lot of confidence that most of it isn't lining the pockets of various bureaucrats. It adds up to a sorry situation - a huge amount of money going to the upkeep of monuments that, for all their beauty, are cold, dead things, while outside, the living starve on the streets.

The economy here has been so skewed and stunted by the tourist dollar that it appears that there are few other ways to make a living than by reliance on the largesse of the West. No new industrial developments are allowed in Agra - they might besmirch the Taj - so unemployment is rampant, and apart from those who work for the tourist dollar, everyone appears to be dirt poor. For all that the Taj and the other monuments provide Agra with its lifeline, its sole raison d'etre, they also seem to hold it back. A strange Catch-22, really.

So all in all, I'll be glad to be out of here. Tomorrow we get on a train to Varanasi, just two more Westerners who've blown through and then left Agra to continue struggling with its magnificent marble millstone.

The Kashmiri vigilante posse

Christ, what a couple of days.

First, we got our MP3 players back. Yay. Of all the material things we own, they're pretty much the worst thing that could have been stolen - I spent the best part of a week burning pretty much every CD I own onto the computer so that we could have a heap of music to take away with us. This makes them pretty much irreplaceable, and thankfully, we still have them. But what a saga it was to get them back.

They were, as noted in my last post, stolen from our hotel room. What actually happened went something like this...

On returning to the hotel from the internet cafe, we unlocked our door and were rather taken aback to come face-to-carbuncular-face with someone in our room. We were, in fact, so taken aback that it took us a moment to react when he mumbled something about fixing the toilet and slipped past us up the stairs. It only took a second to realise what had happened - L's purse was lying open on the bed, and our MP3 players were gone - but that was long enough for the thieving fucker to leg it out of there.

I tried to chase him, but by the time I started he'd got far enough ahead to disappear. The small army of people who were around saw nothing - the highly trained guard dog was busy investigating the local tradesmen's lunches, and the tradesemen themselves were busy fending off the dog, so no-one noticed a dodgy-looking panic-stricken thief running past them. Wonderful.

On returning to the room, though, we found that our marvellously incompetent burgular had left a passport and a gold chain sitting in our room. Grabbing these, we went upstairs, reported the theft to reception, and got on the phone to begin our dealings with the masterpiece of bureaucratic incompetence and idleness that is the Indian police force.

It took a couple of hours for them to deign to come and investigate, and when they did, they advised us to report the items lost, as it'd be far too much trouble for all concerned to actually investigate the theft. Their moods brightened considerably, though, when we showed them the passport we'd found in the room:

"Oh yes sir, this is the thief. See, he is a Kashmiri and Muslim. Very bad people."

We expressed our doubts that *any* thief, no matter how stupid or desperate, would be idiotic enough to leave his own passport in a hotel room that he'd just burgled. There was also the small fact that the passport photo didn't look much like the chap we'd seen in the room. But no, we were assured, this is the thief, we will trace the passport and find him.

When the "thief" was found an hour later, he turned out to no thief at all, but rather John, the irate owner of a local jewelry shop. He was a lovely fellow, and after we confirmed to the police that no, of course this isn't the guy we saw, he explained that he'd left his shop open to go and have chai and play chess with his friends (apparently not an unusual course of action). Returning to the shop, he found that his passport and three gold chains were missing from his personal carrybag. Further confirming that the thief wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, the shopkeeper threw up his hands in bewilderment that the thief had robbed a jewelry shop without actually taking any jewelry - nothing was missing apart from the stuff from his bag, although the shop was fairly overflowing with expensive trinkets.

The police were completely thrown by all this, and explained that there was now basically no chance of getting our things back. Disheartened, we went off to the local cinema to watch the Borat movie (which was fucken hilarious, by the way). The police went back to the station to smoke more cigarettes. Behind the scene, however, the Kashmiri vigilante posse was swinging into action!

Thoroughly pissed off with having been robbed, John rounded up his mates and, armed with the description we'd given the police, went on the prowl. It was an impressively staged operation (in stark contrast to the police "investigation") - once the description was circulated, one of the local shopkeepers said that he'd seen a guy fitting the criteria hanging around and acting suspiciously. The next morning, the posse watched the bus station, and sure enough, they spotted the guy. When they approached him, he legged it... and the posse had their man. As one expained to us proudly, "We chased him and caught him, and actually sir, I beat him quite a lot!"

All this happened while we were arguing the toss over compensation with the hotel, who were imploring us not to get the police involved as "they are so stupid and corrupt". Just as we were coming to an impasse, one of the Kashmiris arrived to summon us to the police station. I jumped on the back of his Royal Enfield - aaaaahhh, what a bike - and off we went.

We arrived at the station to find the police drinking chai and John the shopkeeper interrogating the suspect. One look confirmed that, yes, it was definitely the thief. At this point, the police swung into action doing the one thing they seemed to do well - namely, hitting the suspect. It was quite a disconcerting and squirm-inducing experience - they slapped him, pulled his hair, shouted at him... I felt about 50% sorry for him and 50% disconcertingly pleased that he was getting what was coming to him. The percentages shifted as it carried on, though, and I was glad when they finally loaded him into the back of a car and went off to his hotel room to recover the goods.

As with everything in India, this took *forever*, so we hung around drinking chai with John the shopkeeper and his mates. They explained that this sort of thing had never happened before in McLeod Ganj, that they weren't going to stand for it, that the police wouldn't do anything, and that they had thus decided to do something themselves. All very impressive. Eventually, the police returned with a nice big stash of stolen goods - traveller's cheques, credit cards, jewels, and yes, our MP3 players. It turned out that the thief had been at it for *five months*, operating out of a hotel room, and that nothing had been done about it, despite several other Westerners and shops being burgled - one Canadian lady had lost $2650 of traveller's cheques, all of which turned up in the thief's hotel room.

Anxious to wash our hands of the entire affair, we stuffed our stereos in our pockets and walked back to town. We dropped in to see John today, and found that unsurprisingly, this is going to run and run - the police have had him back twice already to sign different statements, the point of which appears to have been to cover their own arses as well as possible. Surprise, surprise.

All part of the experience, I guess, but we'll never, ever, ever be leaving anything valuable in our hotel room again. And we'll be having as little to do with the police as possible.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

...and while I was eulogising Dharamsala, someone was breaking into our hotel to steal our MP3 players. A little too ironic, and yeah I really do think.

*chunders*

The example of Dharamsala

Picking up my copy of the Times of India this morning, I was rather taken aback to see the nasty leering visage of one John Winston Howard staring back at me from the top left corner of the front page. Apparently readers of the esteemed literary institution that is FHM magazine have voted him "Most Embarrassing Australian". The fact that this makes the front page in India goes to show that news is very slow over the new year, but still, it got me thinking about patriotic embarrassment.

I guess that FHM readers are embarrassed by Johnny because he's short, bald, talks like a helium-laden homunculus and isn't particularly good at cricket - I can't imagine that the finer points of economic and immigration policy are of much interest to participants in a poll that also included separate votes on "Best Boobs (Real)" and "Best Boobs (Fake)", along with polling on "King Hit of the Year".

FHM readers aside, though, what is it that really gets our goat about Johnny? Is it the breathtakingly cynical doublespeak adoption of terms like "mateship" and "a fair go" in a political discourse of scaremongering and selfishness? Is it the even more cynical pork-barrelling of budget funds to buy off the electorate in election years? Is it... ah fuck, I won't get started, not at 30 rupees an hour. But suffice it to say that what I've seen here in Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj is enough to make me cringe at the mere thought of the vile little fucker who runs our country.

Dharamsala is, as I've mentioned before, the home to the Dalai Lama - he ended up here after a week-long trek through the Himalayas after China thoughtfully liberated Tibet from the clutches of autonomy and freedom by invading it. More appositely, it's also a permanent home to around 10,0000 Tibetan refugees who've fled here since 1959. There are plenty more such refugees outside of Dharamsala - I believe some 80,000 are scattered throughout northern India, although I'm not enturely sure of the exact numbers.

Anyway, the point is that when the Dalai Lama arrived in 1959, Jawaharlal Nehru effectively offered him the chance to set up camp in Dharamsala and make a home for himself and his people. Since then, India has welcomed Tibetan refugees with open arms - I've seen virtually no resentment anywhere of the Tibetans, and the fact that Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj are more Tibetan than Indian these days doesn't seem to bother anyone.

So, yes, you can probably see where this is going. Compare and contrast this with the Howard government's appalling treatment of refugees, and it's yet another illustration of just how selfish, small-minded and downright immoral our government is. India, a nation of nearly 1 billion people, home to a large proportion of the world's poor, unable to feed its own people, is more than happy to welcome refugees from an oppressed nation. Australia, a nation of 20 million people, among the most affluent in the world, throws a handful of people into indefinite detention for having the gall to jump a non-existent "queue".

Sure, the Indian Government's motives may not be entirely altruistic - supporting the Tibetans is probably a nice way to step on China's toes. But still, no-one can argue with the results, and no Australian who visits Dharamsala and sees the thriving Tibetan community here should feel anything but ashamed of the fact that Howard still holds sway in Canberra. Myself included.

The inverse proportionality theory of economics

Self-discovery in India is a well-worn cliche, but I think I've gone one better and unexpectedly discovered an entire new theory of economics, one that turns the old axiom "You get what you pay for" completely on its head. I'm calling it the inverse proportionality theory, and it can be summarised as follows: The less you pay for something, the better it is. I'm basing this entirely on my observation of two things: chai and crappers.

First, chai. Buy chai in a restaurant, and it'll cost you upwards of 10-15 rupees and will invariably be vile. Over the course of the past month, I've discovered that you only buy chai in one place: on the street. A wander down the streets of any Indian city will soon bring you to a dhaba, a little establishment which is roughly equivalent to a cafe. At a dhaba, chai will generally cost you 5 rupees, and it'll be good. Not amazing, but good. But you can do better.

Continue your walk, and you might come across a chai-wallah cooking up chai on a gas stove in a pot that looks like it hasn't been cleaned for days. This chai will cost only 4 rupees, and it'll be better than anything you'll get in a dhaba. And if you're very lucky, you may stumble across the holy grail of chai, the sweet cardamon and ginger-laden nectar that is the Three Rupee Chai. I'm yet to come across a 2-rupee chai, but I'm sure that if I do, it'll be life-changingly good. The search continues.

On a less pleasant note, the same pattern applies for toilets. My first encounter with an Indian public toilet was at the Diu bus station - having heard all sorts of horror stories about the general revoltingness of such toilets, I only went out of sheer necessity (ie. the remnants of Delhi belly and an imminent 10-hour bus ride)... but I was pleasantly surprised. I was charged 1 rupee by the attendant, and the toilet was spotless. Since then, any toilet that's charged me 1 rupee has been similarly sparkling. 2-rupee toilets have been clean but stinky, and 3-rupee ones rather unpleasant.

And yesterday, my theory was proven conclusively! I had the unfortunate experience of stumbling across the festering cesspit that was the 4-rupee toilet. Never again. Yech. It should be noted here that anything that comes for free doesn't fit the mould. Toilets that you don't have to pay for at all are indescribably squalid and should be avoided at all costs. In summary, then: Pay as little as possible, but pay something.

Of course, there are still troubling teething problems with the theory (namely, that it doesn't really work for anything except tea and toilets - although expensive food here has generally been disappointing), but I'm confident that this can be explained by the fact that I simply haven't found cheap enough examples of the items for which the theory doesn't seem to hold. In the meantime, I urge everyone to try it out! Be a raving cheapskate! And be *proud*, goddammit!