Where we are

"This one a long time have I watched. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm. What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh! Excitement. Heh! A Jedi craves not these things. (turning to Luke) You are reckless!"

- Yoda, from The Empire Strikes Back

Re-reading my posts here, I've noticed that I've been doing a lot of writing about who we're seeing, what we're doing, what we're planning to do, what the future holds etc, and not a lot about where we actually are. So I thought I'd write a bit about the place we're staying, our home for the last few weeks and the forseeable future.

So we're staying in a place called the Sea Shore Hotel. It's on the top floor of a four-storey building that also houses two other guest houses, one of which is the India Guest House (of Shantaram fame, although we didn't realise this when we first lobbed at the Sea Shore). The building's on a little side street off the main road that runs along part of Colaba's foreshore. At the other end is the palatial Taj Hotel - the standard of accomodation kinda decreases as you head along the road. You get to the Sea Shore by climbing four flights of ball-breakingly steep stairs. The stairwell is no oil painting - paan-stained walls, stairs that could do with a good sweep, and a cobwebbed hotch-potch powerboard that makes you think that Indian electricians must have a hell of a time not to get themselves killed.

Still, for all that it's not much to look at, the building's proven a lovely place to stay, mainly because of the people who inhabit it. On the way up the stairs, you first pass Indian Cottage Industries Emporium, some sort of trinket showroom that occupies the first floor. It's staffed by the amusingly-named Ganesh and Ganesh - Ganesh 1 is the doorman, a lovely softly-spoken chap who we've befriended of late - I do my best to chat to him in my rudimentary Hindi, and he's always keen to know what we're up to and how we are. He was fascinated with my MP3 player - "4,000 songs!? How can this be?" - and I found it kinda humbling that it probably cost several months' worth of his salary. Ganesh 2 hangs out inside - I've not chatted to him much as yet, but Leila seems to have made friends with him.

The second floor houses the Sea Palace hotel - a palace it most certainly isn't, but the staff are friendly and always give us a happy "Namaste" as we struggle up the stairs. The India Guest House, on the third floor, is owned by the same people that own our hotel, so the staff often wander upstairs to hang out. Most of them are Nepalese, although they also speak Hindi - I guess they come here to work and send the money home to their families. It's a hard slog - they live at the hotel, and rarely seem to leave it.

And then there's the Sea Shore. Run by a Tamil chap called Mr Kumar, it's got 16 rooms, of which we occupy #16. It's the best room in the place - all the others are along a corridor and separated by thin partitions, but #16 is down a little flight of stairs and thus is a lot quieter and more private. It's a decent size room, with a desk, TV, air-conditioner, and a big window which gives us a scenic view of the building below, where they seem to be adding another floor. Incidentally, Indian construction methods are a thing to behold - whenever they run out of space, they just whack another floor on top of the building. It probably contravenes every building safety regulation you can think of, but it seems to work (well, we've not seen any that have collapsed yet, anyway).

Anyway, we pay 600 rupees a night - it should be 700, but Mr Kumar seems to like us (especially after all the hullaballoo about the poor guy who died there) and thus gives us a discount. He's a lovely chap - he was telling us the other day that he's been working there 26 years, and only gets home to see his family in Kerala during the monsoon. The rest of the time he lives and works at the Sea Shore. As he's the manager, he at least gets a bed of his own - the rest of the staff, along with the India Guest House crew, sleep either in a little hidey-hole they've set up for themselves in the attic, or in reception (on the desk, or on the floor).

Apart from Kumar, the staff consists of two stern young Nepalese boys and one older Indian dude. The boys are great. They clean, cook, mop, scrub, do laundy, the works - when they're not doing that, they're wandering around in their underwear or playing cards. One sports a disproportionately deep voice and the spectacular moniker of Rampasampandu - unfortunately, their English is of a similar standard to my Hindi, so in either language, our conversation with them is exactly the same, day after day:

Boy: Hello!
Tom / Leila: Hi!
Boy: How are you?
T / L: Fine thanks. How are you?
Boy: I am fine, thank you. (gives a big smile and scurries off to do some work)

There are three shared bathrooms, none of which have hot showers - we wash with buckets of water, which are sometimes hot and sometimes not. Still, given that it's so hot and humid here, a cold shower is often a relief. The TV has no cable channels, so we never watch it - we spend most of our time in the room sitting next to the air conditioner, reading or just hanging out.

So, that's our life at the Sea Shore hotel - us and Mr Kumar, the Nepalese boys, the shared bathrooms, the construction site and Ganesh and Ganesh. Outside, there's the old dude who sells hot peanuts for 5 rupees a go, the even older dude who sits hanging out on his verandah watching the world go by and always gives us a wave when we go by, the cobbler who always remembers our name, the begging gangs who know us well enough by now not to bother, the restaurant that sells us yoghurt for breakfast, the old dog who hangs out in the stairwell to escape the heat, the street dog with a swollen eye who mopes about looking sorry for himself, the local cats... It's a whole little scene, and for now, it feels like home. A good home. It's amazing how quickly you can adapt to a situation. And how much you can get out of it.

Other thoughts since I last wrote:

Great India moment of the week: spotting the latest innovation in luxury budget transport - a cycle rickshaw with a portable DVD player installed in the back.

Amusing India fact of the week: the words for "tomorrow" and "yesterday" in Hindi are one and the same. This probably explains a great deal about the Indian attitude to time.

Oh, and a special mention for the Roger Waters concert - it was great. Explosions, projections, and a giant inflatable pig... everything you could ask for from stadium rock! He played the whole of The Dark Side of the Moon from start to finish, along with plenty of other Pink Floyd classics (including heaps of songs from The Wall , which remains my favourite Floyd album). His solo stuff was a bit hit and miss, but I guess you can afford the man his indulgence. Also amusing was his guitarist, who is basically a Xerox of Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd - same guitar tone, same solos, same effects, same voice... everything. Presumably he does everything Gilmour did, except argue. Old rock stars just get more cantankerous and controlling as they get older, it seems.

Fish curry, Roger Waters, and the meaning of life

Having read my last post, Leila suggested that I might like to counterbalance my anti-hippie tirade with some positive thoughts on our time in Goa. It's a fair point, so here are a few kind words about the place. First, the food. Being as it's on the coast, Goan cuisine is heavily seafood-based, and the seafood is fantastic. I gorged myself on fish for the week that we were there - at least one meal a day, occasionally two, to the extent that I think my body is now experiencing fish withdrawal. Fish curry is possibly the meaning of life (on which, more will follow). Goa is home to the vindaloo, which is nothing like the thickened ultra-hot sludge that goes by the same name in Western restaurants - instead, it's a spicy but subtle taste sensation that just about made the whole trip worthwhile on its own. The simpler dishes of fresh grilled fish were equally good - it's not every day you can get a big fat tuna steak or whole grilled kingfish for about $3-$5, is it?

Apart from the food, the beaches were also a pleasant surpries - not quite the idyllic palm-fringed tropical retreats we'd envisaged, but still good enough for plenty of swimming and sunbaking. Catching a wave is one of the great simple pleasures in life, and I kinda didn't realise how much I'd missed it until I got into the water. Bombay's like Melbourne - great city, terrible beaches - so it's a shame we couldn't just cram the Goan beaches into our backpacks and bring em back here. Still, them's the breaks. And at least there are no hippies here...

Anyway, we're back in Bombay, and the last week has been suitably crazy. We came back to town in order to catch a talk that Greg Roberts was doing at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival (Kala Ghoda is kinda the place for art in South Bombay, with heaps of galleries, performance spaces, etc). The talk was excellent - lots of thought-provoking stuff about God, the meaning of life, and other weighty matters. Senor Roberts has plenty of interesting theories about such things - they get a fairly decent run-through in Shantaram itself, and there's also an overview at his sadly out-of-date website www.shantaram.com. It's thought-provoking stuff - not that I agree with all of it, but I always have a lot of respect for anyone with the balls and brains to tackle such questions in the first place.

Since then, the week has been a bit of a blur - we're trying to get hold of some work to stay here, so we've been running around making phone calls, meeting people, and basically trying to insert our fingers into as many pies as possible. It's been a bit of a slog, but things are looking reasonably positive. We might land some work with a local music magazine (have a look at www.raveindia.com) - we met the editor/owner at dinner a couple of weeks back, and we hooked up with him a couple of nights back to discuss what we might be able to do for the magazine. By the end of an incredibly heavy evening, we'd agreed to regular work and an interview and photo shoot with Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame) about his upcoming gig in Mumbai this week - unfortunately the Roger Waters stuff has now all fallen through, which only goes to show that the music industry is the same wherever you go. Still, hopefully we'll be able to get some more stuff to do - only time will tell what'll happen, I guess. In any case, we get to go and see Big Roge play tomorrow night - he's apparently playing The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety, so it should be a good show.

Apart from all this, we also visited Chor Bazaar this afternoon - a crazy place that seems to be Mumbai's answer to the op-shop. The name translates as "Thieves' Bazaar" - looking at the stalls, you start to wonder how there's anything left in Mumbai that hasn't been stolen. You can get everything there. You want tools? Or clothes? Or circuit boards? Or a 2-stroke engine? Maybe a car stereo? Just some food? An antique gramophone? Or maybe you just have a hankering for strange unidentifiable pieces of machinery? This is the place to be. It's like Dave's Boutique in Smith Street, but spread out over the space of about 6 city blocks. It's crazy.

About the one thing we couldn't find there was a decent computer, so we've shelled out for one from EBay. The mere thought of buying from Ebay India kinda fills me with dread, but we need a computer if we're going to work, so $1000 later it's apparently on its way from Delhi via courier. We'll see what happens.

Anyway, if nothing else, life's never dull. The curious duality of hanging out with publishers and models then going home to handwash our underwear persists - all terribly bohemian, I know, but still, it makes for good stories. Hopefully by the time the weekend's over, there'll be some more to post here. Till then...

More photos

Here are some more photos from our travels - these are all hi-res film scans, from the 3 rolls that we've got processed so far (chosen at random from a stash of about 15-20, so there are plenty more to come). They've turned out really well - Leila is a talented girl!

A nice example of the Raj's take on Tudor (?) architecture - one of the main administrative buildings in Shimla.

A blue-themed portrait of some local kids in Diu.

My personal favourite from this bunch - have you ever seen a more regal-looking cow??

A selection from the spice markets in Ahmedabad.

A squirrel! The squirrels here are really pretty, as this picture shows. They're tiny, too - much smaller than the ones you get in Europe. This little fellow is at most 10cm long from nose to tail - the bricks give an idea of how small he is.

Turn on, tune in, slowly lose the will to live

I've spent the last few days trying to write a blog entry that does a good job of summarising my ambivalence at spending time in Goa. We've been here for the last few days, and it's been a while since I've been to a place that has evoked such conflicting emotions. The good aspects of Goa are great: some of the best food I've had anywhere; some very pleasant beaches; a somewhat milder climate than the relentless heat and humidity of Mumbai. The bad aspects actually consist only of one thing: the people.

For those who don't know, Goa is the centre of the hippie universe. And try as I might to like them, I just fucken can't stand hippies. We're in a place called Arambol, where the restaurants are all called things like "Jewels of Buddha" or "World Peace Cafe" - all with menus serving as much Israeli and German food as Indian - where every street stall sells Che Guevara t-shirts or tie-died shiznit decorated with "Om" symbols (almost certainly the only bit of Hindi any of the customers can read, no matter how long they've been in India) and you have to look hard to see an Indian face - apart from the Indians who make a living selling coconuts or jewelry to the tourists on the beach, everyone looks like they've walked straight out of a Xavier Rudd cover band.

So, as I've been sitting on the beach, I've had plenty of time to ponder. First, what in God's name am I doing here? (An easy one to answer - the beaches are nice, and we fancied a quick break from Mumbai). Second, just why is it that these people shit me so much? What is it about hippies that really makes my skin crawl?

I've thought long and hard. After all, there are plenty of things to like about hippies - they might like their drugs, but they don't get pissed and annoy people; they generally keep themselves to themselves; they don't start wars. Surely they're not such a bad bunch?

Argh, but I just can't do it. It's all just so bloody humourless and self-indulgent. And it's so fake. Spend any time here and watch how the hippies treat the Indians - like shit, basically - and wonder exactly how concerned with universal love and happiness they are these days. Just like any other sub-culture - punk, hip-hop, whatever - hippiedom has been reassimilated into the mainstream and sold back to the kidz as a package deal. Goa is its Mecca and the summation of its faults.

If the original hippie idea was about anything, it was about individuality - the freedom to choose not to follow mainstream ideology, to absent yourself from a society that wanted you to fight and die in Vietnam, to choose self-sufficiency over wage-slavery, to make your own way in the world. All very well - a bit self-important, perhaps, but certainly based on noble ideas.

What, then, to make of Arambol, where everyone looks the same, acts the same, does the same drugs, listens to the same music? Sure, they like to have a very nice technoparty on the beach, maybe smoke something, have a very nice time, ha ha ha - but they're a clique. A club. A club that regards outsiders with suspicion. And those who've joined the club have bought into a mass-produced version of rebellion and counter-culture, one that has as much in common with its founding ideals as Sum 41 or any of today's other cartoon punk bands do with The Clash.

The Israeli kids who've come out of their two years of national service to grow dreadlocks and seek some sort of spiritual epiphany on an Indian beach - the fat middle-aged French couples with Om tattoos and Hindu tonsures - the Germans who've left their desk jobs to come here - the gap-year Brits who are spending their one year seeing the world before going back to be accountants... all of them, all they're doing is trading one uniform for another. Take one step away from the prevailing orthodoxy - for example, wear a shirt with a collar on the beach - and you're regarded with suspicion. It's a deeply depressing spectacle, to be honest.

In his book Immortality, Milan Kundera has some interesting things to say about individuality. His theory is that in a world where there are only a finite number of traits - likes, dislikes, mannerisms, etc - by which people can distinguish themselves from one another, there are two ways in which people attempt to generate individuality. He calls these the addition method and subtraction method.

The subtraction method essentially involves shedding aspects of one's life to distinguish one from others. But it's the addition method that's more relevant here. It involves collecting aspects of personality that distinguish you from others - a like for cats, or cold showers, or dope and dreadlocks - then proclaiming these to the world. I'm a hippie! I'm different to everyone else!

I might quote Kundera directly here, because I think this passage nails it perfectly: "[Such people] use addition to create a unique and inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for these added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness, so painfully gained, begins to disappear."

And that, people, is Goa summarised. A wise man once advised me that if you look carefully at anyone you dislike, you'll find an aspect of yourself that you dislike in them. So I've been doing a fair bit of self-appraisal as I watch the spectacle unfold. And I've learnt something here. I think Kundera's addition method is something common to a lot of us. So if you're going to be yourself, just bloody do it. Don't shout about it. Don't proselytise. And don't go to Goa for the answers.

Now, off to find some fish curry for dinner.

Extras

It seems to be part of the Bombay tourist experience to spend a day as a Bollywood extra, so when a guy grabbed us on the street the other day and offered us 500 rupees to record some voiceovers for an upcoming film, we decided to give it a go. I'm glad we did, as it proved a rewarding experience, albeit a kinda bizarre one.

Turning up at the cafe where we'd arranged to meet, we were introduced to two other couples (like us, backpackers who'd said yes out for the sake of curiosity and a bit of extra cash), and herded into a train to the suburb of Andheri. Andheri is basically the middle of middle-class nowhere - a commuter-belt enclave of apartment blocks, malls, fast-food restaurants and gigantic movie studios. After being delayed by the need to find some food, along with some arsing about with one of the rickshaw drivers - the poor chap drove around in circles for half an hour until he was forced to admit that he had no idea where he was going, at which point he threw his keys onto ground and burst into tears, refusing to go any further - we eventually arrived at an the voiceover studio, to be greeted by the ghastly sub-Chapel Street harridan who ran the place.

Anyone who's seen an episode of Ricky Gervais's Extras will probably be able to enivsage the scene - the bottom rung of the film industry, populated by the jaded oldies and the desperately-scrambling youngsters. As the gatekeeper of this particular part of Bollywood, the studio woman was a Gervais-esque enough character - the worst type of petit-bourgeois authoritarian, spending most of the day alternating between bossing us about and mewling obsequiously to the director. Even better, though, were the other voice actors: a selection of Bollywood bottom-feeders, all c-grade "actors" from England and America, who greeted us with a quite astonishingly overblown display of name-dropping and haw-hawing, all done to make clear that they were professionals, not amateurs like us.

The desperate tawdriness of it all was fantastic. Still, it turned out that the film we were contributing to was quite big business - a Bollywood/English crossover production, set in London and starring Amitabh Bachchan (kinda the biggest of the big when it comes to Indian cinema) as a ludicrously-ponytailed and temperamental Indian chef who sets up a swanky Indian restaurant in Regent St. They seemed to be re-recording the entire vocal track, so we'd been called in to provide background noise (for crowd scenes, cafes, parks, trains etc), along with the occasional line for white actors who were presumably still in London.

This all took about 6 hours, including a lunch break in which one of the "serious" actors threw a marvellous diva-esque tantrum about not being provided with enough water. It was pretty easy work - Nurse Ratched couldn't tell the difference between an English and Australian accent, so it'll be funny to see an Indian waiter taking orders in a broad strine drawl. In any case, the director didn't seem overly fussed what we did - the only time he corrected us was when another Australian guy and his girlfriend were providing a background conversation about cricket, and one of them mentioned something about an upcoming one-day match... in an instant, the director came over the PA: "Cut! Cut! No no no no no, it is a test match!"

All in all, it was an exerience, and I'm looking forward to seeing the film - from what I saw, it looked quite good, and even if it isn't, I'll be amused to hear my voice complaining to Amitabh that "I booked a table! Look, I booked a table in my name!" We're back there tomorrow doing some more voiceovers, so who knows... perhaps a career as a C-grade actor might be the next step after bricklaying? I'm an act-or, daahling...