Travels on the Bad F*cker Highway

[ Wednesday, January 14, 2004 ]

  INDIA.

Sorry the travelogue has gone "photo-free" for the time being. I'm taking lots of photos, but getting them dumped into a computer, cropped, and uploaded to my server is more hassle than it's worth for now. If I have time back in Mumbai, I'll get a CD burned and get some India and Turkey photos up. Meanwhile, enjoy the pure text version.

Mumbai, Maharashtra. We arrive in the middle of the night, and somehow find our way (with a lot of help from a tourist desk at the airport) to a hotel nearby. Somewhat jet-lagged, and with Yessica starting to get sick, we lay low for most of the first four days here, venturing out only for half-days of sightseeing, and to the local pharmacy every day for tissues, water, and finally, for amoxy-cyclin or co-amox or one of those, which, fortunately, as it turns out later, is not necessary.

Mumbai. 16 million people. 16 million auto-rickshaws. 16 million cows in the street. There's a head-on collision between a carelessly driven motorcycle and a carelessly driven auto right in front of us one night. No serious casualties. Evidently, it is very dangerous, indeed, to be unlucky enough to be a passenger in a bus or car that hits and kills a cow, as angry mobs will reportedly torch the offending vehicle (and sometimes the offending driver, as well). We haven't witnessed this firsthand, and hope not to . . .

Murud, Maharashtra. We take a ferry across an inlet to Ganwa, and then a local bus down to this tiny beach village - Murud. It's deserted. There are maybe a couple thousand people living here, fishing, mostly, but the hotels along the beach are largely empty. No Indian tourists, no other tourists. It's sort of weird and eerie, as this is high season everywhere in India. Oh, well.

We have the beach to ourselves. Yessica is still recovering from her lung infection, but feeling a little better each day. We find a nice little seafood thali restaurant, and one afternoon go down 5km south of here to explore a very old 16th century fort on an island inlet right off the Arabian Sea. It costs 25 cents to take the little gondola/sailboat out a few hundred meters to the fort, and we are accompanied by an amazingly amicable group of early 20-something Indian pharmacy students, who are on holiday. They insist that we pose in what seems like dozens of photos with them, on the boat, in the fort, individual portraits, etc., etc. It's sort of heartwarming and fun.

Matheran, Maharashtra. We escape the frenzy of two-stroke smoke India, and spend the better part of a day on a combination bus, train, auto-rickshaw journey up to the old Raj hill station of Matheran, which is pedestrian only. The absence of the constant stream of vehicle traffic is a huge relief, in a way, and we spend 2 full days up here, walking around looking at the panoramic views of the surrounding countryside, crashing the poolside terrace of Lord's Hotel to have a drink and play Scrabble, and aimlessly wandering the one (main) street with all the other pedestrians. This time, however, the aimless wandering requires only dodging piles of cow manure, and not (as in Mumbai's city streets) dodging piles of cow manure AND speeding auto-rickshaws and crazy bus drivers.

Matheran is slow, and there aren't a lot of people around. Only 6,000 people live up here, so it's a tiny little village for Indian standards. Everyone stares at us just as much, even though we're not (quite) the only westerners up here these few days.

Walking down main street one afternoon, we pause to watch three monkeys, a goat, and a cow peacefully co-existing as they share a meal from the dumpster they are gathered around. The goat is actually standing inside the dumpster. Ah, India.

Speaking of dumpsters, or dustbins, as it were, or trash cans, as it were, there aren't any. After we get off the train in Panvel (en route to Matheran) we sit down on a bench just outside the train station to have a drink of Sprite and eat some cookies. When we finish Yessica gets up, gathers our trash, and starts looking around for a place to deposit it. Some of the small crowd that has gathered around us by this time start to chuckle. Yessica asks one of them where she might be able to throw our trash, to which he replies in perfect English: "This is India, Madam."

Indeed. Everyone just throws their trash on the ground. If you drink a chai from a plastic cup on the train, the cup does out the window when you're finished. We are making a valiant effort to NOT adapt to local customs in this regard. Plastic trash is a major problem here, and various municipalities throughout India are establishing "NO PLASTIC" zones to try to deal with it. But we aren't helping the problem any by purchasing bottled water. I think we're about ready to switch to water pills, having acclimated to the local contagions to some degree by now (I hope).

It is astonishing to me that a country that is unable to even provide either clean drinking water or garbage disposal to half its population has a sophisticated and costly nuclear weapons program and space program both. "You say you sent a man to the moon, and I say you starved your children to do it."

If anyone is interested, and cares to search it out, there is an excellent documentary on the history of the Hindu Bomb and the accompanying right-wing Hindu warmongering called "War and Peace." Vajpayee (the Indian PM), in fact, said a year or two ago when Indo-Pak relations had fallen apart once again, that he was in favor of "an immediate declaration of war." More on Vajpayee, the BJP, and Indian politics later. Perhaps. One of my goals on this trip is to learn more about domestic Indian politics.

Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Arrived here yesterday via the Shatabdi Express train from Mumbai. I spend a day in the hotel with a mild case of food poisoning. All in all, we've been in pretty good health, though.

We tour the Gandhi Ashram today, which he founded and lived in from 1915 to 1930. There is an excellent museum and pictorial record of his life, and a small bookstore selling his books and other Gandhi-related stuff. It's a very inspiring place.

Afterwards we repair to the "Gandhi Cold Drinks House" on the other side of town (not sure of any relation) and sample the "Royal Faluda" shake, and learn about the "Khaju Draksha," another ice cream concoction. We decide that Royal Faluda and Khaju Draksha may become our nommes de guerre or pet names for one another for the duration of the trip. Khaju Draksha was the villain in one of those Bond films, right? And, you know what they call a Royal Faluda in Amsterdam? It's called a "Faluda Royal."

The International Kite Festival. We have arrived shortly before the beginning of what is perhaps the largest, or one of the largest, kite festivals in the world (still here in Ahmedabad). The streets are full of people sorting and dyeing pink their kite strings, and block after block after block of storefronts display kites for sale. We are informed that on the 14th the skies will be full of tens of thousands of kites literally all across the city. We are very excited.

We take an auto-rickshaw down to Police Stadium, where we see the end of the day's programmed kite festivities, and meet some kite geeks from the USA and Israel. Kite geeks. The government of Gujarat has invited teams of kite flyers from all over the world, and the teams (including the five persons from America) have been actually paid to attend. One of them is a world record "miniature kite" title holder, and as he describes this to us, he reveals and launches a little kite that lives in an Altoid tin in his pocket. Very charming.

One of the oddest aspects of being at the kite festival today are the groups of kids running up to us asking for our autographs and photos with us. We are, at various times and places here, seemingly without any logic, treated like movie stars and accosted (even by middle-aged businessmen on Chowpatty Beach), with the simple request of posing in a photo with them.

Ahmedabad itself is one of the most disgustingly polluted cities in the world, and I can literally feel it in my lungs the moment I walk outside every morning. The streets are packed full of trucks, buses, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, a the occasional elephant or camel-drawn cart. There are virtually no traffic control devices, and yet somehow it manages to all sort of "work."

The first rule of traveling in India is "the pedestrian never has the right of way." The second rule of traveling in India is "the pedestrian NEVER has the right of way."

SEWA. Gujarat is home to one of the largest unions of self-employed textile workers anywhere. It's called the "Self-Employed Women's Association." There are over 300,000 members, comprising everything from domestic help, street hawkers and vendors, to individual quilters and embroiderers and other fabric workers. It is reportedly quite successful in raising wages for these (literally) hundreds of thousands of women. We visit their store here, and buy a load a gifts and souvenirs from them. It's nice to shop and buy gifts here, since SEWA owns the store, and the proceeds all go to the union. Check out the link below.

We return to Mumbai tomorrow via the Gujarat Express train, meet Yessica's friend Stoph, and my friend Floss the next day, and then we'll have 7 full days in Mumbai attending the World Social Forum. (See links below).

Hope everyone is well. Thinking about all of you and miss everyone! Send me e-mail.

Websites: www.wsfindia.org (World Social Forum)
www.sewa.org (Self-Employed Women's Association of Gujarat)

Reading list: The Law and the Lawyers, by M.K. Gandhi,
Snakes and Ladders, by Gita Mehta
Power and Terror, Essays on 9/11, by Noam Chomsky [1/14/2004]