From Hull to Everywhere Else

I've left this entry to be completed for a few days cos I suspected it might be a long one. So I spent a month and a half travelling round India mainly in the North and Rajistan (which is still north but not as north as some other bits). Here are some - definitely not all - of my thoughts.

I really enjoyed my time here but I would say that that is despite a lot of the things that I experienced here rather than because of them. India is definitely a challenge and I think that many of the good things about India become the bad things when taken to excess - and there is an excess of everything here. No doctrine of the mean here (per Aristotle). And I guess the first excess is simply that there are so, so many people. I know it's the country with the highest population but it's also very large. So I have just checked. The population density of India is 488 people per square kilometre. In England (not the UK cos Scotland is empty) the population density is 434 - so not too dissimilar. Yet pretty much everywhere in India felt like Oxford Street on a particularly busy Christmas eve. So I guess all the people are concentrated in the cities and that there are some very empty areas. Dehli was busy and I didn't think a city could be as busy as Delhi until I went to Amritsar - as it turned out on the anniversary of the founder of the city - where visiting the Golden Temple at 4am (cos that was the time to see it quiet apparently) there were literally tens of thousands of worshippers. I've never seen so many people up at that time of day and I'm pretty sure I never will again. And then there was Pushkar - a small town in Rajistan with a population of around 30,000. Except I was there during the camel fair where the population grows to maybe a million. In any case there was one instance where I was trying to visit the Brahma temple along the main walking street and had to turn back simply because there were too many people to make progress - I actually remember thinking that this had the potential to turn into a Hillsborough-like situation - these things do happen in India. Because - and this brings me onto my second thought about the place - there is literally no health and safety culture at all. I know we moan about it in the UK but its complete absence can be unnerving. As anyone else who has been there will tell you, this is most obvious on the roads. The rules of the road? There are no rules - other than "stay vaguely on the left" and even this one isn't observed. We went on one motorway (to the Border Guard ceremony at the border with Pakistan) and saw traffic on what would be lane 1 on a UK motorway or the hard shoulder coming towards us ie traffic going the wrong way on a motorway. In India this was simply no big deal. The traffic rules are what happens when they emerge by evolution rather than a result of planning. Just as a group of tens of thousands of starlings (yes I know it's a 'murmuration') can fly around the sky without crashing into each other as if they are one super-organism - the rules that they fly by emerging over time - so do the Indians when driving. On the whole it works. It works by endlessly hooting to alert those around to your presence; not going crazy fast (I would never go as fast in India as I go on a bike in the UK); not getting pissed off at other people (this rule was occasionally broken if people were really stupid); realising your place in the traffic caste system: - big trucks at the top; tuk-tuks then motorbikes, then scootys, then bikes then pedestrians at the bottom. I saw scootys loaded with up to five people- the woman invariably sitting side-saddle and all kinds of other crazy things. But as I say it kinda works. It was loud. It was smelly. It bought on my India cough which didn't really abate until I left. But it was fun. And you couldn't ignore it. It was always there.

The lack of health and safety didn't just apply to traffic though. The crazy patterns made by the electrical wiring systems as they wended their way through the cities were so crazy they could have been exhibited in the Tate Gallery. God alone knows how you were supposed to fix a particular wire if the electrics failed somewhere. I saw people working on high areas without helmets, without harnesses, armed with only a paintbrush. But here I guess life is cheap.

You can't go to India without being aware of the cows. Cows are sacred here and, in the cities I stayed in, just lived in the streets. I saw old cows and young cows, big cows and little cows, solitary and cows in groups, just co-existing with the human populace. They would cross a road and everyone would swerve to avoid them (hitting a cow is not a good idea because you might be hitting a relative - cows are here believed to contain the reincarnated souls of dead relatives). As someone used to seeing cows in fields (or occasionally blocking the road across the Westwood in Beverley), this was new. They were looked after as the locals would feed them with food from whatever local street food vendor was nearby. But I suspect I'd rather be a cow in a field of grass.

Other animals that you can't avoid are the street dogs - there are so many of these and despite what I believed beforehand, were on the whole very friendly - certainly no obviously rabid dogs. They were a little uniform though. Not the variety of breeds that you see in the UK. And finally of course the monkeys. Monkeys, like cows, are everywhere. They were in virtually all the cities that I travelled to. Hanging from gables in Delhi. Hanging from the suspension struts on the Ram Jula bridge in Rishikesh. And just on the streets. I tended to steer clear of the monkeys. At the monkey temple in Jaipur I bought a bag of nuts from a street vendor to feed to them. That went well. One monkey just grabbed the bag off me and ran off with it though. I had the last laugh though as the nuts were still in their cases and the monkey that nicked them off me didn't seem able to - or perhaps wasn't interested in - opening them.

The other thought that I will take with me was travelling around with Eva and Georgia (and also at times Kay, Ruth, Mati, Maddie, Shauna and Dierdre) who kept me sane thoughout my time here. Thanks everyone!

I'm going to pause it here. I'm sure I will add to this entry as I definitely have more to say about India. I think I read somewhere that you might leave India but India never leaves you. I think I know what that means now.Lue lisää