"The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor - they never overlap, do they?
See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?
Losing weight and looking like the poor."
- Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)
There is another quote in Adiga's excellent book about how pale-skinned Westerners jump at the first opportunity to get to a beach and lie there for hours trying to turn brown, while brown-skinned Indians buy face-whitening creams and aspire to be pale.
As I was driven to Kochi airport yesterday morning - a route that took me along five-lane motorways, over huge bridges and next to oversized department stores - I was bombarded with billboard after billboard advertising everything from life insurance to cement, sari emporiums to surgical procedures ('Come to Dr Joy's Hospital: Keyhole Surgery; Painless Delivery!')
The common theme among these ads is the type of Indian person they use to sell these products. Nearly all were pale-skinned. Walking around India you see a thousand different shades of skin, but the large majority are darker than these people:
And it's not just on billboards. It's the same when you read magazines, watch TV shows and visit fashion stores. Pick up the Indian version of Vogue (which I did the other day, killing time before a train journey) and the Indian models all look caucasian; go into a high-end clothes shop like Diesel (which I did the other day, needing a blast of air conditioning) and the shop assistants are all pale-skinned.
So it's no surprise that a white-skinned Westerner walking through the streets of India gets a lot of attention. In areas off the beaten track, away from the tourist trail, you may be one of the first white people some of the kids have seen in the flesh. For adults, there is often surprise in their eyes when they clock you, and then the inevitable conversation starters will begin ('hey man, where you from?', 'you want buy shoes?', 'what is your good name?')
Arriving in Mumbai yesterday after an uneventful flight from Kochi...
...I checked into my hotel near the airport. The airport is about 1.5hrs from downtown - where the tourists go - and knowing I had less than 24hrs before my flight back to the UK I decided to stay nearby.
I asked reception if there were any sights or parks in the area and she suggested I spend the afternoon in a western-style mall, about 20 minutes away. I politely thanked her and decided to take a wander in the other direction. Spending my last day in India in a sanitised mall wasn't what I had in mind.
Within two minutes of leaving the hotel I was in a maelstrom of market life, Indian-style. Row upon row of traders selling anything you could possibly need lined the streets. And not just the streets; up steps, over flyovers, down alleyways. Everywhere you looked. It was a Sunday afternoon and it felt that half of Mumbai's 19 million population were on the street, shopping.
As always, I got lots of attention from the market traders, other shoppers and rickshaw drivers (I didn't see another white face all afternoon - except on billboards...) My brain was spinning with the sounds, the colours, the smells, and - after being talked into buying a case for my phone that I neither needed nor wanted - I decided a change of scene was in order and hopped in a rickshaw to Juhu Beach.
Juhu Beach is an area in north Mumbai that a) houses a beach and b) is home to some of Mumbai's richest and most famous celebs, including a few Bollywood icons. Maybe the Indian Rambo lives there?
I got to Juhu, walked onto the beach and was met by the sight of thousands of people milling about on the sand. The water is too polluted to swim, so families stroll around, eat ice cream and chat.
I was hoping to do the same, but was immediately surrounded by several child beggars - some with their pleading mothers in tow, some on their own. Most were semi-naked, all looked emaciated, eyes rolling vacantly in their sockets. I've encountered lots of beggars on this trip, but these kids were in a worse state than any others I'd seen.
Like bees to a honeypot, the kids surrounded the white man - the man in the adverts with the money - and wanted help. I gave my bottle of Sprite to one boy, some rupees to a couple of others, and then had to leave. People pulling at your trousers, arms, legs and hands can be a bit unnverving after a while and there seemed to be no end of kids coming over and wanting more. What can you do?
I walked away from the beach, past the swanky VIP clubs that look out over the water, past the designer stores that clothe the local glitterati and got a rickshaw back to the hotel.
For dinner, I went up to the roof terrace and - confronted with a menu of Indian dishes that I still, after 5 weeks out here, failed to recognise - asked for some help from the waiter. He called over a guy called Nikhil, whose father owned the hotel. Nikhil was a trained chef himself and after saying I wanted a mild curry with rice and naan, he ordered me exactly that. And it was great.
He sat with me for a while, his friend joined us. I got a refreshing ice tea on the house, promised to send my friends and family to his hotel/restaurant in the future, and he insisted I ate my first paan. Not the best picture quality but this was it:
A paan is a variety of spices, candy, nuts and other stuff wrapped in a betel nut leaf. It's put in the mouth and chewed slowly as a post-meal refresher. The famous sight of Indians spitting out red betel juice is the saliva produced from chewing paan. It was a strange experience - not something I'd rush back to chew in a hurry - but I'm glad I tried it and Nikhil seemed chuffed that I had joined him in a mini paan party.
And that was my last night in India. I flew back yesterday, watching Easy A and Animal Kingdom on the in-flight entertainment system and eating my final Indian dishes of paneer, chapatti and curry. I now have a couple of days in England before heading out to Colombia.
I suppose at this point I should succinctly summarise my five weeks in India. But it's almost impossible to be succinct about such a crazy, colourful, intense and eye-opening experience.
From my first day in Mumbai, when I saw a cow slowly strolling across a main road and almost causing a pile-up behind it, to defacating on the side of a road* at three in the morning during a Salmonella-induced nightmare of a bus journey to Hampi, to sharing good times with good people in Ooty and Varkala, it has been a pulsating journey.
Normally, returning from a trip like that to England would be depressing, but I'm only just over a month into six months travelling and the big trip is to come. I need to dump my old guide book, get a new one for SA, dump some clothes (who's stupid idea was it to take white T-shirts to one of the dirtiest countries in the world?!) and get some new ones. I fly out on Thursday, so the next post will probably be written from Bogota - unless the drug lords catch me first. Woo haa haa haa.
Before I go, one final pic from India:
*too much information...?
See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?
Losing weight and looking like the poor."
- Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)
There is another quote in Adiga's excellent book about how pale-skinned Westerners jump at the first opportunity to get to a beach and lie there for hours trying to turn brown, while brown-skinned Indians buy face-whitening creams and aspire to be pale.
As I was driven to Kochi airport yesterday morning - a route that took me along five-lane motorways, over huge bridges and next to oversized department stores - I was bombarded with billboard after billboard advertising everything from life insurance to cement, sari emporiums to surgical procedures ('Come to Dr Joy's Hospital: Keyhole Surgery; Painless Delivery!')
The common theme among these ads is the type of Indian person they use to sell these products. Nearly all were pale-skinned. Walking around India you see a thousand different shades of skin, but the large majority are darker than these people:
And it's not just on billboards. It's the same when you read magazines, watch TV shows and visit fashion stores. Pick up the Indian version of Vogue (which I did the other day, killing time before a train journey) and the Indian models all look caucasian; go into a high-end clothes shop like Diesel (which I did the other day, needing a blast of air conditioning) and the shop assistants are all pale-skinned.
So it's no surprise that a white-skinned Westerner walking through the streets of India gets a lot of attention. In areas off the beaten track, away from the tourist trail, you may be one of the first white people some of the kids have seen in the flesh. For adults, there is often surprise in their eyes when they clock you, and then the inevitable conversation starters will begin ('hey man, where you from?', 'you want buy shoes?', 'what is your good name?')
Arriving in Mumbai yesterday after an uneventful flight from Kochi...
...I checked into my hotel near the airport. The airport is about 1.5hrs from downtown - where the tourists go - and knowing I had less than 24hrs before my flight back to the UK I decided to stay nearby.
I asked reception if there were any sights or parks in the area and she suggested I spend the afternoon in a western-style mall, about 20 minutes away. I politely thanked her and decided to take a wander in the other direction. Spending my last day in India in a sanitised mall wasn't what I had in mind.
Within two minutes of leaving the hotel I was in a maelstrom of market life, Indian-style. Row upon row of traders selling anything you could possibly need lined the streets. And not just the streets; up steps, over flyovers, down alleyways. Everywhere you looked. It was a Sunday afternoon and it felt that half of Mumbai's 19 million population were on the street, shopping.
As always, I got lots of attention from the market traders, other shoppers and rickshaw drivers (I didn't see another white face all afternoon - except on billboards...) My brain was spinning with the sounds, the colours, the smells, and - after being talked into buying a case for my phone that I neither needed nor wanted - I decided a change of scene was in order and hopped in a rickshaw to Juhu Beach.
Juhu Beach is an area in north Mumbai that a) houses a beach and b) is home to some of Mumbai's richest and most famous celebs, including a few Bollywood icons. Maybe the Indian Rambo lives there?
I got to Juhu, walked onto the beach and was met by the sight of thousands of people milling about on the sand. The water is too polluted to swim, so families stroll around, eat ice cream and chat.
I was hoping to do the same, but was immediately surrounded by several child beggars - some with their pleading mothers in tow, some on their own. Most were semi-naked, all looked emaciated, eyes rolling vacantly in their sockets. I've encountered lots of beggars on this trip, but these kids were in a worse state than any others I'd seen.
Like bees to a honeypot, the kids surrounded the white man - the man in the adverts with the money - and wanted help. I gave my bottle of Sprite to one boy, some rupees to a couple of others, and then had to leave. People pulling at your trousers, arms, legs and hands can be a bit unnverving after a while and there seemed to be no end of kids coming over and wanting more. What can you do?
I walked away from the beach, past the swanky VIP clubs that look out over the water, past the designer stores that clothe the local glitterati and got a rickshaw back to the hotel.
For dinner, I went up to the roof terrace and - confronted with a menu of Indian dishes that I still, after 5 weeks out here, failed to recognise - asked for some help from the waiter. He called over a guy called Nikhil, whose father owned the hotel. Nikhil was a trained chef himself and after saying I wanted a mild curry with rice and naan, he ordered me exactly that. And it was great.
He sat with me for a while, his friend joined us. I got a refreshing ice tea on the house, promised to send my friends and family to his hotel/restaurant in the future, and he insisted I ate my first paan. Not the best picture quality but this was it:
A paan is a variety of spices, candy, nuts and other stuff wrapped in a betel nut leaf. It's put in the mouth and chewed slowly as a post-meal refresher. The famous sight of Indians spitting out red betel juice is the saliva produced from chewing paan. It was a strange experience - not something I'd rush back to chew in a hurry - but I'm glad I tried it and Nikhil seemed chuffed that I had joined him in a mini paan party.
And that was my last night in India. I flew back yesterday, watching Easy A and Animal Kingdom on the in-flight entertainment system and eating my final Indian dishes of paneer, chapatti and curry. I now have a couple of days in England before heading out to Colombia.
I suppose at this point I should succinctly summarise my five weeks in India. But it's almost impossible to be succinct about such a crazy, colourful, intense and eye-opening experience.
From my first day in Mumbai, when I saw a cow slowly strolling across a main road and almost causing a pile-up behind it, to defacating on the side of a road* at three in the morning during a Salmonella-induced nightmare of a bus journey to Hampi, to sharing good times with good people in Ooty and Varkala, it has been a pulsating journey.
Normally, returning from a trip like that to England would be depressing, but I'm only just over a month into six months travelling and the big trip is to come. I need to dump my old guide book, get a new one for SA, dump some clothes (who's stupid idea was it to take white T-shirts to one of the dirtiest countries in the world?!) and get some new ones. I fly out on Thursday, so the next post will probably be written from Bogota - unless the drug lords catch me first. Woo haa haa haa.
Before I go, one final pic from India:
*too much information...?