Divali crackers...

So instead of Christmas, the big Hindu holiday for exchanging gifts is Divali (also Diwali, Dipavali etc.). It's the festival of lights, commemorating the victory of some deity over a demon to allow a god-king to return to his subjects. To celebrate, they string lights everywhere (which is really pretty), and set off firecrackers (which adds more noise than needed).

All of it makes for a good time. Except this year. Some people attempting to spread terror, have detonated three bombs in Delhi. They were timed and placed to get the maximum number of victims. By putting bombs in public markets on the Saturday before Divali, they succeeded in getting a number of people who were out gift shopping.

The only thing is that Ramadan is almost over too, so Eid shoppers were out too. These terrorists didn't try to kill Hindus, they killed Indians of all stripes. I've posted my last email message below, for those who didn't see it. I'm fine, and was nowhere near it.

I think that at this point the odds of the Indians giving up on Kashmir are infinitesimal... Even if they were willing to before (they weren't), they would not dare do it now, thinking that it might serve to encourage or reward the terror. For those of you who thought that the Americans moved with a singular purpose after 9/11, remember that the Indians have been dealing with this for longer, and the fact is that they are amazed when I talk about Quebec and how some people want to secede from Canada. First they're amazed that anyone thinks that independence would solve any problems, and second they can't understand how this can happen peacefully. Their thought is that even if there was a referendum, there would be attacks on polling stations in pro-India areas to cause a revote, and lower turn out the next time.

I guess that the try-try again attitude of the PQ doesn't seem so bad to me now.

Here's that email... I have to run to catch a plane.

This email is to notify everyone that I am alive and well, was not hurt in either the bombings or the train derailment.

As a matter of fact, I didn't even know about these disasters until my mom called me from Mississauga to let me know. I was at my cousin's flat, and none of us there knew anything about it.

Security seems to be beefed up today. More people in fatigues carrying rifles around. I feel far less compelled to take random photos in case I annoy one of them. I'm about to go through security to fly from Mumbai to Bangalore, and I'm thinking that it's going to be a little more invasive than normal.

From what I know, the cops in Delhi have been passing around photos (though they don't post them on TV so that the individuals in question don't see themselves and hide), and they've been tracing some phone calls from the time of the bombing. I feel really bad for anyone who vaguely looks like those guys.

I'm off now to Bangalore, to celebrate Divali (or since, really I'll be with Catholics, to avoid the celebration). I just hope that I don't get dragged to church (if I do, I'm holding you responsible mom... I'd rather be shopping).

I'll post some blog stuff later, but if you all could check to to list, and see if there's anyone I missed, please let them know that I'm in one piece. The plan from here is Bangalore -- Chennai -- Sri Lanka -- Delhi -- Amritsar -- Delhi -- Goa -- Mumbai -- Delhi -- Home. Although I'd like to be taking a train from Bangalore to Chennai, they've closed an entire segment of the rail network around Chennai, so that doesn't look likely.

My love to all of you.

Lonely Planet my ass...

So when I was in Varansi, I found some interesting people. The hotel was okay, but most of the people that stayed there weren't treated like I was. The staff cut me breaks everywhere, and charged me less for things than they did the other tourists. One of the managers took me out for a tour and charged me Rs 200 less than he did another group. He also took me out to buy some Varanasi silks, and before I had a chance to bargain, immediately forced them to cut over $150 US off the price. Then he said we had a decent starting point. It may have been for show, but the fact is that it was nice of him to help (I probably got it for $25 less than I would have otherwise, and maybe $20 more than I could have if I hadn't relented because they were going to do a bunch of alterations for me at no cost.) But the restaurant to the hotel was constantly packed with people clutching their travel bible... that damn ubiquitous Lonely Planet guide. It claimed that the food at the restaurant was great. I disagree. I've also decided that for the rest of the trip the only thing that the guide is good for is helping me find phone numbers.

My hotel in Delhi was excellent, yet is missing from the book. The stores that are recommended jack up their prices when they find out that they are in the book. Restaurants get filled even when their food is crap if it says so in the book. The best food I had in Varanasi was found at some little place around the corner, where no one spoke a lick of English, not at a hotel attached to a restaurant. There's nothing inherrantly wronge with the guide, it's the fact that the only people you meet, and the only things that you do if you follow the book do nothing other than expose you to other travellers. There are advantages to that, but it also tends to breed this inbred culture of backpackers that confuses me.

The hotel section for Calcutta, says that the Fairlawn is the only place in town with character. Character in this case is a nice word for kitchy photos of some Anglo-Indian's family and a bunch of poorly maintained knick-knacks. The rooms aren't great, and the atmosphere seems to be designed to shelter people from Calcutta (although seeing as how I had a tough reaction to the city this may be a good thing for lots of people). The Lytton, where I ended up the next day, was described as a top end hotel. It was nice, but to put it in the same category as the Oberoi is insane. Local Calcutta guides talk about the Lytton as a midrange hotel, which is where it belongs, and talk about the Fairlawn as a budget class place (despite the fact that it cost me more than the Lytton). I don't expect perfection from the guide, but whoever rates these hotels needs to readjust some stuff here and there.

Part of it may be what I want to do, is travel comfortably, without breaking the bank. I want clean hotel rooms, with walls and ceilings that don't look like they're about to fall down. I want hotel staff that are helpful, and who don't try to jack the rate when I arrive. So, I might not really want to be dealing with Lonely Planet, but the fact is that Frommer's and the other guides aren't really pitched to me either. I have no doubt that the guides are great for the first world, but travel in India exposes the real divide between high and middle places. Finding the sweet spot for a lot of people is difficult in a country that had such disparities. I guess that's part of the problem. I'm just tired of having to have breakfast in rooms with people who come to India to find something. India definitely changed my perspectives last time, and it continues to do so this time. But the changes are more dramatic when you realise that you're not finding anything that you haven't already brought with you. These discoveries could be found if you just spent the time at home doing different things.

And on the topic of travelling annoyances, I was leaving Varansi and had the following discussion:

Older traveller (to me): You must be an American.
Me: No. I'm a Canadian.
OT: Same thing.
Me: Hardly... I doubt that you'd find many Canadians who agreed with you. Why do you say that?
OT: You're wearing shorts. Everyone knows that in India you should wear long pants to fit in. Only Americans don't wear long pants.
Me: I'll pass that along to my family here. I'm guessing that you're British, and old enough to remember when India was part of the Empire.
OT: Yes, how did you know?
Me: Only an old Brit, with fonder memories of an empire, would have the audacity to tell someone who is clearly more Indian that he is how he should dress. I'm not offending anyone by going to an airport in shorts, and it takes a lot of nerve for you to preach to me about my attire. As for fitting in, I think in the general population my camera is probably a good giveaway. And I'll be sure to pass along your shorts-free message to my family here.

I hate people like that.

Leaving Calcutta...

Calcutta seemed to challenge me. The city has a long tradition of intellectuals, and was the former colonial capital prior to the point that the British decided to uproot and move to Delhi (largely because of the number of intellectuals working towards independence). As a result there is a lot of grand old architecture in the city. Unlike places like Varanasi, or even Delhi, Calcutta really didn't exist until the British started building there. There were always small fishing villages, but the fact is that the city was really built by the economic power of the British East India Company. So what's the deal with the squalor that everyone thinks of when they think of Calcutta? Why did Mother Theresa become so appalled that she felt compelled to start an order of nuns here?

I have to admit that the pverty threw me for a bit of a loop. I arrived late at night, and after a grueling taxi ride (one hour in a taxi whose shocks were hottible, and had a back seat that felt like it was a bit of vinyl stretched over a bard wooden board... come to think of it I'm sure that's what the back seat really was), the first sight to greet me was a street filled with people sleeping. The hotel turned out to be a dive (see my post regarding the Lonely Planet and it's lack of use in India), so I got off to a bad start with the city. My first action in the morning was to move to a more reasonable hotel (which ironically cost me less per night). I then reshowered, prepped for a meeting and headed off. This meeting was terrific, I felt that I connected with the patent people, and most imporantly had a great conversation with the head of trademarks there. His eyes seemed to light up, and the piles of files in his office seemed to lose all importance when I asked him what I should do while in Calcutta to get a real feel for the city. His office manager wasa appalled at what he wanted me to go see. I told her that I didn't want a candy coated version of the city, and that I would happily return to the city another time to see the tourist sights, regardless of what I saw. Before I left their office they had printed a map for me highlighting what I had to do. Then I went back to a lunch they had planned for me in one of their meeting rooms. Now there are still a few Law firms in Canada that keep a kitchen for preparing for entertainment. There are even fewer firms in Canada that feed their employees lunch everyday like this firm does (it has to do it in shifts). But I've never heard of a firm anywhere that brings in a weekly doctor for the employees. One of the Patent Agents referred to him as the local quack... but he was impressed enough that he has started sending his family to see the quack. The doctor apparantly comes by with his own dispensary, so that if he sees you and prescribes something, you'll have it before you go home that night.

After my meeting I went back to the hotel, and fell apart. It was about 4pm before I coud summon the physical strength to get out of bed. I wandered out just long enought to see the area around the hotel (which naturally atracts the destitute to seek alms). By 6pm or so, the sun goes down (really quickly) and I retreated to my hotel room, where I turned on the TV to find that the flooding is starting to subside in Bangalore but is starting in Chennai, my post Banaglore destination. It seems that I may end up getting pelted by water this trip. I slept through a good stretch of the morning (a bad thing, as the heat makes the late morning and afternoons hard to do stuff during) had a delightful Indian breakfast and then crashed until it was almost dark again. I did manage to get out of the hotel, wander through the local shopping aread, up through some street markets and then get back to the hotel as the last glimmers of light were fading. I couldn't figure it out. I'm tired... sure that's to be expected, but I couldn't figure out why my body was shutting down on me. Then as I was drifting off to sleep I realised that the city had left an odd impression in my mind.

Calcutta isn't a fading beauty. My explorations today really clarified that (I got through most of the suggested walking tour and did get to see the a lot of the city). I think that I understand a bit of the Bengali spirit, and a lot of my problems with the city. This is a city whose people are filled with a pride in the intellectual rigor that their city provides India. When I popped into the local Starbucks knock off, Barista, there were the Indian equivalent of my peers having heated discussions about the future of the country. These were the same discussions that were going on at the local road side chai wallah stand, and the street side food stands too. But there seems to be a disconnect in the discussions (or at least the English ones that I overheard and participated in), and the reality of the city. This isn't just a city that is losing part of its grandeur, this is a city whose treasures are rotted out. The architecture of the city is grand, befitting its old role, but the problems are modern, befitting their era. Unlike the other parts of India that I've seen, Calcutta has problems that are largely external to the country. When Partition happenned, Calcutta had poverty (it always did), but many of the poor had jobs in jute and textile mills. The raw material supply got cut off when partition happenned, as the rural parts of Bangal were hived off to form East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and they were the places that grew the raw materials. The result was that the East Pakistani farmers had no place to process their crops and the Calcuttans had no materials to process. One of these two problems can be solved wtihout throwing huge sums of money around. So Calcutta recovered more quickly. As Bangaldesh seceeded from Pakistan with Indian assistance, the Bangladeshis were now able to export jute again, but the calcutta mills already had other supplies, so the economics were different. This made Calcutta seem like the properous big city surrounded by a sea of rural poverty. The city arracted all the disposessed. No city could have handled the influx, and it continues to this day.

All the intellectual banter in the world doesn't fix the problems if no one acts. But anyone who takes action fails (the problem can't be fixed overnight and no one has been able to stick around as long as is needed at high levels). The government of the state has been Communist, so industry isn't really drawn to come into the area, but the problems spiral. Communism's appeal can't be supported if it doesn't have full control of the levers of the economy (and even then there's only one example that shows promise... China). So there's a catch 22. Anyone who takes action is attacked for failing to immediately fix the problem, so no one acts. Everyone talks about solutions but is afraid of acting. The population vote for a government that has immedate appeal, but in the end can't fix the problem. And life goes on.

They're touchy in Calcutta (or Kolkata to be modern about it), about the images that we see. They want people to see more than just the faded memories of the Black Hole of Calcutta, of Mother Theresa's homes for the sick and dying, and the poverty that allows hand pulled rickshaws so survive. They're hurt that the world sees movies like City of Joy (whcih wasn't a half bad film if you ask me), and see nothing but the poverty. I can appreciate that. But were' in a media driven world that wants flashy images and a bunch of intellectually driven people discussing grand cures for the world doesn't feed that.



I need to go back sometime to see more of the city.

I'm now on my way to Mumbai. When I was thining about my last trip I realised that Mumbai was what I really liked more than anything else. Part of it was the freedom of the city. The city has spirit, not just a grand old soul, not just the standard Indian bureacrats. It has drive and a flare that are missing in the rest of the country. I can't wait to see it again. Now all that I have to do is figure out how I'm going to have fun, see my family and do business in just 3 days. I think that I'll do it, I just hope that I don't step on anyone's toes along the way.

This trip is starting to feel fun. But it's also almost half over.

If this number was permanent it would be far more foolish....

So there have been a number of requests (largely from family) about how to get in touch with me. Apparantly, for some of you email just isn't quick enough...

Anyone can feel free to call me on my mobile. From outside India, you would dial:
011 91 98 7152 8151.

I have other posts that should go up, but they're on my laptop and iPod, which aren't with me at the moment. Just one quick question for the people out there who have wanted to hold an SLR out of a car window: Why doesn't anyone make a left hand grip for a camera? The right handed grip makes it difficult to hold the camera, peer through the viewfinder, and shoot with anything resembling safety in a right hand car drive vehicle (although the idea of "safely" sticking any part of yourself out of an Indian car is a bit odd to begin with).

Oh yeah, one more technical thing. There's been a request for an RSS feedlink for the blog. Anyone who knows what that means and would like to make use of one, you can find it at:
http://blog.dilip.ca/diliprss.xml

I don't know if any photos post through to it or not, but if I post a photo I'll be talking about it, so you'll know about it.

Travel snippets... Leaving Varanasi

I rarely see a gas tank with more than a few liters in it. I guess that gas is so expensive that no one fills up more than 10 L at a time. The physical distances I'm travelling to get from point A to point B in the cities isn't really that big, but the traffic here is a disaster. Roads are broadly separated into two directions, but in each direction it's a bit of a free for all. Sometimes, the direction doesn't really mattter as everyone is bobbing and weaving around the get a better position. The concept of lanes on a road is a bit arbitrary when you find them, I was on a two lane road but when we reached the stoplight, there were four cars abreast. If a car has rear view mirrors, they are usually folded in so that they don't get taken off as you go. Things are so bad in someplaces that foreign industry is doing things about it. Although B angalore is India's Brand Name for high tech, the governor of Karnataka state doesn't seem to care much for the industry. He feels that since they only employ the educated, they aren't doing much of the welfare of the state as a whole (the fact that the people who end up relatively well off end up as consumer driven as we are in the west really isn't the indstry's fault if you ask me). So the governor hasn't been willing to put the resources needed into connecting Bangalore's tech district to the airport he's building. As a result, there's going to be a brand new airport and no highway to connect to it, just the standard one lane each way roads. So the tech companies, from Dell to Sun to Texas Instruments have decided to boycott the government run IT Conference. They're holding out for at least one session of the conference to be dedicated to the infrastructure issues facing the city.

I was planning on being in Bangalore for a few days before the conference, both to see my mom's cousin and to see a client. However, the city is flooded out right now. I'll call them this afternoon to see what the situation really is like and to see if it looks like I'll be able to go.

So here are a couple of travel related reviews and gripes:
The iPod Nano is really great. The fact that I can listen to music anywhere, and play a couple of mindless games to kill the time on a flight makes everything passa a little easier.

My camera has held up well, but as a general gripe, why are all cameras designed for right handed people? Think about it, the trigger is always on the right side, meaning that you have to hold it with your right hand to get it up to your eye. I'm a right handed person, so most times it doesn't matter, but when I sit in the passenger side seat of a car (over here, that's the left side), it makes it really difficult to push my camera out of the window and aim while taking a photo. Thankfully, digital makes taking lots of pictures cheap, but it has resulted in me missing lots of photos that I otherwise would have loved to snap. Why couldn't my battery grip have given me a left handed trigger and grip as well. I tried using my remote release, but the problem is actually that I don't have a grip to hold ontl with my left hand.

temporarily trapped in Benares...

Well, I relied upon the availability of tickets, and Diwali festivities have taken their toll...

I had hoped to leave Varanasi (Benares) today and head off by train to Calcutta. The train would have put me into town at about 6:30 or 7:00am on Tuesday, but all the tickets (including the last call ones) were taken. So I'm in town for one more day, and I'll fly out of here tomorrow at 4:00pm. The silly thing is that there are no direct flights to Calcutta. The only way to do it is to fly to Delhi, and then out to Calcutta. The worst part of it is that I'm half way between Delhi and Calcutta to begin with, so I'm essentially tripling my travel time (more than that if you factor in layover time... but with Indians scheduling this, God alone knows how when I'll leave and when I'll land.)

I did a tour of the ghats this morning. I had a row boat ride around, and it really was cool watching a slice of Indian holy life slide by. When the heat breaks, I'll go back to the ghats and stroll along them for some more people watching.

dilip

On the road to Benares

So after a 13 hour train ride, I've arrived in Benares (Varansi).

For some reason I didn't sleep as well as I usually do on trains, but that seems to be something about this trip in general. Most of my sleep has been in broken segments, with each day ending the same way: I arrive in my hotel room, and fall asleep immediately, but then wake up a couple of times during the night with a final wake up at about 4:30 or so.

After the train ride, I disembarked (while forgetting my Nalgene water bottle), and fought through the train platform until I saw my ride. Everyone seems really confused by me. The backpack is a dead giveaway that I'm not a local, but they seem to find this discrepancy between how I look and how I talk. It really confuses them. Interesting to watch though.

I met a couple of travelers on the train this morning. Dave's a Brit who did his first trip to India about 6 months back, and after spending all his time in Rajasthan, he decided to come back to see some of the rest of India. He packs worse than I do. In addition to packing a travel kettle and lots of Raman noodles (apparently because of a weak constitution... I call it cowardice), he's packed both his digital camera (Nikon D70), and a film based camera, because he doesn't know if he can trust the digital. Dave brought his girlfriend along for this trip, but was having trouble getting her to wake up. There was an older American woman, who was an odd mix of traveler and stereotype. Typically the Americans that I've met traveling have been really interesting people with broad minds (as are most people that you meet abroad). She was helpful, but at the same time when we chatted this morning she came across as incredibly rednecked. She decided that on a train full of Indian, in a conversation with what she clearly realised was the chile of immigrants, and another person who had expressed the desire to immigrate to the U.S., this American railed against the problems caused by immigration. It seemed a bit incongruous.

I've booked my accommodation for Mumbai (but not for Calcutta yet), because I'm going to be there for Divali, a large Indian festival, and wanted to make sure that I had a room.

All in all, I didn't see much of Delhi, most of my time there was spent in meetings, or shuttling back and forth from the meetings. I'll have to try to see more of the city when I get back there. The part of town that I was in was clearly New Delhi, not the centuries old part. The newer part of town was designed by Luytens, and was the best running traffic flow I've seen without traffic lights. The new part of the city is planned around a series of radially connected traffic circles, when you get into a circle, you just loop around clockwise until you get to the street that you need. Traffic (outside of the morning and evening crunch) runs really well with the circles. During the rush periods, even the traffic lights are ignored, so the circles seem to be calmer then too. I spent my last few hours in the city lounging on the enclosed front lawn of the hotel sipping on sweet lime juice.

Benares is a contrast to the order of New Delhi. The big attraction here is the ghats. They're step like blocks built at the edge of the Ganges. People come here to bath in the holy water (not only is the Ganges here, but this is where the Ganges and the Yamuna meet). Just down from there are funeral ghats, where people are cremated. Apparently passing away here and being cremated at the ghats of Benares is a big help in ending your reincarnation cycle. Unfortunately, the river is incredibly polluted here so I don't think that I'll be taking a dip.

Well I best be off. I have to arrange my trip to Calcutta (so that I can then arrange a hotel), get out to see the city and plan for an early morning river boat so that I can see the ghats as the sun rises and the devout come out. I'll also try to get out to Sarnath where Buddha delivered his sermon after discovering the path to enlightenment.

dilip

followup: Damn train schedule... I have 1 night in Benares not two, with the way that the trains run I can't be assured that I'll be in Calcutta in time if I take the train on the Tuesday night, so Monday it will have to be, and Sarnath will have to wait. Now let's see if I can get a ticket 24 hours in advance.
dca

So... I'm in India

So I've been gone about a week. It was a bit difficult to get away, with something exploding in the office while I was unavailable... all of it due to an inadvertant choice of words in an email. The result being a total and complete disaster. I feel horrible for the people in the office caught up in all of the trouble, I hope none of you were too put out (although it cost me a lot of sleep).

The flight (Air Canada's direct to New Delhi) was a bit tough... 14 hours with a reasonable number of small children who didn't like being cooped up for 14 hours. Thankfully my e-shure 2c headphones made things a lot more bearable by helping my ipod nano block out a lot of the screaming. The in-flight entertainment included 3 movies, 2 Hindi flicks that I couldn't watch and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The Hindi flicks were unwatchable largely due to the fact that the subtitles were being cut off the screen, so I couldn't follow along.

After arriving in Delhi, I went straight to the hotel (bear in mind that the flight left Pearson at 9:30 pm or so Oct. 17, and arrived the next day at about 9pm Oct. 18), did some office related emailing, and crashed.

Then it was possibly the most hectic day possible on the 19th. I visited 3 patent firms here in India. The problem is that the distances between everyone's offices were huge and traffic was a nightmare. In a 12 hour day (left the hotel at 10:45 am and returned at about 11:00pm) I spent more than 3.5 hours driving from office to office. It strikes me that most of the drivers in this city (taxi and otherwise) don't really know the city all that well. Having said that I've had some amazing India cuisine (including some at a restaurant named Punjabi by Nature... they really have to come up with better names).

On the 20th, I hired a car, left the hotel bright and early in the morning (something like 5:20 am... so I learned that it does happen if you go to sleep the night before), and went to Agra. For those of you who haven't seen the Taj, I could describe it for hours, and show you every photo that I took (and I took lots), but if you ever come to see it yourself you'll understand that when you get through the gates, you just stop dead. I have never in my life seen anything this beautiful. Below is a photo that I took at night. My day time photos were off loaded from the camera, but I don't have the proper cable with me to get at them on the laptop... when I fix that I'll come back to post some more.




While in Agra, I saw the Taj, Agra fort, another tomb that preceded the Taj and really foreshadowed the work that was done, and spent a lot of time telling my guide that I really didn't want to spend my day looking at shops. Every driver and guide I've encountered so far wants to take me to a shop with really good prices and special deals (the deal being that they'll collect a comission off me). I think from now on, I'm just going to ignore them all and try to see things on my own.

So after a one night stay in Agra, I'm back in Delhi. I did 2 meetings on the 21st, and have another one today. Then it's off to Varansi (formerly Benares), a true Hindu holy sight, where if my senses leave me I'll take a dip in the Holy Ganges and improve my lot in the next life. Then it's off to Calcutta.

I'll post more later.