india – ToewsTravels

new years in hyderabad!

to save some money on flights, we flew from pune to hyderabad for about 24 hours before the the next leg of our trip. it happened to be new years eve! we went to a new years eve party at what is apparently one of the nicest hotels in the city – it was somewhat underwhelming but an experience nonetheless. the countdown to midnight was unceremoniously disturbed by hundreds of intoxicated partygoers trying to get on the stage for a photo at the same time, to the distaste of the emcee who wanted to keep the stage an exclusive space for his countdown; the countdown was perpetually delayed and finally concluded about 8 minutes after midnight!

hyderabad is a massive city in central india with a storied history. it almost joined pakistan and bangladesh during partition as it has a high proportion of muslims, but then was conquered by the indian army so didn’t end up having much of a choice. it is famous for its biryani and is a hot spot for india’s burgeoning information and technology sector, hence its other moniker – cyberabad.

on new years day i took a rickshaw downtown to see the charminar, a four-pillared, elevated mosque built in the 1400s, the can’t miss sight in hyderabad!

around pune

after the wedding we got to hang out with the bride and groom and their families, which was really nice! they really welcomed us in. the evening after the wedding we got dinner with a bunch of cousins in a very nice, almost suburban area of pune, and then dessert at mcdonalds for someone’s birthday; whereby the birthday person goes around and feeds a bite of their dessert to everyone.

the next day the groom took a group of foreigner wedding attendees on a tour of pune! we went to the shaniwar wada, a pasha fort in downtown pune, and walked around downtown and through a hindu temple. we then got a lunch of noddles and dosas at one of his favorite restaurants, including an amazing dessert called a felluti, a rich concoction of vermicelli noodles, cream, jellies, ice cream, and cashews.

pune is considered the cultural capital of maharashta state, has a very high quality of life, and is one of the cleanest cities in india. there are many excellent universities, and over half of the foreign university students in india are in pune.

we then proceeded to another function with the bride’s family – by this point we were the only non-family members so felt quite honored!

lastly, we headed out into the countryside to the groom’s family’s “farmhouse,” which was a very luxurious home surrounded by manicured lawns and herb gardens. we felt very welcomed!

an amazing indian wedding!

ann and i were lucky enough to be invited to an amazing wedding in pune, india! the festivities went for 3 days, but unfortunately due to my work schedule we could only make it to the last day. better late than never though!

we arrived in mumbai at about midnight, and right away took a shuttle to pune, which took about 4-5 hours in heavy traffic. slept for 2 hours at the hotel orchid pune, then up for the wedding!

the wedding was at a very nice baquet hall called the marigold, and the day started with a number of rituals around a fire, with attendees mingling around. all the men got a fabric hat tied on their head, the color of which indicated if they knew the bride or groom. then, all proceeded to the rooftop of the building, where the groom entered on a white horse to the beating of drums and the dancing of guests! this is a northern indian tradition, so apparently there was some struggle of the organizers to find a white horse in pune, but they came through! the groom then needed to try to get to the wedding ceremony room, but was ceremonially blocked by the bride’s family, and they had to negotiate his passage, another custom!

the ceremony then occurred in large room flanked by literal walls of real flowers, and then we had an amazing meal. it was definitely worth the trip around the world; thank you nayha and vineet!

kolkata, and it can’t be normal to have had diarrhea for this long

kolkata! its the new indian name for calcutta. the city of poverty. its true, there are a lot of desperately poor people here. it doesn’t help that every year during the monsoon the entire city has to swim through five feet of water. i’ve been doing things like being mauled after giving homeless kids under overpasses one rupee coins. and getting attacked by a deranged crow that attacked me from behind, drawing blood. so if i come down with some rabies-like bird flu in the near future y’all know where it came from. and trying to avoid being suckered in to buying powered milk for “needy” mother’s “starving” babies – they sell it back to the shopowners as soon as we leave. as if i’m the first person to wrestle with the issue – it is really tough to know how to deal with extreme poverty as a mere passer-through without just perpetuating it by breeding dependence.

kolkata surprised us, though. although there are way too many millions of the world’s bottom billion here, there are also millions living well above the poverty line. kolkata is the cultural capital of india. there are more well-versed english speakers, expensive coffee and confectionary shops, and well-stocked bookstores here than anywhere else in india. yes, you read that right!

we (devin and i) are staying at the couple-hundred-years old calcutta ywca – because our friends are staying there and also because they have an atrium with a dirt tennis court. we’ve had some pretty intense games. we’ve also been eating some amazing food. if north indian food is savory and spicy (actually most of the time its pretty bland), then bengali food is sweet and tangyyyy. i have embraced eating with the right hand (that is – exclusively the hand). i’m going to miss that part about india. i won’t miss the stuff necessity sometimes forces you to do here with your left hand.

yesterday we went to mother teresa’s house and grave. there are now thousands of nuns following in her footsteps all around the world. devin is going to volunteer at the missionaries of charity home for the dying – really wish i could too but unfortunately i leave tomorrow so there isn’t enough time. did some soul searching while reading about her life in a little museum – while right above us a bunch of nuns were making vows committing the rest of their lives to the service of the poor.

darjeeling: cold, tea at every turn, running through clouds, and political martyrdom

darjeeling! the place has it going on. it might be the most beautiful locale i have ever seen. perched along the crest of a hill just in front of the himalayas, it reminds me of a swiss town high in the alps, except with a lot more tibetan and bhutanese people, poverty, $7 hotel rooms, and monastaries. although it still has its fair share of cathedrals too. the best tea in the world is grown here, and you can sip it while sitting in wicker chairs at colonial establishments that have been here since the colonial british era. even though its the warmest time of the year here, it always stays below room temperature. the town is cloaked in clouds – apparently if they were to disappear it is possible to view mt. everest from just down the road, but it doesn’t look like the clouds are going anywhere soon. we took a jeep up here, but its possible to take an eight hour toy train ride up from the sweltering lowlands that chugs (with steam) along a tiny narrow gauge train track. we’ve been eating meals with but three of devin’s unlimited supply of female friends. they happened to be in darjeeling and later kolkata at the same time as us.

although darjeeling is technically in the indian state of west bengal, on the street it is part of independent gorkhaland. there is an intense independence movement that basically controls everything, including whether businesses are allowed to be open, which they frequently aren’t because of political strikes. proposed gorkhaland would occupy a strip of northern northeast india. this is one of the biggest and established movements of its kind in india, although there are numerous others as well. like almost every problem the developing world has ever known, why don’t we blame this one on the british. they created the awkwardly shaped state of west bengal that grouped a few mountain dwelling nepalis in darjeeling with tens of millions of bengalis living in kolkata. by the way, there used to be an east bengal too, but now it is bangladesh.

now here is the juicy news. on our last day in darjeeling an opposition gorkha leader was brutally hacked to death with a traditional nepali knife at a political rally just down the street from where we were staying. the front page of the local papers had a huge picture of him bleeding out on the ground. no sensitivity from the press here. so the entire town went into lockdown mode. we went to visit the girls at the house they were staying at, and we had to stay there for the rest of the day because apparently it was too dangerous to be on the streets. although later that night we wandered the streets for adrenaline’s sake and it was fine. the next day we managed to find a jeep out of town although it was tough to do because all the jeeps were parked – their owners presumably inside their houses mourning. we had purchased a train ticket, but of course we were to pick it up the day everything shut down, and we couldn’t. so when we got to the bottom of the hill (after being privy to some motion sickness from one of the guys stuffed into the back of the jeep with us) and found our way to the train station, everything was sold out for the next three days. so we ended up taking a night and the next day too “sleeper” bus to kolkata. i’ll just skip describing that journey so i can avoid reliving it.

politician death announcement, darjeeling

veg thali and varanasi

varanasi is the holiest city in hinduism. rumor has it that if your body is cremated here and the ashes deposited in the ganges river your soul goes straight to nirvana. that means no chance of being a tapeworm in the next life! we are staying in a really great guesthouse right above the main burning ghat, where this cremation happens on big pyres of wood. there’s a funeral procession through the narrow, winding streets down to the river every few minutes. deceased people are flown here from all over india and around the world. most of the time the bodies are wrapped up elaborately, but sometimes they’re not – which is pretty gnarly when they burn the person right there in front of you. the people doing this work are the dalit, or the “untouchables” – but its a lucrative business so some of them have become the richest people in town. there’s a list of kinds of people who can’t be burned – they are tied to rocks and deposited in the ganges. of course, this being india, most of the time the rope breaks. so there’s all kinds of dead bodies floating in the river and washing up on the shores. along with all the feces from the city. and thousands of cows and buffaloes trying to escape the heat (aside – there are people who spend all day in the water scrubbing down the cows, perhaps for karma). all this in the water that everyone here seems to love to drink.

the first day we were here we fell for a scam about a hospice for dying people right beside the burning ghat. we went up to this “hospice” with a guy, and of course it wasn’t one and they demanded money. then some young guys started physically accosting me and i may have almost lost my temper again. moral of the story: stay away from the burning ghat. varanasi has dozens of ghats though (these are stairs leading down to the river). they are quite nice to walk along, and brilliantly photogenic.

behind these ghats is an intense old city with kilometer after kilometer of narrow streets filled with cows, their excrement, flies, temples and people selling stuff. on some of the ghats there are fire pujas every night, which are ceremonies performed by elaborately dressed young brahmins (the highest caste) involving lots of fire, flowers, what seems like some sort of interpretive dance and continuous noise (some of it provided by automated machines that power mallets that bang cymbals, drums and bells). after one little one of these they handed out this delicious pudding desert that may have been the only free thing i’ve ever received in india. oh, except for some partial body massages. the massagers come up to you and start massaging you without your permission – and you’ve got to literally beat them off before they have a chance to get their posse to surround you to ensure you pay for your massage. but we’d always let it go for at least a little while, because they sure did feel good!

on our second day here devin, lauren and i found a shopping mall and indulged ourselves in american style buttery corn and ice cream. then we went to a hindi bollywood movie at the cinema, in large part because the facilities were air conditioned. the film could not have been more entertaining. it was a romantic comedy that had about ten different basically unrelated storylines. wonderful. we also went on a couple boat rides on the ganges – one at night when people set afloat little floaters with flowers and a candle on it, and one very early in the morning when everyone in the city and their dirty laundry come down to the ganges for their bath and their swimming/yoga lessons.

we also went to an interesting “christian ashram.” a typical ashram is a hindu communal retreat center that focuses on attainment of spiritual enlightenment through the teachings of a guru. so i don’t really know what we were expecting from a christian ashram – i suppose some sort of fushion of hindu practice and faith in Christ. basically we were curious. well, it turns out the place was less of an ashram and more of a chill hangout with christian hippies. we had a communal meal, and then, being hippies, they passed a guitar around the circle for any of the ten people there to play. and a guy put in a good effort trying to play an indian flute thing that he is in india long term to apparently become proficient at playing. there is a soft spoken aussie guy with a head full of dreads and a rather sparse beard and his – you guessed it – musically inclined, artsy, and even more soft spoken wife and their child that have established this place to show Jesus to all the backpackers coming through seeking spiritual enlightenment. we had some interesting light-hearted discussions about such things as spiritual contextualization and different ways of interpreting the great commission; it was good. i appreciated them because you could tell that their hippiness was extraneous to their genuine desire to be missionaries without calling themselves or even necessarily considering themselves said, which in a way was rather refreshing. its all about the love man, not about the colonialism. don’t worry though mom – i’m holding off on the dreads. and by the way, happy mother’s day!!

the taj mahal!

the next stop for devin and me was agra, the home of the taj mahal. it truly is beautiful. there were thousands of indian tourists there. rather unexpectedly, almost every single one of them wanted to get their pictures taken with us. so all morning we posed in pictures. definitely the most popular i have or ever will be in my life. some don’t even ask – they just put their arm around you while their friend takes the photo. and oddly, it is not cool for an indian to smile in a picture. it was outrageous and, needless to say, got a little old after a while.

so we sat on a spatially isolated ledge under one of the minarets for a good while where only one indian tourist could gain access to talk to us at a time. later devin got violently ill, which was rather unfortunate. we then took the night/most of the next day too train to varanasi. we met a girl named lauren from new york where we were staying in agra, with whom we’ve been hanging out with ever since. varanasi is a remarkable place, but i think that will have to wait for the next post because i’m getting tired and we have to get up really early tomorrow…..

more delhi

went to the delhi airport and met my friend devin. he finally came out a little over two hours after his flight landed…. indian immigration. we hung out in delhi for two days – one day in old delhi which is a walled maze of little chaotic shopping streets. went to a very golden sikh temple where they give out free food and sing beautiful sounding sikh songs. also more hindu temples and a jain temple that had a bird “hospital” – more like a couple thousand birds being held in a cage. we tried to get into the jama masjid – the largest mosque in india – but even though it was supposed to be free they wouldn’t let us in unless we payed a lot of rupees. may have almost lost my temper. but i’ll stop writing about it now because its a bit of a sore spot.

the next day we walked around new delhi – refused about a million determined salesmen beneath the shadow of the india arch, decided not to go into the indian national museum because of the exorbitant admission fee, and saw the president’s house. a punjabi chap named mr. singh gave us a ride in his rickshaw. that’s also the prime minister’s name – what a coincidence. the smog in delhi is so bad that there is never direct sunlight – i can’t imagine how hot it would be if there were. we then hung out around connought place, the main shopping circle in delhi, before catching an evening train to agra.

delhi

“all” the trains from jaipur to delhi were “booked” – hard to believe considering i inquired two days in advance and there’s a train leaving for delhi every ten minutes, but whatever. so i took the bus. call me shallow, but my first day in delhi i was magnetically drawn to a shopping mall. i just felt this need to get away from the heat, incessant touts, beggars, bicycles trying to hit me, etc. and to eat something other than veg thali, masala dosas, and puri, as tasty as those foods are. “the great india place” is apparently the best mall in india. it was really nice – for india. don’t let the hype and the gdp growth figures fool you though – india is very much “developing,” and will be for a long, long time. a month ago i would have imagined the nicest mall in india to be a lot more amazing than it was.

after saying that, delhi has an amazing new metro system, being built in preparation for the commonwealth games that are going to be here this fall. the best thing is that you don’t have to barter for how much the trip is going to cost. although that sort of takes the fun out of it i guess. anyways, after taking it to the mall in the suburb of noida, i took it to the largest hindu temple in the world. today, i went to the international church here (after searching for quite some time to find it. rickshaw drivers sometimes say they know where something is and it turns out they have no idea). it was so nice. my first real church service in maybe over four months – it was absolutely refreshing. i love a good church. had a sit down chat with the pastor after the service, at his request. he was the man. there aren’t many churches here, to say the least.

i also went to a museum devoted to mahatma gandhi on the site where he was shot, then humayun’s tomb, perhaps india’s most impressive piece of mughal architecture. apparently there was a serious delhi-specific terrorist alert issued this weekend. so the military is absolutely everywhere right now, doing pat downs and waving their ak-47s around. they even had a little bunker set up in a shiny new metro station – completely surrounded by sandbags. i’m not going to say its overkill or they might arrest me – after all i had to give up my passport and every piece of personal data imaginable just to use this computer. personal liberties………… i digress.

tonight i head down to indira gandhi international airport to embrace my good friend devin from home, whom i will be joining as wingman on his indian adventures. he was supposed to get here last night but the toilet on the plane broke or something, so its 3:15 am tonight. yay! it will be really nice to have someone sleeping next to me every night.

gandhi smriti, the location of mahatma gandhi’s assasination, delhi

jaipur; it was inevitable, i guess

i got really, really, really sick. basically i had every symptom in the book, short of hair loss. i thought i might die. ok, i didn’t really think i would, but it was scary. maybe it was the “aquafina” water that definitely tasted like it had come straight out of the ganges, or worse yet, the yamuna river. who knows. i prayed a lot and took some miracle drug, ciprofloxacin. thankfully now i’m doing much better, although i’m still nowhere near 100%. i was staying at this place in jaipur that was 20 degrees hotter than it was outside during the day, which was already pretty darn hot.

i foolishly decided to take a rickshaw to this fort nearby in amber. it was a climb and a half to get to the fort, and at the top i was basically delusional and completely messed up. i had to lay down in this shady area with the guards for a couple hours to get myself together for the trip back. then i just stayed in my hotel room. but the fort was pretty cool. i think.

the day prior i explored the old walled city of jaipur, the capital of rajasthan and home to three million people desperate to rip off a tourist. can’t blame them, there’s not much else to do in town. its a pretty crazy place – the bazaar area is absolutely huge and there is a separate street for every imaginable thing to purchase. also any camels, cows, monkeys… wandered around all morning looking for something to eat – remarkably not a single establishment around opened until 11 am. climbed this huge free-standing minaret in the middle of the city for a great view.

i went to an amazing structure called hawa mahal, or the palace of the winds. it is a huge facade that women used to hide behind to watch the world go by back in the dark ages when they weren’t allowed to be seen in public. a truly beautiful building. a rickshaw driver promised me a great rate for an extensive tour (20 cents). i now know that any time something sounds too good to be true in india it most certainly is. i knew that before but i must not have been thinking straight. it turns out the rate was contingent upon him taking me to all these overcharging textile factories where they pressure you to buy things and he as the driver who brought the tourist there gets a kickback. i don’t have room in my backpack for textiles. so we argued, and we argued, and we argued, and i ended up walking.