A Sort of Homecoming...

Wednesday 17 December 2008
Verkala – Thiruvananthapuram – Bombay – Abu Dhabi – London

So Evan wakes up and leaves before I get up. We say our goodbyes and he's off to the train station on a day and a half trip to Bombay. He's been a great, easy going travelling companion and his accent, macking talk and fierce eyes have kept me entertained. I get up more or less after he leaves and take it easy sorting myself out and getting breakfast and so on.

I take a taxi from Verkala to Thiruvananthapuram and I get an Ambassador. If there's one car that's typical of India it's the Tata Indica. But I had already driven one of those (while drunk, at night, with no headlights and an drunk, emotional, bleeding and lost tourist driver as my passenger) so that's yesterday's news. The other car that's typical of India is the Ambassador, a stately, regal 1950's looking creation that screams style and class. It's probably a copy of a famous western car but I'm not a car geek so you'll have to guess the make and model.

Anyway so I get to travel in one as my last taxi trip in India (and my first was a Tata Indica, so there's a pleasant poetic mirroring there). The trip is quite straightforward and takes an hour. It's on better roads so it's smooth as well.

At the airport they don't allow you to take lighters on the plane (or indeed pack them in your luggage apparently) so the two that I had been saving – one with an image of Goa on it and another with the Gateway to India – were lost to fortune. Bastards. All things must pass, as the doctor told his constipated client.

The flight to Bombay is fine. It's on Jet Airways and I was expecting a rough and ready no frills flight, but it was surprisingly upmarket. There was a fair amount of leg room and they included a meal which you didn't have to pay for. Not bad. They also played instrumental lounge covers of Christmas carols as we descended which was bizarre. I'd only seen two signs says Merry Christmas since I'd been in India, both of those were in Kerala which seems to have a sizeable Christian population but none in Goa where Christianity is the dominant religion and every fifth building seems to be a church.

Coming in to land, we passed over the Bombay peninsula and surprisingly it didn't look too polluted. We banked right and headed into the countryside. A short distance to the east we passed over a large mountainous area with flat tops like Table Mountain or that area in South America. The tops were covered in trees and it seems like a very incongruous landscape to have so close to the chaotic metropolis of Bombay. Though when I say close, it was probably something like 100 kilometres away.

I arrived in Bombay and made my way to the international terminal. Though the fact that I didn't have a (paper) ticket seemed to be incomprehensible to these people. First they said I wouldn't be allowed on the transfer coach so I'd have to pay for a taxi. I made up a booking reference number and they let me on.

Then at the international terminal they asked for my ticket at the entrance door. When I explained my situation they just waved me in anyway. The check in counter wasn't open so I killed some time blogging. The lack of ticket also caused some confusion at the check in as, in typical Indian style, there are about 20 people to check your details before you actually check in and I had to explain what the situation was to each one. Ironically of course, when I actually came to check in, there was no problem at all.

In the departure lounge I have a chicken byriani as it would be wrong to leave India with the last two meals I ate being a pizza and a fried breakfast. It was at the equivalent of a fast food joint and the taste was average, though the presentation was very good.

I've started reading William Darymple's The Age of Kali, a series of articles on India at the start of the 90s. The first few chapters are all about one of my favourite Indian topics, political corruption. Apparently it all started in Bihar and spread out from there. In The White Tiger Adiga calls the poor, north-eastern part of India “the darkness”, and the richer south-western part “the light”. Darymple expresses his concern about the spread of this corruption from Bihar further west, to all of India (“the Age of Kali”), and it's no doubt that some of that has happened, though not catastrophically.

The reason I mention this is that the person at the centre of Darymple's first chapter is the then and I think current Chief Minister of Bihar state, a person who made jokes about how he forced paying customers out of their seats on a train, and when someone complained they beat him up and left him bleeding on a train station platform. He had many criminal charges filed against him including murder, and due to the undefiled judicial system he would never be brought to trial. He was a village thug turned gangster turned politician, as in India politics and the mob are more or less the same thing. At the time of Darymple's writing he was the Defence Minister.

The reason I mention all this is that at the start of the flight I devour my way through some Indian papers, mainly full of post 26/11 (the Mumbai terror attacks) political fall-out and Tendulkar's match-winning 41st test century. But there is some forgettable article is this man's name, still active in politics. Turns out he's now the minister for railways.

If democracy means that the people get the government they deserve, then India must be a country full of careless, corrupt, short-termist, heartless, moral-free idiots. Wait a second...

One thing that Evan said stuck in my mind. Africa isn't known for its wealth or particularly the sanctity of its politicians, though there are a few notable exceptions – Botswana springs to mind. But what Africa does have is better hygiene. There the people are poor and they wear tattered clothes and so on. But at least they care slightly more about their environment in the sense that they tend to clean up after themselves.

In the whole time I've been here I've never seen an Indian use a dustbin. In fact, I've hardly seen any public dustbins, which may be due to terrorism. It seems that the whole country is one large dustbin. The same seems to apply to the way they build disgusting concrete blocks in front of ancient or historical buildings. There's no care in their actions. The roads are full of rubbish, their buildings are rubbish, and so are their politicians. It puts the pathetic rhetorical crises of the Daily Mail into sharp relief.

Well excuse me if I tar one and a half continents in sweeping generalisations. Of course the devil is in the details and with a billion people who are all of adorning every surface with more decoration than is strictly necessary, there is a lot of detail. I'm not down on India, despite having had some torrid experiences along the way. There are plenty of people that were kind and genuinely helpful or interested. On one occasion some Indians came up to me and took their picture with me, just because I was there it seemed. Or maybe it's because I'm extremely good looking. Must be one of those two reasons.

Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that India really needs to buck its ideas up. But as a travel destination, if you're looking for something different, something out of the ordinary, and you don't mind being uncomfortable, there is a lot to see and experience here.

On a separate note, the third world, eh? And India, for all it's technological reinvention and Mumbai elite, is 80% a third world country. As indeed are Cambodia, Vietnam and to a lesser extent, Thailand. What has this travel, these experiences taught me?

In the third world, human life is cheap. No social services, health care, education, water, electricity and so on. These are luxuries we understandably take for granted (and then whinge about). It seems the true judge of a civilisation or state is how it treats its poor. Not because it has a well meaning socialist manifesto, but because it has enough spare money to be able to, and then also does something about it.

Living with your extended family for all your life? Having 2-3 people sleeping in every room of the house (and usually the total number of rooms is one)? I can see why so many people live alone in the west – living with a wife for most your adult life is a challenge according to the divorce rates. Living with people you haven't chosen for all of your life must be even harder. If you've got the money, you might as well leave home. You've never had it so good.

Back on the plane I started watching the Ricky Gervais “vehicle” Ghost Town which hadn't been release in the UK when I left. It was OK and worked well for him, though I didn't get to the end as we started to descend in to Abu Dhabi. Ah, Abu Dhabi airport. Oh joy. Hello again...