Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala, has little to recommend it. Just moving your head can make you sweat. But one of the sensual pleasures of being in India after the mediocre (and rather pricey) food in Sri Lanka is being able to go to a downmarket restaurant and get a good vegetable curry for about 30 cents. The food can be pretty lousy in India, especially if you are eating meat (and sometimes with the more watery vegetable curries in the South) - but if you like spicy food, you can do very well for very little. Stuffing your face on cheap, tasty grub can be a surprisingly sensory experience after a long journey.
A less wonderful experience in India comes about because many of the people who interact with tourists believe that it is your duty as a tourist to cough up money. Not only are they bemused when you say you don't want something, but they believe that if they just keep at it you will relent (When you say no you mean maybe and when you say maybe you mean yes!). Sometimes what is being sold is justifiable enough (e.g. the pineapple sellers on the beach) but sometimes there are quite extraordinary propositions. One hawker wanted me to buy a drum on the beach. When I said that I didn't want one, he then proposed swapping my ($120) diving mask and snorkel for a drum. [This approach was also apparent to a lesser extent in Sri Lanka - one man on a train wanted me to buy a lottery ticket, even though I was leaving the next day. He then said that the drawing was being held that day and just couldn't understand why I didn't want to win a bicycle, even when I explained I was travelling round the world and wanted to travel light!]
India is a conundrum in so many ways. It has huge resources in terms of land and a population of over a billion (officially denied). It has a middle class of 250 million - some only relatively to the rest of the country, but many also affluent in absolute, world terms. There are 10 million speakers of English as a first language (that's more than New Zealand or South Africa), and many more who use it as their main means of communicating in business. India has a wealth of educated technology talent, both as a local resource and as an export (many of the engineers creating wealth in Silicon Valley come from India).
Yet the country itself still has great poverty, with perhaps a million or more people living on the streets in Calcutta. The bureaucracy, even for simple things like buying a train ticket, can drive strong men to tears of frustration. Hotels that charge $150 a night can have waiters who simply shrug their shoulders when you point out that you asked for tea and they gave you coffee, then wander off to get you what you wanted and are bemused by your annoyance. The caste system paralyses efficiency, since each type of task should be carried out by the appropriate task and it is demeaning to do someone else’s type of work. This sort of worked in an agricultural economy but is non-sensical when companies need to be nimble. Worst of all, years of socialist government and a culture of inefficiency have created massive overemployment in most industries. As the economy opens up, business people are seeing opportunities which they can only exploit by nimbleness and flexibility. Sooner or later they will push for labour reform which will cause substantial social upheaval, possibly precipitating a political shift among some of the more extreme parties such as the Hindu nationalist BJP. Is India a great opportunity, the next South America? Or will it remain only a potentially great economy, destined always to have potential which is never realised?
On a train trip to Cochin I idly speculate about privatising the railways - it takes 5 hours to cover 220 kms (then again, it does cost less than a subway token in New York). Intercity trains in Britain or France could cover that distance in an hour if there were no stops. There would be massive costs involved in modernising the system, but on the other hand each train has a couple of thousand people on it paying way under the real value of the trip (side thought - in a predominantly agricultural economy, where are all these people going? Why do they choose to make long distance trips? Is it just because fares are so cheap that it creates demand?). Fares could go up quite a bit and still be more than competitive with airlines; the six day trip from the south to Delhi could be cut to a one day trip which would make it a feasible business trip.
The main part of Cochin, Ernakulam, is just another Indian town, but Cochin itself is the remains of a trading outpost once settled by the Portuguese and then the Dutch. Kerala is a very cosmopolitan state by Indian standards - a very large Christian population (there were Christians in Kerala before there were any in Britain)., the highest literacy rate in India and a small population of Jews dating back almost 2000 years, mostly in Cochin’s old Jewtown. It is quite strange to walk around this old town and see signs for Sarah’s clothes shop and Cohen the lawyer.
Near Cochin are the Backwaters, a network of canals and waterways which create an economy completely based around boats. People live on narrow trips of land in between the waterways, harvesting coconuts (from which they make rope, mats, boats, houses, thatching, oil and cattle-feed). Life seems not to have changed for hundreds of years. Water hyacinths float in the more still sections of water; sometimes they clog up whole sections.
India also has hill stations - it is noticeable that one’s mood changes as you get higher up and away from the heat. In Kodaicanal the weather is positively cool and drizzly - rather a pleasant change!
This view is from a few miles outside Kodaicanal. Unfortunately when I got there the view was obscured by clouds - but in some respects it made it even more awesome - these cliffs don’t just drop down a few hundred feet as the picture might suggest, but over a 1500 metres. Knowing that under the clouds is a huge drop makes the cliffs more majestic somehow.
On the road to Madurai in Tamil Nadu the bus passes through a plain flanked by hills. The scenery is not particularly remarkable, except that it is dotted with literally hundreds of wind mills along a 10 mile stretch of the road. Somehow a wind farm seems more in keeping with a high-tech, developed economy such as California’s. In India most of the cars still run on diesel - all the more reason to look at alternate sources of energy, but I would have thought the first step would be to clean up existing emissions!
Madurai was by far the most Indian part of this trip. The town itself is mayham, with buses, rickshaws and bullock-pulled carts all competing for space on the road. The road is dirt even in the centre of town, which can make things pretty dusty.
The main attraction in Madurai is the temple - one of the great Hindu temples of India. There are approximately 13 million statues on the walls around the temple, each one garishly painted. Monkeys climb all over the structures, as a monkey is one of the incarnations of one of the Hindu deities.
Pilgrims come from all over the country to the various shrines, especially the lingam, a stylised representation of a phallus which is the symbol for Shiva. This section of the temple is out of bounds for non-Hindus. Outside this section there is a shrine to the monkey god, which people daub with butter and red powder (don’t ask me why. I backed into it by mistake when I was taking a picture of something
The best bit of Madurai temple was the temple elephant. People line up to be blessed - they put a rupee coin in its trunk and it taps you on the head with a wet snout. Every so often he blows out the coins (along with the other contents of his nose) into his handler’s hand.
Kovalam is a pretty double horseshoe of sand which has become one of India’s most famous beaches, and of its most overdeveloped tourist areas. You walk down the beach at night and get accosted by the restaurant workers who want you to come to their restaurant. It can take over an hour for them to grill your bit of fish - sometimes nearer two. But you get a piece of tandoori fish (sometimes the whole fish if it is something like a snapper) and beer and salad for about $3-4 - a huge amount for food in India, but nevertheless, sitting at a table looking at the sea and eating freshly grilled fish is a pleasant way to spend an evening.
On my last morning in India I had two bovine experiences. I sat in the rooftop restaurant of the hotel idly looking at the menu - each section had a theme (“from the sea”; “from the garden”). I noticed that the meat section was called “from the Quadruplets”… but roast babies were not to my fancy that day, so I looked out at the beach and saw… a cow. It was standing uselessly looking at the waves coming up the shore and lapping at its hooves. How it got there I have no idea, because there is really quite a steep road on both the access paths to the beach. In addition, it would have had to wend its way in between the various restaurants, hotels, and above all people, to get to the beach. Somehow it seemed an appropriate summing up for India…
On my last morning in India I had two bovine experiences. I sat in the rooftop restaurant of the hotel idly looking at the menu - each section had a theme (“from the sea”; “from the garden”). I noticed that the meat section was called “from the Quadruplets”… but roast babies were not to my fancy that day, so I looked out at the beach and saw… a cow. It was standing uselessly looking at the waves coming up the shore and lapping at its hooves. How it got there I have no idea, because there is really quite a steep road on both the access paths to the beach. In addition, it would have had to wend its way in between the various restaurants, hotels, and above all people, to get to the beach. Somehow it seemed an appropriate summing up for India…
all the pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/justin.woddis/IndiaSabbatical
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