Morgalogue

Travellers in India are pulled towards Varanasi like teenage inter-railers to Amsterdam. For a Hindu, it is as important a journey as a Muslim travelling to Mecca. Every year millions of pilgrims come to bathe in the Ganges, the holiest river in India that is worshipped as a god. Some come here to die, whereupon they will be cremated on its banks, assuring them a ticket to nirvana, a loophole in the cycle of reincarnation. It is literally, a once in a lifetime experience. (more…)

About a month ago, I realised that while India is ‘really big’, you can still get from one end to the other in a few days if you have to. At the same level of generalisation, it can also be said that culturally, India is divided into North and South. I decided to trade in my thorough exploration of the South for a scatter-gun tour of the North to get a feel for this contrast. (more…)

As I was nudged awake by the motion of my sleeper bus, my first glimpse of Bombay couldn’t have been more perfect. We were gunning along a brand new road, across a barren landscape that terminated in a hazy horizon, bleached by a harsh morning sun. The longer we rode towards towards it, the more this white hot haze grew, draining the colour from the sky and the earth in front of us. Vast, desolate salt plains, half filled with dirty water, like no-mans land battle scars, stretched into the void, relflecting the emptyness. The only clue that something was about to emerge from this bleak mirage were the colossal lanes of electricity pylons, galloping into the distance. (more…)

Before reaching Gokarna, I was about to write a post which would have had to have been filed under the new heading of ‘moans’. I’d been giving myself a bit of a hard time about what exactly I was ‘doing’ out here. I didn’t expect a beach and beer bottle to provide me with so much inspiration. (more…)

Another catching up post. For the benifit of my Mum, who wants a map included (I’ll see), since leaving Madurai I’ve been to Kumbakonam and some small, very rural towns around there, Thanjavur, Tiruchirapalli, Coimbatore, Ooty (the British summer retreat), Mysore, Hampi and now the beautiful, surprisingly undeveloped, beaches of Gokarna. I’m relaxing in the sun doing absolutely nothing and loving it - but you don’t want to hear about that I’m sure. Rather than log all that lot, I just picked a few little snapshots I wanted to write about … and in my usual style, combed through them in minute detail. (more…)

Aside from the famed Meenakshi mega-temple, rising up out of a warren of hustling streets, like a walled city within a city, first impressions of Madurai weren’t great. Hot from our spiritual investigation in Tiruvannamalai however, Eitan and I were keen to scratch the grubby surface and somehow connect with what lay beneath. (more…)

Sorry - this has turned into a bit of a novelette. Get a cup of tea.  

It seems to me, that you can’t really know Asia without understanding religion. Here, it’s a lesson in both history and mainstream culture. Being completely and indiscriminately ignorant of all faiths however, the mind of the believer is taking me alot of effort to get grips with. Without ever properly having stopped to think about it, I guess I’d always explained the continuing devotion of millions worldwide to gods and goddesses as tradition. Self-serving ideas and institutions built to explain a world we assumed to be flat, still tangled up in our cultures and the identities we give ourselves. If people really wanted to think rationally about it, surely they’d realise it’s probably not true. The millions can be wrong - look at James Blunt - so what’s to know ?

Well, while actual faith may be beyond me, the last week has been a fascinating ride into the 3rd eye of Hindu spirituality. (more…)

This week I have been living in the strange, minature world of ‘French India’. I’m not entirely clear on the history, or why the Brits let them keep it at all, but the French clung on to a tiny capsule of territory around the city of Pondicherry until 1954. Unlike the British colonial sites however, the French don’t really seem to have left. Police still wear red kepis hats, people play boules, there are boulangeries galore, street names have largely resisted the re-ethnification process thats working its way through the country. And in a way that seems particulary French to me, French tourists flock to visit ‘the French part’ of the country and compalin about how crap the crepes are (no joke - I overheard a 10 minute moan about the flour used). We clearly have very a different relationship with our ex-colonies. (more…)

I am now (finally) the extremely proud owner of a Canon G7 camera. By far the most high-tech thing I have ever owned. Getting hold of the item was an exercise in ‘modern India’ that took me on a journey of several hundred kilometres, from coast to coast and just about reduced me to tears on several occasions. (more…)

With a heavy heart and dodgy stomach I write to you from Bangalore. Lidka reluctantly flew home on Saturday to start her new job after 10 beautiful days spent touring Kerela. After moping around the completely uninspiring city of Kochi feeling sorry for myself with food poisoning, I have decided to jump-start my survival insticts with a trip to a frightening megatropolis. Also not a bad place to pick up a new camera. I arrived this morning on the night train, a little short on sleep, so I may become incoherent soon. I haven’t seen much of the city since the sun came up, though it has already confused me. I spent over an hour trying to find a hotel that wasn’t full with the mass influx of visitors to the big Farming Expo - not quite the IT boomtown I was expecting. Some outskirts of the city are also under curfew after rioting yesterday. At 5am this morning I was slouched at a newsstand trying to make sense of the following headlines: 2 dead, 40 vehicles burned as riots blaze Bangalore. Jade Goody admits racist slur. “Oh god, what has the silly cow done ? Maybe I should take a taxi” were my initial thoughts, but after reading on, the stories were thankfully unrelated. (more…)