kate & christophe

Chinese New Year is the opportunity for a lot of people in the world’s most populated continent to take a short holiday; consequently most flights across Asia are booked weeks ahead which we did not anticipate. For us, this meant that our plans to extend our stay in India in order to continue to visit more of the South at a leisurely pace were foiled. We had to go back to Mumbai in order to catch our next flight to Hong Kong; or we would have to stay for much longer and forget about Africa. This was not going to happen. And so after three months, twenty days, seven hours and thirty minutes in India, we had to leave.

Unfortunately, given the distance between Pondicherry and Mumbai, the time we had, and the time it takes to travel that distance, we had little choice but to book another internal flight. Otherwise this would have meant spending the last three days on a bus or a train hoping that we would reach the airport on time. But past experience taught us that is very unwise to rely on land transportation with a deadline. In India, it seemed like the world conspired against us every time we were on a tight schedule: the wheel of our bus in Ladakh could fall off, our train to Darjeeling was over 10 hours late, waiting list tickets would remain waiting list tickets, etc… Besides, we found that the average speed in India always seemed to be 30km/h, no matter what.

So to our regret – and increasing carbon guilt – we gave up our snail pace and flew to Mumbai. I later discovered that you can buy off the guilt of flying through organisations such as ClimateCare.org, a UK company which sponsors projects which aim at reducing carbon emissions throughout the world in order to compensate for the extra carbon we emit. Airlines are also setting carbon offsetting schemes, both Cathay Pacific Fly Greener and Qantas Fly Carbon Neutral programs are designed to help us reduce our carbon footprint by proxy.

After spending so much time travelling through a country, the usual exercise is to look back and reflect upon the journey. But as all travel books warn, India is just impossible to pin down. Several books on India like to use this quote from Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian poet:

To a western observer our civilisation appears as all metaphysics, as to a deaf man playing piano appears to be mere movements of fingers and no music

This rang true on so many occasions. For example, the government-run railway company and its complex tickets reservation system involving obscure quotas and sometimes also baksheesh seems like an insane way of managing tickets – we still don’t fully understand how it works; yet most trains do run (eventually) and a lot of them at full capacity. In fact, we have been told that it is a successful business model that other countries are trying to emulate – God help us!

So many other things appear completely nonsensical. But I think that all these apparent contradictions only further aroused our curiosity. We’ve never read so many books and articles about a country before. We have devoured the local newspaper in the morning and assaulted our Indian friends with questions, to which they patiently replied – thank you Kartik and Rupal. The more we knew, the more we wanted to know; something drove us to go beyond the paradoxes and try to make a little sense.

But India can be an extremely frustrating place. Less than an hour after we arrived in India, we had to endure the absurdity of Delhi airport’s security rules. First, we were denied access to the domestic terminal because our electronic ticket was not printed on paper, but printers are located inside the terminal. Then we could not enter the terminal because no one was attending the x-ray machine – apparently, the operator was on an extended twenty-minute break which lasted for a couple of hours; later we were told the x-ray machine was broken – just like most taxi meters. And when we finally made it inside the terminal, the retiring rooms were suddenly full. This was our first night in India.

Suketu Mehta, the author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay lost and found’ summarises this aspect of India very well:

 

India is the country of No. That ‘no’ is your test. You have to get past it. It is India’s Great Wall; it keeps foreign invaders. Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge. In the guru-shishya tradition, the novice is always rebuffed multiple times when he first approaches the guru. Then the guru stops saying no but doesn’t say yes either; he suffers the presence of the student. When he starts acknowledging him, he assigns a series of menial tasks, meant to drive him away. Only if the disciple sticks it out through all these stages of rejection and ill treatment is he considered worthy of the sublime knowledge. India is not a tourist friendly country. It will reveal itself to you only if you stay on, against all odds. The ‘no’ might never become a ‘yes’. But you will stop asking questions.

– Maximum City, Suketu Mehta

But we stayed on; and it was rewarding. If India has not revealed itself to us, we are certainly keen to discover more and continue to explore the country. We felt our trip was being amputated when we were told we had no chance of postponing our departure.

It is a strangely addictive place. India somehow manages to draw travellers back. Indeed, we have met several travellers who had been here dozens of times. Our Spanish companions in Ladakh had made the trip over thirty times – though they had stopped counting. I don’t know that we will be back that many times, but we are poised to come back.