Emily In India

New blog

Wed, 04 May 2011 18:42:00 -0400

I have since come back from India and have continued the generic blog I used before going:

emilywight23.wordpress.com

would love it if people read it!

Thanks for reading

Emily x

Me outside the Taj hotel

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:50:08 -0400

Me outside the Taj hotel

Mumbai: the last day

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:48:56 -0400

The next day, we headed to a free photography exhibition that we’d read about in the Time Out guide to Mumbai. It was snapshots of the city throughout the 1980s and 1990s - all in black and white, but reflected really well the juxtaposition of a developing, modern city well on its way in the industrialistion process, but growing out of a country still entrenched in poverty. For example, the photographer, Pablo Bartholomew, portrayed beggars and children lying on the street, wrapped in blankets, next to soaring skyscrapers; the Taj Mahal hotel; shots of Mumbai looking not unlike Atget’s Paris in its faded colonial glory. It was an incredibly interesting exhibition, particularly as it documented the city through what must have been one of its major periods of change, and really brought out the diversity of the place.

After visiting the exhibition we remained in the vein of juxtaposition by paying a visit to Cafe Coffee Day, an Indian coffee chain which I guess is like their version of Starbucks. It was air-conditioned, with fancy coffees, sundaes and desserts. We both ordered a “chocaccino” and wrote our journals for a few hours. The cafe was clearly popular among the middle-class Mumbaikers in their tight jeans and busty blouses, iphones strapped to their ears and designer handbags. Similar to the social commentary of Bartholomew’s exhibition, an elderly woman without the use of her legs hoisted herself along the pavement outside with her weathered hands, pausing by groups of affluent, pale-skinned Mumbaikers and tourists to beg for food; this was less than a metre away from where we were stitting, cocooned in our air-conditioned box and protected by a security guard from the reality of the street.

After lunch of a masala dosa at a local cafe, we took another train to Grant Road station again, to visit Chor Bazaar, a market famous for its antique goods and where Sarah bought a beautiful Bollywood poster. Unfortunately it took us a while to find; we ended up walking through meat markets before we found the area we wanted. Neither of us could look or breathe: the lasting image I have of when I did look was of a bloody hairless chicken still squawking away as a butcher chopped it up.

We went to treat ourselves to a drink in the Taj; Rob had done it and admitted that despite the extortion it was definitely worth it. Outside were posh Indian families getting horse-drawn silver carriages along the seafront; whilst they were clearly having fun it did look pretty tacky. We went through a bag-check before entering, using the amazing toilets where we were waited on, and went to the Harbour Bar for a ridiculously overpriced Diet Coke.

In the evening we finished off some shopping, and the next morning crammed everything into our rucksacks… it was goodbye to India!

Chowpatty Beach

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:36:46 -0400

Chowpatty Beach

statues of Gandhi’s life

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:34:04 -0400

statues of Gandhi’s life

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Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:31:46 -0400

Me outside Gandhi’s house

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:30:58 -0400

Me outside Gandhi’s house

Haji Ali’s tomb

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:29:16 -0400

Haji Ali’s tomb

Mumbai: dhobi ghats, Haji Ali's tomb, Gandhi's house, Chowpatty Beach and Leopold's

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:19:27 -0400

After the slum tour Florence and I took a train up to Mahalaxmi station to look at the “dhobi ghats”, the streets where people are employed to wash laundry from all over the city; this tradition goes back hundreds of years. To be honest I was expecting it to be more impressive than it was… it was essentially a long line of washing hanging, though I’m not really sure what I expected…

After this I was ravenous, feeling the effects of not having eaten for a while. We stumbled upon a local cafe which had a really cheap menu, and each ate palak paneer and a chapatti for Rs.90 between us! We were stared at a bit because they clearly weren’t used to foreigners eating there. But the palak paneer ranked amongst some of the best I’ve had; they’d fried the paneer separately so that it was brown and crispy on the outside…and ironically, we found this place because we walked the wrong way to get to Haji Ali’s tomb. It just goes to show what you can find if you wander off the beaten track!

We then walked (in the right direction) to Haji Ali’s tomb. One of the reasons I’d really wanted to see this was because I’ve felt so overwhelmed by the Hindu dominance in Tamil Nadu and have even come into more contact with Christian Indians than Muslims, who I’d thought I might see more of. I was interested to observe a Muslim place of worship, to experience a different religious context in action.

Haji Ali himself was an Afghan mystic made Muslim saint who is clearly revered by many Mumbaikers. The tomb itself was in a bright white building of Muslim-style architecture, with an arched dome gateway as an entrance and cylindrical turrets above. The main point was that it was at the end of a long, rocky walkway protruding from the land into the sea. According to the Rough Guide, this often gets covered by sea in high tide, which I thought must have complicated matters considering there were many stalls selling things and also scores of beggars. The sad thing was, it was obvious they had some kind of beggar-master controlling them and who’d placed them there, because almost all of them had some sort of disability, whether it was stumps for arms or crippled legs.

After a brief peek at the tomb - we weren’t sure how far non-Muslims were allowed in - we took a train to Grant Road station, to visit Mani Bhavan, the house where Gandhi lived for a long period of time, including when he plotted his resistance movement. Frankie and Greg had recommended we go there and I’d really wanted to especially as we missed out on the Gandhi museum in Madurai.

It took us ages to find, but after asking directions from about thirty people (it’s astonishing how many Indians seem to have no idea who Gandhi is) we found it on a quiet, leafy lane that could just as well have been a London suburb. It was free to get in, but you could make a donation, though the staff were rather distracted by the cricket on TV - today was the first day of the World Cup in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

There were many interesting artefacts in the museum, including a plaque from the Obamas during their visit in November 2010, stamps with Gandhi’s face on from all over the world, photos and quotes, letters he wrote (including correspondence with Tolstoy and a letter to Hitler in 1939 asking for world peace, insisting that the Fuhrer had the power to prevent millions of lives being lost. Ahem), and the room where he famously did his spinning, everything in place as it had been. There was also a room with about twenty to thirty glass boxes, containing wooden dolls in each. Each box depicted seminal moments from Gandhi’s life, and so lifelike: there was Gandhi with his dying mother, being kicked off the train in South Africa, in court at his trial, at a protest to boycott British goods, on the salt march etc. There were several crowd scenes and the detail on both faces and material for clothes was superb; there was also the background, with buildings, trees etc.

Florence has read Gandhi’s autobiography and is disappointed by his stance towards women; apparently he was willing to let his ill wife die rather than let her eat meat, when the doctor had said that was the only way for her to get healthy again. It’s one thing to abstain from certain “luxuries” because of a particular belief, but another altogether to enforce it on others, even in a matter of life-or-death; this seems all the more ludicrous applied to a loved one!

After seeing Mani Bhavan, we walked down the road to Chowpatty Beach, the famous long stretch of sand with the city’s skyscrapers in the background, where Mumbai’s families and lovers come for strolls. It was 5.30pm - the perfect time of day - and we bought a chai from a passer-by as we watched the couples fertively with their arms around each other on the sand.

We then took a train back to Churchgate station and walked down to Colaba where we went to Leopold’s for a drink. We both only really wanted to go to Leopold’s because it’s famous for being Gregory David Roberts’ haunt of choice in “Shantaram”, the epic semi-autobiographical tale of a fugitive in Mumbai. He and his friends are always gathering there: it’s what Cafe Flore was to Jean-Paul Sartre, what Central Perk is to Monica, Chandler etc…

It was established in 1848 but I get the impression that it has had a complete overhaul since the fame of Shantaram. All the waiters were wearing matching red t-shirts as though they were in an American diner, it was full to bursting with tourists and prices were sky-high.

Mumbai: Dharavi

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:57:43 -0400

I woke up feeling a lot better, which was just as well because we’d booked onto Reality Tours and Travel’s Dharavi Slum Tour, the same one Rob had been on and which I wrote about in a previous post.

We had breakfast delivered to our room, and walked to Churchgate Station to get a train to Mahim, a suburb of Mumbai where we’d meet the tour.

We met the guides and the rest of the tour at 10am. I don’t remember the names of the guides, but we have nicknames for them: one called himself “DJ Shaker” as in his spare time, he’s a DJ and has recorded the sounds of the slum - recycling, manufacturing etc - to mix his tracks that he plays in Dharavi bars at night. He had grown up in Dharavi, and was also the official tour photographer, as we weren’t allowed to take photographs. He was originally from Tamil Nadu!

The other’s name began with “A”, but when I first asked him his name, he said “my name is Khan, I am not a terrorist” and burst out laughing; apparently it’s a line from a film…

The tour split into two; we had My Name Is… as our guid, and were with a group of American guys who worked for a software company and came to Pune on business quite often; they’d decided to spend a few extra days in Mumbai. My Name Is firstly stood with us on a railway bridge overlooking Dharavi and told us about the slum.

The word “slum”, despite its endless negative connotations, simply refers to any houses built on government land. The government has a rule that any structures built after 1985 on this land are illegal and theoretically have the power to turf people off at any time. But thanks to police corruption, they’ll often happily receive bakshish from illegal landlords rather than follow the rules themselves.

My Name Is… told us that “Slumdog Millionaire” was filmed in Dharavi and inf act one of the reasons that Reality Tours and Travel started the tour was a response to the negative, unrealistic image of the slum presented in the film. They thought that it didn’t show the bonhomie, community feel and hard work that really goes on there and will only exacerbate views of India abroad. It seemed like a perfect business idea to exploit people’s interest and educated them about the reality of life in Dharavi, whilst putting money back into their partner NGO, Reality Gives. My Name Is… told us to note if we ever saw any beggars and to consider how friendly everyone was; to conclude, I saw just one beggar, and everyone was, on the whole, very friendly.

He took us to some buildings where we watched the processes of recycling plastics and manufacturing goods. From the rooftop we could see similar goings-on all over Dharavi; we walked past men welding, a Muslim man making Hindu statues, women making pappad (or poppadoms as they are known in the UK)… they were all extremely welcoming given that two tours trample through their habitat each day, which must be pretty intrusive. Just to see everybody’s resourcefulness was so inspiring; of course there are no health and safety regulations so people have to work in the most horrendously dangerous conditions, but our guide reminded us that when there are fifty people applying for one job to feed their families, they can’t afford to be picky about helmets or whatnot.

Dharavi was heaving with people: after the tour I read that it is Asia’s biggest slum and the most densely populated “city” in the world; this was manifest on the tour from the families standing outside their homes, kids running atop gutters, women ferociously scrubbing clothes on rocks, men crammed in doorways smoking beedies. And whilst there were the narrow, dark winding passageways with just loose stones balancing precariously on drains to walk on, and only cracks of light overhead to let in the faintest of the sun’s rays, a lot of the slum had main roads, supermarkets, banks, a cinema… it was, in essence, a suburb.

Something I’d thought would be visually worse was the sanitation problem. Millions of residents share just one toilet, and I’d assumed there would be more people relieving themselves on the streets, and generally more rubbish everywhere. We were taken to an area with several large rubbish dumps where dozens of children were playing, some defecating in the open. Though these conditions would obviously be described as “squalid”, what struck me first was the good nature of the kids, playing so happily with each other. The whole slum was home to such a sense of community; there were also several schools we walked past - our guide told us that around 85% of Dharavi’s children are in education, which isn’t a bad statistic compared to other parts of India. Reality Gives has a primary school, and there are other NGOs also working in the slum.

At the end of the tour we went to Reality Tours and Travel’s office and I bought a poster of one of DJ Shaker’s photographs, of the huge manufacturing process carried out by men from the slum. I want to put it on my wall and remind myself, each time I look at it, of the resilience of some people in the world who are a lot less fortunate than I am. If I ever feel down, I hope that this photograph will inspire me to stop moping and to get up and go!

Victoria Terminus

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:25:29 -0400

Victoria Terminus

Mumbai: Day 1

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:16:54 -0400

We were meant to arrive in Dadar (a suburb of Mumbai) at 5.50am but didn’t get there until about 7am. We didn’t fancy braving the commuter trains we’d previously read about and were now seeing, packed to the brim with people hanging off doors (we’d also read some ghastly statistic about people falling off the trains) with our backpacks and me feeling fragile. So we decided to take a taxi to Hotel Lawrence, which we’d booked and which was recommended by our friend Anna.

A driver approached us as soon as we got off the train, saying he’d charge no luggage fee and that the taxi was on a metre. He drove us south through Mumbai - surprisingly not very busy for rush hour in an Indian city - to the Prince of Wales museum, near the hotel. We asked if he could take us straight to the hotel, and he proceeded to go through the charade of asking passers-by on the street where we were going, which took a while. Eventually he dropped us by the street, which he said was too narrow to drive down. He then demanded a luggage charge, and wouldn’t listen when we protested. It came to Rs.800, and I gave him 2 Rs.500 notes, which he not-so-niftily pocketed and got out 2 Rs.100 notes, saying, “Madam, you only gave me Rs.200”.

For a second I thought maybe he was right and that I was going delusional, perhaps from being ill. But Florence confirmed that I’d given him 2 Rs.500s. He gave in pretty easily to accepting that we knew what we were doing; I guess he thought he may as well try. But the fact remains that he tried to cheat me, and we were angry, though relieved we didn’t fall for it.

Lawrence Hotel - which was more a hostel - was on the third floor of what looked like an extremely run-down office building, on a narrow road and pretty hidden away. There was a groaning lift with a sign saying not to enter with luggage, and we thought we’d stay safe and stick to the stairs. As it was about 7.30am, we couldn’t check in but were able to leave our bags in the office with the smiley owner.

We then walked down past the Prince of Wales museum into Colaba, the area where most tourists stay - Lawrence was just on the edge. We went to the Gateway of India which was pretty impressive in its mixture of Gujarati and Victorian architectural design. Unfortunately however, there was a music concert outside it so there were huge sound systems, a stage and lights obstructing the monument from a far-away, camera-friendly view to see it all in one snapshot. We did get an excellent view, however, of the Taj Mahal Hotel, famous to me mainly due to the terrorist attacks there in 2008. I don’t actually think I’d heard of it before the atrocities, but its history is interesting: an Indian man built it in retaliation to the British colonials’ refusal to allow him into what was at the time the swankiest hotel in Mumbai, claiming it was “whites-only”. Apparently the original hotel has since gone bankrupt and the Taj, glorious in its red and white stately brickwork and majestic towers, is now a chain all over India.

An equally charming fact I read in the guide book was about the Gateway itself: whilst built to welcome the British onto Indian soil, the long-lasting image most people have is of them leaving in 1947.

We walked around the streets of Colaba looking for somewhere to eat breakfast. I didn’t feel like anything but felt so weak that we both thought I should eat something plain. Mumbai seemed, compared to what we’d been told and our experience of other Indian cities, pretty empty. The architecture was interesting: tall, windowed terrace buildings, a far shabbier version of what you might find in Paris or Madrid. The streets of Colaba were wide - and actually had pavements! - it was pretty leafy, and there wasn’t much traffic. The people walking to work were both men and women; women were wearing suits or jeans and t-shirts. Some were wearing saris, but overall the dress code was a lot more westernised.

We found a meals-restaurant and ate some toast. We were both shattered and I was still feeling rough. I was torn between not wanting to miss out on Mumbai, and the overwhelming urge to lie down.

We bought a TimeOut guide to Mumbai and decided to visit Jehangir Art Gallery, attached to the Prince of Wales museum but free (Prince of Wales being out of our price range). One exhibition at Jehangir was by a female Indian artist who’d painted - in the most gorgeously bright colours - depictions of lovers Radha and Krishna. Most of the paintings portrayed a main profile of both or either of them, but always with a separate, smaller motif on the side of other figures or a story - rather reminding me of Klimmt. I absolutely loved this gallery; there was also a collection of works by Vinayak Jagdale entitled “Universal Peace”, showing the Buddha in various forms and colours. I really wanted to buy postcards or a poster, some sort of souvenir, from a shop, as I have done in European art galleries, but they didn’t seem to have established this tradition.

When it was twelve noon and we could check into the hostel, I went back to lie down throughout the afternoon. Whilst the bathrooms were shared, the rooms were spacious and clean, breakfast was included in the price, and the proprietor also filled up water bottles with filtered water which we were free to take as we pleased. For Rs.700, that’s brilliant for Mumbai, and I would definitely recommend it to any other budget travellers.

Florence used the afternoon to get a boat out to the Elephanta Caves, which she said were similar to so many other UNESCO World Heritage sites that we’ve seen and I hadn’t missed much, which made me feel better.

I felt a lot better after a rest and a shower so in the evening we went for a walk, heading north and getting lost amongst commuters and other rushing around on the streets.

The streets - particularly MG Road - were grand and wide, not unlike Haussman’s boulevards in Paris, but with Victorian-style buildings housing banks, designer stores and the infamous Victoria Terminus train station, which looks exactly like St Pancras.

Amongst the colonial architecture and modern European lifestyle, Mumbai’s Indian charm emerged with the hawkers and street stalls set up all the way along MG Road and around Flora Fountain. We ate dinner in an Indian restaurant where I had dhal and rice; I was pretty hungry by that point.

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Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:18:32 -0400

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Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:13:48 -0400

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Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:11:53 -0400

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Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:10:44 -0400

View from Matanga Hill

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:06:56 -0400

View from Matanga Hill

Hampi Part 2; illness spreads...

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:05:26 -0400

The next day we decided to venture across the river; there was a boat that went continuously back and forth, taking about three minutes and costing Rs.15. Once on the other side, we walked past a few cafes and guesthouses and came upon some glorious rice paddy fields. The landscape was odd, because I associate paddy fields with a tropical setting like that of Tamil Nadu; however, towering above were huge rocks and a sparseness that was prevalent all over Hampi. I got quite nervous when we saw two huge monkeys - two-thirds the size of a man walking alongside them - darting down the rice paddy. I wouldn’t have wanted to come into close contact with them, but luckily we didn’t see any closer up!

We walked quite a bit but never got round to finding the Hanuman temple we’d been told about; it was so hot that we couldn’t be bothered to walk much further and eventually turned back and ate lunch and had a nice cold beer by the river (unlike the bazaar, establishments on the other side of the river are licensed to sell alcohol).

In the afternoon, when the heat of the day had died down somewhat, we walked up Matanga Hill. Many people go there for sunrise, but we weren’t really sure about this because we were unclear about where it was and how long it would take; IVC Lisa had also warned us of the monkeys there at that time!

I’m so glad we went up there: the views were stunning. We had a 360 degree view all over Hampi, of palm trees, rocks and ruins stretching out for miles. There was even a chai-wallah there, calling himself “Chai Raju”, though we made the mistake of not asking how much it would cost before drinking it, and it cost Rs.80 for two (chai is usually Rs.5 per cup…)! Though he had carted it all the way up the hill…

Poor Florence was badly ill that evening, so I went out for dinner alone.

The next day she wasn’t feeling much better, so I used the opportunity to hire a bicycle and cycled around to the Royal Enclosure, a lot of which we hadn’t yet seen. I really enjoyed cycling again; it felt good to be exercising, but also the old corny phrase of the wind being in my hair really rang true.

Florence was feeling better later, and we took a rickshaw to what people had told us were “the waterfalls” - but which was in fact just a gushing river several kilometres from the bazaar. I enjoyed talking to our rickshaw driver, Shiva (we met several people called Shiva in Hampi…), who was from Pondicherry and was a sponsored child at Volontariat! What a small world.

The next morning we got up at 5am and got a rickshaw at 5.45 to Hospet train station. Annoyingly, though our train was supposed to be at 6.50am it was an hour late, but we managed to get some sleep when it did come.

Our first train was only three hours; we stopped at a station called Hubli for six hours before embarking on the next overnight train to Mumbai. Just before the train came I suddenly started feeling really sick and weak; when we did get the train I was really quite ill - I think I must have caught what Florence had, but I also had a fever and ended up passing out in the toilet, I think from dehydration! The guard ended up phoning ahead to one of the stations and getting a doctor to come and check on me! Being on a train was probably the worst place to be ill, and especially annoying as I wasn’t that violently sick the entire six months in India. But I just hoped I’d be better to enjoy Mumbai as that was the trip I was most looking forward to…

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Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:13:07 -0400

Thiruvengalanatha Temple

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:10:27 -0400

Thiruvengalanatha Temple