First impressions of India are going to hard to write about as they have all but gone. I will use my diary to help me with this one. I will split this up and put it into 2 chunks, first impressions along with my stay in Mumbai and Goa (the first 2 weeks) and then what I have done since (Hampi, Hyderabad and Varanasi)
Ok you stay at homers, really to be honest I don't know where to start. I got to India in the evening and befriended people to share a taxi to a hotel in Colaba, which is the area where lots of the backpackers stay. Outside the taxi it was total madness through the streets of Mumbai.I once asked Damu (my Indian friend from Kerala), why Indian people are so polite and well mannered and yet drive like lunatics and he laughed uproariously and said he had no idea! The pollution and smog was evident as was the dust as 4 of us squeezed into the taxi. The one main thing I remember from the ride was that there was no women anywhere, on the streets or in the cars. When I was in India for a few days I realised that men can go out at night and often they are still working whereas the women have children to look after and must stay at home and perform the duties outlined to me by my husband and mother in law
India was SO different right from the start, that I know no matter how much I write here (and boy this one is gonna be a biggie) that I will never EVER manage to convey India through written words or even with pictures. Before I went to India I asked several people who had been to India to tell me what it was like and every time I was given the same response, a smile, a shake of the head and 'I cant TELL you about India. you just have to go and experience it for yourself'. The closest I can come to an analogy of it is for you to imagine your favourite food. You are eating your favourite food and your friend across the table asks you what its like. Now you know it would be madness to try and describe your favourite food (I could fill a whole page simply on how wonderful a bowl of raspberries right now would be) so what do you do, you hand them the spoon and say 'try it'. That's India. This blog over the next 3 months will try and tell you about India but it will be barely skimming the surface and will not convey the depth of feeling, emotion, hardship, friendliness and as many more words that would fill a page. You cant be told about India, you have to go and jump in feet first and experience it for yourself.
This part I will concentrate on my first 2 weeks in India, Mumbai and Goa.The first thing you notice in India is the smell. Nothing can prepare you for the way that India smells and believe it or not, its not all bad! Every day I smell something worse and I think to myself, ok I have just smelled my worse smell, until the next day when it gets worse. The same is true of the dirt, every day I think I have seen the filthiest thing or the thing that makes my stomach lurch from its resting place and I imagine it cant get any more disgusting or horrifying than that and then it does. Emotionally every day I would see something that shocked, upset or horrified me to the very core. That makes it all sound really bad and its not. You get used to the smells and outside the cities smells are less. Believe it or not you get used to the dirt as well, when you accept that nothing is clean and nothing is hygienic then you relax a lot more, as basically you have little choice! Another first thing I noticed is that not a lot of Indians speak English! There is more English spoken in the big cities but I had an assumption that 'they speak English in India' well they don't. Those of a higher caste and education do, as do some of the touts in places that are very touristy but most people don't speak English.
I spent a week in Mumbai and split my time between local eateries, sightseeing and making money!In India there is not always tourist places to eat or tourist areas in cities so local places are always best. The food is fantastic and if you are white they don't put as much spice in the food. One thing that is very different is 'curd' this is basically plain yoghurt and it comes in a dish to cool the curry or you can have it as a drink with banana in it. Its good to have one a day as it helps the bugs in your stomach! I was worried about not liking Indian food as it would be my last choice back home for a take-away but I met a few people who had been in India for a while and helped me around the menus for things I would like. Food in the city was more expensive than elsewhere in India according to the friends I made there. However for a large meal of 2 courses and 2 drinks (juice plus a big bottle of water to take away) it would cost 70 rupees. At present it is about 80 rupees to the pound so my budget is looking much healthier! You can live comfortably in most places for 500 rupees a day. Mumbai also saw me doing a wee bit of sightseeing, I went to the Gateway of India, the Taj hotel and Elephanta Island. This island was where I discovered discrimination because of my white skin for the first time! The Indian price for the island was 10 rupees and the tourist price was 250 rupees. Now I know that 250 rupees is only about 3 quid but compared to 12p its a big difference! Made me wonder what would happen if they tried it in Scotland - ie entrance to Hollyrood palace is 10 quid for Scots and 250 quid for foreigners! Now I know the Indian tourism board has to make money somehow but maybe asking for 20 times as much as the locals is a little excessive. This 'tourist pricing' occurred at most places I went to that you had to pay an entrance fee.
The hostel where I stayed was predominately full of white westerners. There are a lot of films being made in India, mainly Bollywood films. People think that Bollywood is 'hollywood in India' the name for the film industry and that is not the case. It was explained to me that Bollywood is the name for the group of emerging people in India that believe in love marriages, divorces, wearing what they please and the right for women to have their own careers. This is a very small proportion of India though and includes some people in the big cities (where you can even find gay clubs now!) and people from Kerla and further south where there is a 2% Christian population.
The film industries would send scouts out to find people and often they turned up at out hostel! The first thing I did was a promotional evening where we went to Bandra (the posh part of Mumbai) to the Rennaisance hotel with 3 other white girls and we had to all put on the same dresses and shoes and serve white wine to the guests with the lights of Mumbai below us. After the event, the host asked us to come clubbing with us and we all piled into his private car and his driver took us and him and his friends to the biggest club in Mumbai where were treated like royalty and danced the night away.The whole experience of the hosting thing was weird though as it was definitely a package deal that someone had paid for 'a free bar, a band, and 4 white girls to give out wine' I couldn't work out if was being revered or exploited. One interesting point was that a girl from Australia with Indian heritage asked if she could do hosting and they scouts weren't interested in her stating that 'it would be insulting to Indians to see you with your shoulders bared' So in other words they expect us to dress as we please and do as we please as long as our skin is white enough! I have experienced a lot of strange things here to do with the Indian Caste system and the fact that I am white but I will go into further detail later. I have not read enough about the caste system to fully understand it
I also got to attend a HUGE wedding on a film set along the same lines.Cultutrally the wedding was amazing to see. It was an arranged marriage. The whole wedding was set on a huge outdoor film studio. The groom arrived on horseback alone with his family and there is a band that leads him in and everyone has video cameras on him. All the attention is on the groom. Then I noticed the bride, walking through the crowd surrounded by her sisters and mother. She was so heavily jeweled I could hardly see her face and I was surprised she could walk. They met on the stage and exchanged wreaths and then sat for photographs. Not once did they touch each other, not once did they look at each other. The place was incredible, women floated in balloons in the sky and fireworks and lights, the whole thing was so over the top and amazing. However as I stood there and watched them I thought 'you know what? you can keep it' I'm quite sure that if my parents and family members were to pick my husband they would make a good choice, but to have a whole life without love, no thanks.' As much as I liked seeing the wedding I wouldn't swap any of it for being in love. It was then that I realised that as much as I had hated western culture in Sydney I was comforted by the fact that there was still some very important things about western culture that I liked and wouldn't give up for anything. At home and in western society, basically I can do whatever the hell I want to and I have a right to do so!
Here, if I was an Indian women, at my age I would be married and I would have at least 2 children by now. Hopefully I would have boys as they can work and will marry and the family will collect the dowry (now illegal but still happens apparently). If I have girls I have to marry them off and it is rumoured that among the lower castes, people abort female babies or have them killed at birth or break their arms and legs in order for them to beg on the streets to make money. I need to read more into this as I am not sure about all the rumours I have heard. It is true however that the population is becoming very skewed and there are far more males than females so it must happen somehow. I cannot hold hands with a man in public, I cannot have a divorce (for any reason). I cannot have a career and must give up my education when I marry. (this is why a lot of Indian women can speak very little English) I cannot have sex unless to have children, I must obey my husband as he is as God to me and I must obey his every word. Revealing my shoulders in public is more offensive than showing cleavage. No one looks twice if you bear your entire stomach, front and back. I must not go out alone as an unmarried woman I must always have company. When I travel here with a female friend that is acceptable but when I travel with a man I always say that he is my brother as it is the brothers responsibility to look after his sisters and marry them off as well.
The other thing I did was go to a drama series shoot where they wanted 4 of us to be filmed having drinks and dancing in a nightclub in Dubai. As they flatly pointed out to us 'the setting is an expensive club so of course there would be some white people in the background'That day was more fun than the hosting as you got to watch the setting up of each shoot. There was several men to set up the shoot and carry around and bolt in the ancient lights (one of which crashed to the floor missing someone by inches!!), about 20 people standing around on mobiles, one guy to light a fire in a pan and add powder, this he carried around the set and was followed by 2 guys frantically wafting cardboard to disperse the smoke that the powder created, this was the smoke machine! There was also about 6 guys whos only job seemed to be ensuring everyone had chai. I hated chai when i first got here. For those not in the know, chai is tea made with condensed milk, yuck! i hear you say! Actually back home I cant stand a lot of milk and here I complain if they don't put enough in! There is also masala chai which is spicy and great!I fot paid 800 rupees for the hosting and 500 for the film shoot. Now that amounts to less than 15 quid for 18 hours work. However when your daily budget here is 500 rupees and the accommodation is 150 rupees it is a lot. Its not about what it converts to in pounds, its what it can buy you in India.
I am going to post this one here and then I will write a second one about buying a bus ticket, the train journey we took, a bit about Goa and the famous Indian head wobble!
Ok you stay at homers, really to be honest I don't know where to start. I got to India in the evening and befriended people to share a taxi to a hotel in Colaba, which is the area where lots of the backpackers stay. Outside the taxi it was total madness through the streets of Mumbai.I once asked Damu (my Indian friend from Kerala), why Indian people are so polite and well mannered and yet drive like lunatics and he laughed uproariously and said he had no idea! The pollution and smog was evident as was the dust as 4 of us squeezed into the taxi. The one main thing I remember from the ride was that there was no women anywhere, on the streets or in the cars. When I was in India for a few days I realised that men can go out at night and often they are still working whereas the women have children to look after and must stay at home and perform the duties outlined to me by my husband and mother in law
India was SO different right from the start, that I know no matter how much I write here (and boy this one is gonna be a biggie) that I will never EVER manage to convey India through written words or even with pictures. Before I went to India I asked several people who had been to India to tell me what it was like and every time I was given the same response, a smile, a shake of the head and 'I cant TELL you about India. you just have to go and experience it for yourself'. The closest I can come to an analogy of it is for you to imagine your favourite food. You are eating your favourite food and your friend across the table asks you what its like. Now you know it would be madness to try and describe your favourite food (I could fill a whole page simply on how wonderful a bowl of raspberries right now would be) so what do you do, you hand them the spoon and say 'try it'. That's India. This blog over the next 3 months will try and tell you about India but it will be barely skimming the surface and will not convey the depth of feeling, emotion, hardship, friendliness and as many more words that would fill a page. You cant be told about India, you have to go and jump in feet first and experience it for yourself.
This part I will concentrate on my first 2 weeks in India, Mumbai and Goa.The first thing you notice in India is the smell. Nothing can prepare you for the way that India smells and believe it or not, its not all bad! Every day I smell something worse and I think to myself, ok I have just smelled my worse smell, until the next day when it gets worse. The same is true of the dirt, every day I think I have seen the filthiest thing or the thing that makes my stomach lurch from its resting place and I imagine it cant get any more disgusting or horrifying than that and then it does. Emotionally every day I would see something that shocked, upset or horrified me to the very core. That makes it all sound really bad and its not. You get used to the smells and outside the cities smells are less. Believe it or not you get used to the dirt as well, when you accept that nothing is clean and nothing is hygienic then you relax a lot more, as basically you have little choice! Another first thing I noticed is that not a lot of Indians speak English! There is more English spoken in the big cities but I had an assumption that 'they speak English in India' well they don't. Those of a higher caste and education do, as do some of the touts in places that are very touristy but most people don't speak English.
I spent a week in Mumbai and split my time between local eateries, sightseeing and making money!In India there is not always tourist places to eat or tourist areas in cities so local places are always best. The food is fantastic and if you are white they don't put as much spice in the food. One thing that is very different is 'curd' this is basically plain yoghurt and it comes in a dish to cool the curry or you can have it as a drink with banana in it. Its good to have one a day as it helps the bugs in your stomach! I was worried about not liking Indian food as it would be my last choice back home for a take-away but I met a few people who had been in India for a while and helped me around the menus for things I would like. Food in the city was more expensive than elsewhere in India according to the friends I made there. However for a large meal of 2 courses and 2 drinks (juice plus a big bottle of water to take away) it would cost 70 rupees. At present it is about 80 rupees to the pound so my budget is looking much healthier! You can live comfortably in most places for 500 rupees a day. Mumbai also saw me doing a wee bit of sightseeing, I went to the Gateway of India, the Taj hotel and Elephanta Island. This island was where I discovered discrimination because of my white skin for the first time! The Indian price for the island was 10 rupees and the tourist price was 250 rupees. Now I know that 250 rupees is only about 3 quid but compared to 12p its a big difference! Made me wonder what would happen if they tried it in Scotland - ie entrance to Hollyrood palace is 10 quid for Scots and 250 quid for foreigners! Now I know the Indian tourism board has to make money somehow but maybe asking for 20 times as much as the locals is a little excessive. This 'tourist pricing' occurred at most places I went to that you had to pay an entrance fee.
The hostel where I stayed was predominately full of white westerners. There are a lot of films being made in India, mainly Bollywood films. People think that Bollywood is 'hollywood in India' the name for the film industry and that is not the case. It was explained to me that Bollywood is the name for the group of emerging people in India that believe in love marriages, divorces, wearing what they please and the right for women to have their own careers. This is a very small proportion of India though and includes some people in the big cities (where you can even find gay clubs now!) and people from Kerla and further south where there is a 2% Christian population.
The film industries would send scouts out to find people and often they turned up at out hostel! The first thing I did was a promotional evening where we went to Bandra (the posh part of Mumbai) to the Rennaisance hotel with 3 other white girls and we had to all put on the same dresses and shoes and serve white wine to the guests with the lights of Mumbai below us. After the event, the host asked us to come clubbing with us and we all piled into his private car and his driver took us and him and his friends to the biggest club in Mumbai where were treated like royalty and danced the night away.The whole experience of the hosting thing was weird though as it was definitely a package deal that someone had paid for 'a free bar, a band, and 4 white girls to give out wine' I couldn't work out if was being revered or exploited. One interesting point was that a girl from Australia with Indian heritage asked if she could do hosting and they scouts weren't interested in her stating that 'it would be insulting to Indians to see you with your shoulders bared' So in other words they expect us to dress as we please and do as we please as long as our skin is white enough! I have experienced a lot of strange things here to do with the Indian Caste system and the fact that I am white but I will go into further detail later. I have not read enough about the caste system to fully understand it
I also got to attend a HUGE wedding on a film set along the same lines.Cultutrally the wedding was amazing to see. It was an arranged marriage. The whole wedding was set on a huge outdoor film studio. The groom arrived on horseback alone with his family and there is a band that leads him in and everyone has video cameras on him. All the attention is on the groom. Then I noticed the bride, walking through the crowd surrounded by her sisters and mother. She was so heavily jeweled I could hardly see her face and I was surprised she could walk. They met on the stage and exchanged wreaths and then sat for photographs. Not once did they touch each other, not once did they look at each other. The place was incredible, women floated in balloons in the sky and fireworks and lights, the whole thing was so over the top and amazing. However as I stood there and watched them I thought 'you know what? you can keep it' I'm quite sure that if my parents and family members were to pick my husband they would make a good choice, but to have a whole life without love, no thanks.' As much as I liked seeing the wedding I wouldn't swap any of it for being in love. It was then that I realised that as much as I had hated western culture in Sydney I was comforted by the fact that there was still some very important things about western culture that I liked and wouldn't give up for anything. At home and in western society, basically I can do whatever the hell I want to and I have a right to do so!
Here, if I was an Indian women, at my age I would be married and I would have at least 2 children by now. Hopefully I would have boys as they can work and will marry and the family will collect the dowry (now illegal but still happens apparently). If I have girls I have to marry them off and it is rumoured that among the lower castes, people abort female babies or have them killed at birth or break their arms and legs in order for them to beg on the streets to make money. I need to read more into this as I am not sure about all the rumours I have heard. It is true however that the population is becoming very skewed and there are far more males than females so it must happen somehow. I cannot hold hands with a man in public, I cannot have a divorce (for any reason). I cannot have a career and must give up my education when I marry. (this is why a lot of Indian women can speak very little English) I cannot have sex unless to have children, I must obey my husband as he is as God to me and I must obey his every word. Revealing my shoulders in public is more offensive than showing cleavage. No one looks twice if you bear your entire stomach, front and back. I must not go out alone as an unmarried woman I must always have company. When I travel here with a female friend that is acceptable but when I travel with a man I always say that he is my brother as it is the brothers responsibility to look after his sisters and marry them off as well.
The other thing I did was go to a drama series shoot where they wanted 4 of us to be filmed having drinks and dancing in a nightclub in Dubai. As they flatly pointed out to us 'the setting is an expensive club so of course there would be some white people in the background'That day was more fun than the hosting as you got to watch the setting up of each shoot. There was several men to set up the shoot and carry around and bolt in the ancient lights (one of which crashed to the floor missing someone by inches!!), about 20 people standing around on mobiles, one guy to light a fire in a pan and add powder, this he carried around the set and was followed by 2 guys frantically wafting cardboard to disperse the smoke that the powder created, this was the smoke machine! There was also about 6 guys whos only job seemed to be ensuring everyone had chai. I hated chai when i first got here. For those not in the know, chai is tea made with condensed milk, yuck! i hear you say! Actually back home I cant stand a lot of milk and here I complain if they don't put enough in! There is also masala chai which is spicy and great!I fot paid 800 rupees for the hosting and 500 for the film shoot. Now that amounts to less than 15 quid for 18 hours work. However when your daily budget here is 500 rupees and the accommodation is 150 rupees it is a lot. Its not about what it converts to in pounds, its what it can buy you in India.
I am going to post this one here and then I will write a second one about buying a bus ticket, the train journey we took, a bit about Goa and the famous Indian head wobble!
posted by Amy | 12:50 AM
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