So I recently reached the End of India.

I have just spent the first two weeks of December travelling around Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the South, mostly by train, and taking in Ooty, Madurai and Kochi, with a stop in the middle at Kanyakumari (pictured), the Southern-most point in India.  The end of the line.

And then five days ago I left India. It was four years ago today that I arrived in Bangalore at the start of that adventure, eventually spending two years there and two years in Delhi.

It feels strange, and a bit sad, to think that I won’t be there any more. There are lots of people and so many things I will miss about the place.  Of course, there will also be some trials and tribulations that I won’t miss at all—the appalling air pollution in Delhi for a start.

But I think it’s simply not possible to switch off India and walk away, just like that. So I will be using some spare time in the next few weeks to ruminate, reflect and write about my experiences over the last 4 years.

In the meantime some photos from the trip are here:

• Nilgiri Mountain Railway (Mettupalayam to Ooty)
• Mudumalai National Park
• Madurai
• Kanyakumari
• Kochi

Somehow time has been flying by, and I’ve been neglecting this blog… Not sure whether it’s because I’ve been extremely busy at work, or because I don’t have quite so much to say about India these days.  Possibly both.

Anyway, Monsoon is over and now it’s Autumn.  Sort of.  A couple of weeks back, Monday morning was suddenly cooler and slightly hazy.  The day-time maximum is now less than 30 degrees every day, and overnight it’s comfortably below 20 and falling by a degree every 2-3 days now.

Being able to manage without air conditioning on overnight means getting a much better night’s sleep, which is very welcome.

It’s also Diwali, the biggest festival of the year in most of India…

It began yesterday  with Dhanteras, and tomorrow will be the main day of celebrations with Hindu families celebrating Laxmi Puja.  The tiny diya oil lamps will be lit around people’s homes, and Ganesha and Laxmi (see above) will be worshipped.

Fireworks are now going off constantly outside, houses are festooned with coloured lights all over the outside, the shops are overflowing with hampers and sweets and dried fruits. Lots of people are shopping and visiting family.   It’s a happy time.  I gave Rs 20 to a beggar with one arm today, and he beamed and wished me “Happy Diwali!”.

The atmosphere at work became very relaxed and jolly towards the end of this week, with lots of smiles, gifts and celebrations.  Everyone is looking forward to spending time with their families, and taking a week off next week.

As for me, tomorrow I’m heading to Nepal for the week. And I’m really looking forward to finally seeing some of the Himalayas.

It’s two years ago today since I set up this blog, just after buying my “one way ticket to India”.  Looking back now it’s hard to recall the trepidation of making such a commitment to jumping into the deep end, applying for the visa without understanding how it all worked, wondering about how I would find somewhere to live, and what it would be like to live and work in a country I had never even visited.  But everything fell into place and it all seems to be working out pretty well.

Probably the most important thing I’ve learned here is to stop worrying about things so much, and to trust that things will work out.  So far, everything seems to have done so–touch wood!

I’ve just come back from a great week’s holiday in Rajasthan, visiting Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, so hopefully I will get some photos online soon.  I hesitate to say I’ll write it up here, given that I’ve still not written up Part 2 of the Uttar Pradesh trip I made way back in March.

Now all I can think about is finally travelling home at Christmas, to see my family and friends for the first time in 2 years.  I’m not looking forward to the cold though, I have to say…

I had my first brush with Tropical Diseases recently.

As I’ve moaned about regularly since arriving in Bangalore 17 months ago, I’ve been mildly sick  quite often here… I mainly put this down to a combination of unfamiliar cold-like viruses and the terrible air pollution here, along with large amounts of dust during the dry parts of the year.   (Whereas local people often seem to blame any sickness on “the change in the weather”.)  But up to now, I’d not really had anything serious.   Usually a day at home in bed and I’m ready to go back to work the next day.

But I started feeling properly sick about 10 days ago… woke up on a Monday morning with a raging fever and shivering like a maniac, like you might have with a bad flu, but also with terrible stabbing pains in my joints, which was a new experience for me.   Something jogged a memory of a friend telling me about the Dengue Fever she’d had in Brazil, and I realised I needed to go to find a doctor to check it out.

I have to admit that I wasn’t keen… so many services here are really hit-and-miss and unreliable, that the thought of going to the doctors for the first time (when, erm, properly ill) didn’t really fill me with confidence.   But in the end I went to somewhere nearby that was recommended by a work colleague, and  I have to say I was extremely impressed.  Very clean and professional, pretty fast service, and the physician who saw me was a genuinely lovely and helpful man.

Anyway, after 2 sets of sample tests (both with results back on the same day), and a couple of consultations, the diagnosis seemed to be that it wasn’t Malaria or Dengue, but some milder “Dengue-like” viral fever, which the doc said he’d had himself recently.

I’m now pretty much recovered I think… I’ve been back at work for a week anyway.  But the recent rains and the inevitable increase in mosquitoes have made me slightly more conscientious about using insect repellent and covering up.  Even in my own apartment!

1st January, 8.30am.  Woken by the sun streaming in through the bedroom sky-light, and the silence being shattered by some very loud shouting in the street.

Hangover-free and glad to see that the sky is blue and the sunshine is back, after 3 days of cold, grey, wet and windy weather caused by the tail end of Cyclone Thane, which had been causing destruction and even some deaths over on the East coast.

Shorts and trainers on, I put the recycling outside the front gate and walk down to the tiny park at the end of the road.  Past one of the many construction sites, where something looking like a grey fire engine has turned up to do something with their bore-well.  Must’ve been what all the shouting was about.

Into the long, narrow park by the side of the busy main road and it’s already pretty full.  The tall trees and palms provide shade from the sun — already warm now.  A few street dogs are lying in dappled sunlight. The only path is more of a narrow running track around the edge of the park, with a very high kerb painted in green and white stripes.  To me it looks like somewhere kids would ride round in toy cars at a fairground, but I guess the kerb-stones are there to stop all the soil being washed away during monsoon time.

I’m the only white face in the place, and the only person in shorts…  my pale bare legs are attracting quite  a bit of attention but I’m pretty used to this now.

Elderly ladies in sarees and cardigans amble round, alongside white-haired men in white shirts and dhotis, their flip-flopped feet pointing outwards as they shuffle along.   Some more energetic men are doing brisk yoga in the shade, and one or two people are sitting meditating, with their hands on their knees, thumbs touching forefingers. A few younger ladies in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts are power-walking with their iPods. Apart from me, only one other person is actually running… a young man with a pony tail.  He’s going the opposite direction, and we acknowledge each other with eye contact as we pass every couple of minutes.   The path is only wide enough for 3 or 4 people to pass, and intricate overtaking manoeuvres are needed from time to time, because everyone’s moving at a different speed.

Just outside the fence a couple of small 3-wheeler garbage trucks, piled ludicrously high, are unloading into a bigger lorry.  Every time I come round to that part of the lap, there’s an overwhelming stink of rubbish; quite sweet and similar to rancid milk.  The kind of smell you get at any street-corner rubbish dump, but more concentrated.  Next to the rag-pickers and garbage-wallahs, a dozen or more yellow and green auto-rickshaws are parked.  Khaki-uniformed auto drivers gather in a large group, counting out bank-notes, chatting and smoking small, fragrant beedis.

Walking home from the park back the way I came, I see a crowd of people, all standing quietly and looking.  This means there’s been an accident.  Sure enough, as I get closer I can see two men lying in the road next to a motorbike.  One of them is casually resting his head on the kerb while he talks on his phone.  The other is rocking back and forth, clearly in pain, but there’s no blood.    The last time I saw an accident on this street was 2 months ago in exactly the same spot.  A car was upside down in the street.  In the 11 months I’ve lived here, I’ve probably seen 5 or 6 accidents along this stretch, pretty much right outside my flat,  and — apart from the car — all of them involving people falling off their 2-wheeler.

Back to the flat and I optimistically run the shower, but the solar panels haven’t quite warmed up yet. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and apart from the odd car-horn, it’s about as peaceful as it gets.  An ambulance comes past, presumably for the spilled bikers. I have a cold shower anyway.

I remember I have strawberries in the fridge.

We have a whole new year ahead of us.  366 days of potential, good intentions and even whole new lives. Happy 2012, everyone.

It’s exactly a year since I arrived in India.

Almost impossible to believe that 12 months can fly by so quickly.

So, after being in my current apartment for nearly 11 months, I’m going to have to move again — or “shift” in the local vernacular — partly because the landlord wanted to put the rent up, and partly because I’ve realised I need to move somewhere cheaper anyway.

The place I’m in now has been great, but it’s huge and I only use half of it. It’s also way more expensive than what I’d been budgeting for, but I was persuaded by the fact that it has 2 large balconies and a roof terrace. I was really keen to get back into gardening after a 12-year hiatus (gardens are almost impossible to find in the centre of Edinburgh), and the balconies clinched it.

When I moved here in February the flat was completely unfurnished except for a fridge and washing machine, and of course the balconies were completely empty.  I very quickly set about turning the balcony outside the kitchen door into a container garden… foraging plants locally via nocturnal walks around the neighbourhood with a pair of scissors and a carrier bag ;-) as well as making weekly visits to the Gardener’s Co-op at the Lalbagh, Bangalore’s botanic gardens, and coming home in an auto full of plants and compost.

Here’s after I’d been in the place for 2 weeks:

… and here’s a couple of weeks ago:

The climate and the seasons here have taken some getting used to, but basically it feels like I can grow anything I want to, at any time!  I guess this is one reason why Bangalore used to be known as “Garden City” before the big IT companies moved in, and rapid expansion saw large-scale road-widening at the expense of many trees.  Anyway I started growing tomatoes about 5-6 months ago and I’ve had 2 harvests so far.  One of the plants that looked like it was just about to give up has just perked up and started flowering for a second time, so it looks like I’ll have another batch before I leave as well.

The slightly wonky bamboo structure was meant to be a support for some shade netting, because there’s no shade at all in the afternoon and some of the plants didn’t like it.  I haven’t yet managed to find anywhere to buy the netting, but it seems pointless looking for any now, until I know where I’ll be moving to.  Still, I had fun for a weekend looking up lashing techniques on various Boy Scout websites and teaching myself timber hitch and clove hitch from YouTube…

And the 3-tier ceramic thing you can see is a Kambha, a composter I bought from Daily Dump, a local firm who are promoting composting as well as the understanding of waste management, which in India is a really big issue. (And more people composting their own waste is A Good Thing.)  The Kambha works really well — you add kitchen and garden waste to the pot at the top, and then swap it with the middle one after a month or so.  Rinse and repeat.  And after 3 months you get usable compost which you can transfer to the bottom pot and start again.  Making the ceramics employs local artisan potters, and the design is open source so that anyone who wants to can start up a “clone” business making and selling the composters.  It’s a pretty inspiring project.

It’s been fantastic having a garden again after such a long time and I will be sad to move on, but I’m reminded that I arrived in India with 2 suitcases and I will have to leave with the same at some point.  It feels like a reminder of the saying about arriving in the world with nothing, and leaving with nothing…

Having to shift has also meant I’ve been thinking ahead about what it will be like to leave India. I’ve been here almost a year now, and my current contract expires at the end of 2012 — although it should be possible to extend it.  My conclusion is that despite all the difficulties of living here, I will be really sad to leave when it eventually happens — life here is so vivid, intense, colourful and crazy most of the time.  Returning to cold, grey Britain doesn’t really seem very appealing right now, especially with the economic difficulties, the state of the job market, and particularly the utter shambles the current government has made while trying to reform Higher Education.

Still, who knows how things will change over the next year — as we come to the end of 2011, the world is a very different place to what it was in January.

Moong Daal is one year old today. On 2nd November last year I bought my one-way plane ticket and decided to start this blog to document the adventure I was about to embark upon.

Today also marks my first visit — at long last — to the cinema here.  A friend from the UK is staying with me just now, so we went along to the big multiplex next to college to see Ra.One, Shahrukh Khan‘s new block-buster Bollywood/SciFi crossover epic. Co-incidentally, it’s also SRK’s birthday today.

A bit of a strange film… a collision between the Matrix and Terminator, with “heavy references” (shall we say) to Tron and Mission Impossible.  And car chases, and a disaster-movie sequence. And of course, the invevitable Bollywood songs, dance routines and romantic storyline, plus a bit of comedy for good measure. About 2.5 hours’ worth in total.

Apparently it’s the most expensive Hindi film ever made, and the budget is second only to the Tamil Enthiran, currently India’s most expensive film, period. (There’s a rather gratuitous cameo by Rajnikanth in Ra.One, in which he appears as the Chitti character from Enthiran.)

Not sure if  I’d particularly recommend it, but as a snapshot of Indian culture in the postmodern world, it seems like a landmark of sorts.

It’s also 21 years to the day since I started my first teaching job, as a lecturer at what was then Leicester Polytechnic, later De Montfort University.

Like many people, I got into teaching by accident.  But here I am 21 years later, and still doing it… I guess this proves that I still like it!

Obviously, daily life is now quite different in many ways. I now live in a big flat with 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and 3 balconies. (But still practically zero furniture!) More to the point, I have space for a garden outside which is something I’ve been looking forward to regaining ever since losing it in 1998. For the first time in my life, I have a cleaner. Monday to Friday — and alternate Saturday mornings unfortunately — I catch an auto-rickshaw through the crazy traffic to work and back. I’ve been having Hindi lessons and can read and write some Devanagari script.

Some things are still the same, though, and I now realise how important it is to hang onto some aspects of your life when you teleport yourself to another continent and another culture. Bringing a laptop with 60GB of music on it has been quite important — playing a few favourite albums really provides a strong sense of the familiar if you need it. One thing that surprised me was how important food has been… I like Indian food very much — and even experimented with eating it every day for 3 weeks before I came out here just to see if I could do it! — but the hard bit has been when there was something I really wanted but just couldn’t find, and that happened a lot, especially in the first few months.

Proper cheese in particular has been really hard to find, as I expected it would be from my previous experiences in Malaysia and Japan… but good wholegrain bread is quite popular here in supermarkets and bakeries, and my local supermarket even sells Heinz Baked Beans for a fairly reasonable price. The first time I sat down to a proper home-made cheese and tomato sandwich here I was really surprised at how important something so mundane could apparently be. Since then I’ve found a few more home comforts, many of which are stupidly expensive — as almost everything that’s imported seems to be — and so they have to count as rare “treats”.

South Indian food is really great though — especially if you’re vegetarian — and I’m lucky that I’d been exposed to it back home due to living for 8 years in Leicester, where 20% of the population was South Asian, and I discovered aspects of the cuisine that hadn’t been on the radar in places I’d lived before: Chaats, Dosas, Dokla, Pani Puri and stuff. Since arriving here I’ve realised that was only the tip of the iceberg though, and even a single counter in the food-court in the mall next to work has a range way bigger than Bobby’s, my favourite Chaat House back in Leicester.

I’m so glad that the food is good. Several people I work with “don’t like spicy food”, which must make life difficult, even though I don’t think South Indian food is particularly hot compared with Northern cooking, but anyway.

Some things which seemed strange at first have now become familiar or even melted into the background altogether. I barely give a second look to cows wandering through rush-hour traffic, and I was surprised to find myself chilling out on the balcony recently one weekend, when I realised that all the drivers coming by my flat were honking their horns constantly — as everyone does, as if it’s the law — but they weren’t even registering and I was actually relaxing!

The famous Indian Head-Nod, a side-to-side wobble, was pretty indecipherable at the start, as it can mean any one of Yes, No, Maybe, I Agree, Thank You, and probably others I’ve not picked up on yet…. but I’ve come to love it and can usually work out what it means from the context. I haven’t started doing it myself yet, but that’s probably inevitable if I stay here long enough… after all it’s human nature to adopt the conventions everyone around you is using to communicate. I noticed quite early on that Indian English was somehow insinuating itself into my vocabulary — just as Scots did when I was living in Edinburgh, really — and recently it seems to have taken up residence in my brain without any invitation whatsoever. Just this morning I was taken aback to find myself writing in an e-mail “please revert to me if you have any doubts”, which means “please get back to me if you have any questions” (I hope!). I’ve even caught myself using the construct “X is there” which is particularly common, at least here in Bangalore. But I’m still trying to work out why locals seem to use “only” and “itself” in sentences where they obviously don’t mean what I would expect them to mean.

Not everything that I’ve become used to is welcome, though. I found the begging quite traumatic at first… being a white person sitting in an auto-rickshaw with no sides on it makes you an obvious target when you’re waiting at traffic lights, and when I first arrived I was quite shocked at how many beggars were hitting on me during the daily journey to work, which already seemed quite eventful at that point anyway — by turns hair-raising and surprisingly joyful (mostly depending on the driver and the state of the traffic). I was told that I shouldn’t give money to beggars who approach me in this way, because they were being run by gangs who would take the money off them anyway. Several people told me about women “renting” babies which they then drug, to put them to sleep, and then they carry them around all day while begging because it increases the takings that go to the gang-organisers. Sure enough, I’m accosted by women carrying unconscious 1-year olds in slings pretty much every day. It doesn’t make it any easier to look the other way though, when they’re tapping on your arm going “sah! sah!”.

The beggars I really can’t ignore are the tiny kids, wandering through the traffic on their own, with matted dusty hair. A cynic might say these are the gang’s biggest earners, I don’t know. The saddest thing on an everyday level has to be the plight of children. Every single day on my way to work I pass many small construction sites, there on the busy city streets, and they all look the same. There are big piles of sand, gravel and rebar (for re-inforcing concrete) next to the pavement. If there’s scaffolding, it’s made from small irregular tree-trunks. The construction workers themselves are families, which includes women and small children. I expect at some point I’ll probably find out they’re from a particular tribe or caste, but from the clothes of the women I see here I’m guessing they’re maybe from Rajasthan.

These construction families are usually living under some kind of tent made out of a blue tarp, or in a shed-sized temporary building made out of cinder blocks, or in the building that’s under construction itself. Sometimes they’ve found electricity from somewhere, and they often seem to have mobile phones. If it’s morning or evening, one of the women is usually cooking over a campfire on a black, cauldron-shaped pot. If it’s mid-day it’s not unusual to see everyone avoiding the blazing heat and crashed out sleeping on the gravel-pile or on the sand. On my way home from work I often see the men and boys in their underpants washing themselves under a hosepipe or in a big plastic barrel.

It’s seeing the children on these sites that really shocks, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get used to this. Being a tiny, smiling, half-naked 2-year old playing in the sand is something I guess we can all relate to — but this sandpit is on a city street, a building site, it has been used as a toilet by the street dogs, and only a few feet away mum and dad are carrying bricks and cement around in wok-shaped metal bowls balanced on their heads.

Not quite so shocking, but perhaps the most worrying when you really think about it, is the number of children you see out and about who are working. South Asia has become somewhat notorious, perhaps even stereotyped, for children working in sweat-shops, but the kids I see every day just seem to be trying to make a living. Selling food, shining your shoes, hawking all kinds of plastic rubbish on the street…. they look street-wise and some of them are quite entrepeneurial and obviously bright, but the sad fact is simply that they’re not in school.

This quote from the World Bank stopped me in my tracks when I came across it:

“Close to 13.5 million underprivileged children in India are out of school and into child labour in order to earn a single meal in a day”.

Go back and read that again.

Everyone knows that India has one of the worst poverty problems of any country in the world, but it’s also well reported that it has one of the fastest-growing economies too. For any Indian child to escape the poverty trap and to be able to benefit from this growth means they need an education. I recently came across the Akshaya Patra Foundation, whose simple mission is to feed school-children every day, so that they don’t have to quit school to be able to earn enough money to eat. Needless to say I was happy to become a supporter.

When I think of the simple, basic things that so many people here in India are lacking — clean water, electricity, being able to read and write — it really puts into perspective the petty complaints that many, myself included, in “the West” might make. I find that perspective extremely valuable and humbling, on pretty much a daily basis. Which is probably doing me a lot of good. Not only that, but — to risk a possible cliché — the people here generally seem so incredibly positive and cheerful compared to people back home. Whether it’s the construction worker, the rickshaw driver I’ve just had an “argument” with over the fare, colleagues at work, a security guard outside a store, the small children living by the side of the road… there is so much smiling and laughing going on here that I find it remarkable, and I can’t help but be uplifted by it. Add to that also the gregarious Indian nature. Most people here seem to love being in groups and with friends, and it’s not unusual to see gangs of boys or young men walking down the street with their arms around each other, or holding hands, in a way that we “grow out of” in the west by the time we’re 10 or 11 years old. Adults still giggle too, and I find that surprisingly charming.

Of course, there’s a flip-side to all of this good-natured gregariousness, and the history of the last 70 years in this region is dotted with truly horrendous counter-examples of mobs going on the rampage, and of neighbours turning on neighbours. I’ve not seen any sign of violence in the short time I’ve been here… a few small incidences of road-rage at the most. But the willingness of the local government to shut everything down when there’s a potentially volatile political event — such as a Bandh, or the announcement of the ruling on the Ayodhya debate which came recently — perhaps hints at the way things can suddenly turn for the worse.

All in all, though, I’ve realised in the last few days that I’m feeling very happy here. Perhaps this is just short-lived relief, or a simple sense of achievement that I’ve managed to live for 6 months in a far-off land and I’m still pretty much myself, and haven’t yet died of some hideous tropical disease or gone insane.

Anyway for whatever reason… 6 months feels pretty good.