The Interview

It happens every now and then in public transport. Pretending to be oblivious to your surroundings, you feel the countless eyes staring at you without a blink. Even in a cosmopolitan megacity like Delhi, a foreigner remains a novelty to be ogled shamelessly. As it is the Indian man that always stares, for women it is a constant source of discomfort. Despite the gender advantage, the staring used to give me a sense of unease for a long time as well. You feel it in the back of your head, you turn around and the man doesn't stop, puzzled by the situation, you stare back, not an eye blinks. You get annoyed and ask "Can I help you?", the man sheepishly turns his head and shrugs. You remain puzzled. What do they want from me?

For a long time I tried to find an explanation to this phenomenon, but so far my hypothesis has been that staring at foreign people is just timepass (to use an Indian English expression) for bored commuters. That mixed with a pinch of creepiness, if the target is of the opposite sex. Furthermore, since Delhi is an exponentially growing city with a constant flow of migrants from small villages in search of work, it is increasingly becoming inhabited by people who have very rarely if ever even seen other ethnicities. Some may be just plain curious and oblivious to their intrusiveness, while others are blatantly lecherous. It seems that many Indian men do not see anything offensive about the staring, rather it's a given almost. A different face is to be stared at, because it is different. Obviously.

Another phenomenon linked with the staring in public transport is one I call the Interview. Every so often, someone gathers the courage to come and talk to you. This would generally be considered small talk, idle chatting to pass the time. However there's a certain type amongst Indians that has more straightforward approach to talking to strangers. They emerge out of nowhere, bombard you with questions about your personal life and disappear as quickly as they came.It's as if these people were some secret government run operation to gather information on foreigners in the city. Generally small talk includes reciprocation, participation from both parties to the conversation. However, the Interviewer merely nods and replies with a bland "ok" to every answer. This leaves you with sense of being interrogated. As if the man was merely interested in collecting information from you about you, not so much to actually have a chat.

One of these approached me on the metro the other day. On my way from work, I was standing in the metro with my headphones on. A man of maybe mid twenties to early thirties tapped me on my shoulder: a young, thin software engineer type with tightly buttoned shirt and trousers pulled all the way up as high as possible.
"Excuse me sir. So which country do you basically belong? What are you doing in India? You work for which company? How long are you staying here? How long have you been? How do you find India? I've been to Europe many times. Your culture is more liberal towards intoxicants and sex, yes? I know, I've been to Europe many times."

The interrogation went on for a good 10 minutes, and the man kept going on how in the west moral values are more liberal towards sexuality and drugs. He kept repeating this with a straight face, from which it was impossible to interpret neither admiration nor contempt. It seemed that he was merely stating these things. Usually the Interview ends with a forced exchange of numbers and a subsequent series of awkward text messages from the Interviewer, where he keeps asking how I am. Before this managed to happen, my stop came, I wished the man a good day and jumped off the train. He disappeared as soon as he had appeared. On the metro platform the announcer reminded the commuters: "Please, do not befriend any unknown person."

A New Home

Monday. Around five in the morning I'm awakened by the prayer call coming from the mosque few blocks away. Although I had closed all the doors and windows and turned the air conditioner on, the wail of the muezzin penetrates the steady lulling rattle and hum of the AC. The pink morning smog-sun of Delhi casts its rays through the blinds. I pull the blanket over my head to go back to sleep, but it's no use. The adhan-mixtape blasting from the minaret speakers has done it's job; everybody's awake and I can imagine the sikh family downstairs rolling in their beds, cursing the muezzin quietly. The kabadiwallah, or the scrap dealer, starts his round in the colony and the nasal, high pitched ”Kabadiii!!” repeated at intervals of machinelike precision fills the soundscape. Right after him comes the assortment of other wallahs, such as the chikwallah, aka the man who fixes your blinds, the fruit vendor, the wicker furniture salesman, and also recently, the bandarwallah, aka the dancing monkey man, all repeating their pitch in turns as they pass my house.The bandarwallah rides a bike with two monkeys and plays a loud rattling drum. If you give him money, he makes the monkeys dance for you. Another morning in Nizamuddin, one of the residential colonies of South Delhi.

It's been almost a year and a half since I first arrived in Delhi and I'm still having trouble absorbing the fact that I'm still here. After speding a year in North Delhi studying in Delhi university, I have now moved down south. North Delhi gave me a glimpse of a part of Delhi that many foreigners don't see due to its relative lack of interesting sights and activities. Yet it was an invaluable experience of mundane life in an unusual place. South Delhi, or New Delhi, with its posh colonies, malls and markets and landmark sights, exists as a completely separate entity in the mindset of the Delhiite, and everything above the central commercial hub of Connaught Place seems to be considered as something of an uncharted wasteland by many locals. I have migrated from the frontier to the heart of the city.

A lot has happened over the course of the last few months. I got a job, I graduated from university amd I moved to a new flat in a completely different part of the city. Graduating from university cut my final obligations to Finland and there was nothing compelling me to go back immediately. The economic downturn in Europe had hit Finland as well and the employment prospects of your average graduate of humanities were scarce. Getting a job in Delhi sealed the deal and now the city has become a home away from home. To me, it's still a place of very mixed feelings, ranging from giddy marvel and childlike curiosity to sheer uncontrollable rage and white-knuckled frustration. I don't fall into the most obvious pitfalls set for the foreigners in the city anymore, but Delhi life can still be a challenge sometimes.

Since my exchange year had come to an end and I had transformed from student to proper grown up, it was time to leave the International Student House on North Campus and move down South. After a harrowing quest of finding a flat somewhere, I eventually ended up settling in Nizamuddin East in southeast Delhi. Named after the famous Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya aka Hazrat Nizamuddin, who also died there, the area is best known to be one of the key pilgrimage sites of South Asian muslims. Every morning, busloads of sleepy muslim men and women from different parts of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh flock around the path leading to the Dargah, the sufi saint's tomb and shrine, dating back to the 14^th century. The place has now also become a refuge for homeless pilgrims from Bangladesh, who have set their dwellings around the shrine. Groups of young muslim men - boys perhaps 15 years old sporting a handsome beard already - squat on the street corner sipping chai and get first row seats for prime entertainment as they watch the early morning commuters, such as myself, arguing with the autowallahs.

Since Nizamuddin does not fall close to any metro stops, I have to avail the autorickshaw service every morning to get to work. Dealing with the autodrivers is a daily necessary evil that has not become any easier during the year and a half. Even though my Hindi has slightly improved and my presence may not spell ”tourist” anymore, to them I still remain a firang with easy money written all over me and it is their obligation to try overcharge me. Doing otherwise would be sheer waste and almost a sin, it seems. Trying to find an auto from the Nizamuddin East main strip has become an every morning ritual. The drivers break right in front of me with a sincerely greedy smile on their faces, I suggest them a reasonable price or the meter, and they disappear as quickly as they appeared huffing in consternation, almost outraged by my insolence to even suggest such a thing.

Nizamuddin has a certain feeling of transience to it. In addition to the constant flow of pilgrims, the area is known for the Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, which connects Delhi to several other parts of India daily. The station serves as an entry point to hordes of migrant labourers and seasonal workers who come from poor rural areas of surrounding states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to Delhi to seek short term employment, while leaving their families behind in the small villages to take care of the small piece of land that they may own. Some of them come to the city right after harvest to earn extra income only to return in October, around Diwali, while others stay for good. Seeing the confused rural families sitting at the station fresh off the train is the essence of India's drastic urbanisation in process. There is a sense of promise in the air at the station. Anything is still possible.  

Assam

After a long hiatus due to various reasons, here's an attempt to bring the dormant blog back to life. A little something from a few months back. As promised, an account on my trip to Assam.

My friend Anuj was working on a hydropower project in the northeast of India and needed to go to the northeast for a week to meet some people. He asked whether me and my friends Ward and Thomas would be interested in joining him for a trip to Assam, the land of rhinos and tea. My attendance, and motivation, in the university had become pretty much nonexistent and I wasn't doing anything else, so I decided to go. The northeast had not exactly been on my list of places to visit on this trip, but since the god of randomness (I'm sure there's a Hindu god for that too) decided to step in, the same night I booked a flight from Delhi to Guwahati, the capital of Assam.

Although seasoned backpackers worldwide have gone through almost any nook and cranny of India so far, there are still a few places on the map that remain a bit more obscure (relatively speaking). The tumultuous history of India has made the country go through numerous geographical transformations eventually leaving it a fairly strangely shaped piece of land these days. The partition of East Pakistan into what today is Bangladesh left the northeast of India hanging from the rest of the country like a tumor or an extra appendage reaching towards Southeast Asia - mentally as well as geographically. The Siliguri Corridor aka the Chicken's Neck is the only strip of land separating it from the rest of India adding to the isolation of the area from the rest of the country. The northeast has always been a frontier, a seemingly uncharted fringe of the Indian heartland that barely seems to have a place in an average Indian's consciousness.

The Northeast of India includes seven states called the seven sisters: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur and Meghalaya.

What makes the northeast even harder to fit as an integral part of what is generally perceived as "Indian" is the notable cultural and ethnic difference compared to the rest of the country. As Zhou and Kumar in their article on the history of mapping the northeast put it, "as a fluid borderland of Inner Asia, it is difficult to locate India’s Northeast exclusively in either East Asia or South Asia". The geographical borders drawn by the British enhanced this emergence of a separate regional identity somewhere between India and East Asia. This geographical and mental separation is still very present in the attitudes of northeastern people today. Talking to an average young northeastern, one may often hear them refer to "those Indians", meaning people from the Indian heartland, to emphasize the divide.

With all this in mind, we anxiously embarked on our little trip to explore the state of Assam, the gateway to the northeast. We landed in Guwahati late at night, our ride was there to pick us up. After a night of opulent drinking and eating (people in India tend to drink first and have dinner later), the next morning we headed out to our first destination, Majuli, the biggest river island in the world.

The river boat was waiting already at the pier, slowly swaying in the mild waves as the passengers scurried and rushed with sharpened elbows over to get the best seats on the deck below, dragged their heavy luggage behind, drove their motorcycles and mopeds and tried to persuade the occasional domestic animal on the boat. The engine eventually started, emitting black smoke with a steady cadence, and we headed towards vast, sometimes seemingly endless waters, the river Brahmaputra. At some points one could hardly see the shores on both sides. The nickname "mighty" often added to the name of the river seemed just.

Few hours later, we arrived on Majuli, where a convoy of jeeps and other modes of transport were waiting for potential passengers. We hopped on a jeep and cruised through the plains and the forests to our acommodation, a small village of bamboo huts, where it seemed, we were the only residents at the time.
The first night was well spent sitting on the porch of our hut enjoying several cups of fine assamese tea as well as some local spirits, such as rice beer, or lao-pani, as it's also called in Assam. The buzz of the spirits gave us ideas for the next day, since the island was mostly inhabited by tribal people, we decided it would be worthwhile visiting one of the villages and have a chat with them.

The next morning our driver was there rolling his keychain in his index finger, leaning against his jeep. Slightly groggy from the previous night's binge, courtesy of the inn-keepers spirits and other intoxicants provided by local holy men, we jumped into the jeep. We were going to go meet what was known as the Mishing-tribe, a people who originally migrated to Assam from the state of Arunachal Pradesh on the border of China. The village lay nearby and soon enough, we found ourselves in a full on bamboo hut-village surrounded by a number of curious faces peeking out of the huts. A small, thin, but lean and agile-looking man with a thin moustache greeted us welcomingly. He introduced himself as the chief of the village and insisted on showing us around the place.

The houses were supported by bamboo poles and built on a muddy lot surrounded by forest. The place seemed vulnerable to heavy rains. The chief agreed with our assesment and went on telling us how the government of India allocates annually millions of rupees for the development and reconstruction of the village that gets almost wiped out of the pouring monsoon. However, they barely see a single paisa of these funds, because most of the funding gets lost "in the process" to the pockets of state-level bureaucrats, eventually filtering down only a fraction of the original amount. Every year, the tribals have to bribe the local officials to get even a small cut of the funds originally allocated entirely to them. Their predicament is not unique in India, rather it was a textbook example of how corruption on each level of the government spreads its rust on the cogs of development, circulating the funds amongst numerous babu-middlemen and maintaining the unfortunate status quo. Despite the setbacks, the chief seemed optimistic and had faith in his community. He pointed out to a small girl studying attentively on the porch of one of the huts. He told us that the girl was top of her class and the village had come together to support her education so that she could go to college. Other youngsters that had emerged around us told us that they had similar plans.

We thanked the chief for an illuminating chat and decided to move along. Our driver told us that there was a holy man living in one of the temples nearby who could tell us our fortune, if we were interested. I'm not usually too keen on these things, since I prefer to seek comfort in the randomness of the universe, but armed with the metaphorical a grain of salt, I was intrigued nevertheless. Unfortunately we never got that far. Next to the temple entrance was a small booth-like building with a single room. A small group of local men was loitering outside, it seemed some would rather see what was to become their fate. I peeked inside the small, dark room, in which a withered and feeble man was sitting cross-legged. He sat in the middle of huge piles of offerings and gifts given by his visitors. Various sorts of fruit, candles, incense, framed pictures, playing cards, money and other random items lay scattered all over the room. He was dressed in a single piece of cloth wrapped around his body and he was smoking a chillum with such concentration, that it took a good while to even capture his attention. He had a vacant look in his eyes as he kept puffing the pipe while repeating the name of Shiva between the heavy tokes in deep voice that sounded like it was coming out of the bottom of this stomach. We carefully asked whether it was possible for him to tell us our fortune. He looked at us first with a blank stare after which he burst out laughing, blowing smoke out of his nostrils. He said he was currently not in the condition to do so. With poor quality charas, he clearly had fried his brain beyond any clairvoyant capabilities for the day. Instead, as a consolation prize, he dug his piles of offerings for a while and eventually pulled out an apple with a long due expiration date. The next best thing, according to him. The Indians in our entourage were convinced that the man clearly had some powers, because he could afford to turn us down. Only a true holy man could say no to potential paying customers, apparently.


The day was coming to an end and we retreated to our bamboo porch to sit by the candles and mosquito coils. We were going to head back to mainland the next day.


The next day, a bit groggy once again, we found ourselves standing in the back of a jeep driving through a scenery that could've just as well been somewhere in the Serengeti - the Khaziranga national park. The bumpy ride was making me slightly nauseous and the mosquito bites from last night were still itching, only making the prickly heat rash on my skin worse. This all subsided, however, as we entered the national park area and the flora and fauna started to surround us. On both sides lay vast bodies of water decked with thick layers of vegetation. The green mosaic on top of the water was occasionally distorted by the emerging horned head of a water buffalo or the main attraction of Khaziranga - the Asian One-Horned Rhinoscheros.
They mostly prefer to keep their distance to visitors, but as we were turning around to head back, two of them had suddenly appeared next to our jeep, a mother and a baby rhino. The mother turned around and did not seem to approve our close proximity to its offspring. At first our driver and guide seemed excited about the close encounter and encouraged us to take as many photos as possible, but as the heavily armored  beast began assuming charging position, we were barely holding on to the bars of the jeep in the back as the driver was stepping on the pedal already. The mother rhino could've made short work of our 4-wheel drive with a single headbutt.

Despite the intimidating encounter, the Khaziranga was mesmerizing in its natural diversity. Hundreds of different species of birds, the massive water buffaloes, the rhinos, the elephants and the prospect of possibly spotting a tiger - all roaming free in lush greenery, large bodies of water and dry savannah-like grassland.
The possibility of spotting a real live tiger were fairly slim, as they usually see you first and disappear. Seeing one would've demanded a night of patient stalking in a treehouse in the nature reserve. Our time was running short, so we had to leave tigerspotting to more focused makeshift biologists.

A Quick Announcement

Dear readers,

I hope most of you haven't given up on this blog due to the long hiatus in writing. I'm terribly sorry about that and all I can say in my defense is that there have been some major things happening keeping me very busy lately. Furthermore, I also blame the general Indian atmosphere that has changed my formerly protestant-influenced psyche to some extent: Being idle does not give me the pangs of guilt that it used to. Sitting still has become a viable pastime. I can easily spend an afternoon with a cup of chai or two doing nothing and feel good about it. Furthermore, the approaching summer with it's +40C temperatures makes doing nothing even more tempting. This is perhaps good news for my personal development in an achievement and success- crazed world, but less so for anyone who still visits this blog.

In any case, have no fear, the blog is not dead. On the contrary, it has actually been given a new boost due to recent events in my personal life. Through a sudden twist of fate, I've found work in Delhi and hence I'm becoming a permanent resident of the city - a fledgling Delhiite, if you will.

This means that I shall keep writing, commenting and sharing the Indian (and South Asian) experience; however, this time from a more Delhi-centered perspective. A nine-to-five job gives me a sense of regularity in my life that will hopefully help in keeping up writing as well.

There will be some proper entries coming up soon, so keep checking the site. Next up will be an account on the trip to Assam, the heart of northeastern India.

Thank you for your patience and support, stay tuned!

Best,
The Rickshaw Explorer

Kerala

While staying in Goa (see previous post), me and Dan had also decided to venture further south to explore the southernmost state of India, Kerala. After spending a relatively uncomfortable night in one of Goa's commercial northern beaches colonized by old and young hippies, we headed towards the train station to jump to the next train heading south. Since we arrived in the station on short notice, the whole train was fully booked and we had no other option than to take whatever was left in the train, which, we were soon to find out, were two roughly human-sized slots in a train carriage filled with humans almost piled on top of each other. After downing the last beers for the road in one of the shoddy, quickly erected establishments around the small train station, we headed to the station and jumped into the train heading to the town of Kochi in Kerala.

Most of the train's passengers had hopped already in Mumbai, which meant that getting a seat was going to be out of the question for the most of the trip. Seats in Indian trains and metros are a luxurious and scarce resource coveted by all. Getting a seat is a cruel game of survival of the fittest and he who has the sharpest elbows emerges as the victor. Women and the elderly are usually given way, but since the biggest proportion of India's population consists of men between the ages of 15 and 64, fighting for the seat amongst men is an unseparable part of everyday. Unable to find a seat, we dropped our backpacks on the corridor and sat on them, rather uncomfortably. The only place left was the small space between cars, which meant we were to spent most of our journey trying to dodge the people coming in and out. On each station I was trying not to get burnt by the metallic teapots of the chai-wallahs as they boarded the train to begin their robotic drone of a sales pitch, which consisted of a repeated CHAICHAICHAICHAICHAI! at regular intervals of clockwork precision. After arriving on the station, these men would appear out of nowhere and run through the train and vanish almost as quickly. The sixteen hour train ride remained mainly uneventful, with the exception of a drunkard who had taken an interest in me and Dan for some reason. During the ride the man kept eyeing us, eventually he got up from his seat and approached us trying to say something in very slurred Hindi while gesturing with his hands by pointing to his mouth with his thumb. The man's drunken grin spoke of dubious ulterior motives and we weren't entirely sure whether the man was gesticulating for sexual favours or whether he just wanted one of the beers we had in our backpacks. Eventually he got bored after realizing that he was effectively being ignored. As the train was nearing Kochi, the passengers got gradually fewer and we managed to ascend in the seating hierarchy first to seats and finally to luggage racks, which worked perfectly as beds. At this point, the only downside was that there was roughly 30 minutes left of the trip.

Finally, after a harrowing 16 hours standing and sitting at the shuffling feet of people coming and going in the corridor and then finally getting a 30 minute powernap lying on the suitcase rack, we reached the town of Kochi. After being used to the thick Hindi-accented English of northern India and the devanagari script, stepping out of the train was like entering a different country. The rickshaw-wallahs were eagerly offering their services in a z-accented English (as in "treazure") and road signs and street graffiti were written in a script that looked like something from Babylon 5.

The state of Kerala in the southernmost tip of India is an interesting anomaly in the Indian cultural and political map. Often regarded as the most developed state in India, it has the highest Human Development Index of all the states, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, highest life expectancy and, according to a study by Transparency International, the lowest level of corruption in India. The states has gone its own way of social development following a model of equitable growth which emphasises land reforms, efficient reduction of poverty, equal educational access and child welfare, which seems to have been so successful that Kerala is often regarded as a prime example of human development within a developing country.


The fact that Keralans are healthier and more educated that your average Indians seems to be linked with the state's culture of left wing political activism, which has resulted in beneficial reforms from the common man's perspective. It is often claimed that Kerala was the first in the world to democratically elect a communist majority government, The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), has been in control for most of the last 50 years now. The party makes its presence well known; as you walk the streets of Kochi, or any Keralan town for that matter, walls and facades are decorated with hammer and sickle logos and red flags and public greenery is often decorated with monuments celebrating local politicians. The sort of pomp and pride that used to mark the public space in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. This combined with a pleasant tropical climate and the general high frequency of mustachioed men, one could've just as well been in Cuba.

(Photo: Daniel Gregson)

This man introduced himself as Jelal. After noticing our interest in the Communist party's presence in the city, he insisted on being photographed next to his party's monument. (Photo: Daniel Gregson)

The walls of the cities of Kochi, Aleppey and Varkala were covered with campaign posters.

Fort Kochi, the older quarter of the city of Kochi, seemed like a logical start for exploring the state. Its mix of British, Dutch and Portuguese architecture, combined with a Jewish quarter with a 16th century synagogue and Chinese fishing nets from pre-colonial times serve as tangible reminders that Kerala has been among the most visited and busiest areas in India for centuries. As our schedule was tight, we were hoping to be able to take all this in a quick and efficient way. Soon enough, standing on one of the street corners of Fort Kochi, we were approached by an auto-rickshaw driver, who insisted on serving as our guide for the day for 50 rupees and take us for a tour round town. 


The catch for the reasonable price was that we were supposed to visit a few shops as mock customers, so that the driver would get his commission from the shopkeepers. This turned out to be standard procedure when negotiating with rickshaw-wallahs; visiting several shops would always bring the price down substantially. Buying something was never expected, this was obvious to the rickshaw-drivers as well as the shopkeepers. The shops we were supposed to visit were called emporiums, vast boutiques of overpriced Indian handicrafts from different sides of the subcontinent with over eager army of staff attacking every customer who might venture in and exhausting each one with their frantic sales pitches within minutes. The shops were always in several floors, filled with extravagant paraphernalia such as human-sized bronze statues of Ganesh the Elephant God. The shopkeepers persistently tried to convince me that these things were being sold constantly to foreign customers. I'm sure they are, if these shops are frequented by Russian oligarchs and Mexican drug lords looking for lawn decorations, that is. 


Nevertheless, our rickshaw-driver kept driving us around Kochi, past the British and Dutch colonial villas and houses and the Portuguese catholic churches finally to the Jewish quarter, where still few elderly Jewish gentlemen were spending their afternoons on the street corners around the synagogue. These few remaining people on this dwindling community are people whose roots in India can be drawn all the way to the era of King Solomon, during which the first Jews entered South India as traders and eventually settled there and integrated to the Malayalam community. Most of the Kochi Jews have now emigrated to Israel. While driving the narrow alleys of Fort Kochi, the driver kept pointing at places of varying historical interest at a exhausting pace: "British house! Dutch house! Portuguese House! Dutch cemetery! Jewish house!" Eventually the ride ended in one of the colonial cemeteries where our driver, who kept boasting with his sexual capabilities and communist affiliations, gave us a quick overview of the place and then hurriedly went on explaining how he used to take his Austrian girlfriend to one of the crypts for a little "ziggazigga", to use his term. After all, the man declared himself as "number one communist sex man". 


The next day we felt we had seen enough of Kochi and it was time to head south to explore the famous backwaters of Kerala - a vast lagoon-like areaa paralleling the Arabian Sea with endless labyrinthine canals where local fishermen have set up their villages. After reaching the town of Alleppey, one of the gateways to the waters, we decided to check in to one of the accommodations among the fishing villages. The rickshaw dropped us to a small sandy path on piece of land surrounded by rice fields on one side and the serene backwater areas on other. Despite the few houses along the shore, the village seemed almost deserted. We waited for a few minutes, a man appeared with a boat and called for us to get in. In order to reach the house where our room was, the housekeeper had to row to the other shore. The small hotel was built on a tiny strip of land in the middle of the rice fields and backwaters. After dropping our bags to the room, the man offered to take us for a little tour to the surrounding area. 

In the middle of the rural villages, pompous communist monuments celebrating the party and it's past and present leaders. (Photos: Daniel Gregson)

The backwaters are full of narrow canals, along which the locals live.

A view from the boatman's side.

The sun was setting and the villagers were taking their domestic animals back home.

The next morning we decided to keep going south to see some of the beaches of Kerala. After quick hesitation on the bus stop, we eventually ended up boarding the bus heading towards Varkala, one of Kerala's better known beaches famous for its impressive surrounding red cliffs. Few hours later we found ourselves standing on a beach surrounded by steep cliffs, on top of which, over the past years, a booming touristy village had emerged. The guidebook had recommended Varkala as a somewhat less commercial destination, which of course is usually the lethal blow to any deserted beach. As soon as a place is characterized as "unspoilt by mass tourism" in one of these guidebooks, it's only a matter of time when the place becomes another standard destination first for the Israeli backpacker and soon after the German grandmother, the British plumber and the Finnish car dealer. Varkala seemed to be no exception.

There is not much to tell about Varkala. As beautiful as the beach itself was and as refreshing the Arabian Sea was, we felt a day's visit was enough and decided to start heading back up as soon as possible. This, however, did not prove to be as simple as it seemed. December is considered peak season in South India and the days around Christmas are especially busy, meaning all transport is often fully booked well in advance in every direction. We obviously had not taken this into account. The slight crawling feeling of stress started to take over as we realized that we could not leave the beach and we had to catch a flight back to Delhi in a few days. Sitting in an internet cafe wondering what to do, an Australian backpacker tipped us that a Russian travel agent next door had ways to get people tickets in sticky situations like this. Without further ado, we ran to the agent's office. Behind the counter was sitting a big muscular man with face frozen in a bored blank stare. The man promised to help us after we had explained our unfortunate situation to him.  Typically, what he would've done in a situation like ours, was that he would have sent one of his men to sleep at the train station at the ticket counter and have them go for the a train ticket as soon as the counter would open. This time this was not an option, because we were trying to get tickets for trains that had been fully booked many times. It was clear that he was at this hour more interested in closing shop for the day and therefore left for the nearest bar, but left one of his men, a South Indian man with a somewhat lazy habitus, to take care of business. He promised us tickets for the train leaving towards Goa the next day. Come tomorrow, we get a call from him who says that booking the train for the day was unfortunately not possible, but instead he promises that if we meet him in Alleppey, he will get us a train ticket there. Since we had not much choice at that point, we hopped on a bus and headed back to Alleppey, only to discover that our man had not exactly gotten us proper train tickets, but instead a ticket for a waiting list. Just as we were ready to take our money back from the man by force, he promised to find a train to Goa as soon as possible. Having little choice but to trust the man, we had to stay in the Venice of India for a bit longer. The next day comes, and goes, no sign of the man. Second day comes, still nothing. On the third day the man appears in our hostel, holding the same piece of paper saying that we were on a waiting list, numbers 66 and 67. Despite this, he keeps convincing that he has seats for us, the only thing we need to do is head back to Kochi with him to meet his friend who works there as a ticket inspector. Otherwise we would have taken our money back from this man, but his relentless efforts to organize the tickets for us convinced us, and so we hopped on a train back to Kochi, where we had arrived five days earlier.

Few hours later we found ourselves sitting at the Kochi train station sipping coffee with our South Indian ticket hustler, trying to kill time waiting for his friend to arrive in the next train. A couple of hours went by, our train was supposed to leave at eleven o'clock, when suddenly around six o'clock he realizes that his last train back to Aleppey was leaving. The train he was supposed to take started moving, so he quickly gave me the train ticket saying we had spots 66 and 67 on the waiting list and 1700 rupees in cash. We were supposed to locate his friend, the ticket inspector, on our train and give the ticket and the money to him, and make sure that no-one would see us, we were not to approach any other ticket inspector, only him. The clock struck eleven, the train arrived, doors opened, people started boarding, no sight of a ticket inspector. Running back and forth the train carriages looking for our person ticket inspector, we started to gradually get nervous. I jumped off the train to search for the man on the platform and almost hit a young man in a uniform. The young ticket inspector smiled and greeted me with a "you're the ones looking for seats right? Just go on in, I'll be there in a minute!" We boarded the train and sat on one of the beds. The train started moving and the inspector came to us. I handed him the money with the ticket, slightly nervous as there was full train compartment watching bribery taking place. I would have expected him to quickly hide the money, instead he nonchalantly placed the stack of 100 and 500 rupee bills on his lap where everyone could see it, and started making some arcane scribbles to our ticket, giving it an instant-upgrade from waiting list to air-conditioned sleeping compartment. It was obvious to everyone there what was happening, but as it seems, this sort of grass-roots bribery is so mundane in India, that it's accepted simply as a way to take care of business. This is what our ticket man had told us too, that the real problem was the large scale corruption in the houses of representatives, whereas small daily bribery like this is there to merely make things run more smoothly. After filling the ticket with all sorts of number codes, our partner in crime handed us our half and left. It was getting late and the anxiety had worn us out, I fell asleep almost instantly as the train was taking us back to Goa again.

Goa

The semester was finally coming to an end. Fed up with the continuously cancelled classes caused by the apparent catch-twenty two that had been going on the Delhi Teachers' Association strike, I was relieved to leave the classes that I hadn't been enjoying that much anyway. This semester had been a severe disappointment academically and it was time to try to forget it and concentrate on enjoying India itself. It was time to pack the backpack again, it was time for a holiday. Since we had thus far travelled mainly in central and northern India, the south had so far remained unknown. The winter in Delhi was chilling everone's bones, so this was the ideal time to head somewhere warmer. Goa, where many Indians go to escape the constraints of traditional lifestyles and where westerners have come to party since the 60's, came to be our obvious choice to start our southern excursion.

I landed on the Dabolim airport late in the evening. I had no clue where to go and what to do next, but the warm tropical breeze felt comforting. The airport entrance was already rather quiet at this point. My fellow travellers on the plane, most of them Russian and British package tourists, had their own organized chauffeurs to take them to the safety of their resorts. I was supposed to call the rest of my friends, who had already arrived earlier, but there was no answer. Cut off from communication and clueless as to what to do next, I had no other choice but to trust the few grinning faces waiting for me next to their run down vehicles at the airport parking lot. "Yes Sir? Where you want to go? Nice beach? Lot of party! Your friends there too! American, Britishers, Israeli, Finnish, everyone there!"  After negotiating a price, the man rang his friend, who appeared to the lot in less than a minute with a car that looked like it's main purpose was taking backpackers to dark alleys to liberate them of their material possessions. Options were limited, so I got in and we headed towards the northern beaches. I had not bothered to familiarize myself with the local geography that much, so I had to trust my drivers' judgement on where to go.

After roughly an hour's drive, I was dropped off to Baga beach, possibly the most commercialized place you can find in Goa - a place for people who want to travel to places to experience everything they can experience back home, except with nicer climate. Baga is mainly infested with Russian middle class and working class British package tourists; as I was walking along the main boulevard past the identical restaurants with their plastic furniture and continental breakfast menus, I was greeted with a host of drunk red faces fossilized in blank stares of boredom and violence. These are men and women branded with shoddily made tribal tattoos and red tan lines the shape of tank tops spending their two week package deals getting wasted on the nearest restaurant to their hotel complaining about their chips to the jaded waiter and in the evening looking for things to hump or punch, or both. The free-floating testosterone made the atmosphere more intimidating than relaxing.

Most of the bars were equipped with widescreen TVs showing Champions League or cricket non-stop while sound systems where pumping dance versions of Bryan Adams and Belinda Carlisle hits. As these package deal people get bored of bingeing on the patios, the touts outside make a killing selling them the appropriate attire of pseudo-hippyish wooden and plastic jewellery, batik-shirts and assorted "I love Goa" and "Goa head" -merchandise.

Nevertheless, I needed to find a place to stay. After checking my mail in the nearest internet cafe, the man behind the counter winked at me and lowered his voice into a whisper while nervously looking to the streets. "psst, you need room?". At peak season, endless torrents of tourists offer lucrative opportunities for all kinds of illegitimate accommodation entrepreneurs. This guy admitted straight away that he needed to be a bit candid in his moves, in case there would be cops on patrol. Usually the rooms are very basic and barely fulfil any standards, but they are also cheap and most of the time adequate for an undemanding backpacker. Exhausted as I was, we negotiated a price and the man's friend escorted me to the backyard, where a small group of Russian youth in their tracks and crocs were sipping their Kingfisher-beers and getting ready for another night of chasing tail in one of the many Bacardi Breezer-sponsored bars and nightclubs by bulging their muscles and lathering their heads with gel. After several hours, a lot of Indian and Russian youth returned from their mission, less victorious and drunk out of their minds, looking for things to channel disappointment. The diminuendo and crescendo of arguing and throwing insults in Russian and Hindi eventually lulled me to sleep.


The next morning, things started to look up. After getting in contact with my friends, I hopped on the bus towards south Goa. Cruising around Goa's narrow roads, one gets glimpses of why Goa is unique in India.
Back in the day, before hordes of tourists decided to colonize the place, Goa was one of India's best kept secrets to the occasional individual traveller. Come sixties, the hippie era was booming and traveller culture was slowly gaining ground as young people went to India to find spiritual enlightenment, expand their consciousness and to party. Weary travellers exhausted by Bombay's heat and traffic ventured south and often found themselves in a strange, beautiful tropical place with unspoiled beaches surrounded by green mountains. All of a sudden you would hear a strange archaic variety of Portuguese spoken everywhere, the lush green valleys and hills would be dotted with white colonial villas emerging between the palm trees and whitewashed churches would mark major street corners. In the midst of India trying to shake off it's British past, you would end up in this small enclave like a lost piece of the Mediterranean. The architecture is still there and the juxtaposition of modernity and past in its absurdly glaring contrast makes it a place that, only in India, could exist and still make sense: the binge drinking tourists get road rage as they mount their scooters and motorbikes after a day well spent staring at the bottom of the pint. They scoot off to terrorize the roads surrounded by the decadent romanticism of ramshackle portuguese colonial architecture. In the meantime, the pandemonium is calmly observed by Konkani fishermen, who mostly make their living by selling their catches to holiday resorts.

After reconnecting with my friends Dan and Arpita, and after seeing Arpita back to the airport, me and Dan continued our journey onwards. The plan was to venture south to Kerala the next day, so for the rest of the night, the objective was to find an affordable place to stay, preferably somewhere that would serve fish and beer. After quick contemplation, we ended up moving back north to the beaches of Chapora and Vagator. After being ripped off by the taxi driver again, about an hour later we found ourselves in a different, but also very distinctly Goan scene.

As a seamless continuation to the hippy-era travellers and their scandalous partying on the deserted Goan beaches between the 60's and the 70's, the 80's brought along a culture of electronic dance music that would eventually become strongly associated also with Goa and it's seasonal party population. The early 90's is often regarded as the peak era of the Goan beach party culture that eventually spawned it's own genre of electronic music, Goa trance, which (or it's successor psytrance) is still ubiquitous as you approach locations such as Anjuna, Vagator and Chapora in North Goa.

The taxi dropped us off to a junction where we could choose which beach to head towards. By random choice we ended up heading towards Chapora. While walking on the pitch black road, the faint steady thumping of Goa trance led the way to the centre of the village. Once again, as we were walking along the main boulevard past the identical restaurants with their plastic furniture and continental and Israeli breakfast menus, I was greeted with a host of drunk and stoned red faces fossilized in blank stares of boredom and indifference. These beaches are mostly infested with old hippies and their younger techno-disciples, who in their shoddily made tribal tattoos, neon-coloured single dreadlocks, plastic trousers and mini skirts and shirts with pictures of mandalas, elves, mushrooms and bong hitting aliens look like some lost tribe of 90's suburbia that the rest of Europe deported to these communities to roam free and rut.

Come morning, the knell of the church bells echoes around the beaches and a group of elderly Konkani women are returning from a mass while the sleepy "disciples" greet them from the patios while scratching their pierced bellybuttons and lighting up their first bongfuls of the day and wiping their hummus-stained hands on their neon dreads. A coexistence that could've hardly been foreseen by anyone.

The next morning me and Dan made our way towards the nearest railway station to head down south towards  Kerala for a few days (to which we shall return in the next post). A few days later, on Christmas eve afternoon, we returned to Goa to celebrate the holiday. Since turkey or ham were a scarce resource, but seafood abundant, we celebrated Christmas by feasting on a big tuna fish on a beach while watching fireworks and drinking beer. Not your usual Christmas dinner, but certainly a memorable one.

Our days on the land of beaches, fresh seafood, cheap beer were soon coming to an end, but there was one more thing to do. As a project for a university course, Dan had the idea to try to interview some local fishermen on the environmental impacts of mass tourism on their livelihood. To locate the fishermen, we needed to explore some of the lesser known beaches and villages. For this we needed transport; Ideally, a scooter or two. As the peak season was still in full swing, finding one turned out to be easier said than done. After going around different beaches and asking around hustlers loitering on street corners, getting a ride started to seem impossible. Finally, a fat Sikh man with a lint-covered sweater convinced us that he would get us a ride at a good price. Dan goes with the man to get the ride; twenty minutes later he returns with a contraption that looks like something that should've been demolished ages ago. This thing had no mirrors, no working tail lights, no working horn, no working speedometers or fuel meters and finally, no proper breaks. However, this turned out to be a good thing, since this cruiser could only go as fast as 50 km/h. The man also was kind enough to let us know that he had recently changed the engine to the scooter, so we might want to be careful with it as he wasn't sure how it would work. The cherry on top was the decoration, which included a sticker of a skeleton hand giving the finger and an anarchy symbol. I was surprised not to find the words "rad" and "cowabunga" anywhere. Taking this beast to the road, Dan on the reins and me on the back trying not to fall off after each bump, we certainly provided a wealth of entertainment to the locals as we tried to dodge herds of cows coming at us and the drunk speed freaks from Baga beach.

We headed to the fishing village of Morjim, where we, sure enough, found some men sorting out their nets and collecting the catch of the day. Communicating with the men remained unfortunately rather simple as their English was limited and our Konkani even more so. One of the younger ones was chatting with us about the catch of the day and after a while asked whether we'd be interested in going fishing with them for a few hours, to which we responded with an immediate "yes!", and so we agreed to meet the men the next morning. Next morning one of the fishermen was waiting for us with his small boat. The rest of the crew had gone already to the open sea, so we were to go to some of the spots just off the coast to try our luck. Our fellow fisherman was a middle-aged Konkani man with squinting bloodshot eyes, a perpetual grin and a slightly disturbing chuckle, which was his response to almost everything we said to him. We climbed in and the man pushed to boat to the sea. The sun was just getting up, the first rays felt warm against the cool breeze of the sea. We arrived in one of the spots and got our fishing rods out. We sat silently, waiting for the fish to bite. The waves splashed lightly to the sides of the boat, seagulls were circling the boat shrieking. In the middle of marine serenity, somewhere in the distance the steady bass of of Goa trance was pounding on one of the beaches.