India - The Bad and The Ugly

The thing about India is, you’re going to encounter shit. Not metaphorical shit, actual shit. You’ll tread in it, eat it, sleep in it, and if you’re as foolish as me, swim in it. It’s not one type of shit. You’ll encounter faecal matter from humans, dogs, cats, buffalo, and if you’re truly blessed, a cow. The reason I’ve started my story about India with this, is because I want to clarify the content of this blog entry in case anyone gets the wrong impression about my attitude to India. Indiais more than just a country; it’s a continent, and trying to define the place in one sweeping generalisation is about as valid as trying to isolate a singular truth about Europeans. However, generalising and making discriminate observations is what I do, not out of any sort of cliché driven racism, but out of a sense of trying to understand what makes a country unique, and how a nation fits in this weird and wonderful world.

My Couchsurfing host in Delhimade a point about Indiathat really stuck with me. When asking him about a recent report that had discussed how over 90% of Indian engineering degrees weren’t worth the paper they were written on, he explained to me that you have to think of modern India as a country the size of the USA. Within this fraction of the gigantic Indian population you’ll have engineers who are as brilliant as anything the west has produced, you’ll have artists, scientists, and people in every field doing things as well as anyone in the world, if not better. But this is just the top of the Indian pyramid. India is still a developing nation, and for the moment, a majority of the nation is still in that massive base of the pyramid where education, financial wellbeing, and the social aspects that come with these developments, are not yet available. 

I thought I'd break my Indian experience into two parts. Mainly because I was there for 7 weeks, and that would equal a blog post the size of Moby Dick, but also because I want to vent fully about all the things in India that frustrated, vexed, and maddened me, so that I can spend the second part of the post talking about the crazy wonderful part of the world I was lucky enough to see. This also fits chronologically quite well with my trip as I really didn't enjoy my first few weeks in India, and it was only after I got up to speed with how the country works that I finally relaxed into it and enjoyed it.

So when some of my stories begin to paint India in a not so flattering way, you have to remember that this is the developing world. Shit happens when countries are developing, and writing about India while ignoring the shit is just stupid, in fact I think it’s part of what makes it so interesting. So while reading my rants, please remember that I’m in no way trying to infer that Indians are in any way bad people, because that’s definitely not true. I’m just refusing to ignore elephant shit in the room.

As I mentioned above, India is a continent, not a country. I spent seven weeks there and barely saw half of what I wanted to see. In the interest of your interest levels, and to make this readable and not a long drawn out ‘and then I caught a train to…..’ blog post, I’ve decided to remember Indiain a series of ranting stories, such as….

The Time I Was A Bollywood Star.

When I first arrived in India, I was quite down. I had just left my good friend Ronja’s place in one of my favourite cities, Berlin. My trip through Asia was always a bit of an after thought, tagged onto my journey through Europe, in case I had some money left after all my European shenanigans. I now found myself missing friends not just in Australia, but also Europe, and somehow had bicontinental homesickness. This isn’t the best frame of mind to find yourself in when first encountering India, as Indiawill find any weakness you have and exploit it, which is exactly what happened.

My first couple of days in Mumbai were ok, I wandered around the very Raj English feeling downtown area, ate the delicious and insanely cheap street food, marveled at the crazy dabbawala's who transport thousands of lunches to the cities workers every day. and watched the many many many games of cricket that you walk past on every block. 

The dabbawalas organising the hot lunches.

The gateway to India

One of Mumbai's beaches.

So much cricket that sometimes the fielders on one pitch stood right next to the next games' pitch.

One of my favourite experiences was jumping on the local trains during peak hour. Mumbai has the craziest trains that I experienced in India, with people hanging off the side, and having to dodge the poles and other trains that you pass along your journey. The trains don't actually have doors, which is purposefully done just so the maximum number of the city's millions of residents can cram in. But hanging out the side of the train is actually the preferred position to ride in these trains, as inside you are pushed so tightly up against the other commuters that unless you begin moving towards the exit a station or two before your stop, you won't make it off the train in time and will have to double back to actually make your station. The scene that occurs when the train pulls up to the station is the real highlight of the whole experience. Before the train has fully stopped, people are already clambering on and off the train. The idea of 'wait until all passengers have disembarked before stepping on the carriage' is a laughable notion here. It's more like the wall of death from a mosh pit, with two opposing groups running at each other at full pace. If it were a cartoon they'd all end up wearing one anothers' clothes, but this is real life, so instead you just get a bunch of Indian guys yelling something that sounds like 'Hut hut hut' and slamming into each other.

The town was relatively enjoyable, and I was beginning to warm to the Indian culture, but then I had my camera stolen. It was annoying because I actually caught the bastard who lifted it from me, but he managed to hand it off to a friend. The guy who took it, grabbed it by pushing up against me as I was taking a photo of the Mumbai washing baths, a place where hundreds of thousands of clothes get washed every day; quite a spectacle.

There was a bit of a crowd, as, bizarrely, they were setting up a runway for a fashion show to take place in the centre of this very working class area. The guy who snatched my camera, pushed up against me, and at first I just thought he was being a typical Indian and ignoring the concept of personal space, but it struck me as weird, so I quickly put away my SLR camera in my camera bag, checked my left pocket for my wallet, then my right one for my point and shoot camera, but by then it was gone. As the guy walked away I grabbed him and patted him down, but the bastard had gotten rid of it. I yelled for the cops, and he slipped from my grip and ran.

The photo I took as my other camera got lifted. Not really worth it.

I had to report it to the cops, and so I headed off to the nearest cop station. This led to one of my more bizarre traveling experiences. I lost my camera in Valencia earlier in my trip, and reporting it to the cops there consisted of me filling out a form, a sympathetic look from the cop, and that was the end of it. Not in India. In India, white people are treated like royalty, and when I reported it to the cop, he told me he'd get a detective on the case immediately. To be honest it was a bit annoying, because there was no way we were going to get the camera back, but sure enough my detective and two other detectives who obviously must've been bored, rode with me on motorbikes back to the scene of the crime. After a brief reenactment, they found a street vendour who had seen it all happen. She was a sweet lady who had tried to help me when it had happened, but thanks to the language barrier and the fact she was a tad simple, she had thought I'd lost my phone and kept telling me my phone was in the guys hand.

After a few minutes at the site of the pick-pocketing, we headed back to the station. I was waiting there for a few hours, during which they were nice enough to bring me about 6 cups of chai, and some biscuits. I was waiting for them to just give me my police report, when the street vendor lady, now dressed in her Sunday finest Sari and nose ring jewellery, and her three friends who were also working on the street where the incident happened, all walked in and began being interviewed by the detectives and police chief. I couldn't make any of it out, as it was all in Hindi, but excitably gossipy ladies telling ever expanding fantastical stories can be understood through translational gaps, and it was quite hilarious watching the different ladies excitedly giving their ten cents worth in between sending understanding looks in my direction. 

Finally, after about 4 hours in the presence of Mumbai's finest, I was handed my police report, and could leave, being told that 'when' they find my camera they'll ring my hostel. It would have been a great ending to an epic experience, but it was never going to happen. The worst part of the whole process was witnessing a woman come in who had been assaulted in some way, and who was wailing in pain. The moustachioed police chief made her sit for about 40 minutes before anyone saw her, and the worst bit was when she was wailing in pain, he rolled his eyes and scolded her for making such a scene and made her hush, so that all she emitted were muted sobs. It was my first real experience of India's sexual and social inequality, and I felt like such a bastard getting so much attention while a beaten woman was ignored.

At first I thought the camera robbery hadn't really affected me, as I'm pretty quick to dismiss such things with a joke and brush it off like nothing happened, but it turns out this burrowed deeper into my psyche than I first thought. India changed before my eyes, and all of a sudden the country became a leering smug bunch of lecherous money grabbers, and I quickly found myself becoming a shut in. I really didn't enjoy going outside and I lost all motivation to explore the city. The thing that really got to me was that I think I had been joking with the guy who scoped me as a target, and in all likelihood the man who ended up with my camera. Before it was stolen I had been joking with this guy, and genuinely thought I was making a small, but significant connection, as up until that point Indians had only been interested in talking to me as a means of selling me something, begging money, or because I was a novel white alien. The moment I let my guard down, a guy robbed me, and despite my best attempts to logically counter my irrational racist side which now painted all Indians as untrustworthy, I was really struggling to counter the thousands of years of evolution that was telling me to distrust the outsiders.

Luckily for me it was at this point I found out about the fact that Bollywood is mad for white extras. After a quick appeal on couchsurfing, a really nice local guy informed me that his mate recruited white extras, and that there was a position for me, and as many friends as I could find, on the hit TV show (B grade soap), Sanskar. This not only gave me the opportunity to get off the street for a few days, but it also gave me a chance to see how movie magic is made, something I am actually quite interested in, and one of the possible careers I was still entertaining during my quarter life crisis (behind the scenes, not on camera). 

It ended up being a great experience. Being an extra involves mainly just standing around, then every so often  having a director yell not quite complete instructions at you, which you then have to try and interpret, and then you're away, and the director will either ignore you (meaning you did well), or yell at you (meaning you did not so well). Apart from that, you just mingle with your co-nonstars and make fun of the main actors. Actually that's not true, the actors were really nice to us. This was awesome on multiple levels because not only did they help us out with what to do, and make us feel welcome, it was also the first time I'd been surrounded by Indian people who didn't want anything from me, and who I could get along with on a relatively even setting. I ended up getting quite a few on screen shots, I like to think due to my natural acting skills, but I think it was mainly because the suit they gave me was one of the more normal ones (black satin with a blue satin shirt, rather than some of the others that ranged from glittery purple to funky red and tan). The suits were hilarious, and it was a bit weird wearing what felt like a porn stars' bed sheets all day, but I justified it as being all part of the experience. 

My first day on set was brilliant, and I was joined by a whole bunch of people from my hostel, as well as another hostel in the city, all of whom were great fun and super laid back. This was important when the shooting went on until 11:30pm at night (having started at 9am), and especially important when my dance partner (I was in a waltz scene-technically I danced in a Bollywood production!) began to pass out after having partied hard the night before and only gotten one hours sleep. Luckily we were able to keep alert by mucking around between shots, and occasionaly during. My favourite game while we were waltzing in the back of scene, was when one of us rotated around so our back was to camera you'd pull a face and make the other person have to compose their expression long enough for them to have their back to camera again, so they could laugh. But despite being buggered, we were all still able to laugh about the experience at the end of the night, and I was crazy enough to come back the next day.

The next day, while still good fun, saw a noticeably less stoic group of tourists turn up. They were exactly the kind of tourists I was afraid of finding during my travels here. After getting fed up with the fact that there was pretty much nothing for them to do that day, around 7pm they essentially unionised, agreed to leave as one, and then were annoyed that they didn't get paid for their days' work, despite the fact that they were leaving before the day was finished. The best part of it was that most of them were massive Indiaphiles, and had been going on all morning about how they loved the culture here and that they 'really felt at one with the local people', and then turned around a few hours later and complained that they were 'only' getting paid 500 rupees (5 times what most Indian's get) and how they were bored. Most Indians would have loved to have been paid 500 rupees to be bored (not to mention fed three times), and between the blindness to this fact, and the self centredness required to be annoyed at being bored when you're employed as an extra, the extras of the second day (with the exception of two stoic Aussies who stuck it out) were pretty painful to be around, and it wasn't the worst thing to see them go.

But this didn't ruin the experience at all for me, as I got to turn my hand at some minimal acting (about all I'm good for), watch how they set up shots, and see the entire process of TV production first hand. And then, once it was all done, I got to see myself wander around in the back of a touching show about some expat Indian's living in the US, who had forgotten their soul, and were now being reminded by the show's hero who was re-Indianising them, one moral lesson at a time. I couldn't help feel I looked a bit like Forrest Gump, just wandering around aimlessly in the back of shots, but the director must've thought I did a good enough job, otherwise my scenes would never have made such a professional and credible show.

'Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.'

Should definitely have gotten a credit for this.

Bollywood dancer!

Hmm, your Hindi conversation is serious.

The only slight sour note of the experience involved one of the bit characters on the show. He was a bit of an odd guy, who would occasionally come over and chat to me and a few other extras, then would bizarrely walk away mid conversation. This weirdness reached the next level when he asked to add me as a friend on facebook. I didn't think much of it, but when he borrowed my iPhone to find himself to be added, he then signed me out of facebook and proceeded to check into his own and just surf the web for a while. Being too western to object it took me a while to get my phone back, and a few days later I found that he had sent, on my behalf, about 10 different friend requests to random Indian people. His weirdness reached all new heights however after my second day. I thought that I had lost my sunglasses on set that day, which was weird because I was sure I had left them in my bag. This guy was friends with our wardrobe manager - the guy who watched our stuff - and hung around there all day. So maybe it shouldn't have been surprising when I discovered he'd posted an entire album of about 20 pictures of him mugging for the camera in his new (and my old) sunglasses. Luckily they were $2 sunnies I'd haggled for in Mumbai, and it was no great loss, and I would've paid ten times that amount for the photo of him and his mate lifting weights. Plus I guess I should take it as a compliment that a Bollywood star thought highly enough of my fashion sense to steal my sunglasses.

So bizarre.

He definitely enjoyed them more than I ever could've.

The Time Scammers and Hippies Ruined Paradise

From Mumbai I headed south to Goa for some sun and relaxation. Goa is a part of India formerly colonised by the Portugese, and the laid back spirit of Portugal is fully ingrained in this part of the world. This should've been a good thing, but somehow it all went wrong. Goa is rife with the worst kind of hippies. I used to think I was a hippy, but Goa made me renounce my hippydom. The type I'm talking about are the ones who live by the ethos that western is bad, eastern is magical. The type who think getting high is good for you because pot is natural. The type who will then buy pot from a guy dressed in buddhist monk clothing, as well as a bunch of other herbs, and grains, and sawdust, and pocket lint, because the guy has told them that it is good for them. Instead of the hippies who practice peace, tolerance, and open mindedness, these morons practice superstition, prejudice, and just plan stupidity. They have no agenda, they're not trying to make the world a better place, they just want to get high and wear shitty clothes. For the most part they have failed in western society due to ineptitude, and this is the basis of their rejection of it, and this leads them to make all types of wrong, and frankly racist, assumptions about Indian culture, and they essentially treat the locals like they're magic, and believe pretty much anything they say.

They have so much energy because the herbal sand they are dancing on has cleansed them of toxins and aligned their chakras.

The fact that these gullible saps all gather in Goa means that Goa also attracts India's highest concentration of grifters, conmen, scammers, and touts. The appeal of the rich believers is too great to ignore for these opportunists, and as a result, there are essentially no genuine Indian people to be found in town outside of the a few hotel owners and holidayers. Walking to the beach from my hostel involved no less than thirty guys walking up and touting 'Hello, can I help you sir, do you want hash, hash, I got hash, you want hash, drugs, you want drugs'. I have no problem with drugs, but there's something really invasive and just plain annoying about the skeezy way drug dealers come up to you then get in real close and drop their voices low to tout their goods. On top of this, many of the local dealers were in cahoots with the local police, and there was a scam that was frequently pulled (they got an English guy at my hostel), where a dealer would sell to a tourist, and then immediately around the corner from where the dealer took the buyer to do the deal, there would 'coincidentally' be a cop waiting, who would take the pot, as well as all the cash in the tourists' wallet as a 'fine', and then send the punter on their way before returning the pot to the dealer.

Many cities of sin have these sorts of things going on beneath their surface, but what made Goa so unenjoyable was that the place never really turned into any fun. During the day the beach was so packed with people hassling you, even when you were laying on the sand with a shirt over your head, that the day time was an introvert's worst nightmare, and the night time party scene, which had potential as the beach front was lined with cool looking beach hut style bars, was disappointingly dead, as the party petered out around 10:30 with everyone being so blazed out that they were either in their own world, asleep on the beach, or having conversations where every sentence finished with the word 'man'. 

These were my favourite inhabitants of Goa

I don't know if I was just being paranoid thanks to my pretty dark state of mind, and the surrounding cesspool of societal waste, but I think I managed to avoid a con while I was in town. The annoying thing is, I have no idea if I was just being paranoid or if the guy I met was genuine, but I had a sufficiently bad feeling that I decided to get out. What happened, was a guy approached me on the beach while I was walking along on my first day in town. This in itself was nothing unusual, Indian's are quite keen on meeting whiteskins, whether it be for the status of having a foreign friend or just through curiosity. We chatted for a bit, and I agreed to have a beer with him later. A lot of Indian guys are nice enough, but you tend to run out of things to talk about pretty quickly. The problem is that past cricket and niceties about one another's countries, the average Indian guy has a much smaller view of the world than most travelers, so that the conversation flows to the only remaining common thread, women. As I mentioned in my sex and India post, their attitudes towards women are pretty primitive, and extremely naive, and you end up listening to boring tall stories about sexual acts they think will impress you, but in fact either bore, or horrify you. My encounters with this Indian guy followed this usual path over our couple of meetings during my first few days in Goa, and then he invited me to a barbecue for the following days' lunch. It sounded a nice enough offer, and I agreed to come, but then it came up that he'd have to pick me up at lunch time on his motorbike and take me to his friends' beach house, some distance away. Now I was going to be isolated somewhere that was a bikes ride away, instead of just nearby on the beach as I had previously imagined. There was also something a tad off about the fact that every time I walked to the beach, he was there to greet me, and chat with me. I was starting to get itchy feet about the idea, and then I was drawn into a conversation with another guy on the street while walking back to my hotel. I can't put my finger on exactly what it was that he said that tipped me over from uneasy about the bbq to fully aware I might be getting scammed, but it was something about the fact that he knew I was the Aussie guy who was coming to the other guys' bbq, and the way he lured me into conversation which borrowed some phrases from the other guy I had met, but I immediately decided I wasn't going to go. The next day I produced a half assed excuse about having to Skype back home, and luckily that was that, and I still have no idea what the scam could've been, or if there even was a scam, but it left me feeling about as low during my travels as I had ever felt. I had spent my time in Europe saying yes, and having the most amazing time being pleasantly surprised every time. Now I was in a place surrounded by scammers and blank minded believers who called themselves Moonflower and Sunshine, and I was turning down opportunities and feeling scared. Luckily this was where I bottomed out, and after Goa I began to finally get a feel for India, and start to finally enjoy myself.

The Time I Stopped Giving A Shit

A big reason I began to finally be able to appreciate India, was that I got used to the lifestyle and was able to assimilate into the society. My first few weeks felt like playing a rough game of basketball where the referee wasn't calling any fouls, and only once I started pushing back a bit could I stop feeling cheated. This didn't happen immediately, but as a process over my seven week stay. Whenever I tell people about traveling in India I tell them that India is an amazing experience, but it's not necessarily a good experience. This is in no small part due to the fact that you end up learning some highly useful skills in India, but most of them are skills you're sort of ashamed to have mastered. Here are some of the changes I noticed that I underwent during my time in India:

*I Started Littering.
Every single country I've been to, no matter what the locals do, I have always tried to leave the place better than what I found it (with the exception of Finland where you can only leave it as good as you found it thanks to how bloody clean and perfect it is). In India I continued this same theory. The locals may litter and pollute on a scale usually only performed by evil corporations in Hollywood films, but it's their country, and I refused to make it any worse. Then I realised that there are pretty much no bins in India. There were times where I walked around with trash in my hand for so long that I forgot it was there, it was like it had morphed into a part of my anatomy. Then I'd see things like kids going to the ocean to empty trash bags, as they had nowhere to put their garbage. The tipping point for me was when I was traveling on a train between Hyderabad and Varanasi, during which I spent the entire time between the carriages next to the toilets and the trash bags. I got to witness the Indian people dutifully taking their trash from the cabin and placing it into the garbage bags, which I duly copied. I then witnessed the workers on the train come along when the bags were filled, and wait until the train was away from a metropolitan area before emptying the bags out of the moving train into the countryside below. Upon realising that a majority of India doesn't have designated sites to dispose of waste, I just stopped caring, and while still making significantly more effort than the locals, the criteria for what qualified as a bin became the presence of more than three other bits of touching trash.

Beach/dump

Holy Temple/dump

I guess the hippies may have a point in India about meat containing toxins.

Pretty sunset/dump

*I Learned to Ignore Extreme Poverty and Disability.
This one is pretty standard fare for India, but it's still a skill I acquired and wasn't proud of. India is the most libertarian country I've ever been to. You have to fend for yourself here, and everything comes down to seeking an edge in the marketplace. For this reason, the beggars in India are horrific. Even before I mention how horrific some of their disabilities are, they are the most aggressive I've encountered. They reach out and grab you, or crawl at you, and have no depth of shame to how far they will plead or attempt to manipulate you with their words, cries, or intimations. However this is taken to extremes with their deformities. While I'm sure some beggars have genuine mutations or injuries, the state of the Indian social structure has meant that for most beggars, exacerbating any deformities or disabilities is a competitive advantage. As a result you will see people with uncovered fresh burns, wounds that have been left to fester, legs that have had the circulation cut off and left to be dragged under the beggars body, and many many other horrific abuses of the human form. And you walk by. You have to. For starters, if you give money to one person, you'll have tens of others swarming you. There's also the highly likely event that the beggar won't receive the money, that they work for someone who has turned suffering and the sympathy of the rich and the westerners into a business. In all likelihood, your donation will only support the continuation of people exploiting disability for profit. It took me almost no time to learn a dismissive swish of the back of the hand to ward away any begging request, and a stern 'No', which was automatically applied to any beggar, disabled, or destitute, young or old. It's a necessary skill to survive in India, but you will never feel good about telling a destitute doe eyed child to move out of your way so you can get on with your sight-seeing.

*I Snapped
Perhaps this is one of the skills I shouldn't be ashamed of developing. One of my assets I've had since my late teens is a high tolerance level, and an ability to contain my temper, to such a degree that it may almost be unhealthy. Those of you who have seen me play tennis may find this hard to believe, but tennis doesn't count....or maybe that was my outlet which allowed me to stay calm elsewhere (for those who never saw me play tennis, you could usually hear me screaming obscenities from the next town, and that was only during the warm up). Anyway, I ended up going through a break-up with an ex, who then revealed during the course of the break-up that she'd actually cheated on me many, many, many, many, times. Despite this obvious invitation to get some well deserved revenge, I ended up not doing anything petty or vengeful during the entire, drawn out process of the breakup. I have reason to believe I could do with just a little more outward anger in my life, because keeping that in can't be healthy (at least if the Adam Sandler documentary Anger Management is to be believed).

So maybe it's a good thing that while standing in line for the best part of three hours at Varanasi train station, I did something I haven't done in a long long time, and snapped. The reason I snapped was a culmination of me having only about 10 hours sleep in the past three days, the fact that I had been told the incorrect line to line up in three seperate times, and because of the guy behind me. India doesn't do personal space, and I had accepted this as just a part of life here, but it still bothered me when the guy behind me started breathing in my ear standing practically inside me. He then tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to move my backpack, which I had in front of me, just behind the person in front. I told him no, and asked him to move back just a little by indicating with my hands a reasonable separation between two non intimate strangers. About thirty seconds later, he was back treading on my heals and humidifying my neck, and then he again gestured at me to move my bag to the side, so I could similarly insert myself into the guy in front. Then I snapped.

'WHY? WHAT'S THE POINT? IF I MOVE MY BAG AND STEP FORWARD, THERE'S STILL 8 PEOPLE IN FRONT OF US. SEE...1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. THEY STILL HAVE TO GET SERVED BEFORE US, NO MATTER IF WE'RE 10 METRES AWAY, OR 1 METRE AWAY IN A GAY ORGY CONGA LINE. NOW MOVE BACK A METRE, AND IF YOU TOUCH MY ASS AGAIN, YOU HAVE TO BUY ME DINNER.' I'd like to say that was an exaggeration, but it was pretty much exactly what I said, with the exception that I may have called him a fucking moron at the end of each sentence. The problem with creating a scene in India is that everyone in the room is already watching your every move, and so by the time I'd finished, well and truly every person was staring at the crazy Gringo, waiting to see what he'd do next. On the bright side, the guy behind didn't ask me to move my bag again, so that was nice.

Poor guy in the glasses. He was the one guy who understood the stupidity of this.

This happened again when I was lining up to see the golden temple in Amritsar. This time is was a guy behind me who kept barging into me. There was an old lady and kids in front of me, and every so often him and his mates caused me to almost crush the kids. This time I actually picked the guy up by the shoulders and moved him back. Indian's for the most part are quite small, so it was like lifting a 13 year old. The terror in his eyes was quite funny, and again the message got through. The annoying thing in India is that they know exactly what they're doing and that it's wrong/pointless, and if you point this out to them, you're not breaking some cultural norm, you're pointing out something they know is wrong, and so you only ever get embarrassed silence in reply. You will hear a lot of people who have visited India complain about the rudeness, and this is what got to me. It's not cultural, it's not really explainable, it's just a majority of Indians will give it a try, and don't really care if they get called out on it.

*I Reciprocated Behaviour
In a similar vein to the whole losing my temper, I began to mimic the locals. This started gently, with me reciprocating their behaviour when it came to bartering. I started referring to them as 'my friend', and doing the same mock offended expressions that they wheel out for any price offer. This is standard, and not really something to feel bad about. But there are other aspects of Indian day to day life that will cause you to abandon your usual manners. For example, there comes a point where when a vendor jumps in front of you and obstructs your path in order to make you stop and listen to his pitch, that you just bowl them over. You also get to the point where you learn to ignore people trying to start a conversation with you, ignoring your natural optimism that they may just be a normal local, and that you should mingle and experience the culture. Fool me ten thousand times, shame on you. Fool me ten thousand and one times....well you won't fool me ten thousand and one times (cue George W. laugh).

Another example of this, and one that I'm ashamed to say provided me with quite a bit of entertainment, was with people trying to push onto the train in Delhi. Unlike in Mumbai, the Delhi metro system is very modern, and very ordered (as a result of rules put in place for the Delhi Commonwealth Games). You have seats reserved for women, which actually get given to women, you have no one eating or drinking, because it's not allowed, and you have signs telling you to wait for people to disembark before you get on. For the most part, people actually respect this, which in India is a bit of a shock, and the system works very well. But there are still a few people who try and barge through to try and claim a seat that they spotted as the train pulled in. This happened to me a few times when I was trying to get off the train with my backpacks (massive one on the back, carry on on the front). Even without the backpacks I would've been way bigger than the guys trying to push past me, but with them on, I may as well have been a bulldozer. Each time I'd just head directly at them, and push them backwards, keeping them right in front of me, and making it so they were the last person on the train, as they were now about 5-10 metres back. In case you think I was being a prick doing this, on two different occasions I received high fives from other commuters trying to get off with me, and pretty much every time there were people laughing their asses off.

*I Became My Dad
This is definitely not a bad thing, as if I can become like my dad in any way I'd be better for it, but it's still something that made me a little uncomfortable. I'm referring to being a righter of wrongs. I think it's a sign of paternalism when you stop just ignoring injustices to you or your loved ones and brushing them off as 'just a small inconvenience' and begin making a fuss and making sure wrongs are righted. I always cringe when my dad tells a waiter that the coffee he ordered was terrible, or that they have ignored our table for too long and should stop mucking about and do their job. The reason you cringe, I think, is a hangover from your adolescence where drawing attention, especially to something as naff as caring, is a major social embarrassment  But at some point you have to grow up, and India makes you grow up pretty bloody fast.

Indian's are by far the rudest, most inconsiderate, selfish, people I've come across. It may just be cultural, or a result of the population size, and it's not universal, but as a whole, India has the worlds' highest concentration of queue cutting, self centred, sociopaths. At first I just figured it was part of the culture, and a lot of the time there are no queues, just a mosh pit of people at the mouth of whatever service desk or ticket counter they're looking for. But when there are queues, people still duck in, and just head straight for the front. After witnessing this, and just accepting it for the first three weeks of my trip, I decided, 'no more'. Just like with the times when I snapped, every time I ventured to the front of the line and grabbed the offender by the shoulder and said 'BACK OF THE LINE' I never received any sort of repercussion. They knew they were doing wrong, and once caught they went straight to the back. They'd occasionally feign stupidity, but usually they'd just shrug, and head to the back of the line.

Of all my new found skills, I think this one is the one I don't mind. I actually think it just represents that I've grown up a bit. Beginning to become like my father is something that makes me proud rather than ashamed, and maybe I'm finally showing some skills that will one day make me a good dad. I guess all those illegitimate kids I've sired on this trip have a chance after all....

The Time I Realised Indian Middle Aged Men Don't Know Anything

This realisation ties in with me snapping while lining up in Varanasi. As I mentioned in my sex and India post, India is a nation dominated by men. Being born without a penis means you're a second class citizen. There is nothing I hate more, than people being elevated in society for anything other than skill and hard work. Sadly in India, there are dozens of men in positions of authority simply because the women who are better qualified are eliminated due to their inferior chromosomes, or because the better qualified younger men, haven't lived as long as them. I think that interviews for authority positions in India come down to all the candidates lining up, dropping their trousers, and whoever's testicles are saggiest gets the position. This interview process would result in exactly the same level of competence in the public sector, and so I can only assume I'm correct.

This clicked for me, when I was told to line up in the wrong line three different times, by three different middle aged male station workers. Each time they told me where to go with a confident air, and I then found out after lining up for the better part of an hour that they'd told me incorrectly. This happened in all sorts of situations. When trying to find train platforms, bus times, anything. The problem comes down to the fact that in Indian society, projected intelligence is dictated by the following point system:
Penis = 100 points
Years of age = 1 point
That's it. So if you are a man over 50, you know everything. It's kind of funny, because they essentially behave with the same level of consciousness as a 15 year old in western culture. Both the 50 year old Indian and 15 year old westerner think they know everything, but have only experienced a very limited amount part of the world. The teenager, because they've not been alive, or independent for long enough to really have a clue, and the middle aged Indian, because the world has changed so significantly since he learnt about how it functioned, yet he is too stubborn to adapt, and instead just goes on faking it, with an air of unearned superiority. You may think that this is just as common in western cultures, but you have to understand that India is changing at a far greater rate than the west. India is undergoing a cultural revolution that spans what the west underwent over a few hundred years, in a couple of decades, and their economic revolution is even greater. The gap of relevance between the current younger generation and the middle aged men is quite staggering in India, and while some have obviously adapted, the kind of man who tends to become a bureaucrat or civil servant as a means of power, and thus tends to want maximum respect for minimal competence, is left so far behind as to practically be a dinosaur. As a result, these men will simply make shit up. It eventually became quite funny, as they'd look at you as you asked your question, you'd see a brief moment of panic as they realised they had no idea, and then their chest would puff up, their chin would shoot up, and they would authoritatively proclaim the exactly wrong answer.

Eventually I learned to pool answers whenever I needed something in India. Whenever possible I'd ask someone of university age, and in the rare occasions where there was a university age girl that someone had mistakenly allowed out in public, I'd always ask them. I never received a wrong answer from a Uni girl, very rarely from Uni guys, and older ladies were also quite helpful, and would at least admit it when they didn't know.

The Time I Made A Few Billion Facebook Friends

One of the more bizarre experiences in India was seeing how they've taken to technology, especially mobile social media. In a lot of ways India comes across as quite innocent, and almost naive. It's just part of the fact that they're a developing nation. As I've mentioned before, in the west, as the leading culture in most fields, we've had a quite organic introduction into social, economic, and technological change. India has had a lot of these things thrown at them very quickly. This can result in disaster, as can be seen with the way women are being objectified, and assaulted by men who have failed to understand the concept of sexual liberation. However, it's not all evil, and Facebook is the chief example.

Indian Facebook accounts are bizarre. Pretty much every single Indian person who added me as a friend updates their account every day with a selfie photo. You go through their photos and it's just photo after photo of them looking blankly into their phone's camera, with a slightly concentrated look that informs you that they haven't quite figured out the exact location of the photo taker button. But even weirder is the reason why I know what Indian Facebook pages look like. It's because pretty much everyone I met added me. I made some genuine friends in India, and in these cases, adding them was a no brainer, but there were far more Indian people who I would make small talk with on buses and trains, or who I would be dealing with in a business sense, buying or renting something from them, who would ask me to add them on Facebook  It was always innocent enough, and I didn't have the heart to say no (I just deleted them later), but they were always so excited, and having international friends clearly has some sort of status tied to it, as I encountered many locals who would tell me about their 'friends' from France, Germany etc., and it was only after a while that it clicked that this was someone they badgered for a few seconds and learnt the name of before never seeing or contacting again.

The final progression of this weird obsession with befriending foreigners, is their deification of white people. Every time I went to a notoriously touristy location, where Indian tourists were present en-mass, I would end up posing for hundreds of photos with Indian tourists who were more interested in me than the world famous site they were supposed to be there to see. This happened everywhere in India, and it got to the stage where you'd just have to shut it down, despite the line of Indians with cameras still waiting for you. If you've ever wanted to feel like a celebrity, India is the place to go. People spot you in the street and get excited, point, and take photos, you're constantly asked to pose for photos, and you get asked the same inane questions by strangers over and over. You really begin to understand why celebrities crave anonymity.



I think that's all my venting and badmouthing of India done. I wanted to write this blog entry first, and finish on all the positives I enjoyed in India, because it really was a fascinating place. It's definitely not a place you'd go for a relaxing getaway, but it is a great place for an adventure, and despite how this first entry on the country reads, I'd still recommend it as a destination (though not to everyone). But I thought it was important to be as honest as possible about the place, and not hold back, because for one, this blog is essentially my diary for my travels, so I want to remember the good as well as the bad, but also because ignoring the negatives of developing countries helps no one. The hippies and dreamers who view India as a dreamy paradise full of spiritual people are so far off the mark as to be insultingly racist. India is a diverse, immensely interesting country, but it is also still in transition, and as a result, there are many bugs still in the system. But as you'll see in my next post, there was a lot of good to go with the bad.