Happy Holi!! ... From Pushkar with Colour

Dog and Mosquito

"Dog and mosquito were in love. Mosquito kissed the dog. Dog became emotional, gave a love bite! Mosquito died by rabies. Dog died by malaria.
Moral: Inter cast love is danger"

- Text message I received from man in Terela after leaving the village

4 newspaper articles, 100 chais and 1000 photos later...

I'd like to tell you I'm the kind of traveler who adapted to India with ease. The kind of traveler who revelled in all the wonder of the excitement parried and ducked through all the hyper-sensual mayhem that India throws at you every day.

I'm not. My trip so far has been a series of experiences that range from breathlessly beautiful to the sour and cringe-worthy. Moments of pure, innocent affection and connection with complete strangers or new friends, to frantic and stressful frustration exchanged with touts, or hustlers  who call themselves your best friend after exchanging a couple of lines with you, to the awkward and aggravating custom of cue jumping...

Last week we were welcomed with open arms into a family living in a small village in the middle of Maharashtra, Terela.

The Nagri family are a happy and humble farming family with giant hearts. On arriving, we didn't realise the impact of our presence until the 20th invitation for chai at a villager's place or at street wallah's stalls becoming our daily ritual. For a lot of the people we met, we were the only foreigners they'd ever seen. Crazy.

We divided our time between running on the dirt track behind the house in the mornings, helping the family through the daily routine, more chai and snacks with the villagers in their homes, and visiting Patoda, the closest town about 6kms away that supplied us with chicken, ice cream, a stiff drink and bottled water.

Having experienced so much that baffled and surprised us and simply loving living it, I think about the circumstances in which we met Ashok Nagri. It was on our second day of our trip in Mumbai - and all we did was be friendly and on a good feeling, nurture the new friendship. What it turned into was being able to visit his village and his family and share memories with them, moments that will be written in our 'personal legends'. We were able to be there for his son's 7th birthday, celebrate our engagement with their family, and on the same night there was a freak March storm - something that we were told never happens and was even less likely to happen now in the drought-stricken state... Ashok who is superstitious as they come, will tell you that bringing us to the village, brought the rains to the village.

Leaving the village was hard. We had let the Nagri family and Terela into our hearts. And hugging promises of visiting again we were so grateful to have them as part of our lives.

We observed some tourists at The Ajanta Caves the following week... shipped from their hotel by tour bus to the cave for sight-seeing, collected and swept back into their hotels without even touching the ground with their feet. We were still reflecting on the wonderfully intense week we'd had in the village. 

India is not the type country you can observe like an an exhibition or an aquarium. You have to participate, get dirty, soak it up, make real connections, experience lessons and take the good with the bad.

I can't call myself the model Indian traveler. 

But I would call myself a test and learn kind of traveler. 

The kind who's traveling India to open my mind. 

The kind who gets too emotional about some of the nuances of Indian-foreigner communication. 

The kind who still wants to wade and dive into this diverse, complicated and beautiful country... 

The kind who's willing to love India.

 

What a Waste

It's everywhere, attacking your senses as you go about your daily activities... and not in the desirable way. You see it all around you, smell and taste it in your breath, wade through it as you make your way down the street and hear it gently smouldering in not so neat piles on the roadside. 

With over a billion people and no sustainable vision for the future, it seems India has no effective waste management system. When you first arrive you can't help but notice the staggering amount of rubbish clogging drains and littering the streets. Initially I thought it was due to the scarcity of bins but soon discovered how wrong I was. Their solution to the enormous amount of discarded paper, food and plastic is to sweep it into piles on the side of the street. There it sits in the heat providing a meal to a lone passing cow or a family of rats that share the pavements with the homeless. It sits there until the pile is deemed large enough then it's set alight and left to slowly burn. Obviously the smoke emitted from these garbage BBQs is toxic and not only can you see a hazy cloud hovering above the city like charras smoke but you also feel it in the form of sizable black chunks coughed up and spat out in the morning shower. 

After observing the behaviour of the local people it quickly became obvious that not only is there is no shame in the act of littering but also no guilt in the practice  of it either. Tossing rubbish out the window of moving trains and buses or onto the street when finished with the contents is normal practice and something the whole population partakes in from young to old, rich to poor, educated to illiterate. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have witnessed the blatant display of littering, and not always in a place where there are people working meticulously on these aforementioned waste piles. Some of the finer examples include a ferry trip to the 'majestic' Elephant Island off the coast of Bombay. A man probably in his early 50s siting next to me polished off the remains of his 'Midura' bottle (basically a Fanta knockoff) and without looking or giving it a second thought swiftly tossed the plastic bottle over his shoulder and into the Arabian Sea. 

The more time you spend in India, slowly and sadly, the shocking impact of this common practice begins to fade. However there was one other instance I witnessed that gave new meaning to the term 'taking out the trash'. 

Munnar is a hill station located in India's south. It is famous for its tea plantations and beautiful views from the mountains into the valleys. Whilst drinking chai at a small vendor on a quiet road amongst the clouds, I heard the chai waller call out to his daughter. She appeared a moment later and picked up a large rubbish bucket that was kept under the man's make shift sink. The young girl reefed the bucket up and balanced it on her head, crossed the road and proceeded to pour the contents over the cliff and into the valley. She skipped back across the road, replaced the empty bucket under the sink and following a look of approval from her father she disappeared. 

Casual conversation with various people over the past month has revealed some unusual explanations and justifications for the habitual dumping of rubbish, none of which makes me feel any more comfortable or willing to participate and contribute to the mass destruction. It seems to me, many higher caste people believe that the lower castes are there to serve them. Therefore they feel entitled to throw their rubbish in the street and expect people I these lower castes to clean up after them. 

Others think that by littering and having someone else pick it up creates work for people that otherwise wouldn't have any. At first this seemed somewhat reasonable as unemployment in India is staggeringly high. However after further investigation into this rationale I discovered that the people sweeping the streets of rubbish are not all doing it for the money (and would probably make more begging) for some believe this work is their duty in this life to make up for evils in a previous life. 

The most astounding and devastating thing is that not once in anything I've seen or heard has anyone any concern for the effect it is having on the environment or on their health. The entire population seems to be ignoring the fact that it's impossible to burn the discarded waste of a billion people. Inevitably, most of the rubbish will end up either as landfill or in the ocean. In fact when I asked an elderly shopkeeper if he had a bin in which I could discard my plastic bottle. He looked at me funny and directed me to a large pile of rubbish delicately stacked on the edge of Kerala's famous backwaters. When I voiced my concern that the bottle may end up in the water he looked at me in total confusion and said "Water, plastic... no problem".