10 posts tagged “india”

Throughout the week-long Ganpati (Ganesh) Festival in Mumbai, neighborhoods display Ganesh idols in temporary temples built on the street -- some of these plaster of paris Ganeshes can reach ten feet tall. On the final day of the festival, families and big groups carry their Ganesh idols to the ocean and immerse them in the water. I think the tradition comes from when the idols were made from clay -- by returning them to their original element, one ensures that next year Ganesh will return (don't quote me though).

Anyway, on the last day of the festival, the whole city basically shuts down and massive crowds march through the streets with their Ganeshes to immerse them in the ocean. It's quite a spectacle -- especially on Chowpatty Beach, where we were.

We had a great trip going with some friends to see the action, and were lucky enough to know someone who had wrangled a boat to go out and see the immersions up close. Kudos to him, since by all accounts this is simply not done. It's not illegal, but there are just no boats to rent anywhere and if you asked you'd be turned down. Increasingly, we find that the art of living in Mumbai is knowing when and how to circumvent these sometimes baffling limitations that everyone, foreigner and local alike, finds in their way.

See the rest of our pictures on Flickr.

Yesterday, we finally got out of Bombay and went hiking in the hills in the surrounding area. We've been in Bombay for nearly a year now, and up until now have never been outside of the city proper except for flights -- an unacceptable situation we had to remedy with a day trip to go hiking in the Sahyadris. (For those getting vertigo at the length of this post: full set of Khandala photos on Flickr here.)

Just inland from Bombay is the mountain range known as the Sahyadris -- they extend in various form, as the Western Ghats, down almost to the southern-most tip of India. They are an area of extreme biodiversity, and have a great deal of human history as well -- there are massive ancient Maratha forts and Hindu temples on top of many peaks -- and are filled with endless hiking possibilities. Unbelievably, all of this is just a two and a half hour train ride or drive away from Bombay -- closer than going to Lake Tahoe from San Francisco! I had heard people talk about the Sahyadris, but had not experienced until now how accessible this beautiful area is from the city.

We got up at 5:30am to catch a 7:20 train from Dadar, the main railway hub in Bombay, which is a short train ride from our place in Bandra. As we have become accustomed to living in India with only rudimentary Hindi, there were the usual challenges: it was nearly impossible to figure out which 40 person line to stand in to get tickets and after gambling on the most promising line, when we reached the front, the man at the counter decided it was time for a tea break and closed it in our faces.

As is also typical in India, however, frustrations like this are often accompanied by unexpected good fortune -- some guys at the front of the next line beckoned us over to cut in front of them and we were able to get tickets easily. Also: cost of a 2.5 hour train ride? 40 rupees (less than $1). Not bad. So after a mad scramble to get on the train after much confusion about where the unreserved seating ticket-holders should wait, we found ourselves with a view out the window as the train pulled away from busy Bombay through the outer suburbs, and eventually into the mountains.

The train route that leads through the Sahyadris ends up in Pune, the closest major inland city to Bombay, but on the way, it winds through many mountain passes and rugged forested hills, through train tunnels, and past many towns that are weekend getaways for many Bombay and Pune residents. During the monsoon (July-Sept), the views are especially gorgeous as the hills are lush and green, and waterfalls pour from the cliffs -- I must have seen a dozen spectacular falls just from the train, and I was dozing off half the time! (We DID get up at 5:30...)

We got off in Khandala, just past Karjat and before Lonavla. It's a small town, with a few restaurants and shops along the main road, and hotels, B&Bs, and weekend houses stretching up the forested hills. We were planning on hiking to a peak known as the Duke's Nose (as the British called it, after the Duke of Wellington's apparently prominent feature) -- or to the locals as Nagphani -- the Cobra's Hood. I like Nagphani better. 

In classic India fashion, there are no signs, dedicated hiking trails, or designated hiking areas. You're hiking through somewhat populated rural areas, cutting through people's fields, following abandoned roads and overgrown trails, occasionally walking through a village. We had a bit of instruction in our guidebook (follow abandoned railway track to top of hill, look for three paths, take the middle one, head vaguely right through the fields, look for the big hill, and climb it), but hiking in the Sahyadris turned out to be just like navigating Bombay: you ask 15 people where to go, and though you are confused the whole time, eventually you reach wherever you're trying to go. Except here, most people spoke Marathi only, so our Hindi was out for communication - it was just English and pantomiming.

The hills were gorgeous -- jungly mountains rising up everywhere, bird calls, mist rising up and obscuring/revealing views across the valleys. It reminded us a bit of hiking in Hawaii, with the mild humidity and wet weather and jungle terrain. It rained on and off through the day, but mostly was misty -- we carried an umbrella for the occasional 5-minute downpour.

We reached the summit of Nagphani after just 2.5 hours of hiking and route-finding, and enjoyed our PB&Js on top, along with a group of guys from Pune, and two local kids whose friends had offered us a ride in their truck as we passed through their village. Nagphani is a minor peak, really a giant hill (says the spoiled west coaster), but it has great views of the surrounding mountains and valleys, and some serious exposure -- three sides of the mountain drop away in sheer cliffs almost to the valley floor.

As we headed down, it started pouring rain and we tried to balance on the steep, eroded path -- which was already turning into a bit of a river -- both trying to fit under one small umbrella. Our pants, which were already muddy and wet by this point, quickly became soaked. Cotton pants are not ideal hiking wear, but shorts - especially on women - don't go over too well in rural India. Luckily, the rain stopped after a minute or two, and we were blessed with no rain for the rest of the return trip, so we dried out pretty well.

Beth and I were mentioning to each other yesterday how whenever you do anything in India, you don't really get to determine when the experience is over. India always has the last laugh. Even when you're just walking to the store, you never know when your plan might get derailed (you step in a foot-deep mud puddle, a street performer with a whip won't leave you alone, there are three buses trying to turn around in your residential street, etc.). This trip was no exception -- we got back to Khandala exhausted but with no difficulties, got our return tickets, and waited for the train, which was on time, but somehow things just seemed a little too...easy.

Of course, what India had in store for us this time was that the train back to Bombay was rush hour packed full of people. And rush hour on Bombay trains means mosh pit, means cattle car, means take every passenger on a BART train and cram them all into one car. Bombay trains are LEGENDARILY crowded, and this Sunday evening train coming into Bombay from the weekender's paradise was no exception. Of course, it was our own fault, since we got the 40 rupee unreserved class seating, but we didn't know we had an option until we were standing at the track in the morning watching the other train cars go by.

So, after 5-6 hours of hard hiking through jungle, rough trails, streams, and up a mountain, we now had to push our way into a train car and stand up for the ride home. I ended up in the aisle, with people pressed up directly against my body on every side. Beth reached a wall, so she had a little space on one side. And there we stood. What really took this scene from the ridiculous to the sublime was that an endless stream of chai vendors and candy/guidebook/food sellers continued to ply their trade in the train cars as usual -- picture a guy calling out "chai...chai...chai" in a nasal monotone, lugging a giant silver pot of tea over his shoulder, and arduously pushing himself down the aisle through a sea of shoulder-to-shoulder standing people.

I was thinking, "Why in the name of God would these guys torture themselves by continuing to try to push through this train car, and who on earth would inconvenience everybody else by stopping one of these guys to actually buy a guidebook?" Apparently, everyone else was thinking, "Hey, nice guidebook!" Because as crazy as it seemed to me, people would regularly flag down one of these vendors -- forcing the nearest ten people to shift over to let the vendor put down his tea pot, or hand over one of the guidebooks, or reach in his bag for more candy.

Was there outrage and frustration? No. Was there even the appearance of inconvenience? Only minorly, if someone's toes got stepped on. But no one had any qualms about the right of these guys to continue plowing through the train car, or the right of anyone else to order whatever they wanted. Everyone was in totally good spirits, chatting away. One guy had cranked up some Bollywood tunes on his cell phone's speaker so that everyone in the train could hear, and everyone seemed to be enjoying that, despite the fact that if he were in the States, he would have been tackled in about three minutes by an angry mob. Since I had no say in the matter, I decided to just stand there and enjoy it all too. I would have ordered some chai too, if I could have raised my arm.

The corollary to the "India always gets the last laugh" rule is that just when you've accepted that the worst has happened and you had better get used to it, fortune smiles upon you and things miraculously improve. Most of the train cleared out when we hit one of the farthest suburbs of Bombay, and so after an hour of standing, Beth and I actually got seats, and I even took a much-needed nap. When we got back home, unpacked, stretched out, took a shower, and petted our cats, our apartment and whole surrounding neighborhood in Bombay seemed so easy. We know where to buy everything, how to get places, how to speak to people (in Hindi). And it was at that point that it struck me that we must have really come a long way from home if we're thankful for the familiarity and order of a 16+ million person developing world megacity...

[Chris writes:] Mint is a relatively new newspaper in India (JV btw Hindustan Times and WSJ), and one of the two papers we get every day. (The other is Times of India.) Mint, for my money, has the best big-picture coverage of Indian societal issues around. They are primarily a business paper, but write on general interest issues with an objective journalistic tone and enough background information to effectively convey to outsiders why India is such an interesting place to be these days.

Two great articles today illustrate this:

Mint: Waiting to die in Varanasi means lonely lives, talk of mercy killings
On pilgrims who have come to Varanasi (Benares) to die, unexpected increases in health and life expectancy, and a conflicted healthcare system.

Mint: When the gates can't lock
On wealthy gated communities in the Delhi suburbs and the arrival of hijras. (Hijras are intersex or transgender individuals who dress in feminine clothing -- they are largely ostracized by mainstream Indian society, but even wealthy families will seek a hijra's blessing for a wedding or the birth of a boy. They typically survive through begging, and are a common sight on the streets, but obviously can't easily access gated communities...)

[Chris] I've been helping our Hindi teacher set up a website to promote and sell his novel online, and I'm finally finished. I used Wordpress for the main website, and set up a basic but pretty slick site with several static pages and a blog. Then I used Lulu.com, a print-on-demand book seller site, to actually lay out the text and create a cover, and set it up so you can buy a paperback copy or download a PDF. This was the best solution I found for the least amount of money -- Wordpress is free (except for buying a domain name, which we are doing shortly), and Lulu is free to set up your book for printing, then takes 20% of revenue from any book sold, which is a pretty good deal for authors. So now my Hindi teacher instantly has a web presence, his book is available worldwide, and he is set up to make decent money from selling his work!

Check it out:

The Hope Seller site

Buy The Hope Seller at Lulu.com

Reason #4513: Awesome Kleenex

And last but not least, the Taj Mahal.  Much bigger and more stunning than in photographs.

Lying on the grass, Chris was repeatedly beckoned to pose in pictures with Indian schoolboys.  Note the ultra-formal 'strike-a-pose.'

We then drove north to the pink city of Jaipur, painted pink as a bright welcome to the Prince of Wales in the late 1800s.  None of us has ever or (most likely) will ever lay eyes on this many palaces or forts again!

Jantar Mantar, which means instrument of calculation, was an incredible astronomical and astrological site.  Of course, we had to pose with our respective astrological signs.

After hours of driving through villages on bumpy (understatement) roads, we arrived at Bundi, a magical town dotted with blue houses.  The thunderstorms of that day provided a dramatic backdrop for exploring Bundi palace.  Chris and I were the one of the only ones inside, and we gave the guard 100 rupees to take us up to the off-limits area - where dilapidated paintings of gods were rivaled only by the copious amounts of monkey residue that had piled up in the the century-old rooms.

This place was cool.  Ruins for miles and miles from the 14th century. We took the tack of exploration (rather than destination), so hiked all over the place - subtle carvings beneath huge boulders, decaying temples with a herd of goats wandering through, and little kids from nearby villages helping us find our way.

Train ride to Hampi.

Ruins, goats, and temples.
More ruins.  And Chris.
We climbed our way over a fence, wondering what the whitewashed building was ahead.  It turned out to be an ashram.  The actual entrance was through these large boulders.