This is an introductory article for those who are looking for some information on the various facets of India and also for the those who are still searching to locate India on the map!!
It is difficult to talk about INDIA as the enigma that she is and thus the blog obviously suffers the fatigue of oversimplification of a complex topic. But I still feel, that as a first timer in India this will give you an outline of the diversity that is ‘India’.
This is not a guide to India nor must-do itinerary.I will leave that to you to decide once you have understood India minimilastically. This is not a ‘quick fix guide’ or a ‘sure shot trick’ for the India finder.
I do not intend to scare you away or discourage you from visiting India before you are there… I am merely presenting you with the some facts. India opens up for some their hearts and minds and lets the smells and sights beguile them; while for others its just not do-able.Its a complete turn around for those with a set western lifestyle. This isn’t a vacation to just sit and let time go by. You may not be Braveheart but neither can you be plain Jack.
A better understanding of the scheme of things goes a very long way in your memorable India trip.
The India confusion
Unexplainable. India lives in all the Centuries together. You will find the 9th century co-existing with the 21st…. And very harmoniously so. The co-existence works more like biology than physics. Your India plan invariably starts with the classic confusion - India or Not. The experiences narrated by those who have already visited India only add to the confusion.. Any one can convince you about the contradiction that is India.
I have heard of tourists who flew out by the next possible flight within hours after landing and also those who are well into planning their next Indian trip in the first lap of their first one. Also that people get a real cultural shock on returning home. And every one of these people have been right in their perceptions. How can you tolerate the chaos of so many centuries together?
“The most valuable currency you need to enjoy India in total is 'patience'. She never allows you to run faster than her nor she is bothered about your hurry.”
The excitement a traveller seeking from the ‘ancient spiritual India’ is comparable with that of the Microsoft executive visiting India for business. Both are enthusiastically scratching the India itch but at the two ends of a century!
India is a unique, overlapping and entangled landscape of all Time living within the other. One part of India is mired in history and God forbid you ask her to look forward and walk ahead!…….the other part is moving with the 21st Century’s fast paced life and damned if you try and stop her! You trip is facilitated by the 21st Century’s modern conveniences to explore the Ancient past of India which is a palpable living presence too.
Her past collides with her present in the middle of the road. You will witness this never ending and mind-boggling fusion of contradicting things. This is the how the whole of the hysterical chaos can be explained in simple terms.
A man driving a Mercedes on the Indian Highway sits impatiently with his hand on the horn of his car urging the bullock-cart to give way to him is a funny sight. Both the drivers know the cart will only move when the bullocks feel the need. It’s a real life situation very common on the Indian roads.
At every turn you are met with such hither-to-unknown surprises. These surprises hound you all the way from the ‘India or not’ scepticism through the India adventure and finally fade into that India nostalgia.
The rude welcome
Your welcome to India is hardly friendly and relaxing. The first thing you’ll notice is the people….endless numbers walking in all directions some very purposefully some aimlessly. This is the first head-on collusion with Indian reality that overwhelms the first time visitor. To some this experience is too raw to deal with comfortably even later on during the trip. So many people ??? As a foreign tourist you are the favourite catch of the beggars, the touts, the urchins or the local taxi drivers. Everyone has a quick-fix remedy for all your ills and you have to deal with all of them within minutes of your arrival.
All your tips from well meaning friends and other visitors and Lonely Planet Guide book will be forgotten in the midnight chaos of your arriving at the airport…(all international flights to and from India are in the wee hours!!) So you dive into the pool and then check your swimming abilities. And when all your lessons have been unlearnt, India will teach you new survival skills!!!!
As a tourist, unless you know someone personally you will in all probability never meet an Indian of your Social class. And this is another cause of the distress for the foreigner in India. We are a very stratified society and although we ideologically believe; through our religion, that all visitors are our guests and therefore akin to God; yet we make little or no effort to befriend a foreigner amongst us. This, unfortunately, is true even for Indians visiting different states within India.
There is no ‘Indian’ culture.
Because we are so diverse, ethnically and socially, that we have no homogeneous ‘culture’ as the West expects. India is not a monolithic cultural block. It’s an anthology of a thousand countries within a country.Would you expect to have a homogeneous 'European' culture...from the Nordic countries to Greece?
More than a dozen languages are spoken principally within various geographic regions. The diversity is visible in food, costume, religious rituals and traditions, and even in the social behaviour. We have a varied range of looks with people of the far west provinces looking more like Caucasians, the far east prominently Mongolian, and the South is mostly populated by the Dravidian looking people. In between we have all the other mixed races that came and stayed in the great Indian sub-continent. Vive, vine.vici!!! for centuries together.
If you’re travelling the length and breadth of the country everyday you are arriving at a new India, different from the one you have seen yesterday. The north, south, east and the west are all distinctively different. No cities or towns are stereotype representative of India. All are unique in their own way. You will never guess what a place is like until you go there..... Indian wills you to explore her.
The Indian paradox is never ending and deceptive. On the one hand you have the beautiful and erotic sculpture of the Sun temples and then again ‘sex’ is a dirty word in a country which traditionally had ‘nagar- badhu’ (prostitutes) as an honoured profession from the ancient times. The phallus is a enduring symbol of fertility and is deeply venerated both by men and women amongst Hindus. An article I read says this “You’ll find a lot of sex symbols and signals of modernism almost everywhere in India. Like women in the cities walking around in tight T-shirts and jeans. Those huge billboards profiling modern attire.” The ‘modern’ Indian middle-class man still thinks that women who wear jeans and such like are ‘sex-symbols’….The traditional Indian dress ‘sari’ is the sexiest dress with revealing mid-riff and slipping ‘pallu’…. But it is considered modest and unassuming.
.The clash of traditional India culture occurs more in the middle-class living room between the 21st Century children and their 19th Century parents, rather than with a western tourist. Very 21st century yuppie Americanized Indians become 19th century spoil sports once they mature into parents!!!
Indians have “Indianized” everything they like. The numerous “Chinese fast food” joints doted all around the country serves Indo- Chinese food with Indian spices and anything that suits the customers palette.We are street-smart to the extreme. The vegetarian McDonald and the Indian version of MTV (empty V, as they call it!) are other examples.
But in spite of all this India is a study of ‘Unity amongst Diversity’ as our first prime minister Pt Jawaharlal Nehru once said.
The Social structure
Indian society is highly stratified. There is firstly the religious Hindu ‘caste’ division., then the linguistic/regional division and then the Class division, and the religion variations….and all exist simultaneously and coherently. The extremely rich and the unimaginably poor live almost side-by-side. And the middle-class lives somewhere in-between.
All share more or less the same public landscape. The cultural co-existence of these classes/castes/religion/regional is a symbiotic miracle unexplainable. Accommodating a foreign tourist in this society is not a surprise as compared to her own social contradictions. In spite of so many divisions we still feel united against a single foreign tourist where he/she is a ‘firang’ and we are ‘us Indians’.........
The sheer sizes of all these diversities create a unique economic system to accommodate and cater to all budgets. As a tourist you use this to your advantage and fit your trip in the shoe-string category or the luxury category . You can adjust yourself anywhere in this spectrum. Your India can provide you with hotel accommodations from $3 to $300.You may travel three thousand kilometres from $10 to $150 by the same train at different classes and different comfort levels. You can have a decent meal from less than $0.50 to a five star dinner for $50. Like everything in India you need to find out which niche your budget fits !
A foreign tourist while not a novelty, is still different!! The difference can be used to your advantage. People take it for granted that a foreign tourist is well travelled and courageous. So play safe and not fall prey to the unscrupulous. To the average Indian the whole of the western population is part of the same monolithic culture,from the US to the Europe everyone is a ‘firang’, let alone the difference between Scotland and Wales!
The family factor
Don't get surprised if your Indian friend introduces her father's eldest brother's son-in-law's younger sister to you! Indian families are highly networked, quite alien to the west. People are not independent of each other as in the west. Parents play highly influential role in everyone’s life. In a typical Indian arranged marriage two families get married not just the bride and groom!! The suitability of both families to each other clinches the deal. Often the hapless bride has no say in it.A family is more of a collective consulting body where everyone’s opinion matters.
This explains why a large number of people travel as family. This is one reason why the trains and buses are crowded. ‘Family only’ sections are available in most of the restaurants.
The family is the elementary building block of the Indian society.
Communication
Anyone will pick up a conversation with you…. We are a gregarious and garrulous people. Intruding into others privacy is not considered rude. We have lots to say and share with complete strangers. In fact the less we know each other the better…. One unburdens oneself without the fatality of ones secret going anywhere.…. They share personal information… ranging from where they live, where are they going, what business they do…. and the list is endless. …. Strangers can talk for hours as if they are long lost friends and at the end they may depart without any personal introduction to each other.
Don’t be embarrassed if a total stranger, standing next to you in a queue, asks outrageous questions. The fun is that if you do not reciprocate with similar inquisitiveness you’ll be regarded as impolite or rude. In Indian customs this is a bit of insult to the initiator of the conversation. And funnier still is that you will attract a lot of stares if you are not talking to them. This is more so in a rural or a small town setup.
English is the defacto communication language for government and business communications. A business traveler faces no trouble at all in getting his work done but not the tourist… Your concern is the English knowledge of a taxi driver, a counter clerk or a layman at the bus stop.. Almost every Indian language has a good sprinkling of English so while people may not understand the sentence but they can pickup the key words. Pronunciation isn’t homogeneous either so have patience or look for meaning in words. Syntax isn’t stressed because mostly English is a direct translation from the vernacular language. So don’t get flustered with ‘Myself is the Station Master’. Speak to all without grammar!
Culturally there is no “NO” in India. An evasive or ambivalent answer is equivalent to NO. Never use the word NO if you don’t want to harshly deny something.
Patience
The most valuable currency you need to enjoy India is ‘TOTAL’ patience. She never allows you to run faster than her nor is she bothered about your hurry. The India elephant moves at her own pace. She leads a procession not a race!!!
Never take a two day break in India. If you are to move on or back you WILL miss your connecting flight! Leave your clockwork life style in the arrival terminal and pick it up when you depart from India. Don’t get frustrated if someone tells you that you have to sit on a bench and wait for four hours for the next bus to the town. You never knew you had so much patience!!!!
The India nostalgia
You can never be neutral about India… you either love it or you are the ‘good heavens! I’ll never go back there again’ category.
If you love India you return again and again… to see her in different colours and hues. The itch makes you return.
It is difficult to talk about INDIA as the enigma that she is and thus the blog obviously suffers the fatigue of oversimplification of a complex topic. But I still feel, that as a first timer in India this will give you an outline of the diversity that is ‘India’.
This is not a guide to India nor must-do itinerary.I will leave that to you to decide once you have understood India minimilastically. This is not a ‘quick fix guide’ or a ‘sure shot trick’ for the India finder.
I do not intend to scare you away or discourage you from visiting India before you are there… I am merely presenting you with the some facts. India opens up for some their hearts and minds and lets the smells and sights beguile them; while for others its just not do-able.Its a complete turn around for those with a set western lifestyle. This isn’t a vacation to just sit and let time go by. You may not be Braveheart but neither can you be plain Jack.
A better understanding of the scheme of things goes a very long way in your memorable India trip.
The India confusion
Unexplainable. India lives in all the Centuries together. You will find the 9th century co-existing with the 21st…. And very harmoniously so. The co-existence works more like biology than physics. Your India plan invariably starts with the classic confusion - India or Not. The experiences narrated by those who have already visited India only add to the confusion.. Any one can convince you about the contradiction that is India.
I have heard of tourists who flew out by the next possible flight within hours after landing and also those who are well into planning their next Indian trip in the first lap of their first one. Also that people get a real cultural shock on returning home. And every one of these people have been right in their perceptions. How can you tolerate the chaos of so many centuries together?
“The most valuable currency you need to enjoy India in total is 'patience'. She never allows you to run faster than her nor she is bothered about your hurry.”
The excitement a traveller seeking from the ‘ancient spiritual India’ is comparable with that of the Microsoft executive visiting India for business. Both are enthusiastically scratching the India itch but at the two ends of a century!
India is a unique, overlapping and entangled landscape of all Time living within the other. One part of India is mired in history and God forbid you ask her to look forward and walk ahead!…….the other part is moving with the 21st Century’s fast paced life and damned if you try and stop her! You trip is facilitated by the 21st Century’s modern conveniences to explore the Ancient past of India which is a palpable living presence too.
Her past collides with her present in the middle of the road. You will witness this never ending and mind-boggling fusion of contradicting things. This is the how the whole of the hysterical chaos can be explained in simple terms.
A man driving a Mercedes on the Indian Highway sits impatiently with his hand on the horn of his car urging the bullock-cart to give way to him is a funny sight. Both the drivers know the cart will only move when the bullocks feel the need. It’s a real life situation very common on the Indian roads.
At every turn you are met with such hither-to-unknown surprises. These surprises hound you all the way from the ‘India or not’ scepticism through the India adventure and finally fade into that India nostalgia.
The rude welcome
Your welcome to India is hardly friendly and relaxing. The first thing you’ll notice is the people….endless numbers walking in all directions some very purposefully some aimlessly. This is the first head-on collusion with Indian reality that overwhelms the first time visitor. To some this experience is too raw to deal with comfortably even later on during the trip. So many people ??? As a foreign tourist you are the favourite catch of the beggars, the touts, the urchins or the local taxi drivers. Everyone has a quick-fix remedy for all your ills and you have to deal with all of them within minutes of your arrival.
All your tips from well meaning friends and other visitors and Lonely Planet Guide book will be forgotten in the midnight chaos of your arriving at the airport…(all international flights to and from India are in the wee hours!!) So you dive into the pool and then check your swimming abilities. And when all your lessons have been unlearnt, India will teach you new survival skills!!!!
As a tourist, unless you know someone personally you will in all probability never meet an Indian of your Social class. And this is another cause of the distress for the foreigner in India. We are a very stratified society and although we ideologically believe; through our religion, that all visitors are our guests and therefore akin to God; yet we make little or no effort to befriend a foreigner amongst us. This, unfortunately, is true even for Indians visiting different states within India.
There is no ‘Indian’ culture.
Because we are so diverse, ethnically and socially, that we have no homogeneous ‘culture’ as the West expects. India is not a monolithic cultural block. It’s an anthology of a thousand countries within a country.Would you expect to have a homogeneous 'European' culture...from the Nordic countries to Greece?
More than a dozen languages are spoken principally within various geographic regions. The diversity is visible in food, costume, religious rituals and traditions, and even in the social behaviour. We have a varied range of looks with people of the far west provinces looking more like Caucasians, the far east prominently Mongolian, and the South is mostly populated by the Dravidian looking people. In between we have all the other mixed races that came and stayed in the great Indian sub-continent. Vive, vine.vici!!! for centuries together.
If you’re travelling the length and breadth of the country everyday you are arriving at a new India, different from the one you have seen yesterday. The north, south, east and the west are all distinctively different. No cities or towns are stereotype representative of India. All are unique in their own way. You will never guess what a place is like until you go there..... Indian wills you to explore her.
The Indian paradox is never ending and deceptive. On the one hand you have the beautiful and erotic sculpture of the Sun temples and then again ‘sex’ is a dirty word in a country which traditionally had ‘nagar- badhu’ (prostitutes) as an honoured profession from the ancient times. The phallus is a enduring symbol of fertility and is deeply venerated both by men and women amongst Hindus. An article I read says this “You’ll find a lot of sex symbols and signals of modernism almost everywhere in India. Like women in the cities walking around in tight T-shirts and jeans. Those huge billboards profiling modern attire.” The ‘modern’ Indian middle-class man still thinks that women who wear jeans and such like are ‘sex-symbols’….The traditional Indian dress ‘sari’ is the sexiest dress with revealing mid-riff and slipping ‘pallu’…. But it is considered modest and unassuming.
.The clash of traditional India culture occurs more in the middle-class living room between the 21st Century children and their 19th Century parents, rather than with a western tourist. Very 21st century yuppie Americanized Indians become 19th century spoil sports once they mature into parents!!!
Indians have “Indianized” everything they like. The numerous “Chinese fast food” joints doted all around the country serves Indo- Chinese food with Indian spices and anything that suits the customers palette.We are street-smart to the extreme. The vegetarian McDonald and the Indian version of MTV (empty V, as they call it!) are other examples.
But in spite of all this India is a study of ‘Unity amongst Diversity’ as our first prime minister Pt Jawaharlal Nehru once said.
The Social structure
Indian society is highly stratified. There is firstly the religious Hindu ‘caste’ division., then the linguistic/regional division and then the Class division, and the religion variations….and all exist simultaneously and coherently. The extremely rich and the unimaginably poor live almost side-by-side. And the middle-class lives somewhere in-between.
All share more or less the same public landscape. The cultural co-existence of these classes/castes/religion/regional is a symbiotic miracle unexplainable. Accommodating a foreign tourist in this society is not a surprise as compared to her own social contradictions. In spite of so many divisions we still feel united against a single foreign tourist where he/she is a ‘firang’ and we are ‘us Indians’.........
The sheer sizes of all these diversities create a unique economic system to accommodate and cater to all budgets. As a tourist you use this to your advantage and fit your trip in the shoe-string category or the luxury category . You can adjust yourself anywhere in this spectrum. Your India can provide you with hotel accommodations from $3 to $300.You may travel three thousand kilometres from $10 to $150 by the same train at different classes and different comfort levels. You can have a decent meal from less than $0.50 to a five star dinner for $50. Like everything in India you need to find out which niche your budget fits !
A foreign tourist while not a novelty, is still different!! The difference can be used to your advantage. People take it for granted that a foreign tourist is well travelled and courageous. So play safe and not fall prey to the unscrupulous. To the average Indian the whole of the western population is part of the same monolithic culture,from the US to the Europe everyone is a ‘firang’, let alone the difference between Scotland and Wales!
The family factor
Don't get surprised if your Indian friend introduces her father's eldest brother's son-in-law's younger sister to you! Indian families are highly networked, quite alien to the west. People are not independent of each other as in the west. Parents play highly influential role in everyone’s life. In a typical Indian arranged marriage two families get married not just the bride and groom!! The suitability of both families to each other clinches the deal. Often the hapless bride has no say in it.A family is more of a collective consulting body where everyone’s opinion matters.
This explains why a large number of people travel as family. This is one reason why the trains and buses are crowded. ‘Family only’ sections are available in most of the restaurants.
The family is the elementary building block of the Indian society.
Communication
Anyone will pick up a conversation with you…. We are a gregarious and garrulous people. Intruding into others privacy is not considered rude. We have lots to say and share with complete strangers. In fact the less we know each other the better…. One unburdens oneself without the fatality of ones secret going anywhere.…. They share personal information… ranging from where they live, where are they going, what business they do…. and the list is endless. …. Strangers can talk for hours as if they are long lost friends and at the end they may depart without any personal introduction to each other.
Don’t be embarrassed if a total stranger, standing next to you in a queue, asks outrageous questions. The fun is that if you do not reciprocate with similar inquisitiveness you’ll be regarded as impolite or rude. In Indian customs this is a bit of insult to the initiator of the conversation. And funnier still is that you will attract a lot of stares if you are not talking to them. This is more so in a rural or a small town setup.
English is the defacto communication language for government and business communications. A business traveler faces no trouble at all in getting his work done but not the tourist… Your concern is the English knowledge of a taxi driver, a counter clerk or a layman at the bus stop.. Almost every Indian language has a good sprinkling of English so while people may not understand the sentence but they can pickup the key words. Pronunciation isn’t homogeneous either so have patience or look for meaning in words. Syntax isn’t stressed because mostly English is a direct translation from the vernacular language. So don’t get flustered with ‘Myself is the Station Master’. Speak to all without grammar!
Culturally there is no “NO” in India. An evasive or ambivalent answer is equivalent to NO. Never use the word NO if you don’t want to harshly deny something.
Patience
The most valuable currency you need to enjoy India is ‘TOTAL’ patience. She never allows you to run faster than her nor is she bothered about your hurry. The India elephant moves at her own pace. She leads a procession not a race!!!
Never take a two day break in India. If you are to move on or back you WILL miss your connecting flight! Leave your clockwork life style in the arrival terminal and pick it up when you depart from India. Don’t get frustrated if someone tells you that you have to sit on a bench and wait for four hours for the next bus to the town. You never knew you had so much patience!!!!
The India nostalgia
You can never be neutral about India… you either love it or you are the ‘good heavens! I’ll never go back there again’ category.
If you love India you return again and again… to see her in different colours and hues. The itch makes you return.
Labels: Introduction to India
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