Limping into 2009

Of course it wasn't all poverty and desperation in India. Our group managed a jolly day on December 25th with a lavish lunch, Indian-brewed champagne (which wasn't nearly as disgusting as it sounds) and Secret Santa presents.

But it was New Year's eve that claimed most attention and demanded much ingenuity. Compulsory Indian fancy-dress meant scouring the local markets for baubles, and a couple of hilarious visits to bemused merchants in Bijaipur village. The 'boys' of the group went collectively to the nearest tailor to be kitted out with pyjama suits and turbans but my own costume demands were such that I had to be diverted to a separate, female, seamstress who agreed to manufacture, overnight, not just a sari and choti but a pair of magnificent fake breasts, complete with triple-pinch-pleated nipples, so I could impersonate Mother India herself, Indira Gandhi.



Since no-one in Bijaipur has access to the internet, it was a feat of collective memory to re-create Indira's streaked hair-do and habitual plain sari - everything in Rajasthan is so darned colourful, white is considered almost obsolete! But with the help of the wonderful Maneka and her husband, the beauty and massage therapists, even the make-up was achieved more or less.



as you can see, Maharajah Narendra seemed delighted at his ghostly guest and took pride in introducing 'Mrs Gandhi' to everyone. He even asked her to dance, which was the moment at which it all went horribly wrong.

About two minutes into my one-woman Bhangra display, I felt the most terrible pain in my calf and thought first of all (I had had several cocktails at this point) that I'd been shot, possibly in some ghastly re-creation of Indira's own assassination. A fellow holidaymaker was a GP and helpfully pointed out that it was probably a torn gastrocnenius muscle and there was nothing to be done but hobble for the next four to six weeks whilst it sorted itself out.

Fortunate perhaps, because in that get-up it would have been a long night in A&E ...

I crawled, literally, the three flights to bed and spent a restless night, not least because the magnificent firework display planned for midnight was launched from the platform immediately above my bedroom - and despite craning my neck from every available window I couldn't actually see much of anything, just hear the third world war breaking out overhead.

The next morning I limped into an eerily quiet Bijaipur village - nothing to do with it being New Year's Day, but most of the shops and businesses were closed because of cow-rustling. Somewhere nearby, a (sacred) cow had been killed and men arrested for selling the meat. It was extraordinary to see the lowering impact this had on the population, an odd combination of collective shame, mourning and disgust. It also highlighted for me the strange situation in India where so many people are starving whilst meat walks amongst them unmolested, such is the power and conviction of the Hindu faith you can do nothing but marvel at it.

So, in the muted village, I managed to find an open pharmacy and to buy over the counter, oh the delight of not needing prescriptions for anything, some Diclofenac anti-inflammatory pain killers. Since the pharmacy dealt in both human and veterinary preparations, I'm not sure which I received and think they may either have been horse pills, or human suppositories, but I swallowed them like they were M&Ms.

Six weeks later, I'm on the mend. But I won't be Bhangra dancing for a while.

The White Man's Burden

Thanks to wholesale overbooking by British Airways, I got upgraded to first class on the way home from Delhi, and am in the seat of my dreams 1A at the very front of the plane where the windows curve to give you a view forwards. From this vantage point, I can - just - see the brown villages of India slipping beneath the fuselage.

And I'm in torment. Having spent most of the past two weeks in the small village of Bijaipur in Rajasthan, staying in whatever comfort it can manage as a paying guest of the local 'Rao' (I think it translates as 'King') in his ramshackle castle, I've had an opportunity to see, up close and personal, how more than four-fifths of the population of India survives in the 21st century. Which is to say literally scratching a living from the red dirt.

What point is there, then, to complain that the lobster tasted of fridge-chill and the Chablis had more oak than the average coffin, when 35,000 feet below people are starving. These are the kinds of counterpoints which have been exercising me since a few days into the holiday.

I've been to India before, in fact this was my sixth or seventh visit, and surprisingly little has changed since my first trip 25 years ago except perhaps my attitudes and the fact I now know to bring a hot-water bottle because the nights are so cold.

Castle Bijaipur has been in the family for pushing five hundred years, and the current Rao Saheb Narendra Singh is the feudal lord of the local manor. Except the title is not a mere honorific. When you see the local people run to bow to the ground and touch his clothes, you realise that to them he is landlord, employer, teacher, judge, father, and king. It's a bizarre anachronism.



And none of the feudal loyalty seems affected or fawning, it's transparent that the farmers, goat-boys, watchmen and keepers we encounter on our early morning birdwatching walks with Narendra genuinely adore and revere him. Although clearly an authority figure, he never patronises them in his demeanour or conversation. It's like a working version of the sixteenth century, and the inequality and injustice compete with the obvious munificence and working practicalities to tug confusingly at my liberal heart.

It's strange to be a tourist where tourists are so rare. In most of my forays to Asia, I've followed well-trodden paths and seen only a sanitised version of the country. Typically if you try to photograph a local they will shy away, or women pull a veil across their faces. Here, when our safari in rattling old Indian Army jeeps encounters a woman trudging home along a forest road with a bundle on her head and a baby on her hip, the Nikons and Canons are instantly levelled at her like a firing squad. Instead of retreating, she widens her smile and hitches the baby higher on her hip to oblige the photographers. No question of payment or small gift, this is friendly return of curiosity. It's uncanny.



Returning to Delhi is a nasty shock. The city seems hell-bent on Westernised destruction. Whilst the dignified Lutyens government buildings still flank Rajpath and have been remarkably preserved, the commercial areas are as frenetic as anything in Hong Kong or Singapore, rabid with retailers chasing the middle-class rupee. In its relentless pursuit of commercialism, with adverts for mobile phones, cars, scooters, sportswear, media and airlines on every hoarding and in every magazine, it appears that the Government of India, in cahoots with the multi-nationals, has decided that there are enough salaried Indians to sustain an urban middle-class consumer market, but that the rest of the population - say a billion of India's 1,200,000,000 headcount - can be safely ignored.

200 million people represents a market the size of any four major European countries, and presumably justifies the advertising spend of Nokia, Nike, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, but the consequences will be the continuing polarisation of India where the city-dwelling fifth of the population has its aspirational lifestyle built on air-conditioning, cellphone, laptop and MTV while the other four-fifths don't have clean water or sanitation.

These concerns were honed for me by reading Aravind Adiga's Booker prize-winner White Tiger which refers to the uncommercialised sector of Indian society as 'The Darkness' and seeing Danny Boyle's Oscar dead-cert 'Slumdog Millionaire' whose plot hinges on the unlikelihood of a tea-boy from the slums to have had any sort of education.

... to be continued