Saturday 30th December 2006 Part 1: Udaipur

[With thanks to my parents and my sister for the photographs used in this entry].

I am in the Girnaj Palace, an insalubrious beer bar on the outskirts of Bharatpur, sitting in a dimly lit mock-Rajput atrium with an artificial flower garden. I have hours to kill before my train back to Udaipur and intend to fill them drinking and writing. Earlier this afternoon I said goodbye to my family - my father Antony (To), my mother Carol and my sister Rosemary - as the “Golden Temple Mail” tugged them back to Delhi, from where they will fly to London tomorrow, aiming to reach Rosemary’s house in time to gulp champagne at midnight.

*

Ten days ago, the evening of Wednesday 20th December saw me running down the second floor corridor of the Lake Pichola Hotel into the arms of To and Carol. They had just arrived in Udaipur, from Jodhpur, and I had come back from Delwara to meet them. It was wonderful, and not a little extraordinary, to sit on their balcony overlooking the lake, catching up on the recent events. For the most part they were full of enthusiasm for the India they had seen so far and full of stories of crowded lanes in Delhi, rip-off rickshaw drivers and the wonderful blue of Jodhpur’s old city. We had a brief stroll around the area across the lake from their hotel and came back for supper in the hotel restaurant followed by beer in their room, admiring the night view of the City Palace, Bagore-ki-Haveli, Gangaur Ghat and Jagdish Temple.
   We spent the next morning (21/12) in the old city. We visited the Jagdish temple and had fun studying the carvings on the outside for which I now had a heightened post-Chittor appreciation. We also visited a second temple, between Jagdish and the City Palace, which I’d never spotted before. Architecturally and culturally insubstantial beside the Jagdish Temple, this temple was pleasantly un-touristy and was surrounded by a second story later addition which served as a good viewing platform for the lake. We identified To and Carol’s room at the hotel, and I was also able to point out the gaudy, secluded Udaivilas smugly basking in its seven stars. After lunch we headed in a tempo up to Fatehpura, and I showed them my local area, including Vikas Samiti, which was both fun and meaningful, as it was the most personal of all the places we visited together. We ambled up towards Fateh Sagar – “the Udaipuris’ lake” as I billed it, in contrast to the tourists’ Lake Pichola –  arriving at just the right time to gawp at and photograph the sunset (rather successfully in To’s case) and then appreciate the beautiful milky quality of the water in the precious half hour after sunset.
  I was determined to show them the real Udaipur, although I would be hard-pressed to define exactly what I mean by that. I suppose this was a combination of a natural filial desire to prove myself and a need to separate myself from the chaff of mainstream tourism by demarcating an area that was mine. The former was the fruition of a fantasy I have had for nearly a decade of showing my parents round an adopted homeland - firstly Russia (which I have never visited), then Italy (my longest trip lasted five weeks) and now India - and manifested itself through rather artificial displays of “going native”: dropping a banana skin by the side of the road; drinking “unsafe” water from shopkeepers’ pitchers; speaking unnecessarily loud and jovial Hindi at every opportunity. The latter took us the next day (22/12) into the backstreets of old Udaipur, away from tourist-ville. I think this was partially successful as it showed my parents a little-visited area that was nevertheless brimming with Udaipuri charm and antiquity, but this kind of aimless roaming palls quickly in company as, unlike an individual, a group of people can’t surrender itself utterly to such surroundings.
   For contrast, I decided that we should go to Nagda in the afternoon. Tradition has it that this was the capital of Mewar before Chittor, although today it is just a collection of temples by a lake on the Delwara road. We took a jeep-taxi that filled up fast, and got off just before the temple town of Kailashpuri. A path led around the lake, straight into a rural idyll which Carol was particularly taken by. The beauty, even quaintness, of the setting probably explains the presence of an incongruous heritage hotel on a hill overlooking the lake, which in turn explains the persistent calls of “Five rupee! One pen!” from the ragged, tribal-looking village children. I tried hard to imagine the thriving capital of 8th Century Mewar but found it almost impossible, as there were no living props like the village in Chittor and, in any case, 1,200 years ago is inaccessible to most of us. In one of the temples, we were all intrigued by a bell with Cyrillic letters carved on it, including a date in the 1960’s – how did it get here of all places? Did a visiting Soviet official (after all, India was leaning towards to the left at this time, tilting away from America) fall in love with the area and decide to make a lasting gift of friendship? Rather far-fetched, surely. To described it as the “most surprising thing he’d seen in India” – the implication of course being that “that was saying something!”
  We hitched a lift to Kailashpuri on a ramshackle truck – Carol sitting inside with the bemused drivers and To and I standing in the empty carrier at the back where we waved joyously to bewildered passers-by. Kailashpuri is chiefly famous for the Eklingji temple, which houses the Maharanas’ family deity, Lord Eklinji. It was a busy place with an obstreperous guard at the entrance, who made a great point of telling us that we weren’t allowed to eat or smoke or wear shoes inside. “Sharab bhi nahi?” (no alcohol?) I asked him, teasingly. For a moment he toyed with an apoplectic fit and then realised it was a joke and chuckled a little. Inside, the temple was equally busy and a little mysterious and everybody was excessively beautiful and well-dressed. We had some difficulty getting back, but I eventually managed to get us a free lift, which assuaged our tempers that were becoming a little frayed at the prospect of calling out a taxi. We had a delicious supper of typical vegetarian dishes at a favourite volunteer joint, Swastik.
   We met early the next morning on the platform of Udaipur station where we talked to a woman from the airlines while waiting for for a train from Delhi that eventually arrived two hours late bearing my sister Rosemary! It was lovely to see her, and we went back in a rickshaw to the hotel for a gloriously leisurely breakfast on the roof terrace with fruit juice, coffee, porridge and mountains of toast.

 Family Breakfast L-R: Rosemary, To, JG

After plenty of convivial natter, we got ready and headed out to spend the day being real tourists. Despite a delayed flight and delayed train and the nevertheless sudden jerk from Herne Hill to Hindustan, Rosemary was characteristically full of energy and excitement, so we had another packed day. First of all the City Palace, which was a joy to visit in the light of my study of Mewari history. Carol has a cynically plausible theory on the great sacrifice of Panna Dai, the nurse who supposedly swapped her baby for the baby Udai, so Udai could escape assassination at the hands of the dastardly Bunbirs.
   “Rubbish!” she said, “She obviously knew exactly what she was doing. She let the murderer kill Udai, and then went around pretending she’d made this great sacrifice so that her own son actually became the Maharana.”
  From the City Palace complex we took a boat ride, which curved a wonderful route round the Lake Palace (which I have come to appreciate even more since showing it off to the others!) to Jagmandir Island, which until then had always appeared to me as a mysterious, distant island-palace with an alluringly tropical appearance and an intriguing history. The earliest part of the building on the island was built by Karan Singh and it was completed by Jagat Singh I. It was here that a Prince Khurram was given refuge by one of the Maharanas during a feud with his father, the Mughal Emperor Jehangir, an oft-quoted instance of unstinting Rajput hospitality. Holed up with his favourite wife Mumtaz on this tiny and presumably boring island, the prince apparently found solace in admiring the Mewari architecture. Later, when his beloved wife died (so the story goes) it was the palace at Jagmandir that inspired the mausoleum he built at Agra. Prince Khurram is better known by the epithet he adopted after he killed his father (de rigeur for an up and coming Mughal) and became emperor himself: King of the World, or in Persian, Shah Jahan. The mausoleum at Agra, of course, is named after the Shah’s wife, the Taj Mahal. Having now seen both the palace at Jagmandir and the Taj Mahal at Agra, all I can say of the theory of the former inspiring the latter is… what utter drivel!
   We ordered lunch at the beautifully set Jagmandir restaurant and waited at our table right by the lake. And waited – it was already late for heaven’s sake, and after a more-than-one-hour-wait I was painfully hungry. When it eventually came it was small, bland and outrageously overpriced. My fish and chips (how amusing this all sounds now) were alright but the others’ Indian dishes were bad rather than mediocre. I complained – India certainly brings out the bolshiest aspects of my character – and the smugly complacent head waiter, to whom I had already been frosty in exactly the manner I have always despised on the occasions when I have been the one serving, said he would do his “level best” to get us a reduction. In the end he offered us free teas and coffees that would come in five minutes. “Panch minat matlab kya hai?” I cried in Hindi deliberately to make him feel uncomfortable. “Panch shatabdi?” [17]. What angered me so much, fuelled by a bland meal on a desperately empty stomach, is that a place that could be so wonderful could be made so awful by its terrible food and appalling service. Even as I write this I see the apparent ridiculousness of it all – privileged tourists on a boat trip, complaining because their food was a bit late, a bit small, a bit bland and a bit expensive, in a land where much of the population is below the poverty line and eats worse food in smaller quantities and more irregular servings.  But that rather misses the point, because it is precisely because the Jagmandir restaurant could afford to get things so right that it is monstrous that they actually produce food and service that is laughable compared to the exquisite lunches cooked promptly for me by a Jain family in Delwara for less than a tenth of the price!
  Still… the boat ride was thoroughly enjoyable and we watched a beautiful sunset over the lake when back at the City Palace, before heading over to the Bagore-ki-Haveli to see the same dance programme I have described in a much earlier entry (29/10). We had supper in Savage Garden, a chic restaurant in the old town with striking blue walls and the night air for a ceiling, lit with candles and draped with bougainvilleas. I had chicken livers and red wine! Indian red wine, admittedly, but nonetheless every sip a joy after three months’ painful separation.

 Exploring Udaipur

   The most successful example of the “real Udaipur” came the next day (24/12) in the form of a visit to the Khandelwals’ for coffee and chitchat. Mrs Khandelwal was mistress of ceremonies and I was as flattered by her continual references to things I had said or done as I was surprised by the extent to which she evidently felt she had got to know me. She appeared uncertain as to the level of knowledge she should expect in educated English adults and, in the course of a conversation about national parks, veered on the side of caution by explaining the meaning of the words “tiger” and “elephant”. To remarked afterwards that educated middle classes the world over share certain traits that make them in some ways less different to each other than to the less educated classes in their respective countries. I think he’s right, although I firmly believe that you can find some way to connect with anybody you meet and, conversely, everybody has areas of themselves that are, to you, alien and unreachable. That’s not a particularly profound thought, just a reflection on shared humanity versus individuality.
   We later climbed up the nearby hill to the Neemach Mata temple which offers superb views over the city. The path leading up the hill is lined with signs bearing edifying pieces of lifestyle advice, such as the following imprecation against smoking: “Let your mouth be not the entry gate to your death”; and the more technical but equally sombre “Mouth is becoming bacteriologically more dirty than anus”.
   We conformed broadly to this guidance by lunching at the Natraj and expunging any residual anger at yesterday’s disastrous lunch. A pleasantly uneventful afternoon followed, in my case  involving packing for the next day’s journey to Jaipur. Priya, who had met the family briefly in the morning told me: “Oh Jon, your sister is beautiful. Really beautiful. Nothing like you.” Flattering, of course. I reconvened with my beautiful family at the station, ready to board a night train to Jaipur.

Footnotes 

[17] "What does five minutes mean? Five centuries?"

Saturday 30th December Part 2: Jaipur

This seedy drinkers’ den is filling up, and I must sip my beer slowly to justify my continued presence here. I’ve already had a brief supper break – a fair to middling half tandoori chicken and plain naan – and have hinted at the fact that I’ll have a coffee later. Having already spent far more than an hour and, excluding supper, nearly Rs 100 on describing our time together in Udaipur, and given that my train back to Udaipur is in two and a half hours’ time, I need to pick up the pace. I cannot linger in Jaipur describing everything in painstaking detail, so some sketches will have to suffice. It is a huge place, and the new city gives an impression of size and connection with the business world that Udaipur lacks. The buildings along the main roads of the old town, as well as some in the new, are painted a dark salmon colour, as befits the “Pink City”. The old town is a bustling, chaotic, absorbing place full of little shops and stalls and swarms of cycle rickshaws, all laid out in a roughly rectangular grid, the planned creation of Jai Singh II who transferred the capital of his Rajput kingdom from Amber, only 11km away. We visited Amber fort on our third day (27/12), an interesting and pretty place which is full of tourists, but not a patch on Chittor or Kumbhalgarh or indeed Agra fort which we later saw. More impressive is Jaigarh, on a hill above Amber palace, still strictly part of Amber fort. This has grand views of the surrounding rugged hills and is more fort-like in character than Amber, although equally full of tourists and cars. We had also hired a car and driver for the occasion and on the way were able to visit a gorge called Galta, whose lower portion was lined with elegant temples and tanks. We left our driver drinking tea and followed the path up to the top where we got fantastic views of late afternoon Jaipur, many of whose landmarks were by now familiar.

Amber Fort: L-R Carol, JG, Rosemary

   We had arrived two days earlier on Christmas morning, fresh off the night train from Udaipur. After a leisurely breakfast at our hotel, the fairly luxurious Umaid Mahal, we had the traditional present distribution in To and Carol’s room, displaced thousands of miles from our living room in Exeter. Conventional Christmas activities were, unsurprisingly, thin on the ground, but we had an interesting day. This included visiting a fascinating astronomical observatory – or at least a collection of large astronomical macro-instruments – called the Jantar Mantar, which we had fun exploring. To’s knowledge and patience were absolutely invaluable here in helping us figure things out. We also visited the City Palace Museum that has a fascinating collection of documents, such as Sanskrit texts and Persian translations, and miniatures. Christmas dinner, of course, could not be missed although the evening meal we had at Cinnamon, the Indian restaurant at Jaipur’s Taj Group Jai Mahal hotel, was unlike any Christmas dinner I have ever had. In fact it was quite unlike any meal I have ever had. As soon as we arrived, setting the tone by travelling two per rickshaw, we knew we had come somewhere special. The hotel was a kind of fairy-tale of cupolas and Christmas lights, set around a terrace that fronted a long courtyard garden, occupied by an upper-crust Jaipuri Christmas party. We found the appropriate restaurant without much difficulty and where ushered by suave waiters to a wonderful low table in a candle-lit alcove where we had to sit cross-legged. We ordered beer and then wine (this time the real European deal – Merlot!!) and all had the non-vegetarian “Degustation” menu, a series of exquisitely refined dishes – chicken, mutton biryani, indescribably rich dal, various devastatingly beautiful naans and rotis… these words cannot do justice to the sheer gustatory bliss and delightful ambience we experienced in this carefully-constructed world of top-end hospitality. Suffice it to say it was a lovely way to spend Christmas evening, notwithstanding a slight pocket of wistfulness I’d had all day in the absence of our good old family Christmases in Exeter, replete with tree, roast duck and the prospect of a week with the extended family in Norfolk.
   Having browsed through a fairly light-hearted history of Jaipur (Jaipur Nama by Giles Tillotson) and picking up information from the forts and the City Palace, I got something of a feel for Jaipuri history and its cast list: Man Singh I, the Maharaja of Amber and darling of Akbar, whose army he led against Udaipur’s Pratap Singh in the battle of Haldi Ghati (see entry 3/12/06), also acting as Akbar’s Governor of Bengal; Jai Singh II, the founder of the new city of Jaipur; Ishwar Singh, who built the Ishwari minaret (which we climbed on Christmas Day) and later killed himself by snakebite after endless problems with the Maratha armies of the Deccan; his half-brother Madho Singh I, who was enormously fat; and Madho’s son Sawaj Pratap, who seems to be have been something of a pansy, judging by his pink dresses on display in the City Palace Textile Museum and his architectural legacy – the Jal Mahal, a water palace that can only suffer from comparisons with its more famous counterpart in Udaipur, and more importantly the Palace of the Winds, or Hawa Mahal, Jaipur’s poster child.
   We viewed this extraordinary building several times from the roof of a jewellery shop. This, of course, ended with recriminations from the formerly friendly Kashmiri shopkeeper who had let us up hoping to nurture our gratitude into a visit to his shop, in which we had minimal interest. The palace is, in fact, much more impressive from the outside, as it is little more than a façade, although it has lots of amusingly tiny windows from which you can peep onto the road in a throwback to the buildings’ original function as a zenana, or harem, where the ladies of the Maharaja’s family could discreetly watch the royal processions in the streets below without breaking purdah. My most cherished memory of our visit to the Hawa Mahal is something quite simple and very personal. Leaning out over one of the balconies, the four of us stood watching the road and talking, maybe for half an hour, as other visitors came and went. It is surprising how something as ostensibly little as this, that perhaps might be dwarfed by architectural splendour (however effete), can remain an unbelievably precious memory.

Hawa Mahal

   There are so many other Jaipur memories that should be extracted from the jumble and aired here, but time is winning and my coffee has been drunk. If I have portrayed it as an inferior Udaipur then I haven’t done my job properly. The two are utterly different – Udaipur, calm and serenely charming, Jaipur vast, busy and teeming with self-important street life. Moreover, we all felt a great deal of warmth for the place and had lots of fun exploring it, although Carol’s prowess at crossing its busy roads was far superior to mine. On our second night we went to see a soppy film called Vivah, in an outrageously opulent cinema called the Rajmandir, which Jaipur is extremely proud of. After all the hype, the auditorium was a bit of a let-down – it wasn’t too many million miles away from the cinemas of Udaipur, although it was certainly larger, brighter, cleaner and more well-behaved. On our last night we had a meal out so completely different to that of the first that it is worth mentioning. The Ganesh Restaurant was simply a bit of the old city wall, converted into a square terrace with five or six tables. The very friendly manager and waiters allowed us to watch the food being prepared in a little pit round to the side, and the results were delicious. Totally unpretentious, proper “no frills” food and atmosphere – although that of course is a bit of an effect as, while not specifically aimed at tourists, it plays successfully to their expectations of down-to-earth homeliness in a way that a truly cheap, strip-lit joint with wooden benches and dirty metal tables in a functional canteen with tacky calendars and posters of waterfalls would not.
 

Saturday 30th December Part 3: Agra and Bharatpur

We left the hotel at the crack of dawn the next day (28/12) to get the train to Agra which travelled through some interesting landscape, featuring peculiar round thatched huts. We were met at a seething Agra Fort station by a driver we had booked for the day. He made a hash of getting out of the station, but eventually extricated his car from the throng and drove in the direction of the Taj Mahal. I caught a brief, teasing glimpse through some trees en route, which gave me a little jolt of excitement, so that I silently shook To’s arm and pointed at the now impenetrable wall of trees. Arriving at the car park gave us a taste of the frustrations we would face, as everybody wanted to take us the short distance to the entrance for outrageous sums. In the end we went in a horse-drawn cart for a fairly ridiculous price – I’d have rather walked, but seemed to be in the minority. The queue caused greater hassle, as it was segregated by sex, and we had heard some (false) rumour that there was a time-limit on each visit. What would happen if one half of the family got in first? The idea of not seeing the Taj Mahal together seemed absurd – more than absurd, actually, distressing. We realised further down the queue that we had to leave our bags in a cloakroom – nothing of this had been mentioned before – so To had to rush off and take our bags, while I got closer and closer to the entrance, and more and more jittery. He came back in time and Carol and Rosemary joined our queue for a while but ended up being shunted back across to their queue, much further ahead than they would have been had they not joined us. An Italian couple in front of us had done exactly the same, after a long and unsettlingly emotional argument with the queue guards. The Indian women in the queue were understandably unhappy about all this – “You come from a civilised country,” one said to the Italian girl, “so we expect good things from you.”
“How can we be good when the system is so uncivilised?” I felt like shouting.
   Three of us eventually managed to get through, but Carol was sent back to deposit her MP3 player with our bags – no easy task, as she hadn’t put them away in the first place. Finally, fuming, she arrived inside, and the four of us made a pact not to let the horrendousness of the last hour detract from the beauty ahead. We walked on and turned a corner, and there it was: through an arch, shimmering. In To’s own account of this trip, he states that there would be utterly no point trying to describe what is one of the most famous buildings in the world. I agree, almost fully, but perhaps that refusal puts it on a pedestal the way people put Bach, Shakespeare, Gandhi and others on pedestals. It is almost universally regarded as the sublime peak of Mughal architecture,  a remarkable building whose journey can be traced through the mosques, forts and mausolea of Delhi and Lahore. What can I do but agree? While inside, admiring the exquisite pietro dura - gemstones inlaid on the white marble by Italian artisans - I remembered a story I had read somewhere: the emperor Shah Jahan, wanting to check up on the progress of his builders went to the site in disguise. He approached one stonemason and asked:
   “What are you doing?”
   “Building a palace for the emperor,” came the answer. “What are you doing?”
The conversation lasted several minutes, the stonemason all the time unaware of his companion’s identity. After a while, the emperor left and approached another worker, asking the same question.
   “Building the palace for the emperor,” came the answer again. “I’ve got my work cut out for me, so can’t waste my time answering your questions.”
  Finally, the King of the World asked a third labourer the same question and received this astonishing reply:
   “I’m helping to build the greatest building ever built, for the greatest ruler ever to have lived, and if you don’t stop pestering me it will never be finished. Bugger off.”
   Shah Jahan was not impressed at all with the first builder, as he was idle and easily distracted, and had no pride in his work. The second showed admirable focus on his labour and impressed the emperor more, but it was only the third, who understood the magnitude of his task, that truly won his admiration.
   Another stock classic about the Taj Mahal is that when Aurangzeb (Shah Jahan’s least favourite son, a ruthless dictator and Islamic hard-liner according to orthodox histories) overthrew Shah Jahan, he imprisoned him in Agra Fort, and Shah Jahan spent the rest of his days languishing in captivity, gazing over the river at his immortal creation, lamenting the loss of his beloved wife buried inside. Cynical historians disagree: Shah Jahan is more likely to have spent his last days whoring and drinking himself to death. From everything I have read about the Mughals, I am inclined to favour this latter version, although I must admit that the reason I find it the more appealing is its challenge to the conventional romantic account rather than its greater inherent plausibility.

No introduction needed...

   After a bland lunch in a tourist place that our driver insisted upon, we drove to Agra Fort, which, free from the burden of deep cultural resonance was a very fine, solid complex of buildings. According to a sign outside, there has been a fort at Agra since 1080 when it was built by the Chauhans, a Rajput clan from Ajmer. It came to prominence when Sikander Lodi (1487-1517), Afghan ruler of Hindustan, shifted his capital there from Delhi. When Hindustan seceded to the Mughals, Agra served as the capital until the middle of Shah Jahan’s reign, when he transferred power back to Delhi and built “Shahjahanabad”, today’s Old Delhi. Akbar, Shah Jahan’s illustrious grandfather, has left quite an architectural legacy here, with red sandstone palaces such as the Bengali Mahal, which combines very typical Islamic arches and elements of Hindu-Jain temple architecture to great effect. Shah Jahan has left a number of white marble mosques and, more importantly, beguiling views of the Taj, which no doubt provided an excellent backdrop for his mourning or moaning.
   We rejoined our driver in the late afternoon and set off towards our final destination: Bharatpur.  Sadly our mode of travel that day, while wonderfully efficient and eminently the most sensible way of allowing us to see Agra’s key landmarks in the limited time available, did not leave room for exploring some of its less exalted parts and did not afford us even a glimpse of the city’s soul. The route to Bharatpur was not especially interesting, although we passed by Fatehpur Sikri, a dream alternative capital not fully realised by Akbar, and now a detour on the Golden Triangle (Delhi, Agra, Jaipur) for those with a particular interest in the Mughal legacy. We arrived at the Hotel Spoonbill, where we were to stay two nights, in the early evening. It was rather shabby in comparison to the Jaipur hotel, although more upmarket than most of the places I had stayed in previously. We had a cheery supper at the old Spoonbill, just down the road, where we were able to wait for our food by the campfire, sipping beer.
   We got up early the next day and headed off to the Keolodeo Ghana National Park, the reason for visiting this otherwise undistinguished town. We decided to travel into the centre of the sanctuary in two cycle-rickshaws. The drivers were both Punjabi Sikhs, and clearly very used to the sanctuary’s fauna, as they were able to point out numerous species en route, including birds such as the orange-headed thrush, remarkably well-camouflaged in the surrounding leaf litter, and the delightfully named rufous tree pie. We also saw a number of mammals such as the nilgai (literally “blue cow” but actually an antelope) and the large-antlered sambar deer. After such a rich crop, the rickshaw drivers evidently expected more than the Rs100 we had agreed and pretended to be very hurt that we only gave them an extra 50% tip.
   We spent the rest of the day out own masters on foot and saw a great many other interesting, mainly avian, species, returning the Spoonbill in the late afternoon for our final evening together. This we spent in the old Spoonbill restaurant – more beer, campfire and merriment, and the inevitable looking back over a successful holiday that had been something of a milestone. We praised Carol for her excellent organisation – a tremendous feat of long-distance co-ordination long in advance of the actual holiday, resulting in all our trains, cars and hotels being booked, hugely reducing the stress that would have resulted from more a spontaneous kind of travelling in the most touristy part of India at the busiest time of year. I would have felt guilty for not having played a more active role in the organisation had I not known how much she enjoys this aspect of things.
   This morning, our final morning, was spent back in the bird sanctuary followed by a brief lunch at the hotel before getting a taxi to the station where I saw the others onto the “Golden Mail Express” (presumably destined ultimately for Amritsar) and ran alongside the train as it pulled off until it became too fast for me to keep up with.

*

And so I am about to go home to Udaipur. I can almost write that and believe in the “home”, because I now realise how essential the idea of having Udaipur to return to has been to my sense of self in the past week. I have used it to separate myself from the other tourists I have seen and, more importantly, from the rest of my family. Without any malice I have allowed myself to imagine a special depth to my experiences compared to the others’ because of my deeper connection to the country and also because I know that I will still be here, in an official capacity, long after they have left.
  The reasoning behind this is dubious, and quite apart from that I have actually been racked with insecurities over the last few days about my work in Udaipur. Last night, in particular, I slept very badly, letting worry pile on worry - about money, about the future, but most of all about my vocation. The question of whether this is really what I want to be doing has almost without my noticing it matured from a shameful doubt to a healthy desire to revise my career aspirations. My Plan B has always been to return to England, preferably London, and find work in the field of Climate Change mitigation (perhaps some kind of “Sustainable Energy Manager” if such exist). Until now I had always regarded this as something I would turn to when, after years of international development work and the accompanying world travel, the hypocrisy of trying to save the world in between long-haul flights became too much to handle. It seems that the moment has come much sooner than anticipated, and this is having the dangerous effect of making me view my Vikas Samiti work as a naughty indulgence when compared to the real jobs the rest of my family are returning to. Thus the demarcation is turned on its head...

*

   I am still in the seedy bar, pretty much ready to head off to the station. Bharatpur is nothing special, but interesting enough to while away part of an afternoon in. There is a big fort built by a king called Suraj Mal, who was a Jat. I had thought the Jats were a Punjabi farming caste, but there seem to be Jats down here as well. There are genuine Punjabi Sikhs in Bharatpur too – someone told me that 20% of Bharatpur’s population is Sikh – and I’ve seen a lot of them, instantly recognisable by their style of turban, just like the Sikhs in England. The main palace is open to the public in a way that makes as little effort as possible and it gives the impression of being about to fall down at any minute. Part of it has been commandeered by some kind of government office.

*

As usual, I can’t resist a postscript: I got to the station very early, around 8.30pm, and had a wander round the quiet streets nearby. I met one Ravinder Singh, who insisted on taking me for a spin on his motorbike, introducing me to all his friends in Pidgin English before taking me back to the station and giving me his number (extracting promises of frequent phonecalls from me) before profuse farewells. As an afterthought he asked me to look out for English girlfriends for him – the way he asked made it absolutely obvious it was an afterthought, not an ulterior motive. It struck me that none of the above would have taken place in England. I would have felt more on edge strolling round the side-streets near a station (take King’s Cross for example) and the idea of somebody in a spirit of disinterested fun offering me a ride on a motorobike is hopelessly implausible. Much more implausible still is the idea that I would have accepted it!

Tuesday 19th December: Delwara and Udaipur

I wish I could write something positive about the last two days in Delwara. I wish I could describe how the exciting promise of a new project is being richly fulfilled. But I can’t: this week has been neither rich nor fulfilled so far, and in parts has felt like a void filled only with despair. Udaipur evenings distance me from this despair and make me wonder whether it is really so bad, dulling the acute feeling of worthlessness that accompanies the minute-by-minute tedium of have not enough to do. I feel right now that I should be able to use force, charm and charisma to make things happen, but my late night vantage point obscures the social awkwardness of the situation. It is hard to recapture the powerlessness I feel in the Nagrik Vikas Manch hierarchy; the extent to which Mohan and Kit’s combined presence, however benevolent, makes me feel ten years younger than I am; the peculiar embarrassment I feel in front of everybody apart from Haider.
   So far I have discussed ideas with Haider, drafted an e-mail to another NGO that was never sent, made a couple of suggestions to Mohan and Kit that may have made a slight difference, entertained a few kids and unsuccessfully tried to teach a half-witted girl the concept of syllables (giving up when, after half an hour of difficult spade-work I asked her to give me a word of one syllable and received a blank look, followed by a mystified but delighted exclamation of “Elephant?”). Not a very impressive track record, but to date there simply has been nothing else to do. In my copious spare time I have sat up on a shady ledge on the roof and studied the Hindi script or grappled with a book about globalisation.
   All of this makes me question the usefulness of volunteers who are well-stocked in the heart and mind departments but lacking practical skills and a thorough command of the language. I can almost see Sumita’s “told you so” expression as I write this. This leads to the real questions that I have been trying to avoid: is this really what I want to be doing? Am I truly realising the dream I came here to chase? There - I’ve written them down now, they’re out, they’re alive! But tonight I am not ready to answer them.

*

On a much happier note, I am going to see my parents tomorrow. I will spend a final day in Delwara before breaking for Christmas, and come back to Udaipur at roughly the time they expect to arrive from Jodhpur. The strange and wonderful excitement I described on Sunday has haemorrhaged into something magnificent that will protect me tomorrow from whatever dark clouds working in Delwara might induce. 
    I am not alone in having visitors - Ellen’s parents are already in Udaipur, prior to a jaunt like ours, and Rachel has left to travel with her boyfriend who arrived in India a few days ago. Anna is taking the opposite approach and returning to England for Christmas, while Zelda is going back to America.
   Meanwhile, Amir left today in typical style, begging Priya and me to tell him what his “negative points” were, which we firmly refused to do. He was in such an emotional state as his departure loomed, assuring us again and again how happy he had been with us all and how much he would miss us, that it was quite a relief to see him onto the bus. But I will miss him, as he has been such a feature of life here over the last month, and despite his oddities he has a good, generous heart.

*

I bumped into Dilip as I came back into Vikas Samiti this evening.
   “Hello! How are you?” I asked.
   “Very fine!” he replied with a grin. “I’ve just been meeting with your fellow volunteers Ellen and Anna.”
   “Oh right? I didn’t know Anna was working with you as well?”
   “No, no, she’s not - the meeting was purely social. We took chai in the canteen together.”
 We talked a little about my work in Delwara, and I vented a muted version my earlier diatribe. He listened sympathetically and then leaned forward with the air of a conspirator.
   “Actually, Jon, can I tell you one thing?”
   “Go on,” I said curiously.
   “I always wanted you to work on another microplan. In fact I said specifically that I wanted only Jon, but it was decided that it would be more suitable for you to work on a different project. I just wanted to clear the air with you about that.”
   “Thanks - I really appreciate that,” I mumbled in slightly embarrassed confusion. I was rather relieved, but also ashamed of having suspected Dilip of having a hand in thwarting my microplanning career. Most of all I was touched that he had thought to “clear the air” on the subject. The whole scenario seemed strangely and undefinably un-Indian although I don’t know what I had imagined the “Indian approach” in such circumstances would be - something more histrionic, perhaps? In any case, I had never felt more warmly towards him that I did earlier this evening, and I am sorry not to be working with him any more.

Next Post - Saturday 30th December 2006: Udaipur, Jaipur, Agra and Bharatpur (will be posted Friday 30th December 2011)

Sunday 17th December: Udaipur

The piece of news at the forefront of my mind is that my parents are in India. They flew into Delhi and are now in Jodhpur and will arrive in Udaipur on Wednesday, signifying the start of my “Christmas holidays”. We plan to spend a few days here in Udaipur, where my sister Rosemary will join us, and then set off on an adventure to Jaipur and Bharatpur, visiting the Taj Mahal en route. From the brief communication I have had with them since they arrived, they appear to be having a whale of a time. This is a relief, and the prospect of meeting them here in India, hitherto my private property amongst the family, fills me with a strange and wonderful excitement and just a twinge of possessiveness.

*

I spent yesterday evening with the hotel management students I first met on the hilltop fort above Dudh Talai on the 27th November. Their ringleader Sanjay must be added forthwith to my museum of oddities. He is the kind of person that can never let anything go. Everything has to be commented on and analysed. I misunderstood where we had arranged to meet, and when I called later to find out what was going on he seemed surprised that I wanted to meet at all –  “You don’t come to meet us at the arranged place and now you need to see us?” – and reminded me later that it had been entirely my fault. A far cry from a previous (unrecorded) occasion when he had praised me so highly for waiting in such a visible and obvious place – “Look at this man’s thinking,” he announced to his friends and the world at large. “Look at his stance there in the middle of the circle where we could find him so easily. Aap bahut minded hain [you’re very clever]!”
   When we later arrived at his student digs he cautioned me strongly to “curb my excitement” as the neighbours were apt to complain about the slightest of noises. He sent off some friends to purchase refreshments (egg curry and whisky, it turned out) and showed me some of his coursework. Every time I let my eyes wander for a second he would say a little reprovingly “But I don’t think you’re interested in seeing my work” to which I could only reply that of course I was interested! We argued quite heatedly about something later – I don’t remember what – and I was almost tempted to leave, except that they lived far away from the town centre in an area called Hiran Magri Sector 4 and there were few rickshaws around. None of his friends were allowed much of a look in, and I wondered how they could all be so passive and patient and even subservient to Sanjay when as a person he seems so ripe for ridicule. But I cannot ever know what he is like with no foreigner to impress and perhaps he is very different. He may well possess qualities that I have signally failed to detect.
   In contrast, I have just come back from Bablu’s very jolly 21st birthday party on the roof of a family member’s house in the heart of the old town. Before the party started I met him at his uncles’ hotel to watch part of a mock-Hindu wedding for a Korean couple and their Korean friends. This is becoming popular among young Koreans who want to spice up their love life with a touch of exotic Occidentalism, although I found the experience bland rather than magical. I suppose the couples in question have “proper” Korean weddings back at home. The party itself was much more interesting, with Bollywood music and dancing on the tiny terrace, surreptitious whisky drinking when Bablu’s girlfriend wasn’t looking and endless, endless photographs. The birthday cake was a kitsch green and red creation covered in rose petals – something for a ten year old girl back at home, I remarked, not a twenty-one year old man!

Next Post - Tuesday 19th December 2006: Delwara and Udaipur (will be posted Monday 19th December 2011)

Friday 15th December: Udaipur and Delwara

Amir is unfathomable! He came back unexpectedly from the field today – whenever he comes, whatever he does, it is unexpected! – and on my return from Delwara the two of us went for a stroll towards Fateh Sagar. First we took chai with some casual acquaintances of mine whose names I always forget but who always depart with an insincere “I love you”. Then we left them and strolled along the lake, while Amir deconstructed the social gathering we had just come from telling me everything he, Amir the master psychologist had observed and deduced.
   “I must tell you truthfully, Jon, that I was watching these people and they are not interested in your friendship. They are just passing time.”
   “But I know that!” I answered defensively. “That’s all we were doing anyway!”
  “Come on, man! I was previously a student of psychology - I can see beyond the surface. I was watching you also. You were being duped basically.”
   “What do you mean? Why are you so sure I was being duped?”
   “You believe these are your friends...”
   “...but I don’t!”
   “...come on, yaar! You think they are friends, but actually they don’t feel in this way.”
  “But Amir, Amir, Amir! Listen to me! I hardly know them! I just - they’re just... people I bump into sometimes. Acquaintances, not friends.”
  “Exactly right!”
  Both convinced we had won different arguments, the conversation ground to moody halt. There are some people who seem to enjoy making others feel uncomfortable, and I think Amir breaches this zone at times. After much debate we then decided to gatecrash a jolly looking wedding party in a large public garden just next to the lake. We entered under the false pretext that I had never been to an Indian wedding before, and were able to have some good food and meet a few people, although given our illegitimate presence and rather shabby dress this wasn’t the ideal social forum.
  Amir told me off for saying “Namaste” to a girl who was with her family, worrying that her father or brothers might want to beat me up. I rubbished this as absurdly over-cautious, but he reminded me that I didn't understand India. On the way back I began to believe him when he made the following extraordinary statement: “Whenever I go back to Delhi – for a week, or a day or even just for a few hours – I always receive at least one proposal from a girl”. I thought he meant marriage at first, but I believe what he really meant was a more a “proposal of love”. Something like being asked out, but with the thrust more on the love than on the dating. What I find hard to understand is how Amir – awkward introspective and not especially good-looking – comes by all these proposals, especially given his peculiar attitudes towards women and friendship! And more seriously it underlines his point that there are still so many things about Indian culture that I don’t understand. I have great difficulty picturing these proposals, far more so the situation Amir described with one of his admirers, who “started to do some physical activities in the rickshaw which I hate”. Yes, I realise plenty of unmarried Indians are sexually active, but having seen Indian boy-girl interactions I find it hard to imagine how it all starts!

*

In Delwara, I have met another of the Nagrik Vikas Manch crew. Kit, from England, has been with Vikas Samiti for the last three years, making the transition from volunteer to worker as, in fact, Mohan has done. He has only recently joined the Delwara project and his role, as he put it to me, is to “piece together a vision” for the place. He seems to be concerned with the nuts and bolts of the NGO and improving its communication and efficiency. From what I can tell, he is breathing new life into Vikas Samiti and, through extensive internet research, is bringing a lot of new ideas in.
   As for my own role, it has been frustratingly limited so far. I felt down about this yesterday, as there are few things more disheartening than wanting to work and not being able to, but still having a feeling that there probably is something one ought to be doing. I did not allow myself to blame Vikas Samiti, because it is not and should not be a priority of an organisation to make sure its volunteers are provided with nice projects designed to make you feel like you’re making a grand contribution, especially if these projects aren’t very useful to the NGO. On the other hand, as Vikas Samiti takes volunteers from overseas, I think it ought to try and manage its human resources more efficiently. Indeed, as I have already discussed, this problem doesn’t apply solely to foreign volunteers!

*

Meanwhile singing lessons are creeping up ever-higher on my agenda. I returned to the Khandelwal household for a second lesson on Monday, and after an hour’s out-raag-ing by the precocious Tamil siblings on Monday Madhu agreeably informed me that I would be better off joining a new class with a 20-year old beginner called Priyanka. We shared our first lesson yesterday - she is pretty, shy and not overburdened by any obvious musical talent. Madhu stuck firmly to the easiest raag, called Bilawal, which sounds to the occidental ear like a major scale.
   No, I am guilty of an over-simplification. Raags are the poster-children of Indian classical music, but I shouldn’t bend the truth in deference to familiarity. A raag is actually a rather complicated, undulating affair, and the simple up-down scale-analogues are called thaats. What Priyanka and I studied together should therefore be referred to as Thaat Bilawal.
   Since the lesson it has occurred to me to wonder whether it is a coincidence that the “easiest” Indian thaat should be the one most closely resembling a European scale. By wondering whether it  is a coincidence, I suppose what I am really asking is whether there is something fundamentally “normal” about the major scale that appeals to more than one musical culture. The alternative, which I suspect is the more likely answer, is that at some stage in its history, the organisation and teaching of Indian classical music was influenced by that of Europe. It is the notes themselves that make me suspect European influence on India rather than the other way round. The use of the harmonium is widespread in Indian music, and I vaguely suspect a Portuguese hand here. Whatever the truth of this, the harmonium has certainly influenced Indian musical notation. The basic notes that make up the thaat are called swaras, and the names given to them - Saa, Re, Ga, Ma, Paa, Dha, Ni - are relative, rather than absolute. The first note, Saa, therefore, does not correspond to any specific pitch and thus needs to be set to an agreed pitch frame. This, revealingly, is named after the chosen position of Saa on the harmonium. Middle C is pehli safed (“first white”), C sharp is pehli kali (“first black”) and D is dusri safed (“second white”).
   The ten principle thaats vary, like scales and modes, in the relative pitching of the swaras. In Thaat Bilawal all seven swaras assume their “default” or shuddh form - that is, they would all correspond to white notes on the keyboard if Saa is pitched to pehli safed, another clear consequence of the use of the harmonium. In other thaats, different combinations of the swaras Re, Ga, Dha and Ni are flattened: all  of them in the case of the devastating Thaat Bhairavi I sang in my first lesson, but only on the Re (third) and the Dha (sixth) in a thaat confusingly called Bhairav, which has a distinctly Arabic quality. In some thaats, the fourth note, Ma, is sharpened, which can create a lightheaded, Debussy-esque mood.
   Madhu told me that in the old days, vocalists would use quarter- and eighth-tones as a matter of course (she didn’t use these terms, but her meaning was clear) but that now these are becoming rarer, and the preserve of the highly skilled, although still required in certain raags.
   We spent a long time singing alankars, various formulations of the thaat, starting from the simple up-down scale and then moving onto a series of doubled and then trebled swaras and more complicated forms. At first it seemed like mindless repetition, but now I begin to understand why Madhu is making us sing these – to become familiar with the swaras, to develop confidence, to sing in time with the taal, the underlying beat and also to concentrate on making a beautiful sound. In my case there is an additional complication - I have trouble pronouncing the names of the swaras correctly, and Madhu is adamant that we conquer this, otherwise, “You will be exposed as foreigner straightaway!”
   To my relief, at the end of our lesson, Madhu announced that we would add some richness to our diet of thaats and learn a song, written by none other than Dr Nirmal Khandelwal. It is beautiful and upbeat and the first verse, all we have studied so far starts with the words:

“Ye mosam hasta hasta,
Ye rasta khulta khulta,
Utho, satiyo! Chale safar ko –
Vahte nahin hai rukta!”

(Translating loosely as –
“The weather is smiling,
The road lies open,
Get up, friend! Let’s go on a journey –
Time waits for nobody…”)

I can say with more confidence now that, amongst other things, it is the use of Ni, the seventh, that makes Indian classical music so unique. Rather than always “resolving” to Saa, in a subcontinental form of the perfect cadence, Ni can be followed by any note, which alters its meaning to something rarely experienced in the European classical canon.
   As for Madhu herself, I must admit to the mildest of crushes. She is attractive and elegant and we have a talkative, jokey sort of relationship. I am her first non-Indian pupil and she seems to have developed her own way of dealing with that, accepting the fact that I will talk and argue more than her obedient Indian pupils who touch her feet at the beginning and end of the lesson, and understanding that I have a long experience of music, albeit of a different sort.

Wednesday 13th December: Delwara

Three days in and the new project can be said to have started in earnest. Banish any images of a gruelling work schedule - Delwara, I feel, is not conducive to such an approach. It is a sleepy market town with two main streets, narrow but not quite congested, purposeful but not quite bustling. My first visit was on Monday, and with slight difficulty I navigated the maze of lethargic backstreets to find the Nagrik Vikas Manch, the tiny compound housing Vikas Samiti’s Delwara outpost. I was greeted at the gate by the young man I had thought of as “Hedda”, who turns out to be Haider, or Hyder, an Arabic-derived name meaning lion that has lent itself to the Indian and Pakistani cities of Hyderabad.

Haider

   He is a Muslim from a village near Lucknow and looks somewhat oriental, possibly as a result of Central Asian heritage. He has a very gentle, almost diffident manner and a radiantly beautiful smile. His English is rather limited and very quaint – “I am wery happy that all peoples is wery hard-working” – but aspires to jargonese, using words like “attend” and “convey the message” rather than “come to” and “tell” wherever possible, so that “Who is coming to the meeting now?” will be rendered “This time which people is attend the meeting?”, and “Who will tell the youths about the training scheme?” becomes “Which person is convey the message to the youths about the training scheme?”.
   Youths and training schemes look set to play a important part of this project. The first day, however, was simply one of orientation. Haider introduced me to other members of the Manch and showed me the one-room Youth Resource Centre (YRC) which was occupied by a pair of desultory-looking youths playing a board game. We also took a tour round the town. To my eyes its streets look drably uniform, but they conceal something exotic: Delwara, quite unlike Maal, is ethnically heterogeneous, and consists of a set of mohallas (neighbourhoods) divided on community lines. There is a Brahmin mohalla, a Rajpiut mohalla, a Muslim mohalla, a Dalit mohalla and so on. There is a significant Jain community which has erected a number of mildly interesting Jain temples throughout the town. All this is so much dross when compared to the town’s real jewel: Devigarh, a fort that has been converted into a luxury hotel.

Devigarh

   Devigarh, in a muted echo of Suraj’s degree in History, Politics and Hindi Literature, pricked the balloon of my preconceptions. That there should be a seven star hotel in this provincial backwater is in itself a cause enough for wonder, but it is the fact that Europeans might be roaming carefree in this town whose sole purpose is to play out my back-of-beyond fantasies that really strikes me as beyond the pale! Pale, indeed, is the operative word if the pasty American millionaire couple I saw from a distance yesterday are anything to go by. They were both wearing identical shorts and polo neck tops and had expensive cameras slung ostentatiously round their shoulders. They may have had an official guide, but all I could see was a crowd of delighted youths, probably truanting from the resource centre, wafting the pair round a corner to their fates. The employees of the hotel appear to come from almost anywhere apart from Delwara, as Haider and I confirmed when we bumped into three stylishly-dressed male receptionists returning from a shopping trip in Udaipur.  One of them came from Jaipur, another from Calcutta and the third, most bizarrely of all, Madurai in the far south. All were a little supercilious, and none had heard of the Nagrik Vikas Manch.

*

The mantra of the first day was “When Mohan comes back.” Haider said this so frequently and with such quiet reverence that I imagined Mohan, manager of the Manch, to be an old professor-like figure, perhaps a little shabby but nevertheless commanding the respect of his underlings with a gentle wisdom. When I arrived on the second day I remarked “Bahut thanda hai,” (it’s very cold) to the non-descript man with Haider in the office.
   “Yes it is,” he replied, a little bemused.
   “You are introduction already for Mohan?” asked Haider, looking embarrased.
   So much for my wise old professor. Mohan Joshi, a Brahmin from Jaipur, turns out to be only twenty-six and has a background in business. On my discovering his identity, his non-descriptness was quickly replaced by an impressiveness created by his suave command of English and air of quiet authority. He is a little stand-offish and radiates that Indian upper-class trait of not being very concerned with one, but somehow instills in me a feeling that I will like him. He impressed me by cutting straight to the heart and soul of the matter of livelihoods: there is no point getting people to produce something unless there is a market for it. Therefore any newly proposed source of livelihood, or “Income Generating Activity” needs to be bolstered by a market feasibility analysis.
   Despite this, it is becoming increasing unclear what I shall be doing for the next few months. It turns out that an NGO called Pradan is expected to come at some unspecified point to conduct a livelihoods analysis, potentially rendering my own efforts in that direction redundant. I have e-mailed Pradan’s director to find out what, if anything, we can do before they come. Meanwhile, the  new plan is to encourage young Delwarans to attend training courses in Ahmedabad, run by an organisation called the Dalit Shakti Kendra (DSK). The DSK offers courses in various professional skills including driving, tailoring, electrical engineering, computing, carpentry, motor re-winding and “fabrication” (whatever that may be). So far, Samir, a regular at the Youth Resource Centre, has completed a DSK driving course, and two others are currently in the middle of courses. My role in this will be in promoting the courses and identifying appropriate youths to send.
   While on a stroll around the town yesterday I hit on what seemed to be a vital question: the issue of whether we should be giving priority to those youths who are most needy or vulnerable, or whether we should target youths who demonstrate an aptitude for a specific course. I self-importantly regaled Mohan with the question this morning, but he seemed unimpressed and unconvinced that there was much of a distinction between the two approaches. Whatever we decide, I look forward to seeing whether and how this project develops.

Sunday 10th December 2006: Chittor

My first port of call this morning was the Surajpol (Sun Gate) which faces east on the other side of the fort from the town. This side looks over a vast agricultural plain which rises up to a long ridge running parallel to the fort. I presume this is part of the Aravalli range, but I didn’t confirm this. In the morning the views were rather hazy, but when I returned at four, the clarity was exceptional and the colours – greens, browns and yellows – were vivid. Towards the northern end of this view is a rather hellish-looking industrial plant and a large kind of quarry. The latter’s aesthetic unappealingness is mitigated by the reassuring human tableau spread across it – boys playing cricket on a flat part, women in saris walking through with baskets on their heads, and even a couple of tiny temples, allowing the quarry workers to get the day off to a religious start.

"A vast agricultural plain"

   Near Surajpol is a smaller version of the Tower of Victory called the Kirthi Stambha (Tower of Fame) which actually dates from the 12th Century, earlier than the Jaya Stambha. It is a Jain monument, specifically Digambara, and is covered with carvings of naked thirtankaras of various sizes and postures. Next to the tower is a Jain temple with erotica similar to that of Mokal Singh’s Samideshwar temple, which I re-visited later and was struck anew by the astonishing beauty and profusion of the carvings round the outside.

Detail from Jain Temple

   At the northern end of the fort I visited the palace of Ratan Singh II, the son of Maharana Sanga, and brother of Udai. It’s quite impressive, although less interesting than Kumbha’s palace, maybe in part because Ratan II was a fairly nondescript ruler by all accounts (or lack of them) who only ruled for four years (1527-1531) according to Brian Masters. His other brother was Vikramaditya who is made out to be a bit of a loser. It was he who was on the throne during the second siege of Chittor in 1535. He was later killed by the anti-hero Bunbirs, from whom Panna Dai shielded baby Udai by substituting her own baby.
   The walk from Ratan’s palace to the main part of the fort took me through a village that is entirely contained within the fort. This was an enlightening walk, as it was probably the closest I could come to imagining what life may have been like inside the fort, which we must remember was a city, not just a palace. Some things, like women preparing food or men sitting around chatting, probably haven’t changed much. There are several temples here, none particularly impressive but all very much in use. At any rate, I felt a faint resonance with the past. I felt a less faint pang of hunger, and luckily I managed to strike up with four young men who invited me into a house and fed me delicious roti and cold but flavoursome dal. Fortified by these I walked right down to the southern portion of the fort, where there are a few relics – a temple tank and a putative coronation ground – of the pre-Rajput past when the fort was occupied by the Mauryas. Historical resonances were elusive here, but there is something satisfying to be in a place that you know has a substantial history.
   There is a strange, neglected Muslim tomb quite near here, supposedly belonging to a man nine yards high and infatuated with a Maurya princess. The tomb is certainly substantially longer than normal tombs. Every Hindu fort I’ve been to has had a Muslim shrine or tomb in it. I wonder whether this is a coincidence or a particular tradition.
   I am glad to have seen Chittor, not only because it is so damn impressive and filled with interesting and beautiful structures. Years after the final sack of Chittor and final women’s jauhar, the new Mughal Emperor Jehangir agreed to return the fort to the Maharanas of Mewar, now ruling from Udaipur, on the condition that it was never re-occupied. So it is that Chittor has turned into a museum, dead as a doornail except in the case of certain temples and the still-inhabited village. But for anyone who wants to understand the background of Udaipur it is a vital museum, and long may the Tourist Board of Rajasthan preserve it!



Next Post - Wednesday 13th December 2006: Delwara (will be posted Tuesday 13th December 2011)

Saturday 9th December 2006: Chittor

No long rants today. As anticipated, I’m in the venerable old fort town of Chittor, or Chittorgarh – the garh means house or fort, and the ‘Chittor’ component apparently stems from Chitrangar Maurya who is supposed to have founded the fort, back in the murky, undocumented past. In the cold light of substantiated fact, it seems to be accepted that there has been a fort at Chittor since the time of the Mauryas, which could well mean BCE, but certainly none of the present fort, save perhaps a temple tank here and a crumbling ruin there, dates from this sort of antiquity.

 Chittorgarh

   It is not my intention to write a historical study here, although somebody ought to do some serious research into the subject, as Chittor’s history is confused, largely anecdotal and, being Rajasthan, heavily romanticised. I must say, though, that exploring the fort after having read Maharana was a real pleasure. It was wonderful to traipse around the fantastic ruins of Maharana Kumbha’s palace while knowing that Kumbha was a sort of Rajasthani Lorenzo da Medici back in the 15th Century, and that maybe one of the higher up rooms in the palace was the site of nurse Panna’s great sacrifice. According to legend, a dastardly pretender to the throne, Bunbirs, had reached Chittor intending to slaughter the baby heir, Udai. Udai’s nurse, in a display of extraordinary loyalty to the princely family, replaced Udai with her own baby (conveniently the same age) so that Udai escaped death, and later in his career founded Udaipur. Bunbirs’ sole material contribution to posterity, on the other hand, seems to be an incomplete inner fort wall. It was also wonderful to know the significance of the Jaya Stambha (Tower of Victory) built by Kumbha after defeating, and later magnanimously releasing, a Muslim adversary (the Sultan of Malwa? There seems to be some disagreement as to his identity). It is supposedly an “architectural dictionary” of Hinduism, which also includes references to India’s other religions. It is an impressive structure and has beautiful views over the fort, but all I could decipher on the dictionary front were a few of Vishnu’s avatars. [16]

 Jaya Stambha

Detail from the Samideshwar Temple

   There are lots of temples in the fort, Hindu and Jain, many intricately carved and some surprisingly erotic in nature such as the Samideshwar temple, famously restored by Maharana Mokal Singh (Kumbha’s father) in 1427, which features a plethora of nubile dancing girls, from whom time’s cruel hands (as Kailash would say) have snatched limbs, heads, breasts and hands.
   One thing that is particularly striking – and this is something I have noticed time and time again in India in various ways – is that the fort, while technically “dead” since Akbar sacked it in 1567, it is in many respects still living. People still live inside the fort, and I don’t think this is just people in the tourist business as there are signs of agriculture. Moreover, many of the temples are still pilgrimage sites and have attracted the kitsch trappings of modern Hinduism – stalls selling snacks and coconuts and garish memorabilia, iconography and Shiva-knows what else. One temple is now associated with the mystic poet-musician Meerabai. She was a devotee of Krishna and married Rana Sanga’s son who died before his father, leaving Meerabai as a maltreated widow who was forced swallow poison (possibly connected with the second sack of Chittor at the hands of Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat and his Portuguese forces) but miraculously survived. Her temple has attracted a cult following. At the entrance to the temple was a sign outlining the various services offered to Meerabai devotees, exhorting them to give generously. There was some brash, almost African-sounding music coming from inside the temple – apparently Meerabai’s music – to which an old woman was half-heartedly banging some tinkling cymbals together while next to her a boy, maybe her grandson, was doing his homework. There is also a Jain dharamsala, where I was fed some delicious halwa and puris.
   Another thing that makes the fort special is its location, high on a hill above the city. There are consequently glorious views – the old town a jumble of small square houses, white, blue and green, and the modern part sprawling out in all directions. What amazes me in this kind of situation is the degree to which noise, like traffic, shouting and canned music, travels up to you as you look down on the sources, but then disappears immediately you move away from the edge.
   Moving back into the interior of the fort, and well back into the 2nd millennium AD, I visited the reconstructed water palace of Padmini, the beautiful Sri Lankan bride of Ratan Singh, who presided over Chittor during the first of its three sieges, in this case at the hands of Ala-ud-din Khalji, Sultan of Delhi in 1303. So taken was the Sultan by Padmini’s beauty, argues Brian Masters, that he offered to lift the siege in exchange for possession of her body. Ratan received the suggestion with righteous Rajput indignation, but eventually agreed to allow Ala-ud-din to look at her from a nearby vantage point through an elaborate set-up involving a mirror. This gentleman’s agreement turned out to be a ruse on the Sultan’s part, and he used the opportunity to seize Ratan as a captive. The terms of release were simple: hand over Padmini. The story now assumes opera-plot complexity - Padmini agrees to submit to Sultan Ala-ud-din but insists on being accompanied by her retinue of purdah-screened woman, and as Ratan bids his spouse a final, tearful farewell, the purdah curtains open to reveal an army of Rajput soldiers. A desperate battle ensues, with an initial victory to the Rajputs. Ala-ud-din retreats, humiliated, but darkly plotting to renew the attack. Ratan, naturally, is plagued by awful visions and sends each of his sons out to fight to the death, believing this to be the only way of preserving his supremacy over Chittor. The final scene is a heroic jauhar (mass suicide) of Rajput men and women who realised that it was, realistically, only a matter of time before Ala-ud-din would conquer Chittor. The women threw themselves and their children onto a vast funeral pyre and their husbands smeared themselves with their wives’ ashes and went out on one last reckless assault on the enemy. Ala-ud-din’s army won  hands down, but the Sultan received the ultimate humiliation of inheriting a ghost town and of being unable to increase his harem by even one iota. Nevertheless, he added Chittor to his empire, and it was only in 1326 that Rajputs, under Maharana Hamir Singh, were able to wrestle it out of his control.
   I left off my explorations at the water palace and so I will break off now. I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow. One small postscript: I wrote the preceding pages over two cups of deliciously sweet Indian coffee in “Dhoom”, the shack-like restaurant next to my hotel. I’ve now come back to my room to be reminded how grotty it is. Somebody in a room nearby has a “March of the Toreadors” ringtone, which will seriously impinge on my mental well-being if it is allowed to continue much longer. But I don’t mind it all, because it represents freedom, independence, exploration!

Footnotes

[16] Vishnu, the preserver, came down to earth not once, but numerous times, whenever mankind was in trouble. There are ten principal avatars (incarnations) including a fish, a tortoise, a man-lion, the epic hero Rama and Krishna, the greatest of all. Some Hindus include the Buddha as one of the ten incarnations, and all are agreed that the tenth, Kalki, is yet to come.

Next Post - Sunday 10th December 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Saturday 10th December 2011)

Friday 8th December 2006: Udaipur

My international development career is looking up once more! I visited the Education Department yesterday morning, hardly any great feat considering it occupies a room in the guesthouse on the same floor as the dormitories.  The department is headed by a cross-looking lady with a pretty face called Chandrika, whose glasses and teacherly mien radiate an academic air. We have encountered each other on the guesthouse stairs before and she greeted me familiarly, seemingly unsurprised at my errand. She got down to brass tacks quickly and told me that there was scope for me to do some work with a Youth Resource Centre in a little town called Delwara. Delwara I know by reputation already, as it is something of a Vikas Samiti flagship, with many different projects operating there. I have also heard that it has an ethnically heterogenous population - different castes, different religions - which is a huge attraction for me after the homogeneity of Maal. A Youth Resource Centre or YRC, as far as I can gather, is exactly what it sounds like - a centre providing resources for youths. I suppose it is open to all the youths of Delwara and perhaps nearby villages, and the resources include games, books and even a computer.
  The brief is typically vague: to spend some time considering livelihoods for youths. Delwara, apparently, has a growing unemployment problem, and one of the functions of the YRC is to advise, encourage and empower young people in their search for meaningful employment. My role will be to investigate possible sources of livelihood in and around Delwara, and to assist the YRC in whatever action is required to bridge the gap between youth and livelihood. If I sound glib, it is merely a symptom of utter bewilderment. The ethos of the project is noble, providing that it does not degenerate into the kind of basket-making fest I described on November 24th, but the mechanics of it are totally mysterious. I accepted the project gladly, nevertheless (I am a beggar here, after all) and hurried over to break the glad tidings to Sumita, in some trepidation as to her reaction. As it happened she seemed quite relieved not to have to make any arrangements herself, and our discussion could be described, at a pinch, as borderline amicable.
   The project has not really got underway yet, and my only contribution so far has been to attend a general meeting today where staff from all six of Vikas Samiti’s YRCs issued Chandrika with a progress report and discussed future plans. They are a young bunch, and appear to come predominantly from lower-middle class backgrounds, most speaking limited English. In contrast, Chandrika, in her early thirties, comes over as a faintly harassed urban sophisticate and exerts a firm but benign authority over the group.
   The meeting was in Hindi and I was not able to follow much of it. As is customary, the discussion was liberally peppered with English words and expressions and the occasional sentence. In the middle of a heated Hindi dialogue, Chandrika suddenly exclaimed “You are living in a fool’s paradise!” and I was relieved that none of the English volunteers were with me, as the inevitable sidelong glances might easily have developed into a protracted struggle with rising hysteria. After half an hour I began to drift a little and was brought back to attention with a start when I heard my name mentioned. Chandrika introduced me to the shy young man to my right who turned out to be in charge of the Delwara YRC. His name sounds like Hedda, although I doubt he is named after Ibsen’s heroine. We have arranged that I will take a bus into Delwara on Monday morning so he can show me whatever it is that constitutes the ropes.
   Before this, however, I am going on a romantic mini-break - alone. The romance will arise entirely from the surroundings, and solitude is therefore a pre-requisite. I am going to Chittor, the venerable old fort town that served as the capital of Mewar until the battle of Haldi Ghati that Prakash and I had our differences of opinion over. I am thrilled at the prospect of rambling around the by all accounts spectacular fort at my own pace, with Brian Masters’ book as my guide. I am also desperate to escape Udaipur and everybody here for just one night and Chittor seems like the perfect balm for my cabin fever. I have been a little churlish and kept my trip a secret, as the alternatives - either having to be brutally firm with anybody who asks to come with me or being lumbered with an unwanted companion, however delightful, witty and intelligent - fill me with mild dread. I hasten to add that I am not quite conceited enough to assume that everybody would regard a trip with me to Chittor as a fantasy weekend away. I think, however, that I am not being totally unrealistic in imagining that a few people might express a mild interest in this trip. So I shall creep out early tomorrow - a one-man elopement - and indulge my Rajput fantasies for a glorious couple of days. I can’t wait!


Next Post - Saturday 9th December 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Friday 9th December 2011)

Wednesday 6th December 2006: Udaipur

Yes, but who is that 9% growth benefiting? Today my reading has taken an economic turn and I have primarily been tackling some of the work of Vandana Shiva. According to Ellen, she is famous primarly for being a raging eco-feminist, although the books I’ve been looking at – Stolen Harvest and a book she co-edited called Sustainable Agriculture, Food Security and Globalisation – deal more with agriculture and its relationship with global market economics.
   Her focus and, by and large, that of her co-authors, is passionate anti-globalisation. She argues that the “neo-liberal” policies of free trade, open borders and unregulated market economy are ruining people’s livelihoods and destroying the environment. The main culprits she names are the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), large corporations such as Monsanto and Cargill and, in a sense, Western governments themselves. No! Not “Western”, but “Northern”, which in today’s lingo means the rich end of the world, as opposed to the poor, tropical, developing world of rural economies and banana republics called the “South”.
   The IMF she blames for imposing “Structural Adjustment Policies” (SAPs) on developing countries as the condition attached to monetary loans. These SAPs tend to promote agriculture for exports, so India is now being pushed into turning swaths of land over to the production of meat, flowers and shrimps, squeezing farmers off their land, often with only the sketchiest attempt at seeking their agreement. In return, farmers are given lump sum financial compensations, which hardly constitute food security, however that controversial term is interpreted. Ironically, in many cases the costs incurred by these large-scale shifts in land use are not recovered by the miracle export industry that replaces traditional farming. For example, the returns on the Indian shrimp industry recently were only a quarter of the costs incurred, although I must confess here to being very vague about how these costs and returns are calculated, or even what they mean in terms of money and ownership.
   Northern governments are accused of exploiting loopholes in the partly drafted WTO Agreement on Agriculture, so that while they are cutting their subsidies overall, they are actually increasing subsidies for some crops. So we still have situations such as that of Ghana, which despite having one of the best tomato-growing climates in the world ends up importing heavily subsidised Italian tomatoes that sell dirt cheap in the Ghanaian market, outcompeting Ghanaian tomatoes and pushing local tomato growers into poverty. Or that of EU maize that is imported to Kenya, selling far cheaper than local maize. This is the much-maligned practice of crop dumping which the WTO is supposedly trying to target, but ironically seems to be indirectly promoting!
   As for Monsanto, Calgene, RiceTec and the rest of the carnival of the agribusiness giants, this is where Shiva really grinds her axe. As a result of so-called TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) which stem in part from the Uruguay Round of talks that led to the formation of the WTO, these corporations have patented seeds and plants as their own, thus forcing farmers to depend on them for life itself!
  There’s much, much more. The overarching message of Shiva’s writings is that economic “growth” is a myth because it is always a result of theft. Theft of small farmer’s livelihoods or theft from nature. Kristen Dawkins, who wrote a good chapter in Sustainable Agriculture, Food Security and Globalisation also talks about the “externalisation of costs” other than basic monetary costs when making these calculations that reveal “growth”. Meaning that cost in terms of the environment and human development are ignored, so what looks like growth on paper may have a huge “invisible” cost, turning the idea of growth into a mockery.
   My knowledge of economy, ecology and agriculture is far too limited to make a really balanced judgement about all this, much less a dispassionate, scholarly report. So far I haven’t read much from the other camp except a brief browse on the WTO website and a few World Bank publications, where strong commitments to human development and environmental protection are, of course, championed.
  I had an interesting argument about this with Prakash, who is very much on the side of trade liberalisation and has little truck with the likes of Vandana Shiva.  I enjoy our arguments, as they can get very heated but always remain good-natured and stimulating, and I learn a lot from his world view. He a passionate advocate of globalisation and insists that if it is embraced fully, economic growth in a country will always eventually reach the bottom rungs of society. It is only when a country like India tries to leap onto the globalist bandwagon while maintaining a cautious grasp on the gateposts of protectionism and state intervention that problems arise. Supposing, for argument’s sake, that the “trickle down effect” (a country’s economic gains passing down to the lowest strata of society) does work, I want to know what we are supposed to do with the poorest communities until they feel its effects? Is there any way of promoting localisation – often presented rather vaguely as a panacaea e.g. by Helena Norberg-Hodge – and resisting the worst excesses of the corporate neo-liberal economy, so as to tide over the vast underbelly of the world’s poor until the fruits of the free market reach them? Here my lack of concrete knowledge prevents this debate from becoming anything more than a bit of hand-waving and hot air.

*

I’ve just had an interruption from Priya. Since our near-row, our friendship has developed and we regard each other with a new respect. She has just been telling me that her diary is her sole confidante. She talks to people but does not “share” with them. She made the comparison with Amir, who now thinks they are great friends because he confides in her a lot. In reality he is annoying her with his constant phone calls and endless personal questions. Hence she is starting to avoid him. A sad playing-out of the fears he earlier described to me.

*

I made three attempts to speak to Sumita today, the first of which was unsuccessful simply because  she was not in her office. The second was skin-crawlingly embarassing. Coming out of the guesthouse, I saw Sumita and Zelda having chai with another woman in the canteen. With reckless abandon I walked over to them and said hello, accompanying it with an unnecessarily cheesy smile. Zelda smiled awkwardly, the mystery woman looked slightly shocked, and Sumita stared straight through me. None of them said a word to me, and as they resumed their conversation I realised that theirs was strictly a business chai. Meanwhile, I was left cringing in much the same way as you would on crossing the dance floor to chat up the hottie in the corner, losing your nerve and walking straight past, trying your best to pretend that you had only ever been interested in examining the fire exit. But I was at a dead end and had already gone too far to turn back, and in my confusion had no option but to buy a chai, and sit uncomfortably close to the power troika, ignoring them as studiously as I was being ignored. On the final attempt I managed to catch her alone at her desk, but she brushed me off with a curt comment that she was very busy and would be speaking to the education department in due course. The whole thing is frustrating, but at the same time I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to read more widely than I might otherwise have done, and the material is relevant enough to my work here for it not to feel too much like a guilty pleasure. Nevertheless, I have decided to go first thing tomorrow and speak to the head of the education department myself. I am a little worried that Sumita might regard this as insubordination and cause problems, but the spirits of the Cambridge Careers Advisors are haunting me with their urgent motto: “Be resourceful!”


Next Post - Friday 8th December 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 8th December 2011)

Tuesday 5th December 2006: Udaipur

As indeed I did. The performer was a Bombay singer called Pandit Rattan Mohan Sharma and the occasion was a yaadein, something like a memorial, for some prominent local figure. The Pandit’s performance centred round one main piece that lasted a tremendous fifty minutes and opened with  a unique mood of puzzled peace that was slowly and probingly explored during a long and absorbing mounting-up of intensity that was brought to a frenetic climax.
   Before this I had my first singing lesson with Madhu, Dr Nirmal Khandelwal’s daughter. The family live in an unostentatious modern flat in a quiet residential area near Fateh Sagar. The main room extends the length of the house and incorporates a lounge area with armchairs and a sofa, a dining room with a glass-topped table and a kitchen at the far end. A marble floor, partly covered with a selection of tasteful rugs, and a number of ornaments ranging from the elegant to the kitsch complete the scene. It is a typical middle class Indian home, cluttered but tidy and a little uncosy, as if aspiration has moved faster than imagination.
   Madhu herself is less girlish than I had imagined based on her brief performance the other night. In fact, her beautiful blue and purple sari, her rounded but not quite plump figure and her attractive, full face make her positively womanly. I would guess she is in her mid-twenties. She speaks highly articulate English in a clear, refined accent without the vigorous whining intonation common in upper-middle class girls of the bigger cities. We talked for a while about my previous experience of Indian vocal study and I told her about the wizened old crone who had put me through my paces four years ago with the rudiments of South Indian classical music. “She must have been a traditional teacher,” Madhu said with a smile. “You will find my approach is more modern.”
   As we waited for my fellow pupils, she set up the equipment for the lesson - an electronic tanpura (drone) and tabla (drum beat). A real tanpura is a long-necked instrument which is steadily plucked throughout a performance to give that quintessentially Indian drone sound that only the most unimaginative could fail to identify with a vast, heat-hazed panorama. The tabla, of course, is the classic Indian drum which, depending on how you strike it, can make a sound like the slapping monsoon rain or an indescribable scooping. To my mild chagrin, both instruments were replaced with unromantic white cubes.
   My colleagues turned out to be a brother and sister from Tamil Nadu, both bright-eyed and dark-skinned, around ten years’ old. We all sat cross-legged on a rug Madhu had laid out, and she switched on the electronic tanpura. Together we sang three long held notes - the first around Middle C, the next a fifth higher than that, and the last an octave above the first. “The lesson always starts this way,” explained Madhu in a serious voice. For the next half hour we focussed on Raag Bhairavi. To call a raag a scale or mode would be doing it an injustice, as it is something far more complex and subtle, but at the simplest level it can be treated in this way. Bhairavi does not correspond to a major or minor scale, as the second note is flattened, and the mood it conjures is, for me at least, one of desolation - a lone figure wondering round a bomb-scarred eastern city.
  We started off by singing the raag straight up and down many times, but gradually Madhu introduced more complicated patterns that became surprisingly difficult, especially as we sang using the Indian note names or swaras (Saa, Re, Ga, Ma, Paa, Dha, Ni) that I found hard to get my head around, even though I had encountered them before in the South. Hardest of all, Madhu started improvising long passages of alap, freestyle strings of notes that are used explore the raag and develop a mood in the early stages of a piece before the words come in. The boy Ajay, and to a lesser extent his sister, managed to repeat these back almost flawlessly, but I generally got stuck halfway to my embarrassment and Madhu’s amusement. “I think you are not yet used to this style of music, even despite having spent time studying in South India.”
   An elegant woman came in at this point and introduced herself as Madhu’s mother and offered me a cup of ginger tea. A little later Madhu’s brother and his wife, who are visiting from Bombay, came back from a shopping trip and finally Dr Nirmal Khandelwal himself came in, looking amused, but pleased to see me. We finished the lesson with a song, which Madhu called a saadra. Unfortunately I didn’t write down the words, and I can only remember the beginning, “Bhavani, dayani maha vaka vani” and on this all I can say is that Bhavani is a form of the goddess Parvati, consort of Shiva. Athough I didn’t notice him while we were singing, Madhu’s brother recorded our attempts on his phone and played it back afterwards to the great amusement of everybody.
   After the cantankerous Saraswati-Miss, my teacher in South India, Madhu seems like a breath of fresh air. Granted, she is didactic in her approach, and in her efforts to make the poor European boy understand the mysteries of Indian music she comes across as a little patronising, but so far I like her. I have arranged to go back next week for another lesson, and we will take it forward from there.

.

*

There has been no news about a new project today, and I deliberately haven’t yet pushed Sumita on this. I spent a long time this morning reading The Hindu, my favourite among the daily newspapers on offer in the Vikas Samiti library. For the last few days the paper has been full of debates about how to improve the lot of India’s Muslims, and a recent report by the specially-commissioned Sachar Committee shows that in almost all human development indices (such as education, health, government jobs) they are the most badly-off group in the country. Reservations are mentioned guardedly – the Sachar report talks of “multifarious measures including reservations” – although the main focus has been on direct development in the form of schools, policies regarding race-relations, special banks and other schemes.
  There are always stories about Dalits, the “untouchable” communities at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, especially since the massacre of a Dalit family in Khairlanji, Maharastra. For a long time after it happened, the incident was barely investigated or reported and when it did come to light it fuelled an explosion of indignation (mainly from the upper castes) about the callous neglect  of the lower castes by the media and the police. There have also been inter-caste riots in Madhya Pradesh after a statue of Bhimrao Ambedkar [15], the great Dalit lawyer and hero, was desecrated. I recently browsed a wonderful periodical called Dalit Voice, full of hellfire and brimstone and outrageous conspiracy theories. My favourite of these is a complicated mess of an argument to the effect that America is controlled by the Jews, who only care about draining its resources dry to feed Israel. America’s Jews, in turn, are under the thumb of their new found chums the “Jews of India” (not the real Jews of Bombay and Cochin, but the Brahmins) while forgetting it was these Aryan “Jews” who (apparently) gave Hitler his ideologies!
   Another questionable Dalit Voice gem reveals that, “Even as the white Western racist countries led by America have been making a song and dance of ‘aiding’ Africa which actually meant devastating the Blacks by spreading the dreaded disease of AIDS, China has been silently working to save the black continent from facing slow death.”
   Times are definitely exciting, economically as well as politically, and the most recent GDP figure shows a growth of 9% in the last quarter, a “mushrooming economy” as I described it in an e-mail to a friend earlier.

Footnotes



[15] Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956)  was from an “untouchable” caste, but managed to gain multiple law and economics degrees, including one at LSE. He became an indefatigable campaigner against the caste doctrine of Hinduism and converted to Buddhism. Through his own example he catalysed the conversion of numerous other Dalits to Buddhism.

Next Post - Wednesday 6th December 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Tuesday 6th December 2011)