Incredible India

This blogging thing is not as easy as it sounds. One has to make time for it and I always find I have less hours in a day than I thought there were! Agh well. Enjoy this piece on my recent travel to India.

I worked myself up until I had an eczema outbreak on my forehead and chest. I was not looking forward to it. The last three times I had been to India I came back with some skin infection. And here was I getting myself sick before I even boarded the flight! The first time (2003 – Mumbai and Delhi), my 5 year old dreadlocks were infested with head lice and a fungus that the dermatologist simply ordered me to have a chis’kop (bald head)! The second time, (Bangalore - 2007), I sat in Dubai airport on my way back to Johannesburg, for five hours, scratching myself all over until a concerned observer pointed me to a chemist. I wrote a letter there and then to my Directors telling them I was not going back to India unless I was assured I would be put up in hotels where there were no goggas (creepy crawlies) of any kind. Of course I was dismissed as an upper caste Diva who just wasn’t suitable to work in an organization that supports poor people. I retorted that I had grown up in poverty and didn’t cherish being thrust back into it. I was ignored.

So here I was worried sick for my newly tended 3 year old dreadlocks. I was not fooled by the picture of my Delhi hotel which I found on the net. It all looked too swanky to be real. My organization of course doesn’t do swanky, ever, so this remained to be seen.
Travelling to Asia via Dubai has to be one of life’s little pleasures. Even in economy class, Emirates airlines are just absolutely amazing. Firstly they are always on time. And if they get delayed it’s never their fault, (no really, it’s true!). The seats in economy class are wide enough to fit people like me who normally struggle on other Asian airliners! The best part is the food and the movies. The first time I travelled on Emirates I kept skipping channels that I just never watched anything till we landed. I managed to catch up with all the current movies that I haven’t seen this year. New movies, not ten year old rehashes that a certain national carrier will show on the excruciating 18 hour voyage to New York.


Emirates serve real food, well cooked rice, (not some plasticky tasting half cooked substance on that alluded to national carrier), and really tasty curry dishes. On the Dubai-Delhi leg they had proper dhal and rotis! Talk about cultural sensitivity.
In between meals, one can get very tasty wraps with all kinds of fillings, plus so many drinks, little snacks, chocolate. Yes, unlike that carrier which only offers very dry biscuits, and some nameless yellow drink that tastes quite vile!

I arrived in Delhi 13 hours after leaving Joburg, in a very good mood. My cheerful mood continued as we disembarked into the brand spanking new Indira Ghandi International Airport. This was not the Delhi I remembered with a tiny little airport, characterized by pit latrines that left my jeans all wet when I tried to use one back in 2003. The new massive airport was completed in time for the Commonwealth Games of course. The arrivals hall is covered in a lush multi coloured carpet, (I worried about how they will keep it clean?). There are beautiful toilets where I could sit – yeah!



But some things don’t change so quickly. I could swear the same Dalit (previously known as “untouchable”) woman who I met inside the toilet is still there. Her face had been burnt, she told me back then, by an upper caste family when she went to fetch water from a water point that was reserved only for Brahmins. This woman literally “lives” in the toilet. She is paid a wage for cleaning the toilet, I assume. But she practically hangs around inside the toilet, hands you hand wipes, and for her pains gets some “tips” from toilet users. We greeted each other like long lost friends.

The division of Indian society into castes is something that I still can’t get my head around. Even having lived through and still experiencing racism in this part of the world, I still find myself completely defeated by the caste system. Not that the two systems are poles apart, but I still don’t even have the language to express how I feel each time. In 2003, I had come face to face with it, when the mother in law of one colleague whose home I visited, refused to serve me tea in her good china. She gave me the tin plate and tin cup reserved for the Dalits.
Maybe this is why on this trip I bonded so much with my fellow Dalits. On the third day of my visit I travelled to very remote villages in Tamil Nadu state to meet a Dalit movement which has been reclaiming its land taken by Brahmins in the 19th century. We swapped stories about land, what it means for women’s empowerment and what land rights struggles are going on in my region.
In Chennai city, I met a group of women who talked about life before the tsunami and after the tsunami. I told them about women’s experiences in my country before HIV and after HIV. “Every woman has their own tsunami”, one wise one reflected.

We talked about women’s stuff. Wherever I went, the women were completely fascinated by my dreadlocks, touching them, playing with their own hair wondering if they could “lock” it too. Everyone wanted a picture with my hair! We giggled about sex and sexuality. I was asked why I wore silver jewelry. As opposed to, I asked foolishly? Gold of course! All the women, regardless of where they were and their social circumstances were decked in gold; earrings, necklaces, one bangle amongst twenty plastic ones, nose rings. They all looked amazingly beautiful. I worried about how much they must have paid for it. But I fully understood, it doesn’t mean that if one is poor one must always look it. It was amazing how despite the differences, women’s experiences are similar, just a different geography and different nuances.

The biggest reason I keep going back to India has got to be the food. Indian food is the only one I can eat in its own country. Thai food is very overpowering in Thailand. And I was scared off Chinese food during the Beijing conference (1995), when I was asked to choose my own snake at the door of a very classy restaurant. I can eat Indian food five times a day. And I can eat everything that is put before me. It all tastes wonderful. It smells heavenly. Whether its “wej” or “non-wej”, (that’s veg or non-veg in Ind-lish), everything is just delish. I must confess though how ignorant I was about the sheer numbers of people in India who are vegetarian. I knew about the not eating beef part, but not vegetarians. Being the carnivore that I am, I was delightfully surprised to discover the very many ways in which one can cook vegetables. Of course they seem to have a lot more veggies over there not just the cabbage and carrots one tends to be stuck with in Southern Africa. The fruit on the sides of the road is big, juicy and not genetically modified. I threw the travel doctor’s advice out of the window and gorged.

I was struck by the abundance of food everywhere I went. Eating and or drinking is a constant exercise. Hardly would half an hour pass before I was offered chai, or biscuits, or juice, or chai, and more biscuits. These days I am a caffeine addict so I need strong coffee or cappuccino to get me going. Sorry wrong country I was told, we only have tea.
Strangely I had been in Brazil in April and I was in a tea phase, and I was told the same thing, wrong country, we don’t drink tea here. India has some of the best tea in the world. To enjoy it I soon learnt that I had to say, “tea please, and hot milk, separate- separate”. You have to say the separate twice, accompanied by that nice shake of the head, otherwise you will get very milky tea, with what must surely be a whole basin full of sugar! Even when I eventually got the coffee, I had to ask for separate-separate, so I could get the instant coffee, separate from the water, milk and the sugar and mix it myself. Not quite up to my Doppio Zero standard, but it served the purpose.

But even the best tasting food does get to you after a full week. So on day eight the sight of the big M on the side of the road elicited a huge yipeeee from my Brazilian colleague and I. Imagine our disappointment when we found out that donkeys would have to grow horns before even MacDonald’s could serve beef Macs in the heart of Hindu land, North India. Fair enough. We had to settle for Chicken Macs. Not the same thing.

That India is the new rising global power is visible everywhere. There is construction all over. Even at night, construction work goes on. From Delhi, to Bhopal to Chennai, the country is a giant work in progress. Roads, bridges, shopping malls, offices are going up. The hand of global capital hovers all around. So called international brand chain stores with their dime a dozen similar looking merchandise are taking over. Restaurant and hotel chains equally pollute the space. Young Indian yuppies dressed in the latest jeans under beautifully designed kurtas, sit with their laptops (made in India or China), in air conditioned shiny cafes, speaking like their “cousins” in South Africa in a mixture of Hindi or Tamil, and English.


India’s free media is a delight. Every night I went to bed in the wee hours hopping between channels. Such a pleasure to have so much choice – unlike my local so called cable where we are served warmed up movies and talk shows day after day. I even watched Bollywood movies in Hindi (I think it was Hindi) just for the fun of it. The most fascinating are the news channels. I enjoyed the fiery debates between very serious Marxists, and die hard neo-liberals. I was mesmerized by the quality of reporting and political analysis, from Obama’s visit to the unfolding land scandal in Maharashtra state.

As for my hotels and the goggas, well, this time it was different. I stayed in a two and half star lodge in Delhi and my bad back loved being on one of the firmest mattresses I have ever had. Bliss! In Chennai I was put up in a three and half star, with the whitest sheets that side of the Indian Ocean. This was the incredible India that they advertise on my small screen. I will be going back!