Holi Cow!

I’ll confess I’d never actually heard of Holi before I arrived in India. The Hindu ‘festival of colours’ seems to be celebrated by people throwing coloured powder at each other, and filling water pistols full of neon-tinged water, before randomly attacking all and sundry. That’s my kind of festival!

So, earlier this year (March to be precise) I was working in Delhi, and Holi was at the end of my first week’s work. I thought that I’d rely on my trusty friend Couch Surfing (there’ll be a LOT more articles about that in future, I’m becoming quite evangelical about it) to hook me up. And hook me up it did, with a festival called Holi Cow, at a ‘secret’ (it wasn’t really that secret) ‘farmhouse’ (it was in a more rural area, but I didn’t see any signs of an attached farm) in ‘Chatterpur’ (no need for brackets for that one).

Moooooooo

So I bought my ticket from a café coincidentally near work (handy!) and headed over there on Sunday. Mission 1. Finding it. Taxi drivers in Delhi seem to have a ‘best guess’ approach to navigation, and no matter what you ask them before you get in, they will always confirm that of course they know where they’re going, and then about ten minutes later confirm they’re actually lost and can you guide them. Certainly a phenomenon not unique to India that one. After we meandered aimlessly around rural Delhi for a while I cheated and got my phone out, activated the maps and GPS and guided us in. After a short and very chaotic queue I was given a wrist-band and a small, transparent, sealable plastic bag for my valuables and ushered into the grounds of the house. It took less than three seconds for somebody to smear my hair and face with what I am going to poetically describe as ‘purple stuff’.

Colour! Everywhere!

Welcome to Holi! For the following hours I wandered around talking to strangers, drinking, eating, listening to the live music that was on and all the while becoming more and more like Joseph, only he needed a jacket for all his colours, whereas mine were all over me. In your face Technicolor Dreamcoat!

There was a really fascinating mix of people there, locals (loose term here, I met people from all over India), travellers, short-term workers like myself, embassy staff, ex-pats, all with a common goal of letting their hair down and just having a plain old celebration – getting colourfully messy in the process. And speaking of the colours, I didn’t find out til afterwards that they are generally very toxic – are often lead or asbestos based (wait, did I say asbestos? Yes, I DID say asbestos…) and have been known to cause everything from renal failure to dermatitis to blindness. Oh. Never mind.

By the time the police came to break it up in the early evening, everybody was totally covered in these pinks, greens, reds, oranges, purples and silvers – and there’s something symbolically nice about that I think. Despite the broad number of nationalities represented, the number of different skin colours on display, basically everybody looked the same. And I think that’s a great message, because at the end of the day, heritage and culture and tradition is a wonderful thing, but behind it all is the people. We might look different, talk different languages, believe in different Gods (or none), have different hobbies, networks, jobs, dreams and expectations, but at the end of the day? People is people. Always have been, always will be. And that’s my take-home message d’jour.

Get That India!

Well, well, well.
Wellity, wellity, wellity.
Seems I haven't posted to my blog for a while. And I have much to share, dear reader, so sit back and enjoy/endure some updates. Topic: India.

Gratuitous use of Taj Mahal shot? Done! And only 39 words in...

If you're planning a trip to India, it's rather hard to know where to start. If you just look at it on a map, it is a massive place. Truly gigantic.

Fig 1. India vs Moon. True story*

Then you go. And come back. And then you realise that actually trying to write something about it is even harder than deciding where to go. If you've seen the "Incredible India" tourist board advert with the guy trying to write the postcard, well I feel exactly like him. I have literally hundreds of notes about tiny little things that happened when I was there that I wanted to write about. Lots of them I wrote on my phone. Some of them when I was drunk, so they say things like "Blog. REMEMBER THIS. Sikh guy in corner smoking. Nightclub. Lasers??" I'm not sure what that meant. Fortunately there were some that were more coherent. I'll try and fashion some of them into articles over the next few weeks...

Sikhs + lasers + beer + bhangra = AWWW YEAHH!!

So, I guess this post is about initial impressions. So, let's start easy. India is amazing. Hands down one of the most interesting, vibrant, exciting and just plain different places I've ever been. Great food, incredible culture and history, amazing people and beautiful scenery. Bustling cities, arid deserts, stunning tropical beaches, dizzyingly high mountains. Seems to be everything there, really.

I spent a lot of my time in a place called Gurgaon just outside Delhi. Twenty years ago I don't think there was much there, just a small satellite town of the sprawling metropolis that is New Delhi. But then it exploded into being a business district. Shiny steel and glass towers rise up from every corner, the building signage is like a who's who of international commerce. The local infrastructure is struggling to keep up – visibly straining under the pressure. Roads are congested, half-built, horns sound constantly, rikshaws ride the wrong way up pavements. Power outages are intermittent as the grid groans under peak-time surge, adding an almost daily blackout to daily routine. There are almost no street lights. The roads have more cracks and potholes than a 15 year old who works at McDonalds and is about equidistant from last and next (and infrequent) shower visits.

Gurgaon. That wonky building was where I worked. "Worked"

But despite all this, I liked it. You read a lot in the news about India being a 'booming economy this', 'next super-power that', but being somewhere like this, you can almost feel like it's happening right in front of your eyes. I'm fairly sure a new thirty storey building went up behind my back one day when I wasn't looking. Sneaky...

There's a rather new and swanky metro that connects Gurgaon with New Delhi proper, and it was comparable to riding similar systems in any other major city in the world. Air-conditioned, clean, frequent and cheap. Oh, and over-crowded. It was like rush-hour on the London Underground at times, but worse, and without the British penchant for organised queueing. Still, better than spending 2 hours sitting in traffic!

New Delhi itself? I'll confess, not a massive fan. Didn't see all that much of it (what with the working all day long, it was really only weekends I had to explore), but the best thing I think I did was stumble around Chandi Chowk, a huge network of narrow windy streets where every conceivable opening is a 'shop' (I use that term loosely), but people selling everything you can imagine. Everything. I saw about forty or fifty sellers in a row who sold nothing but glass beads used for making jewellery, hundreds of tinkers, some tailors (didn't see any soldiers or sailors in there though I'm afraid), welders, weighers, transporters, grocers. Riskhaws and bicycles everywhere. And cows. Many, many cows roaming the streets steadily, minding their own business for the most part, occasionally stopping to snack on some poor store-holder's livelihood. And although they did move steadily, when a one tonne cow is pushing you into a corner as an auto-rikshaw tries to squeeze past it, you'd better get out of the way quickly. Moo!

OK, I think writing this has given me some more clarity on what else I want to put down on paper to try and make some sense out of India. There'll have to be an article on cricket. On Holi. On trains, planes, automobiles, rikshaws, boats and bikes. On food. I think that'll do to begin with... watch this space, it's India shaped, and I'm going to try and fill in a few tiny little parts of it...

Sunset over Mumbai. Lovely.

*I originally thought this was a totally flippant comparison. It really isn't. The moon's diameter is about 3500km and the length of India, a shade over 3000km. So they're basically the same size.