Jen's Arrival

Merry Christmas.

I remained in India for Christmas despite all of my ex-pat friends escaping the country for the holidays. This was because I was expecting the delivery of a very special present due to arrive in Delhi on Christmas Eve. However, as India time doesn’t honour Christmas, Jen actually arrived on Christmas morning after having to stay overnight in Bombay - as Jet Airways decided to pretend her connecting flight didn’t exist.

Given hectic yuletide deadlines both Jen and I had not managed to plan much for her month in India. Last minute pleading with my corporate travel agent had secured accommodation and a driver for a week’s travel through Rajasthan, which coincided with my week off for the holidays. This was a boon as time in ‘the land of the Kings’ during this cooler season is definitely a worthwhile way to fill up a week.

Rajasthan is a state south of Delhi but still in the north-western corner of India. It neighbours Gujarat to the south and Pakistan to the west. Its regal translation derives from the many kingdoms that still govern the region, albeit through peaceful administration these days. However Rajasthan’s history tells a more bloodied story, a narration of unremitting wars and skirmishes between both adjacent territories and against northern India’s historical common enemy, the Moghuls. Rajasthan’s bellicose history has been fuelled by a thousand year entanglement of feuds between the Rajputs – a collection of warrior clans who take as their creed a code of honour that insists on a violent death on the battle field over the shame of surrender. Violent relations between warlords assured many Rajput the chance to discharge this honour, yet whether they were greeted by their ancestors in the promised eternal celestial brotherhood is another argument.

Continuous battle has left Rajasthan bristling with fortified cities surrounding often excessively vast citadels. Given most of the state is desert, these strongholds are constructed from the stone that abounds the environment – producing the effect of their garrisons seemingly rising from the sand, thus making it difficult to determine at which point the terrain stops and man’s effort begins.

While many of the region’s former occupants were soldiers, it must not be forgotten for whom these wars were being fought – for Rajasthan is the land of the maharajas. The balance of manpower leftover from war effort was applied to the construction of the most magical palaces, mausoleums and cenotaphs. The most beautiful and decadent of which can be found in ‘the City of Lakes’ – Udaipur.

Udaipur was the first city Jen and I visited. We flew there from Delhi and were met at the airport by Bundi – our driver for the duration of our stay in Rajasthan. A morning flight and short trip to our hotel allowed for a full afternoon of exploration. Udaipur is like many other Indian hamlets that paint the countryside. Narrow undulating streets bulge with merchants’ stalls hawking both life’s necessities and outrageous tourist fodder. Everything is overwhelmingly colourful. Possibly the most amazing and baffling peculiarity of desert living is the townsfolk’s ability to maintain their saris’ and turbans’ unblemished iridescence. The men and women match the desert surrounds with their darkened leathery skin, yet their clothing is so brilliantly luminous that one would think a washing detergent commercial is perpetually being shot.

Udaipur is thankfully a little less dusty than many cities, chiefly because much of it is comprised of lakes. Possibly for either security or fanciful extravagance, many of the city’s palaces are built on man-made islands within the lakes. The most central body of water is Lake Pichola, which houses the appropriately named Lake Palace. Upon sundown the palace is floodlit and provides an utterly romantic vista from any of the abundant rooftop restaurants that dot the riverbank. We had a dreamy sunset dinner from one of the rooftop tables of the Jagat Niwas Palace (severely recommended). For the remainder of our stay in Udaipur we simply strolled around the city’s palaces and temples, and avoided (when we could) the rabid street vendors that were fanatical in their wish to divorce us from our money.

Interesting discoveries:

• Reliving the tumultuous India acclimatisation process through Jen’s worry and wonder.
• Indians dressed as Santa are frightening – truly frightening.
• The colour of a Rajasthani turban is dictated by caste, marital status and occasion.

Administrative facts:

• Curry-o-meter: 62 consumed.
• Rajasthan’s population is almost 57 million. That’s almost 57 million people standing around in a desert.

Song of the moment:

Everyone’s a VIP to Someone, by The Go! Team.

Wedding Season

This past week I’ve managed to get myself to three more Indian weddings. Two Punjabi and a rare treat - a Jain wedding. The first two weddings were (in a roundabout way) due to Bobby’s connections, which extend to some absurdly wealthy industrialist families. He received an invitation to attend a marriage ceremony between two such families last weekend. As the wedding was touted to display a level of extravagance and fanfare unusually excessive even for India’s elites, Bobby decided it best to invite a number of ex-pats to witness the spectacle. Prameet, Bart (a Dutch colleague) and I made our way to Delhi’s most blue-ribbon neighbourhood to attend the ceremony. I had already missed many of the festivities prior to the big day, but was eager to witness the Departure of Barat (that part of the ceremony when the groom rides to the ceremonial house on horseback – accompanied by much trumpet blasting).

As is now all too commonplace, India time kicked in with typical mischievousness and delivered us to the assigned street four hours late. I was annoyed as I thought I’d missed my second Barat in as many weddings, so I was happily surprised when we turned into the street just as the 200 drummers begin pounding their skins. We jumped out of the car (seconds before it became stuck in the procession) and quickly joined the assembly of hundreds of jubilant family members and friends surrounding the groom. Not personally knowing either the bride or groom, I was initially content merely to participate as a background spectator. However after receiving free drinks and having a beautiful cashmere sequined scarf placed around my neck I soon discarded this role in favour of much more central one. We all joined the throng of spinning Indians in front of the horse – that was decorated with the most incredible golden saddle and robes. As the spinning and drumming reached fever pitch I realised that we hadn’t spotted Bobby anywhere – after all he had most likely arrived on time and was probably situated in a much more subdued part of the parade. I stepped out of the fracas to call him, and after several attempts (owing to just how thunderous 200 drummers can be) we managed the following conversation:

Rich: Where are you?

Bobby: In the pavilion, where are you?

Rich: In the procession, it’s fantastic!

Bobby: What procession? The Barat finished four hours ago.

Rich: Oh.

Bobby: You’re at the wrong wedding.

Indian weddings, as one can well imagine, are infused with many religious and cultural features. Accordingly, there are many factors that dictate when the optimal time for nuptials falls. Much of this has to do with the positions of various stars and planets, but practicalities also play a role – it’s currently a popular time to be hitched because of the mild climate. This leads to a concentration of weddings around this period, with the month of December known as ‘wedding season’. This aspect of Indian wedding tradition is relevant as it goes some way to explaining how we managed to crash the wrong wedding (or, actually, the right wedding given the freebies we were given). On that very night there were an estimated 36,000 ceremonies taking place in Delhi alone. Boggles the mind.

We sheepishly untangled our car from the procession and drove a little way down the road to the wedding we at least had a loose invitation to. It lived up to Bobby’s superlatives. We arrived for the reception, having missed all formalities. One of the family’s mansions had been transformed into an incredible Aladdin’s cave – complete with waterfalls of candlelight and thousands of curtains made from jasmine flowers threaded together. The bride was festooned with enough diamonds to start wars.

Later in the week many of us from the office attended Deepak’s wedding – a traditional Jain ceremony. Jainism emerged around the 16^th century and is quite closely aligned to Buddhism. As a consequence, they hold the title of the fussiest eaters of any culture. They are super-vegetarian, and are further restricted from eating root vegetables in case insects are hurt during cultivation (how did such religions respond to the discovery of micro-organisms?). Despite this, Deepak and his family laid on a fantastic banquet for approximately one billion guests. During our attendance, we witnessed a number of ceremonies, the purpose of each being hard to decipher. I wasn’t able to pinpoint the actual moment Deepak and Neha were officially married. There were exchanges of floral necklaces, fireworks, cheering, photos of the couple, but no actual moment when I could definitively conclude that a marriage had taken place. I left the wedding at midnight, and discovered the next day that they actually tied the knot at around three in the morning.

Interesting discoveries:

• Indians invited to weddings may not even acknowledge the ceremony – instead opting to linger around the buffet all night. This is totally acceptable, and the invited majority will do this.
• Wedding film crews love singling out foreigners. There were several large screens positioned around Deepak’s wedding and quite often I’d take a look at these only to find footage of me and the fellow white folk broadcast while engaged in typically banal activities – such as eating, or standing.

Administrative facts:

• Curry-o-meter: 49 consumed.
• There are over seven million Jains in India.
• The Fylfot is the most holy of Jain symbols – it’s also known as the swastika.
• The proportionate split of weddings by culture that I’ve now attended in my lifetime: Australian (17%), Jewish (17%), Indian (67%)

Song of the moment:

I Am The Walrus, by The Beatles.

Neha and Deepak

Wedding henna

Bridal party
Photos courtesy of my friend Kurt

Dhoom Macha Le!

Weeks of feverish anticipation finally paid off last night with my attending Dhoom 2, one of this year’s hottest Bollywood blockbusters. For over a month now I’ve almost combusted with excitement every time MTV has played a clip from one of the movie’s dance numbers. I bought the soundtrack a while ago and have become dizzy from overplay. I went with a friend from work, Karthik, who provided occasional but crucial interpretation of the dialogue. The film was astonishingly good and has secured a place in the pantheon of fantastic experiences so far from this odyssey. But before I further prostrate myself on Dhoom’s alter, some information on Bollywood…

The Hindi language film industry is prolific in its production of feature films, having pumped out roughly a thousand movies each year in the recent past. Most westerners will identify only the Bombay based segment of this industry which is popularly referred to as Bollywood. Most exported movies have their origins in Bombay, and all domestic box office juggernauts carry the Bollywood stamp.

Bollywood, and indeed the entire Hindi cinema industry, have several distinctive characteristics that quite markedly separate them from western film. To begin with, the industry is dominated by a few Bollywood family clans. This business is a nepotistic one, producing the effect of every single blockbuster made having only about a dozen megastars to choose from when assigning leading roles. And these guys are real megastars. Each commands a seven figure deal per movie which is on par with Hollywood, but each enjoys the adulation of a fan base a hundred times bigger than the States. The almost palindromic Bachchan family currently holds court among the megastars, with the Khan boys dominating among the younger movie going demographic. The leading man in each movie is referred to as a ‘hero’, and will always be paired off against a leading lady who holds equal supremacy in terms of star power.

Another possible reason for the scarcity of heroes and leading ladies is the immense spectrum of show business talent they must display on-screen. They must act, sing, dance and be disarmingly sexy. This dozen privileged silver screen luminaries have achieved such stratospheric stardom that their movies have become three hour glamour shoots, whereby plots and secondary cast merely facilitate situations in which they display as much flesh/pouts/muscular flexes as possible – and my God it’s breathtaking.

Perhaps the best recognised feature of Bollywood film is the inclusion of song and dance. Western audiences erroneously apply the ‘musical’ sobriquet to Bollywood flicks given the heroes’ propensity to burst into choreographed dancing and singing. This is only partially the case, as Indian audiences demand that each movie covers the entire gamut of film genres. As a consequence it’s unsurprising for plots to manufacture intense action scenes, powerful love stories, slapstick comedy and (of course) song and dance routines so extravagant that Olympic opening ceremonies look like school plays in comparison.

Dhoom 2 sticks to the formula and overwhelms the audience with three hours of phenomenal bombast and cinematic commotion. Creative use of gadgetry, weaponry and costume produce a series of events that includes impossibly precarious jewel heists and convoluted chase scenes involving helicopters, jet skis and rollerblades. Not to be outdone by the excessive action sequences, the film’s locations are equally remarkable – with most of the film shot in Bombay and Rio.

Of course the most impressive aspect of Dhoom 2 is the cast. The heroes are inflated with muscle and bravado, and the leading ladies smoulder with such breathtaking magnetism that they rival sirens for dangerous sensuality. Hrithik Roshan is Bollywood’s highest paid entertainer (as the term ‘actor’ would place an unfair limit on their requisite show business faculties) and heads up a troupe of Bollywood heavyweights. Hrithik resembles an amalgam of Sylvester Stallone and a robot designed to look like a perfect Sylvester Stallone. Interestingly he identifies Stallone as an inspiration. His body has been carved out of a gymnasium, and he wears a great bulwark of a jaw that could possibly stop bullets. He is extremely handsome and is a vigorous dancer.

Opposite Hrithik is Aishwarya Rai, a former Miss Universe and modern day Aphrodite. Ash, as she is affectionately known to her salivating fans, is painfully beautiful. She slides and salsas her way through the movie with such tantalising evocation that it seems she’s managed to weaponise lust and fire it directly into the pores of trembling movie goers. Despite the animal appeal of the leading cast, Bollywood movies do not include sex scenes. In fact, Dhoom 2 attracted controversy as it included Ash’s first ever on-screen kiss. Whatever Indian cinematic classification authority exists has entrenched an interesting double standard in a film’s licence to portray anything sexual in nature. On one hand, conservatism has won over the popular desire for steamy boudoir scenes; on the other, Bollywood has managed to thumb its nose at such traditionalist objections by incorporating almost volcanic displays of gyrating oiled flesh into each musical number. In the improbable case of Ash being insufficient for the ogling public, the producers of Dhoom 2 overcorrected brilliantly in casting Bipasha Basu (a former tiara holder of the excessively titled ‘Supermodel of the World’ contest) in not one but two character roles.

Interesting discoveries:

• A love for Bollywood film.
• Indian audiences will whistle, sing along, jabber into phones and dance at the front of the cinema – all while the movie plays.
• Hrithik Roshan has two thumbs on his right hand – one just grows out of the other. This can be seen quite clearly in many scenes throughout the movie, especially close ups of his handling a gun.
• One doesn’t need a grasp of Hindi to enjoy Bollywood. The plots are usually uncomplicated enough to follow, and important pieces of dialogue are usually delivered in English.
• For reasons still unknown to me, halfway through the movie Hrithik and Ash begin talking about Adam Gilchrist and the virtues of Australian opening batsmen – all while dressed in ninja suits and stealing the British Crown Jewels.
• Many Bollywood stars won’t actually sing their own songs, instead relying on back up singers.

Administrative facts:

• Curry-o-meter: 46 consumed.
• Bombay is the capital of Maharashtra, a western state that is second largest in terms of population (almost 100 million).

Song of the moment:

Crazy Kiya Re, from Dhoom 2 (surprised?)

Movie poster for Dhoom 2: Modest

Vignette number 2: India time

India believes in deadlines, but they are a much different concept to what other cultures may perceive them to be. Indian deadlines are tricky because they seem to be dictated more by emotion, hunger or happenstance than by time itself. There are possibly historical reasons why these folk are not able to stomach time as a non-spatial linear continuum. Whatever these reasons, their manifestation is apparent in the psyche of the country.

To begin with India, in its perversity, has only one time zone. Secondly, India is unfinished. It always has been, and presumably will remain this way. Consequently Indian historians were unable to draw any point of reference against which a periodic interval between events can be quantified. Doubtless at some point they just gave up trying (this point of course would be unknown to them), and the notion of punctuality was shot into oblivion.

Indians have added a few idiosyncrasies to their methods of dealing with time that are very successful in protecting their ignorance of it and confounding those who abide by it. When attempting to solicit a commitment to any time based request, one may find themselves utterly bamboozled by an Indian technique of gesticulation that allows a simultaneous delivery of both a nod and a shake of the head. The most plausible explanation for this is the Indian’s development of an additional rotational axis in their skulls that permits such an action. This is impressive to watch but maddening to receive.

In case this first line of defence fails and the recipient has managed to draw a conclusion from the exchange, then an Indian may conjure further befuddlement. This is usually in the form of a somewhat loose verbal acknowledgement that resembles ‘ok’ (itself a nebulous expression). Even in English this idiom’s function can range from assent to dismissal, yet the Hindi language has taken this concept and engineered it into at least three separate versions – all with minute but crucial differences in implication. It’s difficult to know exactly when one version is more appropriate than another – presumably it’s dictated by emotion, hunger or happenstance. Of course to an outsider it’s all gibberish, but extremely powerful in its capacity to screen an addressee from any semblance of an explicit answer on anything.

Of course, even if one manages to wring a time commitment from one of these folk, there is still no guarantee that it will transpire as decided. India time is a mechanism with a patchwork of inbuilt countermeasures designed to ensure that meetings are postponed, flights cancelled and any other rendezvous scuttled. With notable regard to any international arrangements made that include India, it also seems that India time has the ability to trump any other conflicting treatment of time.

India time is a phenomenon that Chronos himself would find impossible to straighten out. However it does have one redeeming feature – you’re never late for anything.

Vignette number 1: Trucks

An interesting thing happens to Indian roads shortly after midnight. The surge of hatchbacks and auto-rickshaws drains to allow the road’s more purposeful denizens to carry on their nocturnal journey. Given the chaos of India’s copious and profligate peak hours, it makes sense for trucks to occupy the roads in the dead of night. However sensible this may be, it does commit them to long voyages through an unlit country. In a defiant attempt to illuminate these otherwise blackened routes, each truck is painted in vividly fluorescent colours and garnished with streamers, tassels and other decorations. Some have psychedelic Buddhist glyphs splashed across their sides; others have indiscriminate advertisements fastened to them, the only criteria for the suitability of which seemingly the level of dazzle discharged. It’s an encouraging sight, and one that is a characteristic reflection of this country’s rambunctious spirit.

It is also a little eerie. Unlike the daytime Daytona produced by India’s usual commuting lunatics, these trucks – assembled into flotillas of up to one hundred - progress through the night almost at a snail’s pace, emitting a whale tone of one hundred low geared engines.

India’s growth is beheld in these trucks. Their payload is the lifeblood of a burgeoning economy, and as India sleeps these giant road centipedes ensure that factories are supplied, barges are filled and the produce of a billion people delivered – night after night.