back from the subcontinent.

i got back from india in the early hours of monday morning, washed up at home, changed and took a cab straight to my brother's place for some long-awaited halo 2 goodness. oh and it was good. the good kind of goodness. the best kind of goodness.

i spent the last week in india visiting my relatives "before they all die" (in the words of my mother), but it really was much more fun that she made it out to be. i met my cousin (who recently got engaged, the poor lad) for the first time. he's a forensic scientist (like them csi chaps on the telly) from new york, and fittingly, he knows how every imaginable type of alcohol is made.

the flight there was uneventful, but these days, i guess that's a good thing. had a good laugh at air india's air safety guides, which remind me of the scene in fight club where tyler durden explains the function of oxygen masks. i explained his brilliant concept to my mother who then pointed out that i have, without fail, brought up morbid topics only moments before take-off only the last 2,293,183 times we have been in an airplane together. how touching. she remembers!

if there's any law that india rigidly follows, it's murphy's. right from the off, the immigration counter we were queuing up to was fated to be manned by the official who i knew had drawn the shortest straw that day. he really didn't want to be working at bleedin' two in the morning, that's for sure.

having been to india enough times, nothing there really surprises me anymore. so do not be afraid when you, as a tourist, land on indian soil and are immediately assailed by thousands of orange-turban-wearing indian men who ask you where you are going and offer to carry your luggage for you. no, they are not the courtesy brigade, nor are they street louts. they're porters of sorts and they probably drive taxis as well. they want to take you wherever you want to go, assuming you don't like to use those meter things and like to play number games (remember, the bigger the number, the better). even if you wave them away and take pre-arranged transport to your destination, some of them may still follow you. they may even follow you up to your room and stand outside, pretending not to be interested at all in your luggage. you may even have to resort to inviting them in for some tea and a good feel of your suitcase handle before they'll leave you in peace. they're harmless, but odd nevertheless. do not fear them. they can smell it.


hello to you too.

traffic in india is a wonderful thing to watch. that's precisely what you'll spend 95% of your time doing when you're stuck in it. watching. and waiting. and wondering. why. why the hell nobody is moving at all. then news filters through that the road ahead has been closed because some fancy-pants minister of state has landed so they've barricaded the road to the airport so that he can zoom off straight to the airport and catch the next flight back to the capital to sit down with his deputies and discuss why exactly there're so many complaints of jams in hyderabad when he visits that place every week and has never encountered any such problem.

which brings me to my next observation. upon hearing this news from the autorickshaw drivers up ahead, half of the drivers on the road proceed to cut right across the midsection of the road and head back the way they came. this particular road leads to a roundabout, which has no established direction of travel, so everyone makes a random guess at clockwise or anti-clockwise before hurtling through the junction and veering out at their desired exit. traffic in india is some sort of vehicular jaywalking. everyone has a permanently-issued god-given right-of-way which must be exercised by driving right into oncoming traffic. traffic lights and signboards (often proclaiming 'STOP') are obviously nothing more than suggestions. nobody curses or swears. driving is all done calmly, save for the constant horning that accompanies any sort of travel in india.

indian drivers have a habit of horning for everything. every bloody thing.

if you're behind a truck and you know it, sound your horn.
if you're making a turn and you know it, sound your horn.
if you're on a clear stretch of road and you know it and you really want to show it,
if you're an indian driver and you know it, sound your horn.

i hate to say this, but now i know why people from india speak so loudly.

but to give them credit where it is due, they are excellent drivers. driving an ambassador (imagine a car with the body frame of a zeppelin and the steering capacity of a doorknob) is no mean feat. indian drivers (we had two great chaps working for us for the duration of our stay) are adept at handling sharp corners and avoiding careless motorcyclists with an almost german-like mastery of machine. if you can drive in india, you can drive anywhere in the world. respect.


look up ahead laddies! it's the mystery machine!

my brother arrived a day later with his intimidating professional camera and a pair of sunglasses that would convince even a blind man with a paper bag over his head that we were tourists. so, looking foreign enough, we decided to venture out into the city and do follow our instincts. by which i mean shop. a lot of things in india are affordable to people like us who have the benefit of taking their sacred currency and dividing it by a large number like 25 to get our own dollar's worth. americans, because they started the war on terror and have the support of pakistan, india's perennial foes on the cricket pitch and once-beautiful lands of kashmir, have the benefit of dividing it by an even larger number, like 35, or even 40. i forget.

even indian cottage-industry wholesalers have to get their products made in vietnam and thailand these days. it's a sad thing, this global village.


the technicolour dreamshop.

clubbing in india has made me realise the value of zouk. zouk, i will never take you for granted ever again. you are precious, zouk, and i love you.

as much as a man can love an old warehouse.

my cousin and i found the vilest green sludge imaginable at one of the drainage outlets of a small lake used for recreation. the surface had caked in the heat to form this greenish-brown cracked layer. so we did what any scientific mind would have proposed when presented with such a discovery. i threw a large stone into the sludge and my cousin took a video clip of it. my only regret is that i cannot furnish my discerning audience with pictures of this miraculous substance we hailed as what might well have been the original primordial soup from which all life sprang forth. either that or it's the stuff that gave us the toxic avengers.

my father prohibited us from drinking straight from cans because he read somewhere that rats piss all over these cans in warehouses. which is quite a possibility. i wouldn't be surprised if the warehouse workers pissed all over these cans themselves.

young adults in india are never against a good ol' game of dumb charades. oh, and plenty of alcohol probably had a part to play in that equation. somewhere in there, it's always somewhere in there. anyway, i was the only sober one, so my team won. the usual suspects was a really good one. as was freddy vs jason which was hilarious to watch my brother act out, seeing as how nobody in his team had ever heard of the movie before. he thought they got it in the end and was leaping about in joy, when i asked my other cousin to repeat his guess, and he replied, 'fetty vs jason?' they just couldn't get it. you should've seen my brother's face.


everybody in india has a vespa.

the flight home was uneventful as well, apart from the strange looks i got from other passengers and air stewardesses. probably had something to do with the coffee-table-book-sized edition of the kamasutra i was carrying in a thin plastic bag. i'd picked it up as the airport as a wedding gift for my ex-general-paper teacher. it's on the 27th of this month. i'm going to present it to him unwrapped, in front of his father-in-law, on behalf of his old class. a kodak moment in the making.

stay tuned...