My better half and I went to India and then spent a few days in Kathmandu in February and March. It was genuinely one of those adventures one rightly speaks of as a trip of a lifetime. Although, not really a holiday; since it took us several weeks to get over it.
Never been to the sub-continent before; people told me that was a mistake, and they were right! We travel several times a year, we have been to the United States – we went to Vegas for one notable anniversary, that was a surreal experience… – and Southern Africa, lots of places in Europe and if you are into Timeline 10/27/62 books you will know that, particularly in books 4 to 6, and again later in the series, some of the action takes place on Malta, which we visit once or twice most years. But India is something else!
Go there, people. Let the country open your eyes (although beware the air pollution in the cities). I think the expression ‘sensory overload’ is the operative phrase.
A telling memory. My wife and I were walking alone in a bazaar in Udaipur, typical tourists, obviously. We passed some young women sitting on the ground selling all manner of vegetables and spices. They were laughing, we waved and they laughed some more and…belatedly, we realised what the joke was. To them we were exotic aliens, albeit harmlessly, out of place and time. Methinks, it would do a lot of people in the West to stop and think about that. We constantly make the mistake of believing that we in the Developed World think we have all the answers (and the wisdom) but actually, I do not think we do. Mistakenly, we think that because we understand our own society – at least to some level – that we are wise, somehow above the vast majority of people on planet Earth who do not share our good fortune.
There are still places in India where a European might as well be a Martian, with as little cognisance or understanding of the reality of the lives of most of the people around them as one’s cat, back at home.
Elsewhere, we were struck by how eager people were to talk to us; to share their dreams and ambitions in the main, and of course, just to be friendly, because that is what comes naturally. We, exotic aliens, were not threats, but sources of information, insights notwithstanding how astonished we often were by the innate optimism of so many Indians, especially the younger, increasingly well-educated generation often in the face of what to us, seemed like crushing poverty.
There are more English-speakers in India than there are in the United States, Canada, Australasia and the British Isles combined, soon there will be as more under-thirty university graduates, too. That’s probably the only trick the Chinese have missed in the last fifty years.
China and India were the World’s great superpowers long before ‘the West’ supplanted them, and they will be again in the lifetimes of many of you, reading this this now. Although, probably – fingers crossed, I seem to be stumbling along quite well these days – not me, c’est la vie.
That is not going to be much fun for the United States, any more than the retreat from what was laughingly called ‘the Empire’ was for us Brits back in the day…
I tend to find that going on a long holiday means I come back with lots of ideas for new projects, or better ways of doing stuff already in hand. India was too over-powering, I got home exhausted and oddly, quite optimistic about things, mentally refreshed if not exactly hale and hearty. Only just got the last of the Delhi smog – I thought Agra was worse – out of my lungs several weeks later!