Lessons Learnt from India

India’s taught me quite a few things and also put some others into perspective. Here’s a few things I wish I had know before coming here.

1. It is wise to practise evasive manoeuvres for oncoming traffic before arrival

I knew traffic would be bad, but thought this would be restricted to roads and that any risks I would take would be my responsibility. However, in Rajasthan, the vehicles don’t stick to just the roads. Here we have had to perfect the art of darting away from motorbikes and rickshaws that decide roads are just a little too dull. Incidentally, if you moan at anyone for nearly running you over on a pavement, they look either confused or as if you don’t exist.

Cat is now brilliant at anticipating when to dive and I have frequently looked around to find her hidden in the doorway waiting for the time it is safe to come out. I think her nerves are looking forward to a place with less danger to pedestrians.

2. It doesn’t matter how good a hotel is, if hotel owners don’t offer a discount (even the smallest amount) Cat won’t stay there

I’ve learnt since this trip just how important value is to Cat’s enjoyment of a hotel. The discount is just as important as the cleanliness of the room (unless it’s in Gorakhpur where we’d have paid anything for a non-bug infested room). In India, I’m sure she’d enjoy a £1 room that was pretty nasty more than a £20 that was incredibly clean and plush.

Initially I thought letting her take the lead in sourcing hotels was a good idea, but once they refused to negotiate this quickly became a bad idea. Our current hotel is perfectly nice: clean, comfortable and very pleasant, but initially written off because they stuck to the list price.

I admit this is unusual in India and many times you would think you are getting ripped off. However, when the list price is £6.80 it is hard to really believe there’s much room to discount. Yet, if they had given even a 50p discount, it would have changed the hotel in Cat’s mind from being simply ok to really good. I imagine if the list price was higher and they discounted to £6.80 it would have changed how she felt as well. Hotel owners take note.

3. Rules and huge additional charges only apply to those who are foreign

I’ve been brought up with a very clear political correctness radar that has meant the I have never even thought of treating non-British people differently. However, in India you are frequently reminded that you are foreign and that you must be treated differently. This isn’t a racist generalisation being made from a frustrated Brit being ripped off by rickshaw drivers (which is to be expected), this is Indian government policy.

Entry fee for monuments is a perfect example. To visit the Taj Mahal costs an Indian citizen 3% of what foreigners pay [Indian citizen 20 rupees (23p) whilst foreigners have to pay 750 rupees (£8.50)]. Mehrengarh Fort in Jodhpur is similar, but Indians only pay 8% of what foreigners do. It’s no surprise that when the government endorses charging foreigners more that rickshaw drivers, shop and hotel owners and tour operators choose to do the same.

Although the funniest example is the train network. Each time we get a train our passport and train ticket is checked several times over. However, we found today that Indian people are allowed to buy a seat and shove as many people as they like in it. This made our 3AC compartment very cramped when we were forced to squeeze 10 people into 8 seats.

The typical train conductor’s thoughts are: people getting seats when not buying ticket – fine; white people getting train – motive must be questioned. Interestingly, I’ve found it’s always my seat number that is questioned when there’s too many people for the amount of seats there are. I guess India is National Front Utopia.

4. Beware holy men

Apart from the odd Catholic Priest joke, I’ve always thought until India that holy men were honest pillars of the community. After all, how bad could a person devoted to God and religious morals be? Well in India, the answer is very bad. The list of scams in the Lonely Planet makes you think that these holy men are con-artists using religion as a way to legitimise extortion.

Holy men have now become synonymous with “lazy crook” as they do little work to steal your money and have perfected the art of emotional blackmail. They’re persistent bastards who will try to argue that you should give them money to bless your family and not offend a whole religion. It takes the piss even more when the going rate is 100 rupees (£1.14) per member of your immediate family (which adds up when you have a family as big as mine). I was faced with the choice of losing £5.70 or cursing my whole family. Being an atheist the choice was easy.

Later on in Pushkar we were accused of making a donation to the wrong box. This holy man accused us of giving to the government who will only use our money to build hospitals, schools and not give it to the private individuals in the city. It was an odd argument, but he wouldn’t let me look at a monkey for a minute more until he’d got his share; so I chose to not look at monkeys. So far I’m not popular with Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

The extortion here is something that Don Corleone would be proud of. Not even he could use God’s curses to make them rich.

5. Healthcare is unconventional

The title of this section is a bit of understatement. In Udaipur we stumbled upon a healer after Cat had a bad stomach from an awful curry. Immediately he took her inside and clicked her toes and within a short while it was gone. After this, Raju proceeded to diagnose Cat’s problems by looking at her hands.

I would normally see this kind of thing as a load of rubbish, but when he seemed to go beyond general conditions such as “bad bad” to more very specific ones, it seemed like he knew more than your average palm reader. He promised that his massage would in time heal Cat’s persistent bad neck and shoulders. Unfortunately, he had also diagnosed the cause to be a misaligned tailbone which was only fixed by “going through the bottom”. As you can imagine she immediately said no; however, what was more worrying was that there was a lot of people in his comments book who’d said yes….

6. Menus can take a long time to read

The majority of traveller restaurants have menus so long that they make War & Peace look like a short story. The rule of thumb is that a long menu serves crap food. However, sometimes you have little choice.

The worst so far was a pizza we ordered in Jodhpur. After getting a little bored of curries, we decided to have something different and went with something we thought was pretty hard to wreck. Unfortunately, what we were served with was a toasted congealed cream sandwich. I can’t remember ever having pizza topping stick like glue to everything before this meal and the less said about the taste the better. This wasn’t an isolated case as we’ve realised that non-Indian food tends to be crap. When it comes to food, stick to curries.