India Calling.

It’s really tragic because I thought I would do all this blogging in India and I wrote just the one blog entry there (which was gorgeous by the way) and thanks to the perils of blackberry I lost the entire thing! I want to scream in anguish for each letter that I painstakingly pecked out on my blackberry and just the thought that I was praising that little evil device in my mind and saying how it was so much better than lugging a laptop all over India....aargh!
I do have some stupidity role to play in all of this but we won’t go there. Listen it’s my blog and I can do what I want to.

SO.
India. 6 weeks huh? Yep. Lovely. Aaaasum. Yip. Totally.

So much to say that I'm reduced to valley-inspired monosyllables. Sigh.
Let me try to vaguely recall the blog entry I wrote.
Well it was something about how lush and green India is and as my plane was landing in Chennai I was really shocked at how green it was. I was on my way to the lovely islands of the Andamans, specifically Havelock island, flying from Bombay (Mumbai, Bombay, Chennai, Madras, potato, potaaaato...I really can’t keep up anymore) Anyway I was gushing. I clearly remember a lot of gushing and a lot of thinking that I was such an idiot to just keep coming to India once a year, going straight to Pune where my family lives and then a courtesy trip to Bombay (that too mainly because its my port of embarkation and disembarkation) and basically never traveling anywhere else in India. They key in India, I've realized so late in life, is to get the hell out of the cities. I mean don’t get me wrong, I love each bustling, choked to the brim, wildly traffic jammed and polluted city with my dear life but oh life outside the cities is what India is really all about. Not the malls. Oh those damn malls. Don’t get me started on the malls.

Its the children playing, the little water buffalos, the rolling plains, the endless fields of sugarcane and wheat, the cute little chai stalls, the deep green rivers, the mango trees, the palm trees, the loud chirpy birds...oh I could go and on. Its all just so lovely. Yes I've lost my mind but I don’t want to go to India only to have my relatives take me to a mall. I mean I'm the biggest shopaholic I know (after Radhika) but I could go to Jersey Gardens just around the highway and get a pair of Guess jeans for just about one-tenth of the price you get them in India! Those fancy Indian malls are such a rip-off! Body Shop is twice as expensive in India! So there you have me shopping at Khadi Gram Udyog and everyone thinks I'm so not cool.
Anyway I traveled a lot this time around and I have made a vow to travel a whole lot more. I feel awful when I meet people around the world who are not Indian and have seen way more India than I have. There is so much to see and so little time. This time around I went to the Andaman Islands, Goa (ok I've been there before but it still counts as traveling) and from my post in Delhi, I went to Haridwar and Rishikesh. Ok its not an awful lot of traveling but not bad when you're spending a lot of time with family. Next time I am doing Rajasthan and Kerala. I'm dying to go to Kashmir as well. Leh and Ladakh is where it’s at.

India just shocks me each time. The malls are snazzier, the richer get richer and sadly the poorer get poorer. Or at least they seem poorer in the face of everything else thats going on around them. The restaurants are so fancy and absolutely packed to the brim any night of the week. Packed with all kinds of folks too. This isn’t the India I grew up in, the one where only the upper-middle and upper went to the few restaurants in town over the weekends, the one where clubs were only packed with the rich cool kids and their rich cool friends, the one where only a select few had cell phones and laptops, the one where traveling abroad was considered truly wow and exceptional. This new India is like another country. Everyone is the boss here and everyone has a cell phone at their disposal, everyone is connected and everyone is cool. Everyone who is anyone has lots of cash and is going to spend every last dime of it showing you how much cash they have. It’s an India that screams 'Let me show you what I've got. Can you handle this?'