Planes Trains and Automobiles
I've been comtemplating a great deal recently the differences between living in India and touring India.
Lately I've been doing quite a bit of road-tripping across the subcontinent and the trend will only continue with a few more big trips before I leave. Coming off of Kerala, and trying to stay in Chennai only a for a few week days at a time it is interesting how my feelings towards this country change when I am on the road.
Sure there are the puke covered seats, the croweded buses, the creepy men on trains, the devastatingly poor villages that fly by the windows, the cold showers and dirty hotel rooms, the touts, the annoying white people who seem to have too much respect for their cameras and too little respect for the Indian poeple around them. There is all of this but still, there is something about traveling that makes the ugliness of Chennai seem to slip off my shoulders.
I meet shy girls and their moms who politely want to practice their English on me. I meet Indians, men and women, who are so gracious about my stay in their country that they want to hear all about what I think of it, I meet people who help me with my stupid questions and sew up clothes for me at a bargain because they "know I'm from around here." I see insanely beautiful countryside juxtaposed against impossibly thin women and men working in rice paddies.
I hold sleeping children on my lap when the bus is too full for their mothers to hold them up and marvel at how much Indians, men and women, adore their children with abandon. I pass whole families on scooters and fathers stopping buses and standing protectively over their young daughters for them to pee on the side of the road. I see old Indian men and women touring their country for the first time with wonder and feel better about my own tourism. I see young Indian couples shyly holding hands for the first time in public on their vacations and realize how much is changing here before my very eyes.
Chennai is still as frustrating and unfriendly of a city as ever and India won't become clean or egalitarian over nigh. In living here it is easy to get bogged down in the corruption of everyday life, the poverty, the pointlessness of my work but in traveling, in traveling it becomes easier to realize all of the little things that are so captivating about this place and easier to still to be enjoy it.
Lately I've been doing quite a bit of road-tripping across the subcontinent and the trend will only continue with a few more big trips before I leave. Coming off of Kerala, and trying to stay in Chennai only a for a few week days at a time it is interesting how my feelings towards this country change when I am on the road.
Sure there are the puke covered seats, the croweded buses, the creepy men on trains, the devastatingly poor villages that fly by the windows, the cold showers and dirty hotel rooms, the touts, the annoying white people who seem to have too much respect for their cameras and too little respect for the Indian poeple around them. There is all of this but still, there is something about traveling that makes the ugliness of Chennai seem to slip off my shoulders.
I meet shy girls and their moms who politely want to practice their English on me. I meet Indians, men and women, who are so gracious about my stay in their country that they want to hear all about what I think of it, I meet people who help me with my stupid questions and sew up clothes for me at a bargain because they "know I'm from around here." I see insanely beautiful countryside juxtaposed against impossibly thin women and men working in rice paddies.
I hold sleeping children on my lap when the bus is too full for their mothers to hold them up and marvel at how much Indians, men and women, adore their children with abandon. I pass whole families on scooters and fathers stopping buses and standing protectively over their young daughters for them to pee on the side of the road. I see old Indian men and women touring their country for the first time with wonder and feel better about my own tourism. I see young Indian couples shyly holding hands for the first time in public on their vacations and realize how much is changing here before my very eyes.
Chennai is still as frustrating and unfriendly of a city as ever and India won't become clean or egalitarian over nigh. In living here it is easy to get bogged down in the corruption of everyday life, the poverty, the pointlessness of my work but in traveling, in traveling it becomes easier to realize all of the little things that are so captivating about this place and easier to still to be enjoy it.
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