Munnar Pics

A little behind on these photos, but here are some shots of the landscape around Munnar - mountains and tea plantations.

009 in Udaipur

First post since we arrived in Rajasthan - no picture uploads yet, but I wanted to mention that we're here. We spent two days in Jaipur, which is full of extraordinary sights - Amber fort, the Hawa Mahal palace, the surreal Jantar Mantar observatory, and the Pink City - the old town, throbbing with activity and overflowing with color. We're very glad to have seen it but we were also very glad to leave after two days, as it's the most hassle-loaded, annoying place we've been in India thus far.

We're currently in Udaipur, an altogether more laid-back and lovely city, with white buildings tumbling down to a (somewhat dried-up) lake, multitudes of rooftop restaurants, and continuous showings of Octopussy, which was filmed here. Even our room number (noted in the post title) is on-theme. Our guesthouse here is the best we've had since we came to India, and it's going to be hard to leave, but we're off to Jodhpur tomorrow and then to Jaisalmer the day after that, from where we'll be doing as everyone else does and heading off for a camel safari. Will try to post some pics when we have a chance - our two weeks in the north of India are shaping up to be kind of a whirlwind...

Pub Culture, Bangalore

Cocktail at NASA, Bangalore

The parts of India that we've been in for the past few weeks don't serve alcohol (except occasionally discreetly in tea pots!) so we were quite excited about getting to Bangalore to sample the controversial "pub culture." On our first night we went to NASA, which is decked out like a glowing spaceship.

Later we found ourselves at Pub World, which, as the menu explains, is four kinds of bar all in one room. We particularly liked the description of the Wild West Saloon.


The next night we went to Guzzler's Inn. The only way I can describe it is to say that if someone built a toy town for kids to play with, this would be the town bar. It was somehow too shiny to be real.

It's hardly surprising that many of the bars where India's urban youth hang out are deliberate imitations of European and American bars and pubs, considering that "pub culture" is a recent development--traditional bars are strictly for men only. In fact, even in Bangalore's hyper-modern MG Road area, where we've seen far more women in jeans than saris compared to the rest of India, the vast majority of bar patrons are men. As a male and female couple, we were ushered directly into the "families only" area of each bar, a section that is separated from the rest of the bar, presumably to make women feel more comfortable in such a male dominated space. In NASA, we were the only "family" in the bar, while the main (men's) section was full, and in the other two bars there were only one or two other mixed gender groups, and no women unaccompanied by men.

It's interesting how gender and sexuality based oppressions play out in different cultures. Presumably in part because of the lack of women in bars in India, it's quite common and acceptable for men to hold hands, sit with their arms round each other, and dance together in a way that would certainly be regarded as sexual and therefore taboo in most straight bars in the West. In fact there's a hilarious/scary interview with Pramod Mutalik in Bangalore's daily paper, MidDAY, titled "Gays are safe on V-Day." In response to being asked whether the Sri Rama Sene will target gay and lesbian couples holding hands or exchanging gifts on Valentine's Day, Mutalik responds "How can we know they are lovers?" After having the concept of same sex relationships explained to him, he simply responds "Very crazy. I don't think it is natural," and then later, "We have to study the issue before reacting to this." Yikes.

Indian Urbanology

Neon sign, Bangalore

Being in Bangalore has served as a reminder that, as a rule, Western backpackers in Asia tend to avoid cities as much as possible. It's understandable, but kind of a shame nonetheless - especially, as I noted before, if you're genuinely looking for the "real" version of wherever you happen to be.

At any rate, I haven't posted about it yet, but when we were in Mumbai, Rachel and I had the opportunity to meet up for drinks and dinner with some wonderful people who are doing cutting-edge work on thinking through urban planning in India. Among their many projects, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove run the websites Urbanology.org and Airoots.org, which feature thoughtful and incisive analysis of urban design and community issues in a number of global cities including New York, but especially Mumbai. They've also constructed a wiki site for residents and allies of of residents in Dharavi, a very well-known slum in the heart of Bombay.

Dharavi has been attracting some attention lately as one of the settings for the film Slumdog Millionaire, but it has also been in the news because its continued existence has been in doubt, thanks to the proposed Dharavi Redevelopment Project. National Geographic recently featured a major article explaining Dharavi and the proposals for its redesign. It's a complicated issue in many respects - residents are in sore need of improved infrastructure and service delivery, yet at the same time many are not eager to leave behind a community that is highly functional in its own fashion.

Land in Mumbai is extraordinarily valuable - the city competes with Hong Kong and Singapore in terms of real estate costs, and it suffers from a serious housing shortage. Dharavi, moreover, is strategically located in the middle of city, very near the high-end commercial and residential district of Banda. The Maharashtra government and private developers have proposed to completely redevelop the area, moving long-term (but not newer) residents into apartment towers. The proposal has changed somewhat in response to criticism, and now may be off the table entirely on account of the financial crisis, but interest in the future of Dharavi will continue.

Rahul and Matias have written about the complexities of how a place like Dharavi is understood, in the course of explaining their own approach to the community as a "user-generated city":

The global media loves to work with the simplistic and highly problematic label of “slum”. City reporters, activists and non-governmental organizations also find the short-cut concept useful. Dharavi has often been pictured by the city’s media as a wasteland with barely standing temporary structures; an immense junkyard crowded with undernourished people hopelessly disconnected from the rest of the world, surviving on charity and pulling the whole city’s economy backward.

It is only recently, and in conjunction with informed local and global opinions that an alternative picture of Dharavi has begun to circulate. Where it appears as a developed urban area composed of distinct neighbourhoods, as a space where artisanship thrives, where commerce and business are the main defining moments of its landscape. Far from being depressed and isolated, the economy of Dharavi appears to be deep-rooted in the city and networked globally, with local goods being exported as far as Italy and Sweden.

Skepticism about the official DRP does not mean rejection of efforts to reimagine Dharavi - but it does mean emphasing continuity where appropriate, preserving that which should be preserved. For instance, in writing about the Dharavi streetscape, Rahul and Matias argue that rather than wiping the slate clean and imposing a new grid, planners should carefully take note of "a rich legacy of user-generated space patterns that are organically connected to the way people live and earn livelihoods."

These patterns are based on the principles of incremental development. In other words, they have evolved over time, over generations and through the absorption of new migration inflows, constant movement within and between neighbourhoods and through continuous class mobility.

It is our contention that these patterns of incremental development are embodied within the streetscapes of such localities. It is in the street that the genetic code of a habitat gets imprinted. They emerge as walking paths connecting markets, homes and nodes of transport hubs. As they evolve, accommodating cars and other forms of local transport, street bazaars, spaces for youngsters to hang-out, for children to play, for neighbours to exchange news and gossip, for people to shop and set-up shop, they follow the needs of the residents very directly. The signature of a neighbourhood is often a streetscape.

Ideally, slum redevelopment schemes should build upon the incremental logic that most slum histories embody. And a pragmatic way to do so would be by recognizing the street layout that has evolved within such habitats.

In the most simplistic analysis, you might say that this is Jane Jacobs applied to slum redevelopment in a modern Indian metropolis. In the larger sense, the analysis provides a snapshot of the complexities confronting those who approach urban planning issues with any degree of concern for what local residents think.

At any rate, as I said - we met Matias and Rahul and a few of their colleagues for a very convivial evening, giving us a chance to talk about Dharavi, Mumbai's Rent Law (worthy of a lengthy discussion in its own right), New York, and urban politics and design in general. We were very lucky to have the opportunity and it was generous of them to meet up with us, a couple of strangers fresh off the plane in a city they know very well.

Here in Bangalore we had another great conversation about urban India - which I'll talk about in another post.

Beware the Guardians of "Culture"

Pramod Muthalik, Valentine's Day Non-Appreciator

We didn't know it until later, but when Rachel and I had breakfast in Mangalore on January 19, we were next door to the scene of a crime - one that would turn out to be among the biggest domestic news stories during our time in India.

The previous day - a few hours prior to our arrival in town - a mob of "activists" from a Hindu extremist organization called the Sri Ram Sene had forced their way into Amnesia, a bar on Balmatty Road (Mangalore should not be confused with Bangalore, where we are now, though both are cities in Karnataka). In an act that the Sene's leader Pramod Muthalik later described to the press as a "spontaneous people's uprising" against something called "pub culture," the Sene thugs herded the bar's female patrons into the center of the room, beat and sexually molested a number of them, and attacked male patrons and bar staff who attempted to come to their defense.

The Sene - apparently a hitherto obscure fringe organization - followed up on their attack with a further series of nasty publicity stunts, including (allegedly) the abduction of the daughter of a member of Kerala's Legislative Assembly, the young woman having committed the sin of sitting next to a male Muslim friend on a bus, as well as a splashy threat to roam around Bangalore on Valentines Day, abducting and "forcibly marrying" couples who are found expressing affection (incidentally, it's interesting how in India, as in Thailand, Valentine's Day is seen as cutting edge and politically controversial). All in all, it's been a heady few weeks for Muthalik and his followers.

The Amnesia attact was not just an assault on middle class pub goers, but an exercise in enforcing a system of "social control" (the term is Muthalik's) of women that runs through every caste and class in India. This dynamic is well understood by liberal Indians, among whom there has been a considerable backlash against the Sene's actions - including the "Pink Chaddi" campaign, which encourages people to send women's underwear to Muthalik as a form of mocking protest. Press analysis - including, for instance, in The Hindu newspaper - has discussed how extremists like those in the Sene use the defense of "culture" as a weapon with which to control and oppress women and the poor - a practice that is of course not confined to India.

Still, not everybody seems to get it. An investigator from India's National Commission of Women (NCW) blamed the pub management and the female pub-goers themselves for the attack (though the NCW later distanced itself from her report). And the Karnataka state government, controlled by the Hindu nationalist BJP party, has bent over backwards to avoid a confrontation with the Sene, preferring instead to attack the media for "sensationalizing" the pub attack and other stories.

If history and tradition are the wells that nourish cultural conservatives and their radical cousins, India's right-wingers have a vastly deeper well from which to draw than do America's - making the task for India's progressives all the more difficult.

All this helps explain why I am so skeptical about the common travelers' obsession with finding the "real" India. I don't like the prejudices - however well-intentioned - lurking behind such sentiment, and I think it amounts to a denial of a country's capacity for progressive change.

And for all its extraordinary lines of continuity, India's history is full of enormous ruptures - social, political, technological, religious, and cultural. The changes are as constitutive of India as are the traditions.

The people who try hardest to deny this fact, in every era, are the ones with the most vested interest in pretending that things are as they have always been - and thus as they always will be. But even a modest interest in the prospects of the oppressed requires a willingness to accept that every country can, and must, change. It requires a certain tolerance for heresy, blasphemy, "watering down," confusing and upsetting debates over values and morality, experiments in political correctness and experiments in giving offense, urbanization, bastardization, bowdlerization, modernization, and even - sometimes - that old boogeyman, "Westernization."

Every place is a "real" place, because every place is a part of human reality - including the reality of change, for better and for worse. I think I finally understood this when we were living in Bangkok, which seemed so far away from whatever it was that was supposed to be "authentic" in Thai culture. Half the population of the country lived in Bangkok, I realized. If Bangkok is not the "real" Thailand, then half of Thailand is an illusion.

Ultimately, the ones living in an illusion are those who think that they can keep a lid on social change and the desire for emancipation. So here's wishing a very happy and kissy Valentine's day to Pramod Muthalik and the Sri Ram Sene - and if Rachel and I end up getting forcibly married on Saturday, I guess we'll just look at it as a chance to get hitched yet again.

Leaving Kerala

Malayalam graffiti, Fort Cochin

We've arrived in Bangalore after having spent more than two weeks in Kerala. I have to admit to a certain regret at leaving Kerala, even though I'm glad to be moving on. It's a laid back place, and despite the rolling blackouts (the result of a poor year for the state's hydroelectric power network), it seems to be fairly well put together. Some of that is no doubt attributable to Kerala's enviable human development indicators - while it's not a rich place, it has first-world standards of life expectancy and literacy, the result of policies pursued by the left-wing parties that have dominated the state government since Kerala was founded in the 1950s (it was born from the merger of the old Malayalam-speaking states of Kochi, Travancore, and Malabar, during India's post-independence reorganization along linguistic lines).

The leading party of the left-wing coalition is the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - not to be confused with the Communist Party of India, from which it split in 1964 in a dispute over China. The CPI(M) is not without its critics, and I don't pretend to know much about it, but Kerala has emerged in recent years as a model for those who observe that "development" should refer to something other than simple measures of GDP.

At any rate, it's election season in India (for the Lok Sabha, India's national parliament - not for state governments) and CPI(M) posters and banners are ubiquitous. I thought it was sort of interesting, in this day and age, to see the hammer and sickle displayed everywhere:


The script, in this picture and the one above, is for the Malayalam language of Kerala - which, to be politically incorrect, sounds really strange when spoken, but looks really cool on a banner or on a wall.

More from Bangalore and more pics of Kerala in coming days. We fly to Rajasthan on Saturday.

Panic in a speed boat, Munnar

In Munnar we happened to have a friend of a friend who works in government which meant we got all kinds of free perks, including a luxurious (by our standards!) room in a "government guesthouse" for 75 rupees ($1.50), a free driver to show us the sights, and a free speedboat ride! We were expecting the boat ride to be an opportunity to admire the scenery but the driver was more interested in speeding around corners and tipping the boat up on its side to scare us, at one point managing to get a hold of our camera and taking photos of us while doing so! At this point I was mainly concerned that he was going to drop our precious camera in the water and was trying to grab it back off him!

Kochi/Fort Cochin

When we arrived in Kochi, the guesthouse we wanted to stay at was full, but the owner, not wanting to turn away paying guests, unhesitatingly gave us the key to his late mother's room instead. There weren't actually sheets on the beds but there was a whole closet full of sheets so we just took our pick. There were also about twenty chairs and tables, a corner full of photos of the owner's mother, and a huge shrine featuring a 3D image of Jesus shooting lasers from his fingertips.



It was one of the weirder places we've stayed. The next morning we asked to move into a more normal room, not so much because we didn't like the room but because we didn't like the size of the spider we discovered in the room full of boxes that separated the bedroom from the bathroom!

Kochi (or specifically Fort Cochin, the area of the city that we stayed in) is a peaceful little town on the Kerala coast with lots of pretty European architecture and some picturesque (but not particularly effective as far as we could tell) Chinese fishing nets, which it's famous for. (Picture by Paul)



Walking around the town it felt more like Europe than India at times. We stayed a couple of nights before going up into the hills to Munnar.

Heading to Work in a Rice Paddy

Kerala backwaters, morning.

Backwaters Sunrise

Judging from our conversations with other travelers, I'm not the only one who took a million photos of the sunrise. I tried to restrain myself. Anyway, here are three.

Rachel in a Rice Paddy

In the backwaters.

On the Backwaters

Backwaters Church

As mentioned below, we rented a houseboat in Alleppey. It's a bit hard on the budget, but not too expensive really, and it makes for a great time. You head out on a boat that looks like a cross between a bamboo hut and the submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and cruise the backwaters of Kerala for a day. The backwaters are essentially a series of waterways connecting Kerala's villages like a road network.

Over the past decade or so, the trip has become a firm fixture on the tourist route. We debated whether or not it was weird to be on a trip that involved peering in on people's lifestyles, though at this point everyone's pretty much used to it. Actually, we regretted not staying around an extra day to do a canoe trip down some of the smaller canals. Still, the scenery is gorgeous and the atmosphere serene.

Our boat, tied up for the evening beside a rice paddy

At night you park on a lake and watch the sunset:

Photo by Rachel

The food is outstanding - traditional Keralite cuisine - rice, fish, vegetables, dal, flavored with cardomom and other spices.

Backwaters dinner. Not pictured: thousands of bugs.

And in the morning, the sunrise...

Astral Traveling in Varkala

We didn't see any aliens, but the view at sunset was pretty good anyway. I'm not sure how many people actually find spiritual transcendence at Varkala - it's a bit too much of a backpackers' ghetto, I'd think - but good waves and fresh seafood are enough for me.

Above two photos by Rachel

Greetings from Kumily

Unfortunately our ability to access the internet hasn't kept pace with our travels lately. We're now at an internet cafe in Kumily, a small town in the Western Ghat mountains of Kerala, near the Periyar wildlife preserve. And I forgot the USB cable, so no more photos today.

We do have a backlog of pics to post, though given the slow pace of Flickr uploads it could take weeks to get through everything. We'll do what we can later this week though.

As a quick summary: after Palolem, we took the train south, staying one night in Mangalore, a city whose charms, if any, escaped us. From there it was an overnight journey all the way down to Varkala, as Rachel describes below, for swimming in the swirling surf and seafood on the cliffs. From Varkala we went back north to Alleppey, the hub of the backwaters houseboat scene, and we dutifully rented a houseboat for a night and took roughly six thousand photos, the best two or three of which we'll post here at some point. After Alleppey was Fort Cochin, a Portuguese/Dutch colonial town in the former indepedent kingdom/princely state of Kochi. On the 3rd we went by bus up to Munnar, once a hill station in the "High Range of Travancore" (the same Western Ghats where we are now), which is now surrounded by atmospheric tea plantations; yesterday we had a gorgeous, winding bus ride through the mountains to Kumily, from where we plan to do some trips into the wildlife sanctuary. Periyar has a small tiger population, as well as wild elephants and all kinds of birds and monkeys (monkeys, incidentally, are a bit scary in person).

That's all much more interesting with photos, I know, so we'll update when we can with pictures and details on the trip so far.