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Bharatiya pradhikaran
Dec. 20th, 2005 06:38 pmI'm in that straight-up, blissed-out state of not having eaten in three days. India, in all its beautiful glory, is getting to me. Yesterday I met the illustrious leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party on a plane and threw up for the first time in sixteen years.
But I do, as always, get ahead of myself. I am now four weeks short of my nineteenth birthday. High time to be getting to know my own country, I think, but I remain as mystified and beguiled as ever. I arrived in Delhi on the morning of the seventh of December, having spent much of the previous day in Munich. I had never been to Germany and was firmly convinced that as I have the luxury of a European Union passport, I should take use of it and go and visit the city proper. After all, we had five hours to spare in the airport, and had I been travelling alone, as I so often am lately, my first move would have been to skip through customs and onto the S-Bahn. But I wasn't alone, I was with my mother, and by the time I'd finished arguing with her, and won, we now had three and a half hours to spare, which wasn't long enough.
Nevertheless, I insisted on going outside, and there was a beautiful Christmas market going on, with flowers and lights and Christmas trees and decorations, and even a tiny ice rink. Beautiful and much fun. Even my mother thought so, and we almost forgot for a while that we had an eight-hour long-haul still to go. But even so, I slept throughout the flight and only woke up as a ridiculously cultured voice informed me over the intercom, "Kripya dhyan dheejaye, hum Dilli paunchne waleya hai..."
Dilli - Delhi. I freaked. And metaphorically leapt to my feet frantically mustering glasses and bags and passports and visas. By the time we emerged into the airport, I was calm and serene, and my uncle, who is in the employ of Indian Airlines, got us through customs with the most perfect ease. He and his family live in Palam, the suburb of Delhi closest to the airport, and really, it all went well. It was early in the morning, a chilled, foggy morning of the sort you only get in December in Delhi, with the sort of cold that gets into your bones even though the sun still burns. I reached home and slept, soundly, until evening, at which point I half-heartedly picked at my rice and roti and then slept again until morning.
That day was the only day I spent in Delhi at that point. I filled it with my usual antics, reading and doing my maths and reading the English-language edition of the Times of India, one of my favourite newspapers in the world. My life's ambition, incidentally, is to competently read a Hindi-language newspaper. Whilst my knowledge of the language is not bad, it's household knowledge - I know words like "water" and "bed" and "table" and "sleep" and "food", whereas the newspapers and TV news demand that you know words like "government" and "disaster" and "corruption" and "earthquake". (I do know that last one, actually: it's buchaal.) In addition, while I can read Hindi, it's at a kindergarten level - slowly, sounding out the words as I go. When I was little, I was fascinated with reading signs and notices I saw in daily life, and I still have that fascination with any example of Devanagari script.
It's worth mentioning, though, that Hindi's purity as a language is pretty much long-lost. Words for complicated concepts in Hindi are mostly being forgotten in favour of transliterated English counterparts. As an example, I kept on reading the phrase "Bharatiya pradhikaran." The first word is of course "Indian" (the Hindi for India is Bharat), but no-one was able to tell me what the second word meant. At last, sheepishly, they all told me to tell them what the English translation on the sign was (all signs in India are in both Hindi and English, much like in Wales). It turns out it means "authority", and I'd been reading signs countersigned by the Airports Authority of India.
After only two days in Delhi, I caught another flight, this time to Ahemedabad, the biggest city in Gujarat. My mashi (Bengali for maternal aunt) is now living there with her husband, and has been after us to visit ever since she got married a couple of years ago. Gujarat was lovely, but more on that anon - I don't think I have time to write about my entire trip just now. So the long and involved story of how I ended up throwing up at the sight of the BJP leader will have to wait for a little while yet.
But before I go, a little more on India itself, which deserves more written about it, but I never feel I do it justice. Anyway, to begin, it's winter. Delhi is far colder than average, and while I think I know cold - scratch that, I do know cold - this is a world without central heating or hot water, and the cold gets into your blood. Ahmedabad and Silchar, in Assam, are desert heat and tropical heat respectively, and I've been to both those places too in the last ten days. India is like this, always; desert heat and bone-deep cold in the same country, the greenery, the wastes, the dirt and the sewage in the holiest, most venerated rivers on earth, the accumulated richness of centuries in Udaipur with filthy deformed beggars sprawled on the steps. It's trying so hard to develop, but the roads are lethal, the power cuts are frequent as ever - I do my writing by white-hot gaslight - and the government is a perfect model of representation with accusations of corruption and bomb threats sweeping through it in a space of a week.
I am ill, of course. I can't be writing sense. And I'm ready to go home. I fly on December 22nd, so a little while longer, and when I can, I'll write more.
But I do, as always, get ahead of myself. I am now four weeks short of my nineteenth birthday. High time to be getting to know my own country, I think, but I remain as mystified and beguiled as ever. I arrived in Delhi on the morning of the seventh of December, having spent much of the previous day in Munich. I had never been to Germany and was firmly convinced that as I have the luxury of a European Union passport, I should take use of it and go and visit the city proper. After all, we had five hours to spare in the airport, and had I been travelling alone, as I so often am lately, my first move would have been to skip through customs and onto the S-Bahn. But I wasn't alone, I was with my mother, and by the time I'd finished arguing with her, and won, we now had three and a half hours to spare, which wasn't long enough.
Nevertheless, I insisted on going outside, and there was a beautiful Christmas market going on, with flowers and lights and Christmas trees and decorations, and even a tiny ice rink. Beautiful and much fun. Even my mother thought so, and we almost forgot for a while that we had an eight-hour long-haul still to go. But even so, I slept throughout the flight and only woke up as a ridiculously cultured voice informed me over the intercom, "Kripya dhyan dheejaye, hum Dilli paunchne waleya hai..."
Dilli - Delhi. I freaked. And metaphorically leapt to my feet frantically mustering glasses and bags and passports and visas. By the time we emerged into the airport, I was calm and serene, and my uncle, who is in the employ of Indian Airlines, got us through customs with the most perfect ease. He and his family live in Palam, the suburb of Delhi closest to the airport, and really, it all went well. It was early in the morning, a chilled, foggy morning of the sort you only get in December in Delhi, with the sort of cold that gets into your bones even though the sun still burns. I reached home and slept, soundly, until evening, at which point I half-heartedly picked at my rice and roti and then slept again until morning.
That day was the only day I spent in Delhi at that point. I filled it with my usual antics, reading and doing my maths and reading the English-language edition of the Times of India, one of my favourite newspapers in the world. My life's ambition, incidentally, is to competently read a Hindi-language newspaper. Whilst my knowledge of the language is not bad, it's household knowledge - I know words like "water" and "bed" and "table" and "sleep" and "food", whereas the newspapers and TV news demand that you know words like "government" and "disaster" and "corruption" and "earthquake". (I do know that last one, actually: it's buchaal.) In addition, while I can read Hindi, it's at a kindergarten level - slowly, sounding out the words as I go. When I was little, I was fascinated with reading signs and notices I saw in daily life, and I still have that fascination with any example of Devanagari script.
It's worth mentioning, though, that Hindi's purity as a language is pretty much long-lost. Words for complicated concepts in Hindi are mostly being forgotten in favour of transliterated English counterparts. As an example, I kept on reading the phrase "Bharatiya pradhikaran." The first word is of course "Indian" (the Hindi for India is Bharat), but no-one was able to tell me what the second word meant. At last, sheepishly, they all told me to tell them what the English translation on the sign was (all signs in India are in both Hindi and English, much like in Wales). It turns out it means "authority", and I'd been reading signs countersigned by the Airports Authority of India.
After only two days in Delhi, I caught another flight, this time to Ahemedabad, the biggest city in Gujarat. My mashi (Bengali for maternal aunt) is now living there with her husband, and has been after us to visit ever since she got married a couple of years ago. Gujarat was lovely, but more on that anon - I don't think I have time to write about my entire trip just now. So the long and involved story of how I ended up throwing up at the sight of the BJP leader will have to wait for a little while yet.
But before I go, a little more on India itself, which deserves more written about it, but I never feel I do it justice. Anyway, to begin, it's winter. Delhi is far colder than average, and while I think I know cold - scratch that, I do know cold - this is a world without central heating or hot water, and the cold gets into your blood. Ahmedabad and Silchar, in Assam, are desert heat and tropical heat respectively, and I've been to both those places too in the last ten days. India is like this, always; desert heat and bone-deep cold in the same country, the greenery, the wastes, the dirt and the sewage in the holiest, most venerated rivers on earth, the accumulated richness of centuries in Udaipur with filthy deformed beggars sprawled on the steps. It's trying so hard to develop, but the roads are lethal, the power cuts are frequent as ever - I do my writing by white-hot gaslight - and the government is a perfect model of representation with accusations of corruption and bomb threats sweeping through it in a space of a week.
I am ill, of course. I can't be writing sense. And I'm ready to go home. I fly on December 22nd, so a little while longer, and when I can, I'll write more.
