Over The Counter Culture

Before we left, despite common warnings of dodgy road behaviour I still wouldn’t have expected that three weeks into our trip Indian driving would still shock, amaze, irritate and draw expletives from us - that it still does so ought to impress on you just how shite, mad and totally idiotic it really gets.

It would be harsh to criticise road surface quality in a country as large, poor and cattle-infested as India, especially when as a group we’ve not always been on the major touristic circuits. And yet, after two days riding on Indian roads, it shocks me that nobody is doing anything about loose gravel left lying around on sharp corners after roadworks. I managed to spin out and deck my pissy little scooter (escaping with barely a scratch, thankfully) going out wide on a blind right-hander for precisely that reason.

Why take it wide? will ask road veterans. You idiot, if you’d taken a ‘racing line’ you’d have been fine! they might protest. Why not keep your speed down? all very valid objections in a country where the Highway Code isn’t rarer in bookstores than tourist-aimed copies of the Kama Sutra. But in India, corners are viewed the same way Lewis Hamilton views corners at Brands Hatch - the perfect overtaking opportunity, especially if you’re not keeping up ‘the pace’.

The same is true of junctions - even if he wants to take the next left, the average Indian driver will still pass whoever is in front of him. This completed, he will proceed to slam on the brakes (causing all traffic behind him to slow to his selected turning-off speed, piling up), honk and veer left. The honk *is* the indicator.

Having not actually gained any time with the overtake (and slowed everyone in the process), you might think this demonstrates totally careless, thoughtless driving. Not so. Indian driving is, I believe, very thought-intensive. It is a an exercise in anticipation, in second guessing, and in deciphering the meaning of the universal, ceaseless and much adored horn honk. Do not forget that road names and directions are so rarely indicated there, that the average Indian driver is necessarily distracted from his driving by having to navigate using sextants and the North Star.

But it’s largely hypocritical of me to chide the Indians on their driving when twice now we’ve rented bikes (150 rupees/day, roughly 1 quid 50 - half the price of a standard UK pint of lager) and thrashed the hell out of them on- and off-road before slinking back to the owner having given them a spitshine, rinsed off the sand, dirt and animal fecal matter, and bent back the metal rollbars, praying for it to bear them on their investigative test ride without the treacherous engine splutter that would betray six hours of mechanical abuse.

That said, nothing beats the feel of water planing off the soles of your feet as you bomb down a remote Goa beach, racing a retreating wave wearing nothing but boardshorts, your still-wet hair adding its drips to the spray kicking up off your overpowered scooter’s puny wheels. Not something I would ever do to any machine I owned, of course - the dune ride down to the beach alone was a punishing, abrasive affair, but let us not even consider what the saltwater-wet sand combo will do to the poor motor!

+ Special props to Katie, who got over her pre-ride anxiety to ride like Rossi and land later in the pub the most vocal of all of us in her requests for a repeat experience!

Typed from Rishikesh, in the Uttarkhand province, where the hills rise up suddenly from the flat plains of northern india to form the start of the Himalayas. This is the village which George Harrison brought the other Beatles to in order to open their minds (and write the White Album!), though they eventually lost their faith in the spirituality of the place when faced with escalating money demands of their yogi. So it goes. As you can see from the hotel balcony - the environment is reason enough to come here, even if you feel your mind is open enough not to need the zillions of yoga classes on offer here. Rather go rafting, personally.

- the view from the balcony today - in stark contrast to our previous residences:

- our Delhi hostel - TV, shower and sofa + coffee table! luxury. Except when the electricity cuts out in the middle of the night and you wake up with rivulets of sweat pouring down your every nook & cranny. Fenton has once again left a mystery stain on the bedsheets. Must be a common feature to all his travels.

- the sleeper train. Not so bad, actually. Might smother my couchette with vicks vaporub next time though - tad smelly sometimes.

We arrived here having taken a sleeper train from Delhi Wednesday night after a crazy dash through the crumbling, traffic-gorged streets of old Delhi in two autorickshaws, getting on the train 5 minutes after it was due to leave (thank goodness the trains, like us, run on Delhi time, a local unoffical +20min timezone!) Not much sleep to be had on the sleeper, despite decent comfort and nice temperatures. I put it down to the constantly changing (interesting) scenery along the trip, the driver’s addiction to sounding the foghorn (like all drivers in India, for that matter - it gets used more frequently than both the indicator and the gearshift), and the men walking down the train every 20 minutes shouting ‘Tea! Coffee! Chai!’

Delhi is an interesting city, where India’s upwardly mobile youth - skinny jeans, bling, slick hair, westernised (but distinctly Hindi) music - come shoulder to shoulder with abject poverty. It’ll be interesting to see what happens should this dichotomy accentuate - which it seems likely to do, given the huge problem the government faces brining so many millions out of poverty whilst attempting to nurture growth of the other classes. As argued by Prospect several months ago, vast swathes of the Indian middle class seemingly lacks the will to contribute to a social program aimed at helping India’s poorest. The use of technology is fascinating, too - the ‘mobile phones’ you see in use of the street tend to be rows of satellite phones fixed to bike carts, like a mobile phonebox! No iPhones visible, despite its supposed availability in India.

The new Metro system is largely overlooked by the Lonely Planet guidebooks we’ve been using - we discovered it almost by chance, after an unsuccessful con was tried on us (and again the next day, by the same guy! what cheek!!) - it’s modern, built for capacity, much, much cleaner and more efficient than the London Underground; and it’s extremely cheap. Here’s a photo putting Delhi’s traffic problems in context - one can only hope uptake of tube services will grow exponentially. Indian traffic is MENTAL.

Delhi is also home to a seriously new-age temple of the Ba’hai faith (which Daz subscribes to). Set in the middle of huge, green grounds (in Delhi!), the moment of Zen walking around and sitting inside the huge hall was refreshing after a blackout night in the madhouse - though the smelly banter with an american Bah’ai convert in the Information Centre was not.

Also zen: the Red Fort, one of India’s most famous monuments

For an up to date gallery of the photos I’ve been taking on this trip, view the whole thing here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/philbradley/India#

As always, email us with your news - it’s good to know what’s going on back home, plus we may soon find we need other talking points than Katie’s voracious appetite for pizza.

Some stats: 4 friends. 7 visas to be obtained. 2 weeks to go before departure. 7 months abroad!

6 visits to the India visa centre. 3 visits to the chinese centre. 1 lost receipt - crucial. 1 lost passport photo - crucial. £350.

Some observations:

- both China and India now outsource their visa applications and collections to a private company. Yes, the irony of India outsourcing something - to the UK! - is staggering (even more so when the Indian IT system crashes). Yes, this just adds an extra layer of crap to deal with, and delays on your application. You submit at the centre, they take their cut (check these: China imposes a £30 visa fee, the contractor then charges a £30 service fee on top of that!), they send it to the embassy, they receive it from the embassy, they give you the visa. Is that service really necessary? should it cost as much as the Visa itself? It’s small comfort that my government charges foreigners even more for their visas!

- the Indian visa centre smells of fart and is terribly overcrowded. Fill in your forms and pay online, from the comfort of your own home, and book an appointment. Then photoshop the appointment letter to show whatever date and time suits *you* - wave it in the bouncer’s face when you get there and he’ll print you off a good number. The baaaad numbers put you in the ‘no appointment’ queue - and instead of waiting 30 minutes, you’ll be kept waiting up to 2 hours. So avoid it - Photoshop!

- if you’re like me - submitting Visa applications on behalf of friends from around the country, and like me, you happen to lose their passport photo with no way of getting another in time - fake it. This wasn’t a great job (those watermarks are there for a reason!), but printed out on printer paper, it convinced the Communist Government of China. Before and after:

- processing times are usually 3 days. Avoid the Chinese express services if you can, they’re bloody expensive! Note, the Indian visa service doesn’t offer an express service. Plan ahead!

- extra tips: if you have a non-UK passport, the Indians need to see a proof of UK residence from over 12 months ago. The Chinese don’t, but for UK citizens and aliens alike, they need to see flight bookings to China and hotel bookings for your first few nights in China. I had to edit the email sent by the hotel to add my name and a co-traveller’s, before printing it out and submitting. The Chinese visa centre has 2 computers with free Internet access and free colour printing - invaluable!

- scan everything. I cannot stress how important a tip this is. Scan all the receipts you get for passports, scan the passports, the visas, everything. I lost the receipt for my passport and that of a friend - the Chinese would absolutely not have bent the rules and given his passport back to me without him being there in person, without a great deal of charm and printouts of his and my passport scans.

I’ve finally had to face up to the question of what path to take in life. Nobody said deciding on a path through life was easy, and I never expected it to be - but how you manage the human relationships on which your decision process depends can dramatically affect the outcome. This is a lesson recently branded upon my brain, likely very painfully: as I write, a door seem likely to be closing to me that I would have absolutely loved to take, as a result of cowardly mismanagement of one such relationship.

I’ve been faced with a short term opportunity to work with a fantastic bunch of people in a company with a great mission, with a position doing something reasonably interesting. It wouldn’t pay much, in a city that’s (in)famously expensive to live in, and the outcome is highly uncertain and might leave me in a financially unsustainable city with no job. What I’ve been trying to do is greatly reduce the risk by trying to line up a job for winter ‘09 onwards - in an industry which I think would suit me, career-wise. So it comes down to balancing the short term and the long term.

Having been offered the short term position, the long term position dragged their feet, taking their time to organise interviews, get back to me with decisions (and in fact they still haven’t, despite the matter being supposed to have found some sort of closure a week ago).

Rather than having the maturity and openness to communicate what was going on to the startup I wanted to work for over the summer, I in turn stalled them and they were left in the dark about what was going on. I had absolutely no idea what the consequences would be of admitting to a company offering me a position that I was seeking alternate offers. Partly, the issue was that I was slightly leaning towards the view that if the long term path was unwilling to give me time to work for the startup over the summer, I might, to my extreme chagrin, have to sacrifice the short term experience for the long view option.

Keeping them in the dark until I had all the options laid out before me was not a conscious strategy, but rather, a reflex equivalent to sticking my head in the sand. It was a ’strategy decision’ that was made unconsciously, played out over several weeks, as I waited for new information from the long term factor, stalling the startup at every point, thinking I was getting close to a resolution [which hasn't even arrived yet!]

In retrospect it was a cowardly and naive thing to do, completely blind to the needs and feelings of my summer employers - a startup needs to execute fast, smoothly, and with access to the fullest information potentially available to it (hence the importance of openness in all dealings with them) - and I gave them nothing but uncertainty, delays, and a feeling of being played and manipulated as I sought “alternatives” (when really I was seeking a safety net to enable me to work with them at a [reduced] level of personal risk that I could find to be workable).

Furthermore, they were hiring me for a position which demanded great communication skills with outsiders, in addition to the openness and honesty of emotion that working in a small team demands. I’ve demonstrated neither of those in the very turbulent past few weeks that followed my uprooting from a stable, 4-year stretch at university.

Unsurprisingly, they’re mighty pissed off and I’ve greatly shaken their confidence in me, and the chances that this opportunity is still open seem very remote.

Managing your options and the relationships attached to them is no simple task, especially when they each have their own resolution timelines (remember, I’m still waiting to hear back from the long term opportunity), expectations and outcomes. It’s not a simple set of simultaneous equations you can solve and find the right solution to - you often have to make a decision without all the information and options clear to you. There’s a life lesson in risk and decision right there, for sure. And neither is communicating with the people offering you the options - I’ve never known how to explain jobseeking alternatives to potential employers.

But what I’ve learnt here - potentially very painfully if the short term opportunity closes to me - is that openness and honesty would have been the best policy, daunting and impossible though it may have seemed at the time. People would have been more understanding than I feared, had I been open with them and found the right way to explain what was going on, to dispel - or at least minimise - their fears. Obscurity and stalling is the confused coward’s way out - and I fell for its lure; hopefully, if I’ve learnt my lesson, for the last time.