In the past week, I’ve gone… from a land where even stop signs are flagrantly ignored… to a land where people diligently obey the myriad signs with warnings, cautions, and rules such as “do not use selfie sticks on the train” from a land where I’m glad enough to find a sketchy concrete hole in the ground for a toilet… to a land where I scoff if the toilet seat isn’t even heated from a land of brightly multicoloured houses and dazzling, dramatic clothing… to a land where houses and humans alike are mostly dressed in shades of grey and…
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tourist
Let’s get this right out of the way: yes, there are open sewers. Yes, they can smell truly awful. There are certain streets in Tiruvannamalai where they are especially… breath-taking, even when they’re mostly covered with slabs of concrete. You learn to walk across them on an exhale, or if you have to walk parallel to them, stay as far across the street as possible. I don’t remember it being quite as strong last time I was here. Either the rain last month made it more noticeable, or perhaps I had blocked the memory. Sometimes you’ll catch a whiff of…
You hear a lot about the intensity and vibrance of India in the West, and you see pretty colourful pictures and shocking filthy ones, and you watch some Bollywood movies and you read excellent novels. But it’s hard to convey what that intensity is actually like in person. In fact, once you come back to the West and India isn’t part of your present moment any more, it fades into memories that just look and sound a lot like the pictures and stories you’ve seen and read. In a series of five blog posts over the next few months, I’m…
Dreaming of a what Christmas? All of December, I kept being confused by friends’ posts on Facebooks showing off their Xmas trees and talking about holiday plans, and inside I kept reacting with “already?!” There have been zero cues here for anything that sets off any kind of holiday spirit for me. For starters, it’s been pleasant and warm here, around 25-28 C most days, lows around 17-19 at night. Nobody’s decorating for anything – at least not for anything I understand: for the last week I’ve noticed most houses have decorated their front entrances not only with the usual…
I don’t have a lot of time this week for a nice fat blog post, as these project deadlines are getting down to the wire and I’m trying to stay off the computer when I’m not working. But I’ve got a few odds and ends I’ve been meaning to share. The image above is a fairly typical Indian lightswitch panel, and it is to me one of the deep and meaningful mysteries of the East. There may be a few of these in each room. Generally, maybe half the switches on any given panel will appear to work as you…