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August 23, 2004
Denial, introspection and reflection (or "who ran off with my life?")Sometimes a state of denial makes some of lifes more unpleasant realities easier to deal with, and denying the extremely obvious is how Kirsten and I have spent the last six months. The obvious in this case being an imminent and extensive return to Europe; a prospect both of us find slightly less appealing than a series of lengthy visits to the dentist for some major (and unanaethestised) root canal work.
Well, reality has finally kicked in with a vengeance, and sadly the funs all over. This blog is being written not in the majesty of the Indian Himalaya, but in a rather soggy, grey and lobotomised corner of Kent, in the south east of England. The paise is largely khatam (finished), so its time once again for the dreary uphill slog of acquiring more in reasonably large quantities so that we can return to India and do it all over again. ASAP.
In short, we're back in the UK for the next few years.
To those that have written recently asking why the blog (and site) haven't been updated recently, I can only apologise for my sheer slackness. Between the hectic rush to pack and ship our piles of books, clothes etc, saying goodbye to friends and the Kulu Valley, and the rude and alienating culture shock of arriving in a country and culture I find it increasingly difficult to comprehend, have put the most recent stories of life in the valley of the gods somewhat on the back burner.
Its hard not to think of it all as a failure in some way; that not finding a way to perpetuate our life in what is after all a cheap place to live constitutes a cock up of fairly monumental proportions. Sadly, the Indian habit of not giving long visas cost us a stack of cash for regular trips to get new six month visas elsewhere in Asia or Europe. Those unwanted trips probably took two years or more off our time in India. We would have been more than happy to work in India, but obtaining a legit work or business visa makes finding the holy grail look like a pleasant Sunday afternoon out.
It seems 90 percent of the long term westerner population of the Kulu Valley can afford to be long term by shunting Charas around, either overseas or down to Goa, but being sadly more and more fundamentalist as I get older, I really just cant be arsed with the inane "my dopes better than your dope" conversations that seem to be de rigeur among hash smugglers, or the notion that a days work involves swallowing half a KG of hash and spending a 9 hour flight wondering whether I'd be spending the next few days in a room with a glass toilet when I got to Heathrow, courtesy of HM Customs and Excise.
And that is what I assume most people think we do; smuggle dope. We met one of the rickshaw guys that park near our hotel in Delhi just before we left. We told him we were going back to Europe for a few years, and when we went to walk away, Raju waited till Kirsten was out of earshot before asking "so did you have some business in Manali?", with a certain look on his face. Now Raju knows very well we stay in Manali; he sees us about once every six months or so on the way to get a new visa, when we usually book an airport cab with one of his mates, then a couple of weeks later on the way back. He's never asked before how we can afford it, and that has always surprised me somehow, since every time we come back he asks us where we're off to, and we say - yet again - Manali. I cringe every time he asks, especially in the middle of winter when clearly only honeymooners, mad people, and dopeheads take the sixteen hour bus for the wilds of the Freezing North.
So in answer to his question, I just said no Raju, we arent shifting the odd quintal of hash in our backpacks, and outlined the reasons why. He looked at me very cynically, but I think he may have been convinced by the clinching argument - if we were smuggling the odd key, we wouldnt be heading back to the UK.
The other popular ways for foreigners to earn money in the valley, with varying degrees of legality, is either the restaurant trade or trekking agencies. Any regular readers of this blog will know well that trekking for me is the 7km walk from Jagatsukh after missing the last bus, and restaurants are places I eat in, not run. Anyway, both of these little earners involve being ingratiatingly nice to other backpackers on a day in day out basis, something I would find nearly impossble judging from the stories of Israeli (where the money is) behaviour told by our many friends in the travel and cafe trades in Manali.
At the end of it all, the choice of living in India for three years was as much to do with a desire to exert control on my own life than anything else (I can't speak for Kirsten here), and to end up doing something I really do not want to do would be to compromise that ideal. "Ha", I hear you say, "well, ending up back in the UK is an even bigger (and less palatable) compromise! Dont give me that ideology crap!" True, to some extent. But I have been involved in media for a long time, and its as much about what I do as where I am. My future will certainly involve India, and equally certainly it will involve photography, design, the Internet and other digital media.
Although we may not have worked for money, we have certainly learned a lot and added a few more strings to our bow while in India. With the price of computer books in India being a fraction of the price in the UK, we wholeheartedly indulged ourselves in piles of books on digital imaging, design, web site architecture and filmmaking, which sat slightly oddly next to the more mainstream books for travellers; Gita Mehta's classic "Karma-Cola" and Arundhati Roy's "Algebra of infinite justice". While other travellers immersed themselves in courses on yoga, meditation and Indian spirituality in general, I spent many happily geeky hours in the garden up to the eyeballs in "learn PHP in 24 hours" (impossible!) and "Apache webserver administration for Linux". I may not be any closer to finding God ( I wasn't looking) or the meaning of life, but I am a little wiser on the many benefits of Mod_rewrite and .htaccess files.
I have always argued that the satisfaction of my primary income source, photography, comes not only from capturing a good image, but from the excuse it gives me to indulge my curiosity; allowing me to explore and access a wide range of places and situations most people would never have the opportunity - or reason - to see. The satisfaction of experiencing the broader perspective; from photographing visits of Tory and Labour cabinet members, to documenting the effects their policies have on those at the other end of society in East London. That curiosity is, I think, much the same as that which drives travellers to visit other countries such as India; at its best a voyeuristic drive to see - and hopefully try to comprehend - the differences and similarities between the life in another country compared to our own.
The media interests we have pursued during our three years in India have contributed something of the same sense of purpose, and this web site is one of the spin offs. I suspect we would have visited many of the festivals and villages in the Kulu valley in any case, but photography, film and writing have provided a solid reason to ask the endless stream of questions that have filled in so may gaps for us in the "why?" of the culture. And probably led more than a few of the local people to conclude we are a bit barking, although our circle of close friends in Manali have shown incredible tolerance and patience in discussing the finer points of the religion and culture they have grown up with.
The first two trips I made to India (7 months and two years) over the last 11 years were different in character to this last marathon. India is such a multi layered culture that it seems unlikely anyone could understand it all in a single lifetime, and the very obvious differences to Europe tend to occupy a great deal of the first time visitors attention. Its hard to take it all in and digest it, so its temptiing to try to put it all in boxes and say "I understand", as I doubtless did on my first trip. Then you spend a bit more time, peel back a few more layers of the onion and discover that most of your assumptions were wrong (frequently 180 degrees wrong), or at least didn't tell even half of the story. And so it goes on. Some cultures dont bear too much examination, and the fascination wears off, but somehow India - and especially the Kulu Valley - becomes more compelling the more you dig. What you find is not always - from your own perspective - good. There are many aspects of Indian society that I can never get used to; arranged marriage and the caste system being the two most obvious, and I dont think I would necessarily want to have been born an Indian, with all the societal restrictions that can come with the passport. But even those things can have their positive sides, perhaps not obvious to the casual observer, especially one coming from a society that views such things as restrictive or archaic.
I have a long running argument with a friend over the nature of what is best about India. He hankers for the spiritual side of life, the unfamiliar, and the sense of a country whose villages appear to live in a time warp. He has an odd resentment that an idyllic and timeless village in Spiti can have satellite dishes on the roof. Not, apparently, "authentic", even though TV, mobile phones etc might make life a little easier for the residents. In essence, he seeks the image of tranquility and simplicity long vanished from western society.
The more time I spend in India, the less interested I am in the "grand"; the palaces, the huge temples and the more obviously different aspects of the country, and more I am drawn by the essential similarities to life anywhere in the world. The daily rountines differ really only in scale, complexity, difficulty and environment from place to place. The things we do, our desires and dreams all come down to much the same thing, the major difference being characterized by the level of hardship and strife it takes to achieve our goals. Most people in India, self evidently, have a far harder life than those in the West, yet the end goal for us all is to eat, have somewhere to live and to try and find a measure of satisfaction from our lives.
Much as the ancient in India is fascinating, I find the modern equally so. To have the opportunity to see, in a shortened timespan, the extraordinary changes that are sweeping so unevenly across Indian society has been one of the most interesting aspects of the last three years.
In the cities, the changes are fast and furious. In 1993 I recall few private cars on the Delhi roads; the Hindutan Ambassador wasn't far behind the Maruti in numbers, and traffic jams were fairly modest. A mere 11 years later and Delhi traffic is out of control and the trusty Ambassador is becoming a rarity. I think I read somewhere that there are something like 300,000 more vehicles on Delhi's roads each year, and where as the Maruti is a small car, many of those appearing now are huge and expensive. The city government simply will not be able to think far enough ahead to deal with the traffic crisis emerging from the rocketing prosperity of the new middle class, as wedded to the perceived freedoms of car ownership as their Western counterparts.
While much of village India appears on the outside to have changed little, the impact of satellite media seems to have changed villagers expectations of the possible, and images of middle class prosperity on TV perhaps fuelled the resentment of an "India shining" revolution in which the poor were not sharing. That wave of rural anger left the BJP wondering what hit them, and unexpectedly propelled Congress to an extraordinary victory. The villages have suffered badly from rules set by the WTO, IMF etc, that have insisted on the removal of government subsidy as part of so called "market reforms". The "kisan" ration card that guaranteed subsidised purchase of staples such as sugar, rice, kerosene etc is - as far as I know - finished on the plains, retained only in hill areas. Himachal Pradeshs apple farmers now face stiff competition for their produce from imported - and heavily subsidised - apples from as far away as France.
And there are the odd contradictions that are thrown up by rapid change. The odd sense of priority in villages such as Old Manali where most of the people have access to satellite TV, half have mobile phones and there are huge numbers of Internet connections, yet not more than 5 percent (if that) of private houses (as opposed to hotels) have toilets or showers, most people heading off to the fields for a morning dump, just as their ancestors did. The most potent image I have seen of traditional India colliding with modernity came from the Kumbh Mela in 2001, published in the Independent newspaper in the UK, and showing a heavily dreadlocked and half naked Sadhu laughing as he talked animatedly into a mobile phone.
I cannot, as my friend seems to wish, deny Indians the opportunity for what they perceive as a better life with more material comforts. But I do wonder if the country will manage to strike the right balance between the pursuit of materialism and quality of life. A couple of weeks in the UK (2 hours would have been enough) makes it quite clear why Kirsten and I wanted to get the hell out in the first place. Consumerism here is the only religion or spiritual experience left, yet so few people seem satisfied with their lives. It makes me wonder where the sweet spot is; what is enough comfort? Enough money? Enough control? Enough stress?
Coming back is never an experience I relish. Somehow, in the last few weeks in the idyll of the mountains, you kid yourself it wont really be that bad, there are some positive points. Then you step out from the aircraft into reality and realise that that was all denial. It is not only that bad, it is far, far worse, and the culture shock of returning to the country you grew up in is far harder to deal with than arriving in India for the first time. You realise how many habits you have to drop and assumptions you have to change. I nearly got flattened in town the other day by crossing the road in the slow meandering Indian manner that assumes the car will swerve. It didn't, and the driver had a few choice invectives for me. Trying to remember that you dont have to assume everyone is a queue jumper. Rediscovering that price labels are serious and not a starting point for discussion. Paying one and a half times the the Manali to Mandi (100km) price for a ten minute bus journey.
I could drip on like this for hours, but for now I wont bother, because I have X years of all this *&^%$£ to look forward to before I can wake up to the sight of the Himalaya through the bedroom window. Oh dear, oh dear.
Perhaps this is a bit sentimental (I am) and no one else will get this. But at times like this, I look back on what I have seen and experienced and remember the last lines from the old rock anthem by Rush, "Xanadu" (no, not the Olivia Net John one!!) that seem to best sum up the loss I feel;
"never more shall I return, escape these caves of ice,
for I have dined on honeydew, and tasted the milk of paradise"
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What about the Neoncarrot Web site and blog?Most people seem to do websites when they come back from their travels, perhaps as a way of reliving their experiences and sharing them. It was never intended, but neoncarrot seems to have worked the other way round. We originally concieved it as a way of sharing what we were up to with friends and family while in India, then did nothing with it for two years. Finally we rejigged the whole thing, and have used it to communicate our experiences to people we didn't know (the ones we do from Europe long ago lost interest), but perhaps have an interest in India. We didn't really care at the time if anyone actually read it, but it seems some have enjoyed a bit of live coverage of Himalayan life.
We have plenty more material to add to the site, and plenty of dark, poverty stricken winter nights (the UK is like an emotional version of a perpetual winter night) to add more galleries, essays, stats etc. In the last three years we managed to take over 17,000 digital images, so there must still be some unpublished gems lurking in there somewhere. We also have 40 hours of video, mainly of Kulu Valley festivals, that might find its way onto the site if we can get enough bandwidth.
There are quite a number of blog articles left that are half complete, plus a load still to write for the last month we were in Manali, when life was to hectic to write. I also want to write up the uniquely frustrating and expensive experience of shipping 200 +Kg back to the UK. Just think red tape and headbanging. That stuff, when added, will be put in historically by date as it happened, and I'll add an entry at the top of the front blog page with a link. I'm hoping to put at least two or three back stories up a week, at least for the next few months. Who knows. My creativity has a habit of going tits up inside the M25 (londons ring road).
This blog though, is a difficult one. I'm not sure whether to archive this and start a new one on the site to comment on matters India - which I intend to do - as they come up, or just keeep using this one. Perhaps it doesn't matter and I'm (as usual) splitting hairs. Now that half of Manali has mobile phones and moderate typing skills (even my landlord is learning), I've been promised regular updates on the happenings in the village, and it would be nice to publish some, even if it isnt first hand.
A last thought. If anyone actually likes reading this and happens to be both filthy stinking rich and profligate with money - a near impossibility - I'll happily provide live blogs from Manali (and unlimited gratitude) in unprecedented quantity in exchange for a really fat cheque (preferably with numerous zeros) and a couple of one way tickets LHR-DEL. Naaahh. Didn't think so.
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