Bangalore also rhymes with eye sore

April 7, 2006 | Category: Uncategorized

I just returned from a two-week reporting trip to India, specifically southern India, still more specifically Karnataka (home to Bangalore, the allegedly hip and wired womb of a city from which 21st century India is supposed to emerge). In honor of that experience, I’ve decided to resurrect a series by Seth Stevenson that appeared on Slate a couple years back called “Trying Really Hard to Like India.”

The first time I read it, I thought it was a fine piece of travel writing. It was honest, which travel writing never is. Having now been to India, I find it a positively brilliant expression of the kind of defeat and exasperation all of us good, broad-minded types feel in so poor and foreign and fucked up a place but are deathly afraid to express for fear we will no longer be seen as good and broad-minded. An excerpt (long but well worth it) from the first installment:

From: Seth Stevenson
Subject: Learning To Like India: A Five-Step Approach
Monday, Sept. 27, 2004, at 4:44 PM ET

It’s OK to hate a place.

Travel writers can be so afraid to make judgments. You end up with these gauzy tributes to the “magic” of some far-off spot. But honestly, not every spot is magical for everyone. Sometimes you get somewhere, look around, and think, “Hey, this place is a squalid rat hole. I’d really rather be in the Netherlands.” And that’s OK.

For example, the last time I went to India I just haaaaaaated it. Delhi was a reddish haze of 105-degree dust. And while, of course, the Taj Mahal was great … the streets outside it were a miasma of defecating children. I could not wait to go home. (Disclosure: I was there on a previous assignment for Slate. And actually, I loved Ladakh, which is in northern India—up in the Himalayas. But I don’t really count Ladakh, because it’s more like Tibet than like India. Anyway …)

Now—mostly because my girlfriend wants to come back—I’m back. I’m giving this dreadful place a second chance. And this time I vow I will try really hard to like India.

I’m convinced it’s a reachable goal. My plan involves: sticking to South India, far away from Delhi, staying exclusively at beach resorts and luxury hotels, and stocking up on prescription-strength sedatives.

Step 1: Making Peace With Poverty and With Parasitic Worms

After flying into Bangalore and acclimating for a couple of days, we visit a town called Mysore (rhymes with “eyesore”). There’s a famous temple here and an opulent palace—big tourist attractions both. But to me, the most interesting thing to see (in any place I visit) is the daily life of the people who live and work there.

For instance, from our hotel window in Mysore, we look down on a pile of garbage. Every night, this pile becomes dispersed as it is picked at and chewed on by rats, then crows, then stray dogs, then cows, and then homeless people. Every morning a woman dressed in a brightly colored sari sweeps this masticated garbage-porridge back into a pile. It is the worst job I can imagine. (Previously, the worst job I could imagine was navigator for a rally-car driver, because I get nauseous when I read in cars. But this woman’s job is much worse than that. And really, with this added perspective, rally-car navigator doesn’t seem so bad anymore.)

…

To those who scoff at the idea of a reporter going to India with the sole purpose of lounging in beach resorts and luxury hotels, I have this to say: The next time I go to India, I may well spend some time in politically and culturally compelling places (provided someone pays me to write about them), but I will also be spending extended, langorous amounts of time in Goa, on the coast, where I hear there are vast, clean, people-less beaches that stretch for miles with no open sewers and no 2-stroke autorickshaws to vomit diesel exhaust into my precious breathing space. Am I a coddled American? Sure I am. But I’ll wager a lakh that any scheduled caste slum dweller would do much the same, given the money.

Technorati Tags: Bangalore, India, travel writing

One Comments

Peter N-H on April 15th, 2006
1
I’m so glad there’s no danger whatsoever of anyone calling me “good and broad-minded”. Can we form a club whose main qualification for membership is to have published something honest about a travel destination? Your turn: Let’s have something on Bangalore by Josh Chin rather than by Seth Stevenson (whoever he may be).

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About the Author

Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.