Passage Through India – Homeward Bound and Top Ten (Part Three)

Four more to go to complete my Top Ten and I suppose that I really have to include the tiger…

At Ranthambore we had a day of Safari looking for a Bengal Tiger.  After an early start four rather tedious hours in the morning yielded nothing at all except the sort of wildlife that we can see at home in Lincolnshire (except the crocodile of course) so after lunch and the threat of another four hours in the afternoon being bounced about on hard, unyielding wooden seats Kim decided against it and opted instead for a much more comfortable afternoon poolside and a spa treatment.

Out in the jungle another four hours passed and still no big cat except that in the final moments of the jeep trial there was some excitement and there a hundred yards away was a female tiger.  Just sitting there digesting her lunch of raw gazelle and turning her back and ignoring the tourists.

Eight hours of uncomfortable searching and eight minutes of a tiger spotting.  Kim wasn’t too disappointed, I offered to take her to the Doncaster Wildlife Park close to where we live when we got home to see a tiger.  It is only £25 admission (senior rate) and you are guaranteed to see one.  Two months on and she is yet to take me up on this fabulous offer.

Fellow traveller Ruth had this to say.  “I really enjoyed the two safaris.  I think it was the fresh air and bouncing about in the back of the truck with the naughty kids was great fun”.  Naughty kids?  You know who you are.

I have to say that if I hadn’t seen a tiger then the Safari would not have made the top ten at all and would be settled down in the bottom three.  The bottom three up later..

Firmly in the Top ten is the Tour Group, it is important to have a group pf people who get on well together and enhance the experience and we certainly had that.

Fellow traveller Jennifer put it like this…

“I have always wanted to see India…  So we booked… The other passengers on the trip were amazing…. I now call them friends.  Everything was as I imagined but better.  Thank you everyone for giving Ian and I a holiday of a lifetime.”

Tour Manager Rahi said… “We definitely made some friendships along the way which will last a long time.  And we now arrive to the final moments of the journey I would like to let you know that it has been a nice group to work with with loads of laughs and experiences”

Next up and I am going back to day one and a Walking tour of Old Delhi.

Here was the real culture shock that I was expecting.  Poverty and destitution, despair and  malnutrition and deformity are all on public view.  In UK we cross the street to avoid a beggar or complain about street homeless sleeping in shop doorways but here it is all part of street life.

All human existence is on show here, a timeline of evolution and development running through the streets and all in vivid contrast.  Grubby corners, dirty beggars and then vibrant streets and coloured saris.  Different religions, trade and commerce, wealth and poverty, success and failure, suffering, destitution and poverty, improvisation, happiness and joy.  The full spectrum here on open street  display.

What an introduction to India this was, a slap in the face, a punch in the gut, this might have been better at the end rather than the beginning of the experience but never mind, all that was required was to walk into a rainbow or help mix colours on an artists palette.  After one day I was in love with India.

So that leaves just one more spot in my Top Ten and I give this to Tour Manager Rahi.  From the moment we arrived at Delhi International Airport everything was seamlessly organised and brilliantly coordinated.

It seems important to me to have a local tour manager (Rahi lived a long way from Delhi in the city of Udaipur but what is a few hundred miles when we have travelled five thousand) a guide who understands the culture, can tell the history and answer most every question thrown at him.  Calm, collected, patient and seemingly unflappable.  Quite simply the perfect Tour Manager.

And a fabulous sense of humour.  At the end he asked   “I hope you enjoyed my company, my explanations and my commentaries”.  How funny, of course we did, he was the main man in making the holiday a success.

I should also mention here local expert tour guides, Jaswinder Singh in Amritsar and Sanjay Jadhar in Shimla who both provided a wonderful day out.  And also coach driver D,P Sharma and his friendly assistant Chandu.

So, that was my Top Ten highlights of the holiday/tour, not everyone might agree with my selection.

I mentioned a bottom three and these are they – Carpet shopping in Jaipur, the Pakistan border crossing pantomime and the Rose garden with no roses in Chandigarh.

Except for the English Roses of course…

Passage through India – Homeward Bound and Top Ten Highlights (Part One)

So, a second enjoyable evening and an excellent meal in Shimla and then a drive back to Chandigarh for a final train journey back to Delhi.  It was going to be a full day of travel so I thought that I would put it to good use and make an assessment of the tour and come up with a top ten.  I took out my notebook and pen.

This proved to be very optimistic because it soon became clear that it was completely and absolutely impossible to write anything down due to the topography, a slalom like decent down the mountain and the driving.  A fifty mile journey by road but only twenty miles as the crow flies. The mini-bus rolled from side to side, swaying and lurching and avoiding obstacles  as it negotiated hairpin bends, rock slides, pot holes, road works and impatient drivers sometimes prepared to take really reckless risks in order to shave a second or two off their journey time.

It was all rather entertaining and there were some fabulous views on the way down, in fact in some respects it was better than the train journey from Kalka to Shimla as we passed through a succession of vibrant and chaotic towns and villages and the views were not obscured by track side vegetation.

I couldn’t use the notebook but I didn’t really need it because in my head I made my first three top ten selections and they weren’t going to change.

No difficulty coming up with Number One –  The Taj Mahal…

Poet Rabindranath Tagore described the Taj Mahal as ‘a teardrop on the cheek of eternity’, Rudyard Kipling as ‘the embodiment of all things pure’ while its creator, Emperor Shah Jahan, said it made ‘the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes’.

Every visitor wants a first important picture…

I imagine everyone knows the Taj Mahal, it is most likely the most famous building in the World (along with the Leaning Tower of Pisa perhaps or the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona) but to be there and see it is really something special. It is huge, much bigger than I imagined that it would be and the dome is magnificent.  It is ephemeral, it seems to float as it merges seamlessly into the sky.  I was disappointed that the sky was overcast and obscure but in retrospect that seemed to add to the experience as it melted and  dissolved seamlessly into the clouds.

To be fair the Number Two in my selection almost squeaked into first place but eventually Taj Mahal just edged it out – The Golden Temple at Amritsar

If almost everyone is aware of the Taj Mahal then it is almost certain that they will know about the Golden Temple as well.

Not as grand, not as architecturally stunning but almost equally important.  I liked it immediately and there was a difference; Taj Mahal is a tourist attraction, Golden Temple is a religious site and it was possible to connect with that immediately.  To absorb it, to feel it, another impact site but for a different reason.

I enjoyed this day above all others.  Nothing eclipses the Talj Mahal of course but  the Golden Temple was something special, mystical, spiritual, emotional and whilst the Taj Mahal remains in the memory the Golden Temple remains in the soul.  I will never forget it.

Number Three for in my list is the Amber Fort close to Jaipur…

Stepping through the gates of the Amber Fort was truly memorable, the marble stone shimmered and dazzled in the sunlight.  Apparently it was once even more beautiful, once adorned with art and precious stones but another Mughal Prince even more important than the owner of this place was rather concerned that it was even more splendid than his own Palace so ordered that the decoration be painted over and so it became Amber.

Most of us would happily have stayed longer at the Amber Fort but after an hour or so the visit was over, we were through the exit, pestered again by persistent vendors who rather good-naturedly take rejection without offence and back to the jeeps.   We were going shopping at a carpet warehouse.

Back to the journey….

… After two hours or so we left the frantic helter-skelter and crawled through the final few miles of traffic through Chandigrah to the railway station where we left the two buses and waited for station porters to pick up our luggage in the car park amidst madness, chaos, revving, shouting, snarling and bad manners.

Once on the train, the Delhi Shatabi Express there was a two hour ride to New Delhi and this time on a straight and direct line between the two cities and I was able to get my notebook out and consider my remaining Top Ten selections.

What will they be?

Passage through India – Shimla in the Himalayas

“Shimla may have been called the summer capital, but for all practical purposes this was the real Capital of India as the Government of India stayed there for the better part of the year moving down to Calcutta and later to New Delhi only during the winter months.  As the summer capital of the British Raj, Shimla came to be known as ‘the workshop of the Empire’.” – Ashok Kumar, “A Journey into the Past”

The hotel in Shimla was very nice but built of several levels and terraces which made it rather confusing.  We approved our room and then I returned up several steps of stairs to the bar to order a beer.

When I got there I was gasping for breath and I wondered if I was having a medical incident but as it turned out it was all down to the altitude.  We were now two thousand, two hundred metres above sea level (about a quarter of the way to the top of nearby Mount Everest) and that is about two thousand, one hundred and fifty metres higher than where we live almost at sea level in Grimsby on the east coast of the UK.

From the top floor of the hotel there was a magnificent view over the Himalayas…

For our day in Shimla we were joined today by local guide and expert Sanjay Jadhur who met us at the former British Viceroy’s Lodge at the top of the city in the Observatory Hills.

It was designed by the British architect Henry Irwin and built in the Jacobean style, drew inspiration from the architectural style of the English Renaissance but also reflects elements of the castles of the Scottish Highlands. The building is of light blue-grey stone masonry with tiled pitch roofing. The interior  is noted for elaborate woodwork, teak was brought from Burma and was supplemented by local cedar wood and walnut.

It is a very grand building but it has to be said but it didn’t impress renowned architect Edwin Lutyens who  said of it – “If one was told that monkeys had built it, one could only say, ‘What wonderful monkeys — they must be shot in case they do it again.’ “

Shimla is spread across seven hills in the northwest Himalayas among lush valleys and forests of oak, rhododendron and pine is the capital of Himachal Pradesh that was once the summer capital of colonial India and even today there is still more than a hint of the Raj about it.

An interesting visit, wonderful gardens and great views followed by a brief tour of the interior of the Lodge, not a lot of it, just a couple of rooms where there was a photographic display of the final days of Empire and a gathering of all concerned to thrash out the details of withdrawal, independence and partition.  What struck me was that there were no photographs of Mountbatten or the British delegation which I thought was rather odd.

What had become obvious over the last two weeks was that in India there is little respect or regard for the British Empire or for Earl Mountbatten, who it seems made a dreadful mess of his most important job, but nevertheless he was an important player throughout 1947 so I was surprised to find no reference to him at all in the galleries.

Next up was a visit to a Hindu Temple, I forgot to note the name but I think it was the Sankat Mochan temple somewhere close to the centre of the city.

Now, I don’t want to be disrespectful here but a visit to a Hindu Temple is not especially thrilling I have to say.  A Muslim Mosque isn’t very thrilling either because they are plain and boring but a Hindu Temple is quite the opposite with an accumulation of random bric-a-brac and gaudy decoration like visiting an aged relatives house who has collected a load of junk over the years and leaves out proudly on display to impress visitors.

I suppose it would help to have an understanding of the Hindu faith but unfortunately my knowledge is a complete blank on this one.

Leaving the Temple we moved on to the heart of the colonial city, the Ridge and the Mall and this was a real shock.  We had come to see the real India but here suddenly we were in the heartlands of Tory Britain, this was like Chester, Stratford-upon-Avon or Weybridge in Surrey because this is where the British ex-pats built a town where they felt at home, where they recreated town life in Great Britain.

We walked past a  mock-Tudor post office to one side then on past the slate-roofed, slightly Welsh looking Town Hall, to reach the town square at the end of The Ridge and a Tudor style library and Victorian Gothic Christian Church with its very English village appearance.  Suddenly we were in the Cotswolds.   There was even a mechanical street sweeper lurking in a corner ready to deal with a shred of litter.  It is almost like a theme park and it reminded me immediately of Walt Disney EPCOT World Showcase where there is the recreation of an English town much like this.

Here is EPCOT…

And then a street of  shops and cafes that would not have been out of place anywhere in middle England, it was all rather odd, we had a sandwich lunch which was almost English but not quite and then collectively turned down the offer to go shopping for an hour or so and opted instead to return to the hotel to squander away the remainder of the afternoon, reflect on our India experience and prepare for the journey back the next day to Delhi and our final evening.

Passage through India – Himalayan Queen to Shimla

“It is not about the destination, it is about the journey” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was a pleasant evening in Chandigrah, a nice hotel as I recall and another curry.  This morning our luggage was loaded onto two jeeps and after they had driven us to the railway station at Kalka they went on ahead because today we were taking the ‘Toy Train’ to Shimla in the foothills of the Himalayas.

At Kalka station we passed a small group of women labourers with picks and shovels and this brought to mind all of the other women workers that we had seen over this past two weeks.

Just an observation here but it seems  to me that women get to do all the crappy jobs in India whilst the men sit around and watch.  Nearly sixty-five percent of agricultural labourers are women, at Jaipur we had seen women carrying heavy brick loads on their heads whilst men supervised, along the railway tracks women were digging trenches whilst men waited to drop the cables in, what little street cleaning is done is performed by women whilst others work the refuse sights for pickings.  Women in India do tough jobs without any of the employment protection rights that are enjoyed in the West.  And another thing, it is rare to see a woman driver because less than fifteen percent of drivers in India are women.

So we waited for the ‘Toy Train’ and I was expecting something like one of the little trains of Wales…

… but approaching the platform was a powerful diesel beast about half the size of the express trains that we had become used to with eight carriages.  This was the ‘Himalayan Queen’.  Small yes, but a proper train nevertheless.

We watched enviously as the first class carriages that we wouldn’t be using passed us by  because SAGA had cut a few corners here and only purchased second class tickets.  

My research tells me that there are six trains that use the Kalka to Shimla line and if there was a league table then the ‘Himalayan Queen’ would be at the bottom.  The carriage was small and cramped with hard wooden benches which were not really wide enough to comfortably accommodate two people sitting side by side.  There was a toilet facility but you really wouldn’t want to use it and strict bladder control was going to be not just advisable but absolutely essential.

We departed Kalka station about twenty minutes late and the train meandered through the outskirts of the town before quickly entering the forested foothills of the Himalayas. Immediately the train climbed steadily, the tracks constantly twisting and turning, clinging to the side of the mountains like velcro, with few straight stretches of track even as long as the train.

More twists than Chubby Checker…

The train line had been constructed at the turn of the twentieth century as a means of getting British officials and administrators away for the summer.  They didn’t enjoy the heat of Calcutta or Delhi and so made their way to the town of Shimla high in the mountains where the weather was far more to their liking

The sixty mile long line is two foot six gauge (regular lines are five foot six), has one hundred and two tunnels and eight hundred and sixty-four bridges. The constant curves and grades are very tight which means that trains take around five hours to complete the journey with an average speed of a very sedate fifteen miles an hour.

An advantage of the ‘Himalayan Queen’ second class was that the carriage doors were left open even while the train was moving so it was possible now and again to take the risk and lean out to take pictures.  As we passed slowly through stations vendors jumped on and off the moving train like acrobats and walked through the carriages selling food and snacks.

The train made a couple of stops at the larger stations on route and at about half way pulled into Barog.  Barog is the place where the longest tunnel of the line is situated.   In times past trains used to stop here for a considerable time so that passengers could have their breakfast here and today there were vendors on the platform selling street food (well, platform food) and selling tea and coffee.

I nearly had a bit of bother here.  We were told that we could get off here and stretch our legs and I assumed that this would be for twenty minutes or so and went for a stroll along the platform.  I was at the back of the train when there was a shrill blast of the whistle to announce departure, Kim was shouting at me to tell me the train was leaving already and I had to sprint the length of the train to return to our carriage near the front.  That was a near miss I can tell you.

As we climbed through the clouds and the occasional wisps of mist there were intermittent grand views and I say intermittent because for much of the journey the track side vegetation was thick and impenetrable.  The train persevered through sun-dappled glades at the pace of a woodland walk and the occasional break through the trees into areas of bright green terraces and a village here and there with brightly coloured houses tumbling down the precipitous hillsides.

Despite the discomfort we enjoyed the five hour ride but we were all relieved (some of us needed relief) when the engine brought the train to a stop at Shimla station.

It was much busier than I was anticipating and the traffic was slow and queuing, sometimes not so patiently.  And guess what…

We were reunited with the drivers and the jeeps and then made very slow progress through the cramped and narrow streets until we arrived at our hotel, set in an elevated position overlooking a valley and the brightly coloured city and in the distance we could see the snow capped Himalayas soaring into the sky. 

This was a good spot.  I liked Shimla already.

Passage through India – Across the Punjab to Chandigarh

After a second night at the hotel in Amritsar and more curry we set off the following morning on a journey of one hundred and fifty miles to the city of Chandigarh.

It was a long drive but I enjoyed it.  Kim slept of course.  It was a motorway but not a motorway as we would understand it, pedestrians wander along the verge, cows stray absentmindedly into the road, vehicles drive in both directions on the same carriageway, there is no lane discipline and the hard shoulder is decorated with broken down vehicles.  I doubt you can call the AA or the RAC for assistance here.

Around about midway we stopped at a service station for a break and we ordered a cup of tea.  In India they brew tea in a different way to us, they boil a kettle with a tea bag or two, milk and sugar added which makes it impossible to drink if like me you like it black.

Then there was an amazing coincidence.  We were talking to some British Indians that were here on holiday and it transpired that the woman came from Leicester and so do I and as we spoke it became clear that she lived very close to where I lived as a young boy.  Then it became bizarre because the man told us that he was from Grimsby, well Immingham close by actually, but not really Immingham but the nearby village of Healing.  Which is where we live! I will say that again. Which is where we live!  Here in the middle of the Punjab, five thousand miles from home we met a man who lives around the corner!

Later as we approached the city we stopped for lunch, there was curry but a few of us were not in the mood for curry so we turned down the opportunity and went to a nearby Burger King instead and sat outside in the sunshine.  There is not a lot of choice at an Indian Burger King it has to be said with the menu restricted mainly to chicken but it made a nice change.  The young girl serving appeared perplexed when I asked if I could take her photograph.  Middle picture top collage,

Chandigarh is a new city and tour guide Rahi warned us that there is not a great deal to see.  No forts, no Palaces, no old town because the city was built in the 1950s when India needed a new capital for Eastern Punjab on account of the partition and the inconvenience that the previous capital of the whole of the Punjab was Lahore which was now in Pakistan.

The city has one of the highest per capita incomes in the country and the territory has one of the highest Human Development Index among Indian states and territories. In a 2015 survey it was ranked as the happiest city in India.  In the same year an article published by the BBC named Chandigarh one of the few master-planned cities in the world to have succeeded in terms of combining monumental architecture, cultural growth, and modernisation.  Its tag line is the “Beautiful City” and it was immediately obvious that it is quite unlike Delhi, Jaipur, Amritsar or anywhere else that we had visited because it was clean and tidy, no beggars, no litter and immaculate gardens.

We were visiting the city rose garden, the Zakir Hussain Rose Garden named after the former Indian President Zakir Hussain which claims to have over fifty thousand rose bushes with more than one thousand, five hundred species and hosts the annual ‘Rose Festival’ in early Spring.

This sounded promising but the only point of visiting a stunning rose garden is if there are any stunning roses and today there were none, I have no idea how they were going to stage a Rose Festival without roses so it was all a bit of a disappointment.

This is how it should have looked…

So we walked around the garden, got back on the coach and went to another bit of parkland surrounding a lake and went for another walk.  It was beginning to become obvious now that this was a filling in sort of day, a transit day to get us from one side of the Punjab to the other before moving on tomorrow to the next big visit – Shimla, close to the Himalayan mountains.  With such big distances to cover a day such as this is inevitable.

We left the city and drove to our overnight hotel and here we said goodbye to driver DP and assistant Chandu because they were leaving us now and returning to Delhi.  The next stage of our journey was into the mountains and the large coach was unsuitable for the narrow roads so we were transferring to smaller mini buses.

It had been a pleasure to be driven by DP he had been an excellent driver and assistant Chandu had been friendly and helpful throughout.

 

Passage through India – Wagah Border Pantomime and Partition

Leaving the Golden Temple we proceeded now to the Wagah India /Pakistan border.

We were going to see the  Beating Retreat Ceremony which has been a daily military event since 1959. The ceremony takes place every evening just before sunset at the border crossing which came into being when the Radcliffe line was drawn, separating India and Pakistan, and dividing the Province of Punjab into eastern and western sections. The eastern part went to India and the western part into Pakistan.

This is the only official road link on what is called the Grand Trunk Road  between the two countries and which crosses what is the political fault line which is the Indian Pakistan border and which passes through a colossal , rather ugly concrete border with heavy metal gates.

So we arrived early, way too early in my opinion and now we had to sit and wait, sit and wait, sit and wait.  In all that time all that happened was that a family was allowed through from the Pakistan side to the Indian side and they stood for a while with their suitcases blinking and looking bewildered wondering what to do next.  Were they being ejected, had their visas been approved?  They didn’t seem to know.   Eventually they realised that the crowds of excited people were not there to welcome them to India and they moved  slowly on.

I may have mentioned earlier about the visa application process which was quite difficult and asked several times about any connections relating to Pakistan and as I watched them step  tentatively  from one side to the next it all suddenly seemed to make some belated sense.

Eventually after something about twice as as long as the last Ice Age the show got started.

The ceremony started with a lot of singing and dancing and grand theatre and then a storming parade by the security forces from both the sides with a lot of bravado and strutting about. It reminded me of Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks, soldiers pretending to be Can’Can dancers at the Moulin Rouge and it ended in a contrived coordinated lowering of the two nations’ flags. One soldier stands at attention on each side of the gate.

As the sun sets, the iron gates at the border were opened and the two flags are lowered simultaneously. The flags are folded and the ceremony ended with a retreat that involved a rather reluctant and seemingly difficult handshake between soldiers from either side followed by the theatrical closing of the gates once again.

All rather odd.  India hates Pakistan, Pakistan hates India.  India loves Pakistan, Pakistan loves India.  In under eighty years there have been four wars/spats between the two, 1947/8, 1965, 1971 and most recently 1999. It is like two people who live together but can’t get on and live together,  How can a foreign visitor make any sense of that I wonder?

The tension spills over into sport.  India and Pakistan are two of the greatest cricket teams in the World but they don’t play each other except at neutral venues.  Since Partition only one Hindu has ever represented Pakistan and only seventeen Muslims have represented India despite the fact that India has the third highest Muslim population in the World.  Pakistan cricketers are excluded from the Indian Premier League for political and religious reasons.  How absurd is that?

It was all a complete pantomime.  Ridiculous really but to be fair I didn’t understand the relevance of it.  A bit of trivia for you,  the word ‘pak’ means pure in Persian and ”istan’ means land of so Pakistan is literally ‘land of purity’.  That is a very bold claim.

I asked Tour Guide Rahi about it and he was certain that Partition was entirely the fault of the British, their policy of divide and rule that set Muslim against Hindu and led to the events of 1947 which must surely go down as one of the major humanitarian tragedies of the twentieth century when hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and slaughtered for not even a very good reason.

India and Pakistan were separated in 1947 as the British withdrew from India.  It suits to blame the British and their admittedly clueless, clumsy and uninformed division of the sub-continent but surely others were equally complicit in a defiant statement of intent firmly set against compromise.  Viceroy Mountbatten gave up the attempt, referred it back to London and it all ended up going tits up.

I personally didn’t enjoy it, I thought the visit a complete waste of time, I had known about the tension between India and Pakistan but I would have preferred to have visited the Partition Museum but that seemed to get quietly dropped from the itinerary.  I would have preferred to return to the Golden Temple at Sunset but that too seemed to get quietly dropped from the itinerary so had to stick instead with the pantomime ceremony right through to the end.

I would most especially liked to go and see a cricket match between India and Pakistan.  No chance of that of course.

What happened to these main players?  Ghandi of course was assassinated in 1948,  Earl Mountbatten suffered the same fate in 1979, blown up by an IRA bomb, Jinnah was a chain smoker (fifty a day, or one every fifteen minutes based on a twelve hour day because you can’t smoke when you are asleep because you will set fire to the bed) and died of lung disease in 1948, Nehru lived until 1964 and died of a heart attack.

Cyril Radcliffe who drew the line which became the border was so saddened by the violence and death that his line had caused that he refused to draw his salary (£3,000 in 1947 or about £145,000 in 2024 values) and returned to England where he was created a Lord.  Some things never change and reward for failure is one of them.  He lived a long life until 1977.

When it was all over (thank goodness) we returned to the hotel, relaxed for a while before going to the dining room for another curry.  I had now had more curry in one week than I had had in the last ten years, maybe twenty years.

Tomorrow there was a long coach journey ahead across the Punjab from Amritsar to Chandrigarh but on the plus side there was a later start.

Passage through India – An Introduction to Sikhism

“One cannot attain salvation only by showing devotion towards God day and night, that’s not the purpose of life at all. Salvation is attained by performing one’s true duty, by helping those in need, by loving all, by embracing God and all his creations.”― Raj Kiran Atagaraha,

A later start today and we were glad about that, it meant a leisurely breakfast at the hotel before setting off into the city of Amritsar.

As we joined the coach we were introduced to our guide for the day Jaswinder Singh, a Sikh of course with a broad smile and an untidy beard under a daffodil yellow turban.

I digress here for just a moment with a story (maybe true, maybe not) about the Tulip flower.  The name was first applied to the plant by a man called Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who was a Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the sixteenth century and was also a great floral enthusiast. 

One day he was talking to a sultan and he noticed that he was wearing an attractive flower in his headgear.  When I say talking what I mean is that they were communicating with each other in the way that people do when they can’t speak each others language with lots of funny faces and wild gesticulations.  Busbecq was curious about the flower and pointed to it and enquired its name.  In Turkey the name of the flower was a Lale but the Sultan thought he meant what is the name of his hat so he told him it was a Tulipan (or turban) and Busbeqc, who completely misunderstood, acquired some bulbs and sent them back to Europe with the information that they were called Tulipa.

Anyway, back to India.  It was no surprise that Jaswinder was called Jaswinder Singh because all Sikh men have the name Singh.   Sikhism is a relatively modern religion that sought to reject Muslim and Hindu traditions  of hierarchy and caste  so  all male Sikhs carry the surname Singh which means lion, while all females are named Kaur which means princess. It is a radical expression of unity. Sikhs want to show they belong to a single family by rejecting their family names and sharing the same surnames.  It is a sort of socialism and being a socialist I immediately approved.

The identity of a Lion is not only seen in the Sikh name but in their appearance as well. It is represented through the Five Ks:

(1) Kesh — Sikh men do not cut their body hair. They have long beards, and they tie their hair into a turban. This represents discipline

(2) Kangha — a small comb worn in the hair

(3) Kirpan — every Sikh man has a small dagger or a sword, to protect the weak and fight for justice against tyrants and oppressors. It is forbidden to use it for anything else

(4) Kacchera — a special form of underwear that represents sexual restraint

(5) Kara — a steel bangle representing the infinity of God

As we drove to the city Jaswinder told us a little about Sikhism, it is very complicated as you might imagine but basically it boils down to kindness, family,  looking after others and community service.  Not something that the people of the World are generally any good at.

The core beliefs of Sikhism, articulated in the Guru Granth Sahib, include faith and meditation in the name of the one creator, divine unity and equality of all humankind, engaging in seva (selfless service),striving for justice for the benefit and prosperity of all and honest conduct and livelihood while living a householder’s life. Following this standard, Sikhism rejects claims that any particular religious tradition has a monopoly on absolute truth.

If all of that is true then these people should immediately put in charge of running the World.

I was reminded that Kim and I once worked with a Sikh man called Navtej Singh and he was probably the nicest, kindest person that we have ever worked with.

Passage through India – Delhi to Amritsar

 

“India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.”  American historian Will Durant

In a hectic first week we had travelled south and west of Delhi and enjoyed the Golden Triangle through Jaipur and Agra and now for week two we were heading north towards the Himalayas.

This inevitably meant another early pre-dawn start, we were catching the express train to Amritsar, a scheduled seven hour journey.

We were booked and ticketed on the Shatabdi Express, excellent fast air-conditioned daytime trains running at up to ninety miles an hour for some parts of the journey.  Shatabdi is Hindi for century as the first of these trains  were introduced in 1988 to mark the centenary of Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth.  The first Prime Minister of independent, post colonial  India.

We were moving two hundred and eighty miles north on a train of twenty passenger coaches.  The longest train in India is twenty-two coaches and requires a platform length of a third of a mile.  A little bit of trivia for you now – the only platform in the UK that can accommodate a twenty-two coach train without it hanging over both ends is in the city of Gloucester.  

As it happens, in a list of longest railway station platforms in the World, India has nine out of the top ten, the longest is Hubali Junction Railway Station in Kamataka in Southern India which is close on to a mile long.

Standard UK trains are a maximum of twelve coaches.  The longest passenger train ever was ‘The Ghan’ in Australia, which ran from Adelaide to Darwin and had had forty-four coaches.  If you are in the wrong place when that beast pulls in to the station then you are going to need running shoes, that platform would also need to be almost a mile long!

The Shatabdi Express includes food and drink and there is a regular supply of water, tea and biscuits and airline style food.  A lot of people turned down the food, wary of dreaded Delhi Belly but I tucked in and enjoyed it, especially the lamb curry and had no bother at all.  It was a great deal better than Virgin Airlines on board catering I can tell you.  India Railways move seventy million passengers a day and Virgin airlines only twelve thousand so you would think that they could do better.

The railway directly employs 1.2 million people but I suspect that it supports a much larger employment economy than that.  Station porters compete for business. Platform vendors and countless others making a living off the railway even those who pick through track-side litter.

In  travel vendors pass unsuccessfully several times through the coaches, I doubt that they are directly employed, my guess is that they are licenced operators who have paid for the privilege of a concession.  They return every few minutes in the hope that someone has turned down the meal and will have a Snickers Bar instead or maybe hoping that they have just changed their mind and turn a no thank you into a yes please.

It is billed as an express train but the average speed across the journey is only forty miles an hour, it stops six times and speed in and out of cities and towns is soporific. It took even longer today as it was delayed by a farmers protest blocking the line ahead.  Indian farmers demand higher prices for their products and less environmental demands.  They have copied French farmer tactics to make their point.

Kim used the time to make a new friend…

So, we arrived in Amritsar a few minutes late, gave our uneaten breakfast boxes away to the sleeping beggars, met the coach driver and his assistant and drove to the hotel.  A nice hotel Kim reminds me but I remember little about it, I was ready for a Kingfisher beer so I obtained directions to a nearby liquor store and made the appropriate purchases.

Another good day.  I had enjoyed it.  We had enjoyed it.  More curry for dinner.

Thursday Doors – Jaipur in India

Passage through India – An Early Start in Agra

Another early start from Ranthambore and we leave for a six mile taxi ride over the rutted track and the horribly pot holed road to the railway station as the sun begins to rise over the forest.  Our luggage has gone on ahead with D P Sharma and the coach. Early because we have to catch the morning express train to Agra.

Sawai Madhopur Railway Station was surprisingly calm, quite unlike the madness of Delhi and Jaipur, a lot more relaxed and laid-back, it doesn’t resemble a refugee camp, passengers waiting for trains are very casual, we are the ones showing unnecessary impatience as we wait for the approaching train and listen for the hoot of the horn that sounds like a roaring tiger and which announces its arrival from a mile or so away.

Soon it is here, it seems to limp into the station, a little late but we have our allocated seats and settle in for the ride.  A proper carriage this time.  Only a shortish journey again today, just two hours or so, so no travel catering but there is a constant flow of vendors.  In the UK there is a drinks trolley on wheels but in India they carry baskets on their heads, news vendors, tea sellers, water sellers, English snickers sellers, snack sellers and after them the rubbish collectors.  It should be chaotic but it all seems to run very smoothly.

Indian Railways, under the ownership of the Ministry of Railways operates the national railway system. It manages the World’s  fourth largest national railway system with a running track length of sixty-five thousand miles.  With more than 1.2 million employees, it is the world’s largest railway employer.  It operates nearly fourteen thousand trains a day, carries eight and a half billion passengers a year and achieves 95% punctuality.

I wish these guys could run the hopelessly inefficient Trans-Pennine railway line in the UK.

Except for the on-board lavatories that is which are well worth avoiding at all costs.  I was never able to work out just what might require an emergency flush.  Best not to think about it I guess.

On account of the early start we arrived mid-morning in Agra.  D P and Chandu were there to meet us, get us onto the coach and straight off for a visit.  The Red Fort of Agra and another inevitable UNESCO World Heritage Site.

There is an interesting entry system in many of these places in India.  An overseas tourist pays about ten times more than a visitor from India but the compensation is that they get to use a fast lane system which is about ten times quicker to get through the gate so that seems very fair.

Agra fort was completed in 1573 and served as the main residence of the rulers of the Mughal dynasty until 1638, when the capital was shifted from Agra to Delhi.  More than a fort, a walled city once full of magnificent palaces and fine buildings but later demolished by the British when it became an army garrison.  When a place like this gets used as an army garrison there is inevitably a lot of looting and damage and Red Fort is no exception.

During WW2 a lot of stately homes were requisitioned by the UK government for use by the Allied armies and suffered vandalism and damage.

Sadly this is a familiar story about misbehaving troops in requisitioned big houses and country estates and many suffered the same fate. No need for the Luftwaffe to get involved. just leave it to the army and the GI’s.  Apparently owners in general didn’t mind their properties being borrowed for schools or hospitals but dreaded the armed forces being moved in because this guaranteed damage and huge expense.

We liked the Red Fort, especially the top with views over the Taj Mahal, some refused to look because they didn’t want to take away from the actual visit tomorrow but I didn’t think that it would especially spoil anything so looked regardless.  It was rather misty so not a great view anyway.

After the Red Fort it was lunch-time and we dined in a splendid restaurant and enjoyed a thali, which is a sort of taster plate with ten or so varieties of food to sample and the really good thing that there were seconds available of those we liked the best.  My favourite was the lamb curry as it almost always was.  And the naan bread because as everywhere it was fabulous, so fabulous that it will be sometime before I can buy a packaged naan bread in a supermarket in the UK again.  Even in UK restaurants I swear that I have never tasted naan like in India,

I am happy to declare it the best lunchtime meal in the whole two weeks…

After lunch we moved on to the ‘Mini Taj’, a Mughul mausoleum,  the Tomb of I’timad-Ud-Daulah and considered a masterpiece of the domeless style of Mughal tombs.  It was the first building finished in white marble and marks the transitional phase from red stone to marble.  The Mughals had got to spend all that money on something I guess.  It was worth a visit I suppose but everyone was waiting for the visit to Taj Mahal but that would have to wait until tomorrow.

Tonight we stayed in a very nice hotel close to the city centre and we found a liquor store only a hundred yards away so stocked up with reasonably priced wine.  It was on a busy main road and for some bizarre reason Kim decided to cross.  What absolute madness but somehow she made it across two manic carriageways.  I got stuck half way and Kim got stranded on the other side.  Eventually a local man noticed her predicament, took her arm and guided her across safely.

A local is always useful in these situations, advice in Italy for example is to find nuns crossing a road and join them because whilst Italian drivers will happily run down pedestrians they draw the line at nuns.