Sisters and goddesses

Legend has it that it was the apostle, Thomas, the doubting one, who brought Christianity to Southern India - and now, aside from the odd jealous spat, the Virgin Mary and goddess Bhagavati are worshipped with equal fervour. William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

On the edge of the jungle lay a small wooden temple. It was late evening, and the sun had already disappeared behind the palms. The light was fading fast, and the hundreds of small clay lamps lined up on the wooden slats of the temple all seemed to be burning brighter and brighter, minute by minute.

The oiled torsos of the temple Brahmins were gleaming, too. They had nearly finished the evening ceremony - surrounding the idol of the goddess Bhagavati with burning splints as they rang bells, chanted and blew on conch shells. The ritual prepared the goddess for sleep.

Only when it was over, and the doors of the inner shrine were sealed for the night, were they able to tell me about the goddess they served. Bhagavati is the pre-eminent goddess in Kerala, the most powerful and beloved. In some incarnations, it was true, she could be ferocious: a figure of terror, a stalker of cremation grounds who slaughtered demons without hesitation or compassion.

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36 hours in Mumbai

Behind the bustling boulevards are nameless alleys where coconuts are sold and the city’s frenetic traffic occasionally comes to a honking halt because of a scampering goat. Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times:

It’s the Jazz Age again in Mumbai. The populous metropolis is bursting with stock-market money, a shimmering art scene has a growing global presence, and young people are exploiting their newfound freedoms in dim bars until the wee hours. Indeed, in the city’s more rarefied circles, Champagne is sipped every night and everyone knows everyone, darling. But large swaths of Mumbai, the former Bombay, remain immune to the homogeneity of global glamour. Behind the bustling boulevards are nameless alleys where coconuts are sold, haircuts are given and the city’s frenetic traffic occasionally comes to a honking halt because of a scampering goat.

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The healing waters of Nepal

In Geographic Expeditions, Catherine Watson, the former travel editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the author of two collections of travel essays, ”Roads Less Traveled” and ”Home on the Road,” describes a journey to Nepal with a friend who was “coming back from the brink of death”:

In the physical and mental calm that follows whitewater, a friend and I, still dripping from the icy river, were relaxing on the front tubes of the raft, letting Nepal’s hot sunshine dry us off as the noise of the day’s first rapids faded behind.

”I never thought I would hear that sound again,” my friend said quietly. His tone was a blend of relief, gratitude and joy. I knew what he meant. I felt the same way, though my reasons weren’t as good.

My friend was coming back from the brink of death; I, from mere idleness. But getting through that rapids - a modest one, really, only a 3+ in anybody’s book - had made me feel reborn too. The whole trip had, for that matter.

Eight months earlier, my friend’s doctors had handed him a death sentence.

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Lakshadweeps: islands of innocence

If you yearn for a holiday free of the trappings of the tourist industry, then the Lakshadweep islands in the Indian Ocean could be just the sort of unspoilt, back-to-basics destination you’re after, says Edward Reeves in The Telegraph:

Tell a friend that you’re off to the Lakshadweep islands and the response is likely to be a look of blank incomprehension. Not surprising, as these 36 specks of white sand off India’s Kerala coast hardly go out of their way to pull in the tourists.

Foreigners have been allowed in only for the past 20-odd years (and even now can visit just three islands), marketing spend hovers around the zero mark and the official website looks like it was designed by a seven-year-old. The Maldives, these ain’t.

No bad thing, you’re thinking. Those who were lucky enough to visit the Maldives 20 years ago talk fondly of the basic accommodation, hapless but charming staff, and barely developed tourism industry. The Lakshadweeps are a throwback to those days, an example of what the Indian Ocean desert island experience can be before the international chains muscle in with their sanitised “island-resorts”, underwater restaurants, over-designed spas and, God help us, “salt sommeliers” (yes, really - at Anantara Maldives).

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Tourism subsidy roils India’s upscale waters

Bruce Stanley from Port Blair, The Andamans Islands, in The Wall Street Journal [From Mint]:

A cultural collision between working-class visitors and the local stewards of high-end tourism at this idyllic archipelago has raised temperatures here, laying bare prejudices and at times exciting a measure of greed on both sides.

The Asian tsunami in 2004 swamped this Indian territory in the Bay of Bengal and took some 20,000 lives. It also left hoteliers and tour operators grappling with the economic aftershocks, as spooked tourists stayed away. So, several months after the disaster, the Indian government began offering free plane tickets to civil servants and employees of big state companies to treat their families to an Andamans vacation.

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A passage to India — with Mom

Jeff Greenwald about a trip to India with his 75-year-old mother. “Not only was this my mother’s first trip to Asia, but she and I had also never travelled together,” he writes in the Los Angeles Times.

The driver tossed our bags into the trunk of a white Ambassador cab and pressed his palms together.

“Welcome to India, sir. Is this your wife?”

“No, she’s my mother.”

Mom giggled; neither of us was sure whether the driver’s motivation was flattery or innocence. But it was an encouraging start to an adventure I had planned with anticipation and anxiety.

Bringing my mother to India had seemed an inspired idea. I’d wanted to give her something spectacular for her 75th birthday: an eight-day tour around northern India’s signature sites — Delhi, the palaces of Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal — and of the country that had so profoundly altered my own worldview.

My misgivings were equally broad. Not only was this my mother’s first trip to Asia, but she and I had also never traveled together. And although she had been to Israel and Europe, including Russia, India was something else entirely.

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Bangalore airport hurries to make the first flight

Bangalore is set to get a new airport. But its citizens are lobbying to keep the old one going. Somini Sengupta finds out why in the IHT

For years, frequent fliers in this technology hub complained bitterly about having to suffer the indignities of a tattered and tiny airport scrunched in the middle of a busy city neighborhood.

Now, with a new one opening on Saturday, people are clamoring once more. This time, to keep the old airport open.

The reversal does not reflect a sudden bout of nostalgia, but rather the fear that the new airport, no matter how modern it was intended to be, seems destined to be the latest repository of India’s astonishing inability to plan for its future and fix its sagging infrastructure.

The way things stand now, the trip to the new airport, 21 miles outside town, will easily take 90 minutes from the city center, and even longer from the software companies that have turned Bangalore, also known as Bengaluru, into India’s own Silicon Valley.

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[Pic: Escalators are cleaned in preparation for Saturday's opening. Ruth Fremason/New York Times]

A tale of two urban legends

Posted by Namita Bhandare:

My column on the editorial page of the Hindustan Times looks at Mumbai and Delhi and how the differences between the two cities has narrowed in recent years

In the early 90s when I moved back to live in Delhi — ironically because I had married a Marathi manoos who lived as an ‘outsider’ in the capital — the Bombay (not yet Mumbai) versus Delhi debate was at its peak. Bombay was cool and cosmopolitan; a city of opportunity and dreams where everybody who worked hard enough, could make it big; a city that was so egalitarian that it didn’t give a rat’s tit to your last name; a city so safe for women that a ‘beautiful woman’, as the old saying went, ‘clad in the finest jewels may walk in the jungle safely at midnight’.

I had lived between both cities but finished school and college in New Delhi. Then, I left. Returning was like being reassigned to purgatory. Delhi was status-conscious and hierarchical with its own rigid social pecking order. Delhi was about nepotism and networking where those who made it big in the ‘import-export’ business did it because daddy-ji was pulling strings somewhere. Delhi was the city — or over-grown village, depending on your perspective — where no woman could be safe on the streets.

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Be my guest

The desert grasslands of Gujarat in India may be remote, but the Halepotra tribe make the long journey worthwhile. Tom Parker in The Guardian:

‘This is it, it’s probably not what you expected,” Shakur said with a wry smile as he stopped his battered 1965 Fiat 2300 beside a collection of five bhungas - traditional cylindrical mud huts with white walls and grass-topped roofs.

Shaam-e-Sarhad looked like all the other tribal settlements we’d passed en route, though its surprisingly large huts had a few welcome extras such as a ceiling fan and a separate outdoor bathroom.

We were in one of the most remote parts of India, in Kutch’s desert grasslands in the state of Gujarat, with the Pakistan border and the edge of the vast salt plain known as the Great Rann of Kutch just 15km to the north - hence the resort’s name, which means “Sunset at the Border”.

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No room at India’s inns

A serious hotel shortage has businessmen wandering the country in search of a bed. Neeta Lal in Asia Sentinel:

Paul Douglas had a surreal experience on his maiden visit to India last year. Although the Los Angeles trader was on a business trip to India’s Silicon Valley - Bangalore - he put up in Mumbai, nearly 1,000 kilometers away. Douglas would fly to Bangalore every morning during his three-day stay and then jet back after wrapping up work.

Douglas found the city’s hotels so expensive, he says, that he preferred “to stay with a friend in Mumbai, fly in for meetings to Bangalore and then catch the day’s last flight back.”

Much like Douglas, foreign visitors to India are experiencing the country’s worst hotel room crunch ever. As its economy booms, with growth projected at 8 percent in 2008-09 despite the global slowdown, demand for hotel accommodation has far outstripped supply. The shortfall is so acute that hotel rooms in most Indian metropolitan areas are either unavailable or to be had only for outrageous prices.

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Banana pancakes: the answer to a hippy’s prayers

In The Guardian, David Jenkins writes about his food experience — dal, dal, dal was dull, dull, dull — on the hippy trail back in the seventies, and how much things have changed since then with the arrival of apple pie in Varanasi and ‘German bakeries’ and bottled drinking water everywhere

The first one I remember having out East was on Unawatuna Beach, near Galle, in 1981, with Simon Le Bon. Unawatuna was ravishing then: a perfect crescent of golden sand, a few bamboo shacks, a house some rich junkies lived in, two members of Duran Duran seeking inspiration for their next video, and a palm-fringed restaurant, its deck facing the sunset. I was, of course, stoned; I had, of course, the munchies. And Simon… well, Simon was pouring maple syrup over a banana pancake. There it was: glistening, glutinous and the answer to any hippy’s prayers. So I ordered, and I ate, and I was hooked. Ever since - from Sihanoukville to Sikkim, from Vagator to Varanasi - I’ve fallen ravenously on those banana pancakes and wept with joy.

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London to Dhaka by train

Dean Nelson in The Times, uk:

RAIL enthusiasts with a sense of adventure and 23 days to spare will be able to travel by train from London to Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, when a new link opens later this year.

The 7,000-mile Trans-Asia railway will follow one of the old Silk Roads through Istanbul, Tehran, Lahore and Delhi.

It is already being described by train buffs as “the world’s greatest railway journey” and will be longer than the Trans-Siberian railway, which spans 5,772 miles.

Under a United Nations-sponsored scheme, Pakistan and Iran will link up their lines in the coming months to join the sub-continent’s track to that of Europe for the first time.

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Trekking in style in Bhutan

The best way to see one of the world’s most beautiful countries is on foot. The four-day Druk Path trek isn’t for everyone, but the rewards are great. Bruce Einhorn in BusinessWeek:

It was quite an entourage. A dozen mules, lugging the tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, gas stoves, and enough food for both humans and animals for four days. Managing the animals were three pony men. The group also included two cooks, two campground managers, and one guide in charge of keeping everything in order. Oh yes, and two guests: my wife and me.

We were gathered on the edge of Paro, a small town in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, as we were about to embark on the Druk Path, a four-day trek that would take us through forests of blue pine, past monasteries of whitewashed stone that look a bit like Swiss chalets, above the tree line to yak-herder shelters, along snowy ridges with stunning views of the high peaks, and finally down to the valley of Thimpu, a bustling town of government ministries, international aid-agency offices, small museums, and tourist shops, which is the closest Bhutan has to a city.

[Photo: Uma, a traditional-style hotel in the hills above the Paro Valley in Bhutan.]

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Selling the Ramayana trail in Sri Lanka

Pallavi Polanki in the Hindustan Times

The Sri Lankan tourism promotion bureau must have been watching very closely when the Setusamudram Project rocked Parliament last year. Their attempt to cash in on the Ramayana craze in India seems to have hit jackpot.

Ever since the launch in January of the ‘Sri Lanka’s Ramayana Trail’ — a religious/ spiritual tourism venture by Lanka — tour operators have been flooded with enquiries from India.

“A swami from north India is bringing 400 of his students to go on the trail. An Andhra Pradesh tour operator has come and checked out the trail. We have already had batches of 50, 60, and 120 visitors from India,” said Asoka Perera, South Asia spokesperson for Sri Lanka Tourism. He is in Delhi to take part in the South Asia Travel and Tourism Exchange.

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And on more on Sri Lanka’s Ramayana link and cricket icons, Arjuna Ranatunga and Aravinda de Silva marketing that link click here.  

A walk in the mountains

In a remote corner of India, a new tourism project leads trekkers from village to village to stay with locals . Teresa Levonian Cole of The Guardian has a memorable time:

It was dark when we arrived. We had driven six hours from Bagdogra, climbing steadily through the foothills of the Himalayas, the steamy air of the plains becoming fresher as we made our ascent. We twisted through thickly forested mountain roads, crossing bridges that were regularly washed away by monsoons, skirting cliffs that in the past had sometimes fallen away into the Teesta River that burbled below, and gazed out on to the moonlit slopes in the hope of catching a glimpse of a brown bear or elusive leopard. Eventually, the bumpy track came to an end, signalling our arrival at Yangsum Farm, where a large bonfire burned in welcome.

This was the first stop on my village walk itinerary, in the western mountains of Sikkim, India’s greenest and least populated state, close to the Nepalese border and far from well-trodden trails. The plan was to visit places in the Lesser Himalayas so remote that they don’t appear on any maps. Indeed, in three days, I didn’t see a single tourist or souvenir shop. You could call it soft adventure, this concept dreamed up by eco-adventure company Shakti Himalaya which introduces people to the history, culture and lifestyle of remote areas through supported walks and overnight stops in simple village houses. Comfort, however, is ensured, as Shakti helps local owners to convert their houses, by adding bathroom facilities, for example, and introducing homely touches: a Buddha statue here, framed thangkas there, or a comfortable sofa to flop on.

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Kolkata to Dhaka by train

Mark Dummett of BBC was on board the Friendship Express. His report:

On the morning of the Bengali New Year, cameraman Abdullah Al-Muyid and I boarded the Friendship or Maitree Express in Dhaka - the first passenger train between India and Bangladesh in over 40 years.

It seems extraordinary that Bangladeshis and Indians have had to wait so long for this train. The two countries have officially been friends for years, and it has been possible for some time to take a bus, or a plane between the two. There was a genuine joy that sense has at last prevailed.

Click here for the BBC video report:

China’s loyal youth

As is clear to anyone who lives in China, most young ethnic Chinese strongly support their government’s suppression of the recent Tibetan uprising. Matthew Forney, a former Beijing bureau chief for Time, in The New York Times:

Many sympathetic Westerners view Chinese society along the lines of what they saw in the waning days of the Soviet Union: a repressive government backed by old hard-liners losing its grip to a new generation of well-educated, liberal-leaning sophisticates. As pleasant as this outlook may be, it’s naïve. Educated young Chinese, far from being embarrassed or upset by their government’s human-rights record, rank among the most patriotic, establishment-supporting people you’ll meet.

As is clear to anyone who lives here, most young ethnic Chinese strongly support their government’s suppression of the recent Tibetan uprising. One Chinese friend who has a degree from a European university described the conflict to me as “a clash between the commercial world and an old aboriginal society.” She even praised her government for treating Tibetans better than New World settlers treated Native Americans.

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Tigerland

In New Yorker, Caroline Alexander journeys through the mangrove forest of Bengal

The old man stepped onto our boat out of the utter blackness that falls between the abrupt fall of twilight, at five o’clock, and the rising of the full moon. His name was Phani Gayen, and he was employed at the Saznekhali Wildlife Sanctuary, in the mangrove forest on the northern border of India’s Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, where we were moored. Formerly, he was a crab fisherman, taking his small, pole-punted boat down along the forest’s brackish tidal creeks and narrow channels. On June 23, 1984, at half past noon, he had gone into the forest with companions to collect wood. He turned and found a tiger springing for him, roaring. “I was then forty-five years old and very, very strong,” he said. “I did not allow the tiger’s face to touch my face.” He stroked his Adam’s apple. “The tiger’s throat is very hard, here.” As the tiger gripped him with its paws, its head hung over his shoulder, drenching his shirt with saliva. “I knew I was going to die. So I embraced the tiger. He was soft. The tiger was soft. Like a sponge.” Somehow, this surrender freed him—the tiger released him and turned on one of his companions. Taking the companion by the throat, the tiger headed back into the forest.

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[Pic: 'If the Sunderbans goes under, the tiger episode on Earth is over'. Photo Tim Laman]

The beer index

Here’s an interesting economic indicator — a sort of a Big Mac index for tipplers: the price of beer in various parts of the world. People behind pintprice.com say it’s “a completely random idea inspired by several beers.” So check it out before you order your next pint.

To give you an idea of how much a pint of beer costs in this part of the world (in US dollars):

Afghanistan (Kabul): $5.15

Bangladesh (Dhaka): $2.07

Burma: $0.62

Bhutan: $0.26

India: Goa $1.65; Delhi $3.98

Maldives: Only the island resorts sell liquor

Nepal (Kathmandu): $2.05

Pakistan (Islamabad): $8.02

Sri Lanka (Colombo): $1.59

The prices are set by the visitors; if it looks wrong, just change it.

Pondicherry’s French connection

In the colonial city of Pondicherry — or Puducherry, as it is officially known but rarely called — southern India meets the South of France. Matt Gross in The New York Times:

In the garden of the 33-room Promenade, Pondicherry’s second-newest boutique hotel, situated (surprise!) right on the promenade, well-heeled patrons - mostly Western, with a smattering of Indians - drank cocktails and dangled their feet in a small pool. It was a Tuesday in March, but it felt like a summer Friday.

North of the park sat the equally tranquil Pondicherry Museum, an old mansion full of relics from the past, both recent and distant. For 20 minutes, I was the only visitor, wandering alone among the carriages and cannonballs, ornate dining room sets and bronze statues of goddesses, until I found a display of 2,000-year-old Roman amphorae from the nearby archaeological dig at Arikamedu.

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In search of Islamabad’s soul

In All Things Pakistan, a look at Fauzia Minallah’s coffee-table book on Islamabad sends Mast Qalandar off on a trip to neighbouring Saidpur, home to black goats, unglazed pottery and a Hindu temple:

People often describe Islamabad as a city without a soul. Actually, Islamabad’s soul is not to be found in the city itself, but on the fringes of the city. In the little hamlets and hills. Fauzia Minallah, an Islamabad based artist, has recently published a delightful coffee-table book titled ‘Glimpses into Islamabad’s Soul’. She describes many such places in and around Islamabad with long history and heritage, myths and folklore.

One such village is Saidpur, situated just off the Margalla Road, hardly a 5 five minutes drive from the upscale neighborhoods of Islamabad. I knew Saidpur only as a place one ordered garden-manure from. You didn’t have to go there. You just called the guy on his cell phone and he would have a Suzuki-full of manure delivered at your doorstep - literally, sometime.

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Inside the court of the Tibetan god-king

In The Observer, UK, Randeep Ramesh travels to McLeod Ganj and finds that the Dalai Lama’s commitment to peace is being tested - both by China and by Tibetans who want decisive action in the face of escalating violence:

When the Dalai Lama sat down yesterday (March 22) with Richard Gere and Robert Thurman, father of actor Uma and US professor of Buddhism, it was supposed to be for a few hours contemplating sacred art and silent meditation.

But with Chinese troops smothering the protests in Tibet with brutal ease, the 14th Dalai Lama, an incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion, found himself pondering not celestial peace but bloody violence.

Like almost everything the 72-year-old does, who he meets and what he says in his lopsided English are picked over and pulled apart. Gere and Thurman founded Tibet House, in New York’s hip Upper West Side, which serves as a cultural mission for the ‘occupied’ nation of Tibet. Their headline-grabbing appearance will no doubt deepen suspicions in Beijing that yesterday’s event at the Delhi Foundation for Universal Responsibility was politics masquerading as religion.

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The land where the hippy trail reaches a historic impasse

Adventurous travellers have found many things in Goa. Innocent escape was never one of them. Ian Jack in The Guardian, UK:

Fiona MacKeown was by no means the first parent of a large family to travel from a rambling home in rural western England, in the middle of a damp winter, and see what Goa had to offer by way of diversion. Evelyn Waugh had six children (a seventh died in infancy); Fiona MacKeown had nine (eight since February 15, when her 15-year-old daughter Scarlett Keeling was found dead on the beach at Anjuna). Waugh travelled from Piers Court, a Georgian mansion in Gloucestershire. MacKeown came from a huddle of caravans near Bideford, Devon, a home summarised as “a mountain of old tyres … empty beer bottles … and rubbish” by Wednesday’s Daily Mail. But the bigger difference is that Waugh left his children behind.

He came to Goa in December 1952. “The scenery [is] delicious … the people soft and friendly,” he wrote to his wife.

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Travel advisory: pack caution, common sense

Namita Bhandare in Mint on the death of Scarlette Keeling, and the lessons we can learn from it

The life and death of Scarlette Keeling has left in its wake a media feeding frenzy. To be sure, the rape and murder of the British teenager goes beyond your average “sansani” (sensational) crime story: There’s the sun and sand of “idyllic” Goa, a heady concoction of drugs and alcohol, a botched police cover-up, accusations of a powerful drug cartel with political links and, finally, the apparently freewheeling lifestyle of Scarlette’s mother Fiona MacKeown.

I have nothing but contempt for stories that focus on Fiona’s past escapades, lifestyle and lovers. I unequivocally agree with Brinda Karat who said in Parliament last week that you cannot victimize the victim.

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Slum visits: Tourism or voyeurism?

Some tourists are trading museums and monuments for shantytowns and garbage heaps. But critics say these tours are exploitative. Eric Weiner in The New York Times:

Michael Cronin’s job as a college admissions officer took him to India two or three times a year, so he had already seen the usual sites - temples, monuments, markets - when one day he happened across a flier advertising “slum tours.”

“It just resonated with me immediately,” said Mr. Cronin, who was staying at a posh Taj Hotel in Mumbai where, he noted, a bottle of Champagne cost the equivalent of two years’ salary for many Indians. “But I didn’t know what to expect.”

Soon, Mr. Cronin, 41, found himself skirting open sewers and ducking to avoid exposed electrical wires as he toured the sprawling Dharavi slum, home to more than a million. He joined a cricket game and saw the small-scale industry, from embroidery to tannery, that quietly thrives in the slum. “Nothing is considered garbage there,” he said. “Everything is used again.”

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It’s a mud, mud world

A hut made of mud and coconut leaves? Dea Birkett sacrifices modern comforts for spectacular wildlife and top class service in Sri Lanka. In The Guardian, UK:

We were lost, very lost. Our driver couldn’t find the track and there were no signs. We were deep in the jungle, it was getting dark, and we were getting worried. Then we heard a strange sound. It was laughter. Not just ordinary laughter, but deep and continuous, more like an animal’s call than a human sound. But human it was - someone was very, very happy. Then that someone appeared, a short, stocky man in shorts and camouflaged beany hat, a paraffin lamp swinging in his hand. And that’s how we met Kumar, owner and manager of the Mudhouse. “Everything okay?” he beamed, followed quickly by, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

The Mudhouse is in the central western jungle, far from Sri Lanka’s beach resorts and heaving Buddhist temples. The nearest town is Anamaduwa, a place not mentioned in a single guidebook. Kumar wants it that way; he’s refused to put up any signs to help people navigate miles of dirt paths. When the rains are heavy, he has to bring guests up from the local village on a tractor.

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A very civilised jungle

In The Spectator, Matthew d’Ancona describes his time in Mumbai:

A city where the children dash from car to car selling novels is the perfect place for a literary festival: on the way from the airport, snaking past shantytowns and catching my first glimpse of the Arabian Sea, I am offered The Kite Runner by street urchins knocking on the window of my taxi. It is a good location for another reason, which is that, like New York or Rome, Mumbai is a place one visits in literature and film many times before setting foot on the island city itself. In its crush of people, colour, sensuality, surrealism and politics, it is Midnight’s Children or a Bollywood double-bill suddenly made flesh.

I am here to talk about British politics and fiction, doing my best not to confuse the two. A few days before departure, I see the PM at No. 10 and mention my impending trip. True to form, the big clunking bibliomane reels off a list of books I should read before I go. In Mumbai, I unpack my suitcase and look out of the window to the Gateway of India, through which, in 1947, the last British troop left the Empire. A copy of Gordon’s top recommendation, Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, sits reproachfully on the table, still pristine and unread.

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Night train

Thirty years ago, Ian Jack fell in love with riding the rails in India. When he returned this winter to board the famed Delhi to Kolkata Express, would he find the same romance? In The Guardian, UK:

On the night train from Delhi to Kolkata, trying to persuade myself to sleep, I started to count the Indian railway journeys I’d made. I reached 100 or so and then gave up. So many journeys, so many early-morning cigarettes smoked over tea drunk from those disposable clay vessels called kulhads - the platform littered with their smashed fragments - as I got down at a junction and waited for a change of locomotive: dawn the best time of day in India, Gold Flake the best cigarette, steam the best smell, an engine whistle the best noise, tea the best drink. Also remembered: so many conversations with my fellow travellers, salesmen who would tender cards with telegraphic addresses (”CHEMCO, KANPUR”), amateur and professional astrologers, army officers going home on leave, conversations that happened bunk-to-bunk after the conversationalists had unpacked their bed-rolls and spread out their sheets - one-night friendships, often surprisingly intimate (”Tell me, do you love your wife?”), their only souvenir a business card found years later, tucked in a notebook.

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Bhutan: Small wonder

As the people of Bhutan prepare to go to the polls this month in the tiny Himalayan kingdom’s first general election, Patrick French discovers their remarkable achievements and asks how the success of a royal dynasty may have blunted the desire for democracy. In The Telegraph, UK:

Bhutan is the most beautiful country in the world. You fly in over the Himalayas, the plane cruising at the height of the mountain peaks, and watch the snow glistening in the sheer, sharp sunlight. A white blueness envelops the sky and, before you know it, the little Druk Air plane is dropping into a golden river valley and slaloming its way to Paro, the only airport in Bhutan.

You pass all the mountains: Cho Oyu, Mount Everest, Makalu, each peak spiking in a web of frosted snow and giving way to a further peak, the blank whiteness of the summit becoming a filigree of ice trails as your eyes descend to the lower ridges and see stepped fields and trees, the last great undestroyed Himalayan forests, and bump now on air pockets as the plane turns into the next valley and makes its way towards earth. The other passengers, Americans and Germans with padded ski jackets and virtuous hairstyles, are so busy crowding over to the left of the plane to snap photographs that I fear we will list to port.

[Photo: Would-be voters during another dummy run in December.]

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Training reporters to cover elections

Andrea Bernstein, political director of New York Public Radio WNYC, was selected to train 20 Bhutanese reporters as the country prepares for its first-ever elections. The invitation came from Bhutan’s daily newspaper, Kuensel. Bernstein spent a week in Bhutan. Read her blog:

…Today, we began the training (because of the time difference, we were actually going head to head with the Oscars). We were overwhelmed by the response - twenty journalists were supposed to show up, forty three came. One drove “two-days journey” - she actually did in 15 hours by driving through until 3 am over the national highway, the road that hairpins through the Himalayas. Some of the journalists were brand new, but all took their craft amazingly seriously. We were a bit worried that we’d have to draw them out, needlessly so, it turned out. This was a group keenly aware of the history that is taking place in Bhutan, and in the important role they’ll have in shaping it.

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Masjid Mahabat Khan, Peshawar

In Pakistaniat.com, Owais Mughal on the 17th Century mosque of Mahabat Khan in Peshawar

The old city of Peshawar is called the ‘andar shehr’ (the inner city). The mosque of Mahabat Khan is located in andar shehr. The mosque was built in the seventeenth century and it is named after Mahabat Khan Mirza Lerharsib who twice governed Peshawar under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. Its exact date of completion is unknown, as there is no surviving epigraphical or literacy evidence to indicate the fact. Doing a quick web search I found three years marked as its completion (1627, 1630 & 1670 AD) years. More sources cite 1670 as the completion year than the other two.

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The changing face of Bhutan

As the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom cautiously opens itself to the world, traditionalists fear for its unique culture. Arthur Lubow in the Smithsonian Magazine.

On rural highways in Bhutan, trucks hauling huge pine logs rush past women bowed beneath bundles of firewood strapped to their backs. In the capital of Thimphu, teenagers in jeans and hooded sweat shirts hang out smoking cigarettes in a downtown square, while less than a mile away, other adolescents perform a sacred Buddhist act of devotion. Archery, the national sport, remains a fervent pursuit, but American fiberglass bows have increasingly replaced those made of traditional bamboo. While it seems that every fast-flowing stream has been harnessed to turn a prayer drum inside a shrine, on large rivers, hydroelectric projects generate electricity for sale to India, accounting for almost half the country’s gross national product.

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A kingdom in the mountains shares its secrets

Susan Emerling in The New York Times:

When American curators arrived one spring morning at Norbugang Yu Lhakang, a Buddhist temple in a remote village in western Bhutan, they found a group of monks sitting on the floor in bright robes, chanting. They had been there since 6 a.m., intent on creating the right ambience for a divination ceremony.

The question before them was whether a small 18th-century gilt bronze sculpture - a female personification of supreme Buddhist wisdom - could make its way to the United States for a traveling exhibition of Bhutanese art.

It fell to the sculpture’s owner, a Bhutanese businessman whose family had had the piece for generations, to roll the divination dice. Tremulously, he rolled a two, a six and a nine.

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The guide to Bhutan

Bhutan has always been beautiful, but now it is beautiful and luxurious. Tom Fordyce in The Times, UK:

It was a disturbing scene. Three half-naked men, all wearing hideous carved masks, were running towards me, brandishing wooden phalluses the size of monkey wrenches. On my right, a shaven-headed monk mumbled a monotone mantra while striking a pair of discordant cymbals.

Overhead circled a large flock of ravens, getting closer with every lap. From the ancient monastery to my left came another man, wearing what appeared to be a welder’s mask, a sheen of oil and not much else.

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An informal economy

On The Smart Set, travel writer Emily Maloney on her visit to India.

The boy had the kind of ears no human could possibly hope to grow into, and when he showed up at my restaurant table, just tall enough to mouth-breathe into the backside of my newspaper, I told him to eff off. I had become the anti-Mother Teresa in my first month in India. I knew from experience that if I gave a street kid food from my plate, it would lead to him asking for more food, money, and eventually, I feared, a piece of my soul. So I took to regularly telling the kids, beggars, and even the monkeys of Mysore to piss off while I was eating.

As the kid with the ears breathed on the other side of my paper, I read English-language personals to my friend Carly across the table. She was reading the sports section in order to figure out the rules of cricket. It’s what we did every night after school in different sections of the city.

“Listen to this,” I said. “This ad was taken out by the mother and aunt of a university lecturer in his 40s with a Ph.D. in folklore and video conferencing and a limp from polio. He’s seeking a Tamil bride, ‘actor-singer-director, journalist, or scholar preferred.’ Man, people are so self-centered.”

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The Tibetan book of living

In Mint Lounge, Charukesi Ramadurai travels to McLeodganj, India’s Little Lhasa and the home of the Dalai Lama.

On any quiet morning, the reverberations of “Om mani padme hum” seem to rise from the belly of the Himalayas, a chant as eternal as the mountains and as unchanging. They seep into the low-key bustle of locals setting up shop, roadside vendors releasing the steam from the day’s first batch of momos, groups of young monks marching in their deep yellow and maroon robes.

A sudden gust of icy wind lifts a robe, revealing a bright football jersey. His companion balances a prayer wheel in one hand with a cellphone in the other. In the distance, temple bells are ringing; closer by, the Internet parlour blares out hip-hop beats.

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Under the banyan tree

The dictators call it Myanmar. For the first time since they crushed the Saffron Revolution, Adam Karlin traveled to the country he calls Burma-and home. His dispatch on World Hum.

I was on my way home to visit my grandmother when she had a stroke.

Home. That’s a relative term when home refers to Burma. Because I’m half-Burmese, Burma-which I prefer to “Myanmar,” a name conjured up by the nation’s dictators-has always felt a little like home.

My relatives, even Burmese I’ve never met, treat me like a long lost son. I see elements of myself-my passivity, my faith, my taste for rich, oily hot food, and whatever capability I have for empathy-realized in this country and its culture. It’s a self-centered worldview, but travel can be narcissistic, especially in countries like Burma, which seems to naturally lend travelers a sense of self-discovery.

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Postcards from the end of the earth

Delhi-based psychiatrist Sudhir Khandelwal is spending three-and-a-half months in the Antarctica doing research at the Indian base station there. He’s been posting (through a complicated route of emailing his posts to his son in the US) on Himalayan Adventurer. Thanks to Binoo K. John’s column Log of the Blog on Mail Today for pointing this site out.

Unfortunately the chick did not survive. I myself discovered it under some stones away from the nesting area. I felt very sad and could not do anything. I just sat there on a stone praying. I had wished that both chicks should grow and fly away from here to their distant destination. I am not sure what caused its death. It could not have been due to lack of food or weather. There is evidence of availability of plenty of food; there are remnants of freshly killed snow petrels (skua’s pet game bird) strewn all over. So far weather has also not been too inclement. I wonder whether its elimination was through the process of natural selection. It is known to occur in case of Adelie penguin when it lays two eggs. It selects the fitter chick to survive in a very practical but merciless manner. I shall tell you its story some time.

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A sojourn to Muktinath

Our thanks to Himal Southasian’s Kanak Mani Dixit for pointing out an utterly delightful blog called phalano.com. This article on Muktinath by Rishi Amatya and Bhushan Timla is from there.

Muktinath, located within the famous Annapurna Circuit Areas, is one of the most famous and respected shrines in the country. The beautiful aspect of the shrine is that followers of both Hinduism and Buddhism regard the shrine with utmost respect. Pilgrims come to pay their homage to the god all throughout the year.

With the harsh and arid landscape of the path that leads to the temple, the trek was previously limited to serious trekkers. However, a newly construed road (It’s slated to complete later this year) is intending to change all that.

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Kaziranga: Animal planet

In Mint, D.K. Bhaskar goes looking for the royal Bengal tiger in a sanctuary for the one-horned rhino that yields unexpected pleasures

On a misty February morning, flocks of bar-headed geese were converging on a lake amid overgrown grasslands. Fascinating as the sight was, I was more preoccupied with trying to beat the chill when Ratan warmed my heart with a salute. Standing tall at about 9ft, he was a handsome adult bull elephant with great physical proportions and two wonderfully chiselled tusks.

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