C'est fini

So my final three months in India were a blur of memories, farewells, filing, and last minute dashes to places I’d missed.... I fell well short of completing the India bucket list.... perhaps deliberately – now I have a reason to return.

So three years in India – how was it? Certainly, my world view got a tune up, and my assumptions about everything else got a good shake. It’s very hard to avoid clichés when talking about India. Here’s one: There is nowhere in the world like India. And there are plenty of words in the world that can describe it, but none that capture it perfectly. I like the word CRAMAZING – crazy and amazing, both of which walk an ambiguous line between positive and negative.

I’m inspired by plenty of things in India (insert a long list of wonderful generous creative people I met and their works). And I’m thoroughly depressed by others (insert fox news-esque tv anchors, and the hard lives of ordinary people etc). It feels like the oldest and youngest country at the same time. It moves breathtakingly fast at times, and magically slow at others. It made me happy and sad and all shades in between – sometimes at the same time. It is thoroughly confusing to the senses. It is the future.

I once described living in India as like diving into a swimming pool – the underwater world is immediately disorienting, filling your pores, leaving no space for thoughts of elsewhere. When I was in India, I didn’t have time to reflect on it, and now I’m not, I wonder if three years in India was a dream!

Back in Australia I see things anew – the space, the environment, the prosperity... the big clear sky...the small number of people!! I know now that we are not the norm, India is, and we’re a freaky side show.

I miss India – somewhere deep in my heart it burns. I found myself downloading Bollywood songs this morning and the little flame lit up. I will always miss it. I’ll return. Soon. There’s still so much more to discover.

I really enjoyed taking snaps of India (thank you friends for all the kind comments).
I’m not sure what I’m doing with this website, but it might fire up again one day - who knows what the future holds. I’m going to continue posting random pics at a new website: www.bidip.tumblr.com - less SLR and more Iphone! Check it out if you have nothing to do one Sunday afternoon.

Peace out. Jai Hind. Sachin 4 PM.

Xx Tim

But before I go to the big apple...

... I present, a small tomato - the first. Evidence that beautiful things grow in Delhi.

A riot of colour & a short escape

There'll be no tapping and snapping from India for the next few weeks as I temporarily escape this cramazing place. Back soon.

Last rays catch train

blur of humanity

We passed through Mathura Junction station on the day of Janmashtami (Krishna's birthday). Mathura is one of the seven most holy cities for hindus and traces its history back to 1600BC. And given Mathura is the reputed birthplace of Krishna, the platforms were PACKED with people - not so much a sea of humanity as a blur. Family groups clustered close together as the evening humidity hung over the station. We passed by slowly, standing in the doorway of our train, I failed to focus, but you get the idea..... thousands of people sitting in the dim light patiently waiting for their train to take them home.

Wall hole

I'm not sure what drew my eye to this scene of destruction. First it was the random hole torn through a wall in a street of otherwise intact brick neatness. But then it started telling a story: the two empty chairs, a hint of life interrupted (two wizened codgers were spinning yarns as the bricks fell); the two-tone walls in the background, symmetrically split into pink and blue, yin and yang; and then the pick axe, with its mundane functionality and implied danger (like a horse's head on the doorstep). It just looked so discarded and unresolved. I had to snap it. And because Andy Warhol was born in August, and his name sounds like wall hole, I did multiple editions. Prints available for a million dollars.

And then I realised.....

... I could goat no further

Lolita in Hindi is लोलिता

Britney in Hindi is ब्रिटनी. What more to say.

In silhouette

A China analyst, a rickshaw driver and two street kids in discussion, and silhouette.

Lord of the stares

There's a magnetic relationship between the wild platform kids on Indian train stations and farangis. Here they look with fascination, half-heartedly seeking cash, but really just staring. I'd love to know how they end up as adults if they survive their lord of the flies childhood. Tough life.

Orchha at dusk

From our fort hotel looking down on the lush rural ideal of Madya Pradesh: Unhurried buffalos graze with swooshing tails, an ibis riding on back. In the field a family tends their small plot in the cool of the day. A lady in sari carries a big bundle of fresh cut grass on her head, another with a bundle of sticks on her head and a limp. A red tractor passes with a red trailer piled high with people. Beyond the fields, wooded forest, and on the horizon lazy undulations of an ancient landscape. The river meanders slowly across the flats carrying waters warmed by the hot hot day – The stone under my feet throbs with the same heat. A temple singer recites holy words under holy trees, and the pre-dusk spirals of tweeting swallows rise overhead. And parrots. And dragonflies. A pair of vultures swoop from the top of the fort and fly low over the town to a ruin on the other side. In the courtyard a man sweeps the ground in wide arcs. I soak up every gradation of the setting sun and dimming light. And then the golden pre-dusk glow falls from the walls of the fort and the thermals still, the swallows go quiet and the transition to night is complete. After
dinner we emerge to a dark sky full of stars. Another day in the life of a 400 year old fort.

Night rain on my street

Jhansi station

Stars of Orchha

Saturday night, it's hot, and the stars are out over Jahangir Mahal in Orchha. A magic place and a magic night.

calm blue windows

It's a terrible ex-pat cliche, but there are some shops in Delhi that make it all ok on those searing hot-weathered hot-tempered days. The recent addition of a shop that sells sour dough adds bonus points to Delhi's livability index (good bread, VERY important). These pics are from a cafe upstairs - a little bastion of calm. In Delhi we want for nothing from home bar good friends and family. But be sure that when we go home we'll miss heaps of unreplicatable Delhi things... not much mughal architecture in Melbourne town.

Modern mughals

Tales abound of the decadence of Mughal Delhi, of lavish feasts and a rich culinary lineage that continues to this day in the by-lanes of Shahjahanabad. Delhi in 2011 is welcoming a renaissance of lavishness (there's a lot of cash sloshing around!). This is a restaurant in Connaught Place awash with mirrors (including a glitterball ceiling). The food is quite good, but I'm always a little suspicious of restaurants so dark you can barely see your plate. How is a man to tell his keralan boatman's curry from his tadka dal? And are the mirrors a call for us to take a long hard look at ourselves and our excessive ways? Or one man's fantasy - described by Wallpaper as "a bold collision between Marbella 1976 and a Mughul mirror palace"? Given the owner is a flamboyant fashion designer, I'm guessing the latter.

Prodigious India

This is a brilliant video... Delhi past, present and future all rolled in one, the Prodigy spaceship landing on planet India, India loving it, everything.

water's edge and a rhyming pledge - Srinigar

grace in repetition