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

Light and dust

Jodhpur 7am - shadows and hairdos of a rising sun...

... and later that afternoon through the windshield of an auto.

Jai Hind

Today is India's Independence Day. And it's wet. The streets are quiet. I was in a rickshaw at the stroke of midnight, that most famous of midnights that divides forever India's freedom day from Pakistan's. The rain pelted down and in the backseat there was no escaping the warm monsoon spray = drenched to the bone, invigorated, stoked to be living in this amazing place.

I was flicking through Salman Rushdie's ode to partition - Midnight's Children - and stumbled across this: "to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world." No more apt description of the challenge for expats landing on Planet India for a few short years. We love you India, but you are such a big world to swallow!

Here's a pic from the original Independence Day in 1947 - people wandering around near the Secretariat Buildings in Delhi. I drive this road regularly, and always think of this image. The people look so happy, free, proud. But you also get the feeling the adrenalin rush was fading, and lives were returning to normal, a better normal. You can almost hear a collective 'what now?' rise up from the crowd. I wonder what that day must have been like: euphoric, exultant, an end day and a beginning day, but the rotis still tasted like rotis and someone still had to do the dishes.

Beautiful

Disco is everywhere

I'm gunna fix some of these babies to my pimped up innova and drive around town spreadin' the word... Tonight, one night only, Disco On The Ghat, get on down to a ghat near you and SHAKE IT. डिस्को हर जगह है

Inspiration HERE: Bollywood gold - Jimmy Adja the disco dancer loses his mojo... but the show is saved by his disco queen... but then it all goes awry and disco tears flood the dancefloor ...

Justice delayed, justice denied

India does big numbers. But sometimes they’re really big. In the paper this morning a report that there are 54,000 cases pending before the supreme court, a further 4.18 million before the various high courts and an amazing 28 million cases before the subordinate courts (or which 20 million are criminal cases). That’s a lot of files.

Pics from the Kolkata court precinct

87654, 2:06

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, one of Mumbai's main train stations has all the clatter you'd expect in a place of comings and goings. It opened in 1888 and 120 years later bad souls cut loose on its platforms and killed 50 people with Ak's and granades. But you wouldn't know it. Like with so many other things in India, people just brush themselves off and get on with it, no memorialising or wallowing. It's still a train station and a gathering place, and a place of hellos and goodbyes. I love that about India - people are so resilient in the face of adversity.

light, platform, people, puddle

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai

I love a city that puffs its chest out

and then wears its name in gold stars on a t-shirt. Puff-chested BIDIP T-shirts coming soon to a city near you...

Not to state the obvious ...

but how tough are the people who live under bridges... Respect.

Traffic rainbow

The following might sound like total hippy nonsense but w'eva. I was in dense bumpertobumper traffic tonight and the sky was dark with an imminent downpour. To my right in the backseat of an old Maruti-Suzuki hatchback sat a green-sari'ed lady. She was twisted around looking up at the sky through an open window with a beaming smile on her face. The light caught the white of her upturned eyes. I glanced at my blackberry and back again - she was still staring up and BEAMING. Check that out - why is she so friggin happy - is she channeling the Dalai Lama? I looked up and there, in the brooding 7pm Delhi sky was a rainbow - not the best ever, but a nice little rainbow. I looked back at the lady and she was totally transfixed on this sky-miracle, a mary poppins look of innocent pleasure on her face. And I thought ain't that nice. All these half-empty-glassers honking their horns and railing at the bullshit traffic and over there is a solitary half fuller soaking up the dramatic sky with its sash of magic colour. So, thanks sari lady - you made me smile. I'll smell the roses tonight.

Kid. car window.

No taxis

Taxi rank: Mumbai airport - Friday 7pm. There are no cabs in cooee and a long queue stand in line. The suited bloke next to me is fuming, railing through wild eyes against a system that has failed. He breathes fire in the direction of a tubby policeman who he reckons is in on the scam. The word is rain and traffic have conspired with the mercenary tendencies of Mumbai's cabbies to screw us all. No cabs, customers accumulating, and a bidding war has begun far away from the rank. Another bloke defends the cabbies - 'just rational behaviour... they see an opportunity and they're taking it.' And so we all stand, waiting, arguing, hoping that playing by the rules might deliver us a ride home. The man in suit moves onto politics - 'if we don't do anything nothing will ever change, the criminals just keep getting away with it.' He points at me - the very symbol of foreignness in my farangi uniform of shorts and t-shirt. 'Look at how the world sees us. They know it shouldn't be like this'. I speak on behalf of the world - 'our cabs are crap too'. His anger turns to purple and he storms off to yell at some people in colourful Marathi. In ten minutes he returns with a cab by the scruff of the neck. He points at me and yells 'get in!' I obey and shake his hand in thanks - he yells louder 'get in now!'. And as I ride off into the Mumbai streets, driven by a wizened old driver whose ear is still ringing with the verbal belting he's received, I look back to see the argument continue - raised arms and raised voices jousting in complete agreement.