Calcutta, India

After my 1,000 mile train odyssey from Mumbai to Chennai, I decided to take a quick break from the railways with a 2-hour flight up India's east coast to Calcutta. Chennai wasn't really my cup of tea but I will concede that Chennai Airport is wonderful, principally because it's a quiet airport. There is no piped music and there are no tannoy announcements. (I'm reliably informed that visually-impaired people are assisted appropriately.) You just sit there in peace and wait for your flight. The world needs a lot more of this, and not just in airports.

And so to Calcutta. In recent years I've despatched blogs from places like Vienna, Bucharest, Seville, and Mexico City. I didn't see any need to call them Wien or București or Sevilla or Ciudad de Mexico. Similarly, I've never once thought to take issue with the many native Spanish speakers who've enthused to me about their visits to Londres or Edimburgo. And if I ever met anyone who thought it was a problem for us to be called Le Royaume-Uni when we're embarrasing ourselves at Eurovision, I'd give them very short shrift indeed. For all these reasons and more, yes, I'm calling it Calcutta and not Kolkata. If anybody else wants to be more respectful and call it what the locals call it, then go right ahead. It's কলকাতা.

Calcutta is the capital of West Bengal, just a day's bike ride from what used to be East Bengal and is now Bangladesh. It's comfortably my favourite place so far in India. This is partly because it's more liveable than the other big Indian cities I've visited - in some places, there are even functioning pavements - but mainly because it's so redolent of the Raj. It's one of those places where the history still seems to live and breathe, where you can imagine yourself being transported back in time. Admittedly this is helped by the fairly decrepit state of much of urban India. You see buildings and facades and playparks that clearly haven't been used or repaired or developed in many decades. Like in those post-apocalyptic / zombie movies.

Naturally the Victoria Memorial is the highlight. See picture below. Nearby is the racecourse - the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, to be precise - outside of which clouds of dust are kicked up by herds of goats, as well as the occasional white charger being taken for an informal gallop outside the wall. Sadly the museum on the site of the original Black Hole of Calcutta wasn't open when I was there. Not that I particularly wanted to give it a try.

All of this nostalgia is of course tinged with a certain moral ambiguity. There were good and bad things about the Raj. But nostalgia doesn't necessarily imply approval: after all, when Cockneys get misty-eyed about the Blitz Spirit, it doesn't mean they want to go back to being bombed every night. Anyway, I still haven't met a single Indian who's shown any sign of resentment about the past. The conversation always goes straight to cricket.

I've been out here over a month now and in that time I haven't seen a drop of rain, or felt a breath of wind, or worn anything heavier than a T-shirt. The food is wonderful but the beers are awful. The people are fantastic but the streets are a nightmare. The stray dogs are friendly but the insects continue to bite. Overall the balance is still firmly positive. I should have come to India much sooner. 

Tipu Sultan mosque on Central Avenue

All the Calcutta taxis are this cute model

St John's Church

Lions Safari Park at dawn

Victoria Memorial

Amateur cricket at dusk, with the Victoria Memorial in the distance

Vidyasagar Setu bridge over the Hooghly river, seen from the ghats

Edd vs Food #156
A naan bread pizza, or "naanzza" if you will.
Honestly, that's the name of the restaurant.

Chennai, India

Chennai's colonial history goes all the way back. Formerly known as Madras, it was the site of the first British imperial outpost in India, and was in fact uninhabited before then. Over the years, from Kipling's poetry through the novels of EM Forster to Sir Salman Rushdie (himself born in what was then called Bombay), India has been a fertile source of cultural inspiration for our finest brains and pens. 

Whereas for me, the deeply personal link to this city is that, after going to the football and drinking a gallon of lager, my favourite curry is lamb Madras.

In fact 'Madras' curries, like tikka masala curries, aren't really Indian at all. They're very much creations of 20th century Anglo-Indian cuisine. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But you won't find Madras curries on menus here, just like you won't find spaghetti bolognese anywhere in Bologna.

More importantly, when I went for a walk on Marina Beach and allowed the Bay of Bengal to swirl around my toes, that concluded the first part of this trip: a coast-to-coast journey across central India from Mumbai, where it was the Arabian Sea doing the swirling. I've taken trains the whole way, about 1,000 miles in all. It was a 7-hour daytime ride here from Vijayawada in a first-class compartment where I and three others had individual bunks. 

There are many different classes of ticket but the main thing is to be in an air-conditioned carriage. The cheapest seats in 2nd class are just overcrowded wooden benches, and without AC those metal carriages are natural heat traps. You can see that even the locals find them a strain. If I was to try travelling that way then in all seriousness I'd probably end up having some kind of medical episode.

Chennai itself hasn't left much of an impression on me. I don't have anything bad to say about it, but I can't think of much that's particularly good either. Probably one to miss out if any of you are thinking of "doing India". Anyway the second part of this trip begins now, so stay tuned. 

Shoppers on Ranganathan St

Chennai Central: the busiest railway station in South India

Fort St George: the first English outpost in India.
(English, not British, because that was before the Act of Union with Scotland.)

There's a bit too much of this in India.
Every tin-pot local bigwig seems to get a gold statue and a big memorial park.
Politicans, now more than ever, would do well to remember that they are our servants and not our masters.

Horse rides on Marina Beach

There are many reasons not to go swimming off Indian beaches and here is just one of them

Brief interval of fresh air, along Patinapakkam Beach

Edd vs Food #155
I finally got round to having an Indian meal that isn't a curry!
Chicken Almondine Sizzler at the Copper Kitchen.
Chicken fried in breadcrumbs, stuffed with mincemeat & almonds.
Plus rice & veg, and pepper sauce on top.

At the same restaurant: the £125 Full Goat Biryani.
Maybe next time, if I'm here with friends (presumably about 20 of them). 

Warangal & Vijayawada, India

I'm a long way off the tourist trail now. In Hyderabad I saw the odd foreigner in shopping malls and at the main historical landmarks, but here I'm pretty much a lone ranger as far as representing the Western world is concerned. As such, I have become a minor celebrity and I'm getting selfie requests. 

Coming to these places gives you a taste of what everyday life is really like for the locals, although of course the locals aren't staying in the Presidential Suite (picture below). That's in Vijayawada. Earlier I had a more modest hotel in Warangal, for which the booking confirmation email stated "Unmarried Couples Allowed". Good to know, albeit not an issue on this particular occasion. I was halfway tempted to troll them by asking if the other half of the couple had to be a woman (gay marriage is not legal in India), but the receptionist didn't speak English, and things could have got awkward quickly if I'd tried using sign language. 

Warangal is a UNESCO World Heritage site, due to its impressive repertoire of monuments from the Kakatiya dynasty, which ruled much of Eastern India around the 12th century. (Indian history is pretty complicated: the country was first unified long before Christ and has been split apart and re-unified and re-conquered several times since then, although things look more or less stable right now.) Vijayawada doesn't have quite the same level of historic interest but it does have the enormous 1.2km Prakasam barrage, upon which depends almost all the irrigation for farming in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The barrage dates from 1855 and the bridge was added in 1957. When you walk across the span you can hear Vedic hymns being piped out non-stop through speakers the whole way. No instruments, just chanting. It's quite eerie.

One downside to going off the tourist trail is the absence of certain home comforts that Indians generally don't bother with, like good coffee. And good beer. And good pizzas. See the first Edd vs Food below. It was at the highest-rated pizza joint in Vijayawada, where the menu boasted "Italian-style" and "New York-style" pizzas. But it was the kind of pizza that would get you shouted at if you served it up in Italy; and if you served it up in New York, you'd quite likely get shot. That said, in all fairness, it was edible enough: roughly on a par with what would result if you oven-cooked a Taste The Difference pizza from the frozen section in Sainsburys. Managing expectations is the key to happiness.

And on a much brighter note, in Warangal I had the best curry of this trip, and possibly of my life to date. See the second Edd vs Food below. England's cricket team may be having a tough time in India, but it's all smiles here for me.

Prakasam Barrage

Reverse view of the above photo

Wise words indeed. Especially if you say them in a comedy Indian accent.
Another one I saw was 'Use Seatbelt To Avoid Death', which is admirably direct.

Presidential Suite in Vijayawada

Thousand Pillar Temple (roughly 12th century AD) in Warangal

Warangal Fort, former capital of the Kakatiya dynasty

Edd vs Food #153
Indian pizza. See comments above.
All of the meat visible in this picture is chicken.

Edd vs Food #154
Curry heaven. See comments above.
Chicken patiala with biryani rice at Aranyam in Warangal
Interesting touch: an omelette, which you can just see sticking out from under the curry.

Hyderabad, India

India is divided into 36 states and territories. All of my first three blogs have been from Maharashtra, the second-biggest state, which has about the same number of people as Japan. Now I'm in Hyderabad, the capital of the twelfth-biggest state, Telangana. Hyderabad alone has a population roughly that of Sweden.

On the train here from Solapur I talked to a young Indian chap who worked as an electrical engineer. He was astonished to learn that I write computer code for a living without having a degree. I guess this reflects the ferociously competitive Indian tech jobs market: usually you need to have a good degree, in a numerate subject, from a reputable university, before they'll even look at your CV.

And Hyderabad is India's second-biggest IT hub after Bangalore. (Part of the city centre has been semi-officially renamed 'Cyberabad'.) Plenty of European and American businesses have outposts here, and in some cases they match the working hours of their head office. As such the local Metro has multiple rush hours and is always busy.

But even when it's packed, the Metro is still preferable to walking the streets. Indian cities are not pedestrian-friendly. Quite often when the signals change and the green man appears, the traffic just keeps on going anyway. At night, there aren't always streetlights. I don't have any reflective clothing in my backpack but I do have the option of removing my hat in order to give oncoming motorists a shiny chromedome glare. Or at least those motorists who've bothered to put their headlights on, which is by no means all of them.

I do like the auto rickshaws though. They're cheap as chips (my most expensive to date is about £1.60 for a four-mile ride) and you can almost always summon one quickly via Uber. They're not big enough for two people with suitcases, but they're certainly big enough for one person, with or without backpack. And they're open to the elements, of course, so at speed the wind chill effect cools you down nicely from 30°C to 15°C or so. Bliss.

Next up on Edd's Travels: a couple of places that definitely aren't IT hubs, or indeed any other kind of hubs...

Hyderabad by night.
Bridge over the Durgam Cheruvu lake. InOrbit shopping mall on the far side.

Hussain Sagar
Another city centre lake. I walked around it. Three very hot & sweaty hours.

Herbal remedies. I presume 'bold head' is actually referring to baldness.
No worse than some of the nonsense placebos we get flogged back home.
"Homeopathy", indeed.

Makkah Masjid (17th century mosque)

In the distance: Charminar (16th century mosque)

In the south of town, along National Highway 65, there's a whole row of shops like this.
Selling nothing but ginger and garlic.
And even from the street, it all smells so good.

Edd vs Food #152
This is the "non-veg" option in the posh Vistadome train carriage.
Along the lines of airline food, as you see. But still not bad at all.

Solapur, India

"Y'all act like you never seen a white person before

Jaws all on the floor 

Like Pam and Tommy just burst in the door..."

These are the opening lyrics to "The Real Slim Shady" by Eminem, and they have been on my mind in Solapur. I've never been stared at so much in my life. Children go wide-eyed and point me out excitedly to their parents. Before too long I'll have learned how to say 'look mummy, an unclean paleface' in colloquial Marathi. Quite often the bolder teenage boys will yell out to me across the street. But in fairness nobody has said anything rude yet. At least not in English.

I had never heard of Solapur before coming here. It's a fairly nondescript place. I just wanted to get off the train somewhere a bit less crowded and less polluted. Mumbai and Pune are big cities but Solapur barely registers, its population only about that of Liverpool and Sheffield combined.

It's ironic that being in non-touristy places actually makes it harder to get a nice curry. Curry is what the locals eat at home: when they go out to treat themselves, they want Thai or tacos or whatever. Me coming here and looking for a nice curry is a bit like an Indian flying to London and hitting the town for a gourmet plate of beans on toast. But persistence pays off in the end.

The curries I've had so far in India have been creamier than I was expecting. Probably I'll have eaten my own body weight in ghee by the time I get home. Spice-wise everything's been OK, comparable to what you'd get in a UK curry house if you ordered something moderately adventurous. Though for all I know the waiters here have been telling their chefs to tone it down for the white guy.

And on the gastronomic / gastric theme...no, I don't have Delhi belly. I've been in India a fortnight and everything's fine, including the street food. I was prepared for the worst, of course, and so I came out here with my own stash of TP and vitamin pills and rehydration tablets. Not to mention enough Immodium to bung up a buffalo. Perhaps my digestive system has been so battle-hardened over the past two decades that it treats India like just another country. I suspect the same is true of my immune system, hence me never having had Covid. Or at least if I've had Covid then it had no effect on me.

When it comes to home cooking (ie when I'm in an apartment rather than a hotel) the food tends to be vegetarian because butcher's shops and supermarkets aren't really a thing in India. From the convenience stores I get rice, and tins of kidney beans or chickpeas; from the street vendors I get tomatoes and onions and fruit. It probably does me good to cut meat down to once a day, just like it probably does me good to cut down on drinking. Alcohol is taxed and controlled almost out of existence in India and liquor stores are thin on the ground. Indeed, Republic Day (January 26th) was a 'dry day' on which alcohol sales were banned completely! I'm surprised we let them stay in the Commonwealth. There's no danger of me emigrating here. But I'm definitely not in a hurry to leave.

View from the hotel restaurant window at breakfast

At the market

Solapur Municipal Corporation building

Another angle of the above

This fair is part of Gadda Yatra, an annual Hindu festival.

Indian railways trade union. "Step-motherly attitude"!

Edd vs Food #151
Chicken wings (foil wrapped handles), spicy curry, rice, mocktail, sundries.
At Sigdi restaurant in Solapur.

Pune, India

South of Mumbai lies Goa, which is where all the tourists go. So I've headed east instead. Because I'm like that, and that's the way I am.

It's pronounced "poo-nay", and the locals are collectively known as "Punani". (Only one of these two things is true.) Whereas Mumbai is huge and has about as many people as Belgium, Pune is but a small provincial backwater in comparison, its population merely that of Hong Kong. But even if you were to put Mumbai and Pune together, you'd still have only around 1 in every 70 Indians.

The ride here was fairly pleasant. 4 hours or so. All kinds of vendors were doing the rounds, up and down the train. I heard one of them approaching from far off. "Chai chai chai chai chai," he sang from the next carriage. "Chai chai," as he came into our carriage. "Chai chai chai chai," he chirruped to the people in the next compartment, and "Chai chai chai," as he appeared in our compartment. Then he saw the one white guy on the train, i.e. me, and his eyes lit up like beacons. "Tea?" I was reluctant to leave him unrewarded for this nimble feat of linguistic gymnastics, but unfortunately I'm a coffee drinker. 

The young man next to me on the train was excitedly regaling his companions with footage from the Coldplay concert he'd attended in Mumbai the night before. British-Indian cultural exchange has evidently declined a very long way indeed since the days when they gave us curries and we gave them cricket. Incidentally I note that the Coldplay singer graciously took it upon himself to apologise to India, from the Mumbai stage, for colonialism. Yet I just spent two whole months in Italy, and nobody apologised to me for the Roman conquest. What's that all about?

Unlike in the USA, where the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War and the Constitution are hailed everywhere you look, I've hardly seen anything here that commemorates the end of the Raj in 1947. The only images of Nehru or Ghandi are the ones on the banknotes. Nationalism is something we can all do without. I hope it doesn't sound too condescending towards the Indian people if I suggest that most of them probably have more pressing things to worry about.

Notable sights in Pune are the Bund Garden, whose founder rejoiced in the name of Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy, and the original Aga Khan palace, which I didn't bother with. But the main attraction is the Shaniwar Wada temple, pictured below. I had a painful experience in the queue: when the security guards spotted me, I was immediately beckoned to the front of the line. Several dozen little old Indian ladies, evidently from the humbler classes, had to step meekly aside to let the foreigner through. I protested with some heat that I was happy to wait, but the guards were brooking no argument and nobody was going anywhere until I acquiesced. I didn't feel like a VIP; I felt like a cad and a bounder. But I suppose there's a faint justification for this preferential treatment, in that entrance tickets for foreigners are about ten times what the locals pay (£2.50 as opposed to 25p).

Pune has a small but pleasant overground Metro service, where the maximum fare is capped at about 35p. You have to go through airport-style security to board the Metro, and you're not allowed to chew gum or take soft drinks, as I discovered to my cost. There's a sign prohibiting the carrying of nuclear weapons, which is good to know, and it also states specifically that 'mentally disturbed' people are also banned. I fear that last one would leave most American suburban trains half-empty.

They don't allow animals on the Metro, either. You see stray dogs everywhere, and to a lesser extent stray cats, and quite often you find yourself stepping around cows on the street. They're not always tethered, but then cows are only dangerous in herds. I saw an enormous 'flying fox' bat flapping around in the trees at night from my 3rd-floor apartment balcony, and I think there was a tiny baby rat scuttling around the floor of the train as we trundled from Mumbai to Pune. Also, as much as I've been enjoying the Indian food, the local mosquitos have clearly been enjoying their English food even more. I'm getting bitten to death. But at least I'm successfully avoiding the cockroaches. And the tourists. And Coldplay. 

Shaniwar Wada temple (18th century)

Iricen Railway Colony. My 'hood.

Looking south over the Shivaji bridge from the PMC Metro station

My first ever non-Greggs cheese pasty

Every now and then, I'm reminded of home.

The river Mutha. Not one for swimming in.

Ideal development project opportunity for the first time buyer

Edd vs Food #150
Vegetarian Kunwar Thal at Dal Baati, mere yards from my apartment.
Four baati (unleavened bread in centre) plus poppadom and salad.
Lasun chutney, pickle, Marwari curry, cooked gram flour dumpings in gravy, desert beans.

Mumbai, India

For some years, India has been by far the biggest gap in my travel CV. Now I'm finally setting that right. And in my most recent contract (yes, I do actually work from time to time) I was part of a team split between the UK and Hyderabad, so allow me to begin with a warm namaste to my former colleagues Haritha & Sinduja.

On arrival I was pleased to achieve the hat-trick of a) getting me and my E-Visa through immigration, b) withdrawing my rupees (you can't buy them in the UK), and c) sorting out an Indian SIM card. It all works out OK, provided you do your homework in advance, which you definitely need to do.

I walked straight from the airport to my hotel, checked in and unpacked, and then headed out on foot. (Perhaps in search of an English corner shop, ha ha.) I normally avoid American chain eateries when I'm travelling, but I was a bit wary of 'Delhi belly' - and after a sleepless red-eye flight, I wanted to spend my first night here in bed, not on the porcelain throne. Hence my Indian gastronomic experience began with a McDonalds and a Subway. But on the second night I went for a proper curry, for which see Edd vs Food below.

I'm now in an apartment in an area called Bandra West, which is quite fashionable but still largely devoid of foreigners. Most of the tourists stay in South Mumbai, because that's where you find most of the famed sights and colonial architecture. I've had a walk around South Mumbai and it's OK, but I prefer mixing with the locals, and also as always I'm on a budget. Prices in South Mumbai can reach London levels and beyond.

The journey between Bandra West and South Mumbai is not walkable. Mumbai is huge. So I've had my introduction to the Indian railways. There's none of your politically corrrect "stand clear of the doors please" nonsense here. The train doors don't ever close. People start getting off the train long before it stops moving, and they continue boarding the train long after it starts moving. In Mumbai alone, there are over 2,000 railway deaths every single year - about six a day on average -  partly as a result of ill-judged train-hopping manouevres, and partly as a result of ill-judged track-crossing manouevres. I myself am playing it safe, of course, and I haven't climbed up on the roof even once.

Incidentally these trains, like those I've used in Mexico City and Tokyo, have 'ladies only' carriages. It's good that they exist, and it's bad that they're needed. I haven't felt any kind of danger even in the sketchiest parts of town, but of course it's easier to feel safe if you're a man. 

Anyway these are only the suburban Mumbai trains I'm talking about. The national rail network covers 82,000 miles of track and employs 1.2 million people. Time to check it out in detail. I'm not going back to the airport; I'm going to do India properly.

Heavily polluted sunset by the beach in Bandra West

View from the back of the train station

Beach nightlife

Gateway Of India in South Mumbai

Mumbai's beaches.
The Spanish tourism ministry is probably not panicking just yet.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus railway station

Mumbai is hugely multi-racial, multi-lingual, and multi-faith.
But that tolerance is nowhere better exemplified than here. Dogs & pigeons!
Maybe Paul McCartney could write a song called "Pedigree And Aviary".

Edd vs Food #149
My first ever Indian curry in actual India. Another life achievement unlocked.
Chicken Madras with lemon rice. Creamier than I was expecting.
At the Tanjore Tiffin Room near my apartment in Bandra West.
When it's your first visit, they give you a free tasting platter for the entire menu. Gets my vote.