Madhupur / Patna / Benares, India

I was going to say something about being "off the beaten track", but in fact this track is the most beaten of any track in human history. You'll probably have seen the Kumbh Mela and other Hindu pilgrimages in the news. Literally hundreds of millions of people are on the move.

I myself am completely indifferent to all religions, but still it's quite touching to see the lengths, physical and financial, that people go to in order to fulfil what they perceive as their spiritual duty. That said, bathing in the Ganges is one thing, but the tradition of dunking yourself in it, and indeed drinking from it, is deeply problematic. Partly because the Ganges is full of sewage, and partly because the Ganges is full of corpses. I suppose people can risk their own lives if they really want to. But encouraging your children to do the same is downright criminal.

Also there has been some awful loss of life in stampedes and crushes. Rest assured I'm staying safe. The problems arise when people are rushing for unreserved seating in second class trains, which is not how I roll, or at the actual ghats (riverfront steps) themselves, which I haven't been able to get near because the streets start to get blocked off before you're within a mile. Hence the total absence of impressive pilgrimage photos below.

The main pilgrimage destination is Prayagraj, which is vaguely like the Hindu version of Santiago de Compostela. But India's 'spiritual capital' is Benares (otherwise known as Banaras or Varanasi) and I spent a couple of nights there. I think I was the first-ever foreigner in that AirBnB apartment. Not only was there no TP, there wasn't even the upside-down shower hose option. Just a plastic jug, and a tap.  Fortunately I always carry my own stash of TP.

Madhupur isn't on the pilgrim trail. It's a small town of only about 50,000 people. For me it was just a place to break up the long train journey. There my status was elevated from 'Minor Celebrity' to 'Actual ET The Extra-Terrestrial'. I stayed in a posh hotel on the edge of town and when I went for a brief walk along some country lanes, a car stopped and a guy hopped out just to ask for a selfie with me. The car in question was in fact a fairly plush SUV. I suspect he was a local political bigwig, with all the indirect earning potential that entails. And no doubt by now there's a Facebook page where that joint selfie is captioned "Constructive Meeting With British Ambassador!!!". 

In Patna I took the posh hotel option a step further and had a couple of nights in the Taj. One can't rough it all the time, can one? But the downside of Patna is that it's in the state of Bihar, which has a) an area roughly equal to Portugal, b) a population roughly equal to Mexico, and c) an availability of legal alcohol exactly equal to zero. Yes, you read that right. No booze at all. Not even in five-star hotels. So it's time for a pilgrimage of my own, a spiritual quest to the nearest bar, which means getting back on the train.

Taj hotel

"Amateur cricket at dusk" is going to be a recurring pictorial theme in this blog.
This is in Patna, on the Maidan, a 62-acre city-centre park for public sports & recreation.
There's a cafe at the top of the building in the background: see Edd vs Food below.

Ganges beachfront in Patna

From the house of WHAT now?
I asked the head waiter for clarification but he had no idea.
I'm hopeful that it's just an autocorrect thing. 

Posh country hotel in Madhupur

Rural peace outside Madhupur

Pilgrims heading home. Benares railway station at 5am.

Edd vs Food #157
Murg Kohlapuri chicken curry with potato/onion/paneer kulcha bread
At the Lighthouse Cafe in Patna, on the 17th floor.
In the background is the Maidan (see cricket picture above).

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.