Bangkok, Calcutta, Madras, Ramesvaram

Just before leaving Bangkok for India, I met a remarkable man in his mid 40's, white Indian "lizard-belly", Buddhist doctor working for the lepers all over India, astrologer, author of several novels. He filled me with awe and apprehension about my imminent first visit to India, yet gave me quite a deal of factual advice that has since proved quite valuable. Now cynical to the extreme of the whole Hindu ethic, and particularly of westerners coming to seek the "Truth" from money grabbing gurus to return to their country as enlightened "Hindus". (You have to be born a Hindu). He claims that the sole purpose of Hinduism was to find self survival in a miserable over-populated country, while making life as miserable as possible for your fellow man. Non-Hindus (eg foreigners) are the lowest of the low in the order of things, and unless there exists a chance of gaining a rupee, are treated as such. He was obviously an embittered man.

"Sahib", he explains, is really more an insult than a deferential title, being a contraction of an old Hindi word meaning "cow-dung". There is no understanding, he spits out, about compassion or love as we aim for. He spoke of mothers coming to him offering him their fortunes if he would deliberately maim their child for begging purposes. Calcutta has a special school for beggars – it’s quite a lucrative profession. Many doctors make quite a deal of money.

In his continual fight against leprosy he was forever frustrated by the caste system, ignorance and suspicion and the curious habit of many Indians continually picking their nose. One boy lost his nose after leaving the sanatorium at a crucial stage of successful treatment, because he wouldn't dare disobey his father, who wouldn't dare disobey his Brahma, who had a dream that the boy must return and bathe in the holy river. The family involved were educated, rich and influential. Out of the thousands of lives he has helped save, he says, not one person ever showed gratitude or thanked him.

I was thankful to my new friend despite his gloomy warnings, for his informative advice and several contacts.  Travellers always have their ears alert for contacts. He now hopes to start a new life in America - a male friend is "adopting" him. When I last saw him, in a crowded market, he invited me to dinner at one of his favourite restaurants: "Have you had your noodles yet?" It turned into an epicurean feast with superb spring rolls, stuffed chillies, chunks of beef in oyster sauce, etc, finished with pineapple, pawpaw, rambutans, melon and durian. But people in this part of the world have a penchant for adding salt to their fruit. The meal cost me about five times my budget (about $6) but the treat was certainly worth it.

Goodbye to Thailand - one has to fly the next leg, overlanding Burma is impossible. Flying into Rangoon, Burma, where regrettably I had decided not to stay due to new prohibitive restrictions with visas and money - until now the black market could finance a week's stay if you sold your duty free Rothmans and bottle of Johnny Walker. Now you had to spend at least US$100.

From  the air, the famed golden temple stands huge and singularly impressive above the sprawling, decaying socialist city and its flooded rice paddies. Speaking to the friendly but obviously dispirited Burmese ground crew during the unscheduled 2 hour wait in the incredible humidity as our Fokker Friendship was getting "repaired" (I didn't mind waiting indefinitely if that was the reason!); they were dismayed about our reaction to the new regulations and claimed that it was all a Thai plot! I was sorry that I had decided against visiting Burma, but the sparse information from travellers was so contradictory and confusing, that I decided to play it safe.

Calcutta - expected the worst and was not totally disappointed. Beggars and fierce stubborn Bengal independence and nowhere to hide shame. Sacred cows - I got thrown by a nasty bull on the footpath of a main street when my attention was momentarily diverted by a particularly grotesque deformed beggar. Escaping the humidity and the stench of human endeavour by visiting the Planetarium. A cup of sweet, milky tea in a disposable terracotta bowl (which you smash afterwards). Meeting an Australian medical student having a field day clinically examining the beggars to see first hand the exotic diseases that he would only see in text books. He claims that many of the deformities were not pathologically consistent with known diseases - supporting the deliberate mauling thing.

He tells me that anyone who dies on the streets is collected in the next morning’s rounds by the authorities. In the meantime, the body is prized by beggars, who temporarily pretend that it is their own relative in order to gain sympathy from passers by.

A sunset shared with an American family (friends for the next few weeks) clutching perfumed fuchsias while exploring the impressive Victorian Memorial - such a contrast to the squalor only a mile away. The intriguing Calcutta Museum with priceless anthropological artefacts. A display in the museum caught my eye: "These Birds Keep Our City Clean" - a collection of stuffed crows, vultures and buzzards.
We’ll return to Calcutta, but now we’ll head south by train.

Madras - the old city of the East India Company (Robert Clive is still revered) with proud Victorian buildings and English still very well understood.  Vast, sprawled, hot and dry. Bus to Mahabalipuram on the coast where first century Dravidian temples are hewn out of huge boulders jutting out of the plains and the coastline. Sharing the welcomed cool evening sea breeze on top of the highest temple (the tourists had all gone back to their air-con hotels) with a band of cheeky monkeys, scudding around the rocks - all very Kipling!

India, with its countless social problems will never be able to adopt Hindi as its national language as the Tamils in the south will insist. English really did give a common medium for all the diverse provinces, and has since tried to be dropped. Signs are even painted over at the railway stations. This is sad, for most of the educated older generation speak English, and the cost of translating and republishing all the educational material will be enormous. Ah … the price of nationalism.

In the south of India, as well as Sri Lanka, acquiescence is shown by a delightful side to side wobble of the head, which can be quite confusing at it looks like "no".

A worse train from Madras to Ramesvaram - adopted a good "sleeping" position where a hot healthy hot stream of air would blow away the accumulated coal dust, which insidiously gets into eyes, nose, hair and every bodily crevice. And my meagre belongings in a sausage bag, padlocked against the leg of the train seat. Watching sleepily a diagonally striated desert dawn - its gonna be a hot day, a temporary companion remarks.

Indians tolerate insanity (after all 20 million are estimated to be mentally retarded, due to malnutrition, caste inbreeding etc.) and so when you meet a mad man from Manchester, running up and down the platforms, in and out of the carriages, shouting out the same vendor cries in the middle of the night, assaulting little boys, filching vendor's wares and refusing to pay, brutally aping beggars - then one just feels a little embarrassed and insecure in his company.

Nothing, but nothing would prepare me for the short journey by ferry from Ramesvaram, India, across the strait to Sri Lanka.

Bangalore, Madras, Calcutta

5/10/78 Bus to Bangalore - sounds rather poetic. A frighteningly modern city with dozens of cinemas (saw Day of the Jackal) yet the British certainly left their mark with reasonably effective town planning and beautiful old regimental buildings and officers' quarters - one splendid mansion I discovered in my walks has a brass plate on its imposing gate which reads "Devon Cottage" and underneath "Capt. R. Singh, Indian Navy" - confirmed, when I heard a monstrous booming voice of an angry man, no doubt abusing a servant for not leaving things shipshape.

Then I discovered a delightful park with huge ancient shady oaks and elms and knee high grass, obviously once trim and formal, but now neglected, decrepit and overgrown - but just right to escape the heat and noise of furious traffic. Auto trishaws buzz around beeping like sick cicadas and resembling huge bumble bees darting in and about the traffic with their two tone yellow and black, and their drivers invariably young, smartly dressed with khaki shirt and trim moustache, thinking themselves to be kamikaze pilots as they wend through people, oxcarts, buses with big bulb horns honking, pedal trishaws, "Ambassador" cars (India's Holden), and yet even more people, more than you'd ever believe possible, all busy in the amazing process of life survival.

Armed with Taylor Caldwell's Great Lion of God, the fascinating story of St Paul, I endured the bus journey to Madras, surprised to pass through numerous eucalyptus stands which seemed to thrive in the hot, arid, red-soiled, rocky environment (and the cows, bless their sacred bovine hearts, don't eat 'em). An occasional ruined fort flashed by, evoking images of dusty red-coated, polo playing regiments, and Raj's and mutinies and such things.

At Madras station, familiar scenes and smells once again. Beggars whining, luggage trolleys rumbling past, baskets full of dried fish sitting in the sun with the flies, dogs getting squashed under trains. You eat at the surprising clean and cheap railway restaurants - always two - Vegetarian, and Non-Vegetarian (which somehow sounds like a double negative). Coffee (kopi) comes sometimes as a glass of hot sweet milk, with a blob of instant coffee on top (to prove that it's the more expensive instant Nescafe, rather than the local ground mixture) and no spoon. Official porters with red faded coats sleep on the platforms in between train arrival. Official vendors of tea and soft drinks and dubious looking food, cry out their wares. Large families squat on mats midst their possessions looking very tired, wondering whether the next train will be theirs - already it's 17 hours late. No help from the information desk - there's one man patiently dealing with a crowd five deep, all shouting for attention first. You see, the floods in the north had seriously affected several major routes and no-one knew for sure the latest emergency schedules. Normally, the Indian train system is pretty efficient with their times.

Finally I got a berth on a train scheduled to get to Calcutta in a roundabout way, taking three days, instead of one. Well, I sigh, beggars can't be choosers. “Beggars” is an unfortunate word choice. Having a reserved seat in a reserved compartment, it was awful to see my fellow 'privileged' passengers roughly deny access to the thousands of hopefuls desperately trying to join the train as the journey progressed. The doors were locked from the inside at the stations. Afterwards, I received a note from an American family with whom I was travelling earlier - they were not so lucky 10 days before: despite travelling first class, the compartments were jam packed with flood affected people, so much so that they were physically unable to reach the toilets at the ends of the carriage, and they were all badly suffering from diarrhoea. They had no option but to use plastic bags in their open compartment, to be disposed of out of the window! With hundreds of eyes watching.

My friends for this trip were 20 Indians from YHA heading for the northern province of Sikkim for some 2 weeks of trekking - they asked me along and I said I'd be delighted, but I thought it would be unlikely because of permit requirements (Sikkim is a sensitive area politically). Among them were five liberated Indian ladies, who gave me a remarkable insight of the problems facing young women of this country.
Although hampered by parental control in their social activities, women do seem to have equal job opportunities, more so than any other country that I've visited. But of course "job opportunities" is not so much a question of ability, experience or qualifications, but who you know, who your father is, and your caste. In fact it is now Government policy that people of the Harijan caste (the Untouchables) should be given preference in any job application. The result is we find poorly educated, unqualified, socially hated people in positions of authority, and the system protestingly grinds on with its myriad of rules and regulations - a living legacy of the British and their earlier mistrust of the subservient Indians.

A job opportunity advertised in the press makes fascinating reading: an applicant must perhaps forward a postal note to the value of Rp17-32 (!) along with references, testimonials and school report cards clearly showing marks, position in class, class aggregates, etc, whereupon if the applicant is selected for interview, he/she may travel free from the nearest station 2nd class unreserved (certainly not 1st class for the status of this position), etc etc, and the salary offered is outrageously low. For example, an engineer, M.Sc., 10 years experience would be offered A$4000 p.a. The Government has just announces a ceiling for private enterprise top salary earners (all forms of remuneration and benefits) at approx A$10,000. End of initiative.

Yet there continue to be very many rich people in India. How do they do it?  Well, I bought a windcheater in Darjeeling, and a friend pointed out to me that I has just bought what was meant to be aid from UK for Bangladesh some years back. Shiploads of wheat destined for the starving never reach port, but get sold to another country for a tidy sum. Corruption is an accepted fact of life. If you don't, someone else will, and you'll probably starve - seems to be the philosophy. We have corruption too in Australia - but it seems less outrageously desperate, and much, much more subtle.

The train alternately crawls and speeds through the flooded countryside, bound for Calcutta.