Daddy goes to India

As the imminent Director of MA programmes for Durham Business School, I was dispatched to India for a week in late May 2007 to recruit Indian students to our programmes - much like the Taiwan trip in January.

A typical India street scene.

I had feared going to India ever since I was a teenager, when the story went round our village of a very bright lad bound for Oxford, etc etc, who travelled round India, saw the horrendous poverty and ill health and came back an emotional and mental basket-case. I had harboured apocalyptic visions of the street scenes in Mumbai and Delhi ever since then, and despite the enthusiastic reviews from one of my best friends, Paul, I had never wanted to come here. So I was apprehensive about this visit, and had resolved - in part informed by this fear, and in part from knackeredness from my workload - to treat this as a business trip, and to keep the sightseeing to a minimum. Staying in 'posh international hotels' helped, of course.

India is impossible to describe really without resorting to cliche, and of course I've only seen three of its biggest cities, but the scale of the humanity - so many people milling about, so much chaotic traffic - and the variety in faiths on display in that mingling is overwhelming. Perhaps as nowhere else on Earth, in India in any given five minute walk along a busy street you will pass people representing every possible faith: Muslim women in burkas and hijabs, Sikh businessmen in turbans, shaven-headed Buddhist monks, and the secular and Christian of course... It's dizzying.

First stop was Delhi, where I had my first, what-I-could-call-'authentic-Indian-experience'-if-that-didn't-smack-of-"aren't-the-locals-crazy?'-racism' moment... My taxi driver took a wrong turn in central Delhi and reversed up a main road straight into a beggar, knocking him over and under the car. The sound of the bumper thumping into the poor man's legs was nauseating. I was shocked and worried for the guy, of course. I also worried about getting mired in the bureaucracy of Indian traffic accident reporting for the rest of the year. But that just showed how naive I was. The driver, suitably contrite it has to be said, stepped out, dragged the fella from under the car over to the side of the road, made sure he was OK, asked me for 10 Rupees (80p) to placate him, and then drove off. The thirty or so witnesses watched impassively.

That night we had a top curry - I mean, authentic Mughlai cuisine - in Karim's restaurant (here's another pic), down an alley in Chandni Chowk, the rabbit warren of alleys and bazaars near the Jama Musjid mosque in old Delhi. It took me back to the Bradford curries of my undergraduate youth - and there can be no higher praise from me than that. We then walked into the bazaars, which was thrilling: a riot of sights, sounds and smells from the hundreds of tiny stalls that line the streets (we weren't so stupid as to try the tastes). The walk was capped by dodging a few wandering cows and ending up confronted with a lorry full of animal remains outside the local abattoir.

Next stop was Mumbai. We stayed in what to me is an uncomfortably opulent hotel, the Taj Mahal (see picture): by some distance the most fantastic hotel I've ever seen, let alone stayed in. And, the old India cliche held true: literally outside our doorstep lay whole families asleep on the pavement - though round the back as, doubtless, it's not tolerated near the front, as it might upset the posh guests. (If you were homeless, of all the locations in the city you'd choose to sleep rough, just outside one of the best hotels makes a grotesque kind of sense).

One night I saw a whole family asleep on the pavement (a Mum, teenage sister and brother, and a little girl Liam's age - no sign of Dad, perhaps he'd gone, perhaps he was working?) The girl was in just a vest and shorts. No shoes, no blanket, no cushion, her head lay against the rough pavement. None of them were awake to try and beg, all of them were asleep... The sight of that little girl was hard to walk past, though I know you're supposed to. Something welled up inside that short-circuited my supposedly superior organ, the brain, and passed all decision-making over to my heart. I just had to slip 100 Rupees (the equivalent of 12 quid) under the sleeping little girl's head. As I walked off I saw her sister wake up, so I'm sure they got it. I hope it helped, and it might have; it will certainly have given them a few options they wouldn't have had otherwise. Or, of course, it might just have perpetuated their dismal situation: "hey, look! If we sleep here we get given loads of money..." Who is to say which will have happened this time for this family? But as a parent it was all but impossible to walk by, and from my observations this week these kids' lives seem so bereft of hope that perhaps gifts like this are the best response, and walking by, though 'intellectually satisfying', isn't. Perhaps we shouldn't give to beggars, but secret gifts like this are somehow better? Or am I just trying to make distinctions to justify myself to myself? ('Posh international hotels' in such environs should also give their guests the chance to donate to street charities, I think. I'm going to suggest it....) Apparently now you can even go on tours of Indian street kids... That smacks of what the Sex Pistols once called "a cheap holiday in other people's misery..."

But India is exhilarating and delightful too. We had a great meal at Chowpatty Beach (pictured), where families come to sit out under the stars. There is a great funfair on the beach, including a manually-operated Ferris wheel (pictured), where two lads stand on the axis in the middle and pull the wheel round on its hinges, faster and faster and faster and faster - and then execute a marvellous dismount hanging off the scaffolding. Wonderful to watch.

Next stop, Bangalore.