India: All the parts other travel books leave out

By Phillip Donnelly

Travelling through a country he has always dreamed of visiting, the author is confused and perplexed by India; a land he does not understand, and one that does not conform to the rules of any society or culture he has yet encountered. This book is the story of his attempt to make sense of it all. Join him on his journey through the enigma that is India, and see what happens when a cynical neurotic western rationalist is confronted by the spiritualism, poverty and anarchy of India.
From the teeming masses of Delhi and Mumbai, to the deserts and forts of Rajasthan and the beaches of Goa, the author gives his unique perspective on all of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phillip Donnelly
• Release date: May 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458091932

Phillip Donnelly

After completing a psychology degree, the author realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet. Unable to speak any foreign languages and almost incapable of holding a conversation in his own, he decided to teach English as a foreign language because this was the only job that would allow him to travel widely without any marketable skills or noticeable intelligence. He has unsuccessfully searched for life from outer space in classrooms in the following countries: Spain, China, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Beirut, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Lebanon France and Vietnam. In the future, he hopes to continue his search for alien life forms in different countries, and he would be most obliged if any aliens reading this work could spirit him off to an altogether more exotic planet in a more harmonious dimension. About two dozen of his pieces have appeared online -- mainly travel writing and short stories, and one of them, The Interactive Classroom, won a Bewildering Stories’ Mariner Award in 2010. His latest novel, Kev the Vampire, which will be released in early 2014 by Rebel ePublishers. He can be contacted at [e-mail]

Book preview

India

All the Parts Other Travel Books Leave Out

By Phillip Donnelly

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Phillip Donnelly

Discover other titles by Phillip Donnelly at Smashwords.com

Letters from the Ministry

The Inaction Man

Notes on Nam

The Screen

Boots

China

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. All rights remain with the author.

About the Author

After completing a psychology degree, the author realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet.

Unable to speak any foreign languages and almost incapable of holding a conversation in his own, he decided to teach English as a foreign language because this was the only job that would allow him to travel widely without any marketable skills or noticeable intelligence.

He has unsuccessfully searched for life from outer space in classrooms and staffrooms in the following countries: Spain, China, Russia, Thailand, the UAE, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Vietnam, Oman and France. He currently lives in Hong Kong with his patient and long-suffering wife.

He plans to continue his search for alien life forms and would be most obliged if any aliens reading this would spirit him off to an altogether more exotic planet in an altogether more harmonious dimension.

Previous Writing

He has written two novels (‘The Screen’ and ‘Letters from the Ministry’), a novella (‘The Inaction Man’), a book of short stories (‘Boots’) and three books on travel writing on India, China and Vietnam. About twenty pieces of fiction and travel writing have appeared online and can be found at the author's website: www.ministryfox.com.

Video

Videos of the author's trip to India are available on Vimeo and You Tube.

Future Projects

The author has just finished his latest novel, Kev the Vampire, and is attempting to sell it to publishers. He is also working on a short text about Lebanon

Foreward

I should warn the reader that the title of this book is not meant to be taken literally. No work of 30,000 words could hope to explain the enigma that is India, or even come close to it. Even three hundred thousand words could only skim the surface. The reader should also be aware that I only spent a month in India, travelling from Delhi to Rajasthan to Goa to Mumbai and then back to Delhi, and therefore saw only a small part of India. To write with any authority on India would require years of focussed travel and dedicated research. In short, I saw little and understood even less.

This piece of writing is merely a record of what I did and what I thought during a four-week holiday in India in August 2008. And it is what I thought that takes precedence. I do not intend to explain India but rather describe how India affected me, a neurotic and misanthropic Westerner.

If you are expecting a ‘Lonely Planet’ type of guidebook to help you with the practicalities of travelling around India, or an encyclopaedia, or a spiritual quest confessional to help you ‘find your inner self’, or a gushing orgy of praise for all things Indian, then you should go elsewhere. What I have written is a 'warts and all' account of my experiences, and my mind is a field of warts.

And India has her warts too. When I refer in the title to the 'parts that other travel books leave out' I am referring, at least in part, to the difficulties of travelling in India. I have lived and worked abroad for the last fifteen years, in countries as diverse and Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Oman, China and Vietnam, and while every country will present problems for the traveller and lead to a greater or lesser degree of culture shock, India is a whole other dimension. It requires a fundamental shift in consciousness to begin to understand that you don't understand it. There is nothing like it.

I will tell you know, before you begin, that I never achieved 'an Indian enlightenment'. The soul of India eluded me, but I saw enough to know that if I were to win the lottery and become free of the world of cares, I could quite happily spend my life trying to understand India. I would probably fail -- I am too neurotic, too obsessive, too wedded to the precepts of western rationalism. But I would happily try.

Finally, if you are offended by irony, sarcasm, or atheism, or cannot appreciate the humour of tongue-in-cheek, then you read this book at your own peril!

You have been warned.

And now that I have scared away most potential readers, let us begin, at 18,000 feet above India, on a flight from Paris to Delhi, from the City of Light to the City of Djinns.

Table of Contents

Flying The 6 New Commandments for Air Travel

Delhi Culture shock, tout wars and a fistful of monuments

Agra Shah Jahan, Akbar the Great et moi

Fatehpur Long road to a ghost town

Jaipur Pink City, fevers, and the need for Indian feminists

Pushkar Pilgrims, ghats, holy lakes and one sick atheist

Jodhpur Blue City: Happy people

Jaisalmer Yellow City, Thar desert and Boabdil the camel

Udaipur Lakes, palaces and shrines: Shaken, not stirred

Mumbai Impossible wealth and the world’s largest slums

Trains The Mumbai-Goa ‘express’

Goa Let’s Goa

Delhi 2 The Empire strikes back

India Closure and conclusions…sort of

Prelude In-Flight Commandments

It's not flying I object to -- it's the people I have to fly with that I find objectionable. Although modern air travel is cramped and uncomfortable there are easy ways to take your mind off it. All that is required is to sit quietly, stick your head in a book, and focus on it and it alone. Indeed, as there is nothing else to do, a plane is an excellent place to read. This simple truth, however, appears to be lost on many members of the general public, who are determined to find other solutions to the problem of what to do on a long-haul flight. There are the pacers, the talkers, the tappers and those intent on enjoying the unenjoyable i.e. in-flight 'entertainment'.

To bring order and sanity to the anarchy of plane behaviour, I have therefore decided to set down a list of 6 commandments for air travel, as Moses appears to have little concrete advice on the matter of in-flight comportment. While his original commandments still hold true for air travel, in that homicide, adultery, worshipping false Gods etc. are also to be avoided at 20,000 feet, 6 additional commandments are clearly necessary.

The 6 new commandments are as follows:

1: Thou shalt not speak

Flights are for reading, not for yapping. I am constantly distracted from my perusal of fine prose by the inane chatter of others. This is not acceptable.

2: Thou shalt not bring children on planes

Smoking has been banned on flights on the dubious grounds that it disturbs others. However, I have yet to find even the most smoke-filled environment that can come close to being as annoying as a screaming baby, and they always seem to be screaming. Leave your progeny at home, or in the airport lounge or car park.

This will also develop their sense of independence and self-sufficiency because they will have to forage for themselves while you are away, and they will come to thank you in later life for helping them to become more fully rounded individuals.

3: Thou shalt sit quietly

While a very occasional trip to the lavatory may be necessary on the longest of flights, there really is no other reason to leave your chair -- it disturbs other readers.

4: Thou shalt stay within thy airspace

As planes must keep within their allotted airspace to avoid crashing into other planes, so passengers must also stay within the bounds of their ‘seatspace’. This includes not only the confines of your seat, per se, but also the space above and below your seat. In other words, your elbow must not encroach upon the space of your neighbour, and you must under no circumstances sit with your knees outstretched. Keep your knees firmly closed at all times.

For safety reasons, you must also keep your arm away from the misnamed armrest, which is, in fact, a buffer zone between your space and that of your neighbours.

5 Thou shalt not recline thy seat

Pushing one’s seat back reduces by half the amount of reading space available to the passenger behind you, and reducing this space can force other passengers to hold a book too close to their eyes for comfort, thereby exacerbating the already claustrophobic nature of cattle class air travel.

6 Thou shalt stay awake

For some reason,