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CONFLUENCE
Few things can prepare you for your first sight of the River Ganges… The driver was lost. Confused by the labyrinth of one-way streets, roadblocks, police checkpoints and conflicting signposts he became disoriented and anxious. His battered Ola cab bumped along a rutted, potholed street running diagonally across a wide, empty expanse of empty ground […]
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THE GRAND TRUNK ROAD
“Such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.”– Rudyard Kipling On the Dufferin Bridge I was standing on the Grand Trunk Road. Formerly known as Uttarapath, as Sadak-e-Azam and as Badshahi, the Grand Trunk Road is one of Asia’s oldest and longest main roads. Its route from Chittagong in Bangladesh to […]
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TWO BEERS AT THE LEOPOLD
The head waiter has a moustache with the tips waxed and curled up in twin hooks, giving him the look of a villain in a 1920s silent movie… The Leopold Café is the go-to place for the white folks here in Colaba.¹ It is expensive, of course, but after a long day of walking the […]
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IN THE TEMPLES OF OUR FATHERS
The worshippers jostled and shoved me along, moving clockwise around the statue and its marble enclosure. Outside the colourful chaos of the Crawford Market I plunged in deep, following the route set out for me on my phone by Google Maps: half lost and half found. In a densely packed street I came across a […]
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MORNINGTOWN RIDE
Good morning from an Indian train… I came to India to ride trains. They were one of my abiding memories from our visit to northern India in 1992. Trains were fun. They were linear microcosms of Indian life: miniature towns moving horizontally through the landscape and through the mornings, noons and nights of the subcontinent. […]
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Dirt Music
A tall, gangly man in a white shirt and black pants, was opening channels along the rows with his bare feet so that a trickle of water could flow across the field. The driver was a lunatic. I won’t go into the details…but fuck me, what an idiot! It had all begun happily enough. I’d […]
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Journey to the Centre of India
The British are great measurers. They have a sense of order. You can see it best in their maps. The Ordnance Survey maps are a perfect representation in two dimensions of every detail of the three dimensional world. Perhaps it’s their Roman heritage. The Romans, too, loved order, measurement and straight lines. It gave their […]
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The Blue Dome
Asleep in perfect blue buildings…– Counting Crows It was one of those serendipitous discoveries. I was riding in an Ola to the Ganges (now that’s a sentence you won’t read very often!) in the city of Allahabad. It was a warm, sunny day and I sat in the back seat of the car watching the […]
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Scenes From a Doorway
So you are on a train, rolling across the plains of Central India. What do you do? Simple…you sit in the doorway of the carriage, with your feet on the steel footplate, and watch the pageant of rural India sweep by: Curling diesel smoke. A man grazing 2 cows in the shade of a tree. […]
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RAGE IN EDEN
Lines join in faint discord, and the Stormwatch brewsa concert of kings… – Jethro Tull, Dun Ringill The gods were angry. In the predawn darkness of Varanasi I was jolted awake, disoriented and cold, by an eruption of dense, booming sound. My fuddled mind processed the banshee wail of wind around the eaves outside my […]
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