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India – Incredible and Intoxicating: A Week in The Golden Triangle
I don’t know if the phrase Stockholm Syndrome carries any weight in India but it describes my relationship with the country succinctly and accurately. It’s a part of the world that introduces you to norms entirely warped from an occidental orientation (such as the curious cruelty of the caste system) and surreptitiously swipes closely held luxuries upon entry, personal space being the most glaring example. And I can’t wait to go back. Not even the English language escapes distortion although there is precious little of it around. ‘Road’ no longer refers to lane adorned tarmac used by relatively homogeneous motor vehicles. Instead a ‘road’ is a disheveled morass of fumes, both…
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India and its Idiosyncrasies: Namaste to the Newbie
There is broad consensus that the dramatic increase in food allergies in Western society is partly due to the ultra sanitized world we have created for ourselves. Mr. Muscle and his army of military grade detergents have inadvertently blunted our immune systems to the point that they can’t defend us from ostensibly benign microbes later in life. Not so in India. Sanitation and serviceable sewage systems have unfortunately been deemed surplus to requirements in this sprawling sub-continent and in a country where children are more familiar with Dengue Fever than Dettol, peanut allergies are unlikely to make an impression. It’s a very serious cloud complete with an imperceptibly small silver…
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Machu Pizza – Why is good local food so hard to find?
A ‘Curate’s Egg’ is one of the more bizarre idioms of the English language. Meant to describe something which has both good and bad qualities, it has its roots in a now defunct 19th Century British satirical magazine, although the phrase itself has shown remarkable staying power. It now crops up quite widely and I would submit that the tourism industry is one of the most rampant Curate’s Eggs that modern society affords us. Often bringing vast wealth to the area in question, tourism assuredly comes at a cost and even if loss of identity or authenticity are less easily assigned a price tag they are no less discernible. Economists…
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Rio de Janeiro to New Delhi: Poverty and Pride of Slum Life
If sitting on the Copacabana, sipping beer and gazing across the idyllic Rio coastline is not heaven on earth, then it is astonishingly close. The weather is invariably stunning, the water glistening and all watched over by Christ the Redeemer himself. I can’t claim to be a beach lover, but nowhere has been closer to converting me than the Copacabana. However, this is all a matter of perspective. Because my Brahma wasn’t served from an Irish Bar wedged into the sand in the middle of the beach. It was brought to me by the array of people that trudge up and down the beach, a case of beer on their…
