India: Five of the Best

What do I say about the highlights? They all depend upon your priorities.

There’s loads of history - the national capital Delhi itself has over 2,000 designated historical monuments, and there’s no end to the temples, mosques, churches, mausoleums, forts, palaces, villas, colonial bungalows, and more scattered across the country. Top-of-the-mind recall: the Taj Mahal; the Qutub Minar; Gwalior Fort; Amer Fort; Golconda; the Mysore Palace; the Portuguese villas of Old Goa…some are literally hundreds of years old, some just early 20th century.

India’s other big offering is nature and wildlife - almost each state in the country has its own national parks or wildlife sanctuaries. Some of the best include the Keoladeo Ghana Bird Sanctuary, the Corbett National Park (great for adventures, like getting chased by a rogue elephant or coming face to face with a tiger), Bandhavgarh, and Kanha - the last was the inspiration for Kipling’s Jungle Book.

There’s scope for adventure like climbing the world’s highest mountains in the Himalayas, white-water rafting, and trekking (including an awesome week-long jaunt atop the frozen Zanskar river).
There are glorious beaches, fabulous cuisine, and plenty of ethnic stuff to buy. And once you start exploring, you’ll find more to entice you - I still do.

Quick Tips:

India’s really too huge and too diverse to fit all the do’s and don’ts in here, but here are some fairly comprehensive tips:

1. This country is massive, and the attractions are thousands. There’s no way you can see them all, even in a lifetime. Figure out what you really must see, and head for that - don’t try to fit it all in.

2. Bargain. Wherever you go, you’re likely to find people pushing up their prices for whatever they’re selling and you’re expected to haggle.

3. If you’re a woman, dress conservatively. Shorts and tank tops may not draw too many stares in bigger or more touristy places, but it’s safer to stick to long skirts, pants, or even (and many women testify to the effectiveness of this!) traditional Indian clothing.

4. Keep a hold on your wallet. I hate to admit it, but tourists are common victims for conmen, thieves, and other riffraff.

5. Steer clear of touts. They’ll offer you mouthwatering bargains, and they’ll be around at all the big attractions. Avoid them like the plague.

6. Do a bit of research before you come. Too many people get a huge culture shock simply because of sheer ignorance.

Best Way To Get Around:

The best way of making your way around India depends upon how much time you have, and what you want to see. This is a big country - over 3,000km across at its widest point, and about the same distance from north to south.

If you really want to fit in a range of places across India, go for the airlines. Indian Airlines and its subsidiary, Alliance Air, are government-run; Jet Airways; Air Sahara; and a clutch of smaller operators form the private sector. They’re reliable enough, but don’t expect any frills.

If you need to cover long distances on a tighter budget, opt for the Indian Railways. The trains are cheap, and offer a really close glimpse of life as it comes. Large families will share space, family gossip, and food with you, and you may just end up with a very different view of what India’s all about! Long distance travel by bus can be uncomfortable but equally enlightening.

Within cities, the options can range all the way from buses and rented cars to taxis, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, motorbike-taxis (a specialty of Goa), boats, horse-carts (known as tongas or ikkas), and, most dependable of all, your own two feet.

On the fringes of the formidable Thar Desert lies the Neemrana Fort Palace hotel, India’s oldest heritage hotel. Built in 1464, this was the 3rd capital of the descendants of Prithivraj Chauhan III (A famous ruler killed in a battle with the invader Muhammad Ghori in 1192). Neemrana stands on a hill in ten levels, and is an imposing combination of whaleback roofs, jharokhas (carved windows), jaalis (stone filigree screens), and balconies.

A ruin till it was renovated by French experts in the 1990s, Neemrana blends medieval and modern, East and West. The rooms, each one unique, are scattered across the entire palace. Ours was the Geru Mahal (`Terracotta Palace’- its walls are partly terracotta-wash). It was a cosy turret room atop the fort, with a stepladder leading up through the window onto a terrace. Inside the room, wooden beams sloped up to a conical ceiling; there were brass lanterns, old paintings, antiques, Victorian furniture and Rajasthani block print upholstery. The only thing disconcerting was the bathing area- it was part of the bedroom, merely cordoned off with two head-high walls. The toilet was, to our relief, separate, and had a great view – Neemrana prides itself on `loos with views’!

The other room our family booked was the Bagh Mahal (`Garden Palace’- it opens on to a pretty garden). It’s a long, lovely room, with beds arranged footboard to headboard, rather than side by side. A little cramped, which was why the folks shifted to the Jalaj Mahal (`Lotus Palace’) – a beautiful room next to a quiet lotus pond. The room was decorated in cool shades of green, lavishly decorated with a lotus motif.

Neemrana has a swimming pool, yoga classes, health spa (with ayurvedic treatments) and cultural programmes. The latter wasn’t a novelty for us Indians, but was okay if you hadn’t seen anything like it before. A local quartet- a somewhat tipsy middle-aged man, a fat woman, a teenaged girl and a small boy- sang and danced a bit from 7 to 8.

For dining, there’s the French restaurant (very avoidable) and the buffet (very good). The lunch buffet (served from 12.30 to 2.30), for instance, consisted of an eclectic menu, in which the local food won hands down: it featured lentils, okra with spiced onions, lamb cooked with pickling spices, fresh fruit and mawa kachori (sweetened thickened milk encased in syrup-dipped fried pastry- rich but luscious). Buffets are served in the courtyard and the adjoining pillared hall. Tea, served on the terrace between 5 and 6, is equally great- we got a choice of lemon tea, Earl Grey and Darjeeling tea (besides coffee), bhajjiyas (fried savouries, made of a batter that has loads of spinach and chopped onions), cookies and a mouth-watering fruitcake.

Neemrana’s USP is its quiet charm- this isn’t a noisy resort with a million things to do. The highlights here include sipping tea on the cool terrace; watching the parakeets in the trees; and exploring the palace. Peace? Yes – and in royal style too.

The southern Indian state of Tamilnadu has a very rich heritage- whether it’s mouthwatering cuisine or exquisitely glossy silk saris, these people know how to do it- and have been doing it in grand style for the past God knows how many centuries. And way up there on the list of things they’re good at is temple architecture. All across Tamilnadu are fabulously carved, frieze-decorated temples which are certainly nothing less than the result of divine inspiration!

Anyway, to cut things short- the temples at Mahabalipuram are the ones I’m going to be talking about here. My parents and I were on a ten-day tour of Tamilnadu and its neighbouring state, Karnataka (more on this later) and Tamilnadu’s capital, Chennai, was our first halt. We got in on the train at Chennai one morning and spent the day wandering around Chennai, visiting its rather grubby beach and going for a boat ride through its jellyfish-infested water. The next day, we drove down 58 km to Mahabalipuram (also known as Mammalapuram), and although I’d heard of these temples- and seen pictures of them before- I couldn’t help but be impressed by the real McCoy.

The temples at Mahabalipuram are a World Heritage site, and were carved out of massive rocks by the Pallava kings in the 7th century. What I found the most impressive were the temples known as the `Rath (Chariot) Temples’. They’re five stone-pillared, spire-topped temples, each of them monolithic. The fact that they’re five – and not six, or whatever – is because each represents one of the five Pandav brothers, heroes of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharat. All of the temples are splendidly carved, as are the rest of the temples in Mahabalipuram, the Shore Temple and the Cave Temples. All of them have exquisite- and very intricate- carvings of everything from gods and goddesses to animals, birds, flowers and more. All are breathtaking, more so because they’re so old, yet so well-preserved.

And the best of all- also the most-photographed- is the world’s largest bas-relief, known as `Krishna Mandapam’, dedicated ostensibly to the Hindu god Krishna but with plenty of other details included too- from a section referred to as `Arjuna’s Penance’ (Arjuna was once of the five Pandav brothers) to a local version of Aesop’s fables.

You can wander further out- to `Krishna’s Butterball’, a spherical rock balanced almost magically atop another; or you can go swimming in the sea. We didn’t have the time to do either, but what we did see was enough to leave us quite impressed indeed.

A childhood spent in Madhya Pradesh – the setting for Jungle Book- should’ve prepared me for anything the jungle might offer- including the experience of staring straight into the mesmerizing golden eyes of a tiger.

One of India’s finest wildlife reserves, the Corbett National Park is a great place to see wild boar, wild elephant, spotted deer, birds, langurs, and – if you’re lucky – the Royal Bengal Tiger. What’s better is that it’s just 247 km from the national capital, New Delhi. Corbett lies in the Himalayan foothills- dense forests, thorny lantana, and vast grassland. The Ramganga River, full of fish and long-snouted gharial crocodiles, runs through it all.

Established in 1936 as the Hailey National Park, Corbett was later renamed after James Corbett (not the boxer!), a hunter who endeared himself to the local people by ridding them of many man-eaters during the early 1900s.

Anyway, more about what you can see here. I’ve been twice to Corbett, and both have been memorable experiences. The first time, we, en route to the hills, stopped for a day at Corbett. In the afternoon, a jungle ride was suggested, atop an elephant (very normal in India: it’s the best way to see the jungle up close). Lurching about fairly comfortably, we crossed the river, past a browsing herd of elephants and into the forest. It’s eerie: quiet, but not quite, and with occasional gory surprises, like a half-chewed deer leg. Our mahout, a cheery sort, was bent on `showing’ us a tiger, and when he’d failed, even after an hour, he was most disappointed.

We drifted out of the jungle, when a mahout on another elephant called to say there was a tiger in the grass further on. Our mahout got very excited, of course, and he egged our elephant on to within about ten feet of the tiger.

It’s a grand – and scary – sight. This tiger was sitting sprawled in the grass, staring us straight in the face, with a supercilious expression, as if it gave a damn whether we came closer or not. "No harm in bringing this elephant close," whispered our mahout. "These two have met before, and my elephant gave this tigress a kick she’s not forgotten yet." A few minutes- it seemed like an eternity- and the tigress got up lazily, then stiffened and charged a herd of nervous deer. They escaped, and the tiger dashed off into the jungle.

The second time round in Corbett, we never saw any tigers, although one roared outside our cottage. And we did get chased by a rogue elephant, and a terrible flash flood through the night swept away the stone-and-mud roads out of the park. Trying to leave Corbett, we ended up having to build the road ourselves, piling up stones, getting our fingers squashed- and taking five hours to cover 12 km.

Adventure? You can be sure Corbett’s all of that!

If you should be ever offered the opportunity to attend a Kashmiri wedding, or any other celebration which calls for a feast, grab it! The traditional Kashmiri feast, known as a wazwaan, is a treat not to be missed, even though getting hold of one outside of Kashmir may be a trifle difficult.

To begin at the beginning, Kashmir is a land very different from the rest of India. The mangoes and bananas, the coconuts and oranges of areas further south are missing from this state, and the staples here are rice and meat- and lots of meat! The `original’ wazwaan (alas rarely encountered now) was a showcase of the Kashmiri fondness for meat, with close to 36 courses being served, 95% of them consisting of meat. Today’s wazwaans are less extensive, but they’re great, nevertheless.

The first time I was invited to a wazwaan, it was to a neighbor’s home in Srinagar. The gentleman’s sister-in-law had just got engaged, and about 70 guests had been invited to the wazwaan. All through the preceding day, professional cooks (known as waazas) and their assistants had laboured, ritually slaughtering sheep and chickens, pounding meat and spices, and simmering huge cauldrons of the most wonderfully aromatic curries until we couldn’t wait to walk across to Mr. Malik’s house.

At his house, arrangements for the banquet had been made for two huge, carpeted rooms, one for the women and the other for the men (this was a Muslim household), and spread with long white strips of cloth, known as dastarkhans. Everybody was to sit on the floor, and for every four people, a huge plate, called a tarami, had been piled high with rice. You sat down, cross-legged, uttered the ritual Bismillah, and waited for the cooks to come parading through, serving each course onto the taramis. You were expected to mark out your own portion of rice, and eat only from there. We, of course, not being Kashmiris, were kindly provided with individual plates.

The procession of dishes was nothing short of spectacular and it continued throughout the hour or more it took to consume it all. There was tabakmaaz; crisply fried lamb ribs; roganjosh, a spicy red lamb curry; rista, silky meatballs made by pounding lamb and fat together for hours on end and then simmering it in a spicy gravy; and loads more. There also was Marchwangaan korma, a fiery red curry with about as much chilly in it as meat; spinach cooked with tiny meatballs; dhaniwal korma (lamb simmered in a yogurt and fresh coriander gravy); a smooth dish of thinly sliced paneer (cottage cheese) in a tomato gravy, which, along with a kidney bean curry, was the only truly vegetarian dish, and God alone knows what else. Beside each tarami, were bowls of plain yogurt, freshly sliced carrots and onions, and chutney. The three females of our family (I could hardly call all of us women- I was not even a teenager!) were conscientiously consuming rice along with the meats, until one of the ladies seated beside us said, "Oh! You’re not supposed to eat the rice, you know. That’s just for wiping your hands. Eat only the meat. That’s it!"

The wazwaan reaches its climax with the appearance of the pièce de resistance, the gushtaba, a huge fist-sized meatball, for which lamb is pounded with fat and then cooked in yogurt and spices. The gushtaba is traditionally served by the vasta (chief) waaza himself. It’s a tribute to his skills, the ultimate proof of his prowess.

The wazwaan ended with the gushtaba and we had barely enough space to fit that in, let alone the fragrant cups of kehwa, a delicate Kashmiri green tea flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon, and sliced almonds. By the end of it all, we were well beyond satiation, but the experience was one that I remember, as fondly as ever, even today.

By the way, for a taste of what a wazwaan’s like, try the Kashmiri tarami at Delhi’s Chor Bizarre restaurant (Hotel Broadway, Asaf Ali Road, Tel: 23273821). It comes for about US$11 per person, and offers a neat snapshot of a miniature wazwaan. Chor Bizarre also has an outlet in Delhi’s neighbouring city of Noida. The restaurant is located next to the McDonald’s in Sector 16, Noida.

Ladakh, in India’s northernmost state, Jammu and Kashmir, is an arid, bare land, and for miles altogether you’ll probably see nothing but bare- and brilliantly coloured- mountains. And then, just as you go turn the bend along a mountain road, you’ll see a gompa, precariously perched on the hillside, clinging on seemingly through sheer willpower.

Gompas- Buddhist monasteries- are the equivalent of the temples and mosques you see in more southern parts of India. They tower, with whitewashed, wooden-windowed facades, over tiny villages, and are more often than not a virtual treasurehouse of interesting and ancient arts and crafts. The gompas are always rectangular- in typical Tibetan Buddhist style- with a series of inner halls and passages, dark stairways and open courtyards within.

The main hall of the gompa will generally be dominated by a large (usually gilded, sometimes with actual gold and semi-precious stones) statue of the Buddha. Around it, in niches in the walls, will be other deities, including tantrik deities and much-revered rinpoches (‘rinpoche’ means `precious’, and is used to refer to reincarnated Buddhist high lamas. All will be draped in the fine white silk scarves which are a sign of great esteem in Ladakh; and all will have oil lamps burning before them. In earlier times- and even today, in the more remote gompas- the oil will actually be yak butter- a substance which gives off a characteristic and heavy smell all its own.

You’ll see monks wandering around, praying, and (if they’re one of the many novices), perhaps even playing. There’ll be prayer flags fluttering from every pole- each bit of cloth carefully inscribed with prayers. There’ll be whirring prayer wheels, entire colonnades of them; beautifully worked traditional Buddhist thangkas(religious scroll paintings), centuries old but with each hue still fresh. There’ll be mani stones- carved with prayers, especially the Tibetan mantra `Om mani padme hum (Praise to the Jewel in the Lotus Flower’). There will, occasionally, also be some pretty gruesome relics- I remember the gompa at Deskit (in the Nubra Valley), where the central idol- a terrifying tantrik figure- in the main hall holds a mummified human forearm, the tendons still hanging from the elbow. The Deskit Gompa, incidentally, is also worth a visit for the fabulous view it offers of the area. The `Om mani padme hum’ here is inscribed in carefully-placed white stones across the dark mountainside opposite, and the walk up the mountain to the gompa itself (the road ends a little way further down, so whether you like it or not, you’re have to trek up the last few hundred metres) is past walls of deep green rock. It’s fascinating.

Ladakh literally has gompas by the dozen, and you can’t hope to visit all of them in a single trip. It would also be impossible to list them all here- but here’s a brief run-down on four of the ones closest to Ladakh’s capital, Leh. They’re all gompas that I’ve visited myself, so I can vouch for the fact that they’re worth a look-see.

Hemis Gompa: Ladakh’s largest and wealthiest gompa, the 17th century Hemis Gompa is 48 km from Leh, across the Indus River. It’s a huge, stunningly beautiful building, with long yellow stain strips fluttering from its front parapet. Hemis is a monastery of the Kagypa (`Red Hat’) sect, and is richly embellished all through- right from the main gate, beyond which is a row of prayer wheels, to the beautifully painted parapet which surmounts the gompa. The gompa’s hugely popular on itineraries, especially during the Hemis Tsechu (an annual festival, as is the norm amongst Ladakhi gompas), when masked monks perform day-long dances which culminate in the ceremonial triumph of good over evil.

Thikse Gompa: 19 km from Leh, also along the Indus River, is Thikse Gompa. Unlike Hemis, this is a monastery of the Gelugpa (`Yellow Hat’) sect, and with its 12-storey building, all painted in white, ochre and dark red, is home to a nunnery and ten temples. The view from the gompa’s lovely: it looks out over the green fields which surround Leh. Inside, the gompa’s main hall is pretty dark and gloomy, but it contains a breathtakingly opulent statue of the Buddha, all gold, turquoise and semi-precious stones.

Shey Gompa: 15 km from Leh, and slightly different from the other monasteries listed so far, in that it was not always a gompa. Shey began life as a royal residence- the Namgyals lived here till the 1500s- and was later converted to a gompa. The gompa’s main claim to fame is a huge, 3-storied copper-and-brass Buddha, draped all over with silk scarves.

Spituk Gompa: This one’s one of the lesser-known gompas around Leh, despite its name (`spituk’ means `exemplary’). The Spituk Gompa is 18 km from Leh and dates back to the 11th century; today it’s a quiet place, high up on a hill, with the wind howling around it. Besides the usual idols, Spituk also has a small collection of old and rusty weapons, thangkas and icons. A little further up the hill, above the gompa, is a temple dedicated to the tantrik deity Vajrabhairava, supposedly the very embodiment of wrath. The icon of Vajrabhairava in the temple is pretty scary, and is unveiled only once a year, at the Spituk Gompa’s annual tsechu in January.

I was eighteen when I first went abroad. I was to participate in a competition, for which I ended up traveling close to 24-hours almost nonstop, until I ended up at my destination, quite worn out. Arrangements had been made for me to stay with a family, a wonderful lady and her two equally likeable daughters, and all three of them had turned up at the airport to meet me. We exchanged greetings, they bundled me into their car, and we set off towards their home.

Small talk - the drippy weather, the bumpy flight, the dim chance of it clearing up within the day - ensued. And then, all of a sudden, as we stopped at a traffic signal, waiting for the light to turn green, one of the girls said, "Do you have traffic lights in India?"

For a moment I toyed with the idea of saying (totally deadpan, of course), "No. In fact, this is the first time I’ve sat in a car. We usually travel by bullock-cart, you know." But then all the good manners my mum had drilled into me over the years came to the surface, and all I did was to nod demurely and admit that yes, we did have traffic lights in India.

That was my first experience of how totally haywire people’s perceptions of a country can be. And when it comes to perceptions of a country like India- vast, historic and somewhat mysterious- then just too many people let their imaginations run riot. Saffron-robed sadhus, temples, spiritualism, poverty, the rope trick, decadent (and fabulously wealthy) maharajas: all of it, to millions across the world, is what India is all about.

Well, here’s where I do my bit for setting the record straight.

I am an Indian, born and brought up in India. I have spent over three decades breathing the air of this amazing country, and I admit I find it absolutely fascinating. After all, a land that is almost as big as Europe (if you don’t include Russia that is) has plenty of scope for interesting discoveries. Add to that the fact that it has a huge population (the second largest in the world, after China), the fact that these billions of people speak around 1,500 languages, and that there is a cultural heritage, a history of more than five thousand years of civilization. With that sort of background, it’s hardly surprising that India is chockfull of secrets. You could spend a lifetime traveling, and you would probably not be able to see it all.

Yes, there is the flip side to it. India has its own share of problems: poverty, illiteracy, corruption, crime, terrorism, and more. Like in almost any other country in the world, here too the daily newspapers carry headlines that reveal the seamy side of life in the country. Even the rather well-to-do, urban educated Indian bears up bravely against shortages of water and electricity, corruption in government departments, rising prices, and the sad fact that it may be years before he or she is able to visit the beautiful Kashmir Valley, now a strife-torn area.

But despite all that, despite the troubles, the little niggling irritants, the nuisances that may never go away, there are things to look forward to - the big moments and unbelievably beautiful experiences that are so absolutely Indian. The chance to drive up from Delhi into the foothills of the Himalayas, for a week’s trek through alpine meadows, woods of cedar, pine, and oak. The chance to wake up to a bright and sunny morning in Manipur and to see more than a hundred species of orchids blossoming in the garden outside your window. To wander along the shores of a southern beach, looking at ancient rock-cut temples, perfect in every detail. To stand in front of the Taj Mahal and admire its completely symmetrical perfection. To toil up the slope of a hill in the Aravalis and visit the awesome Amer Fort. Or to drive through the high-altitude desert of Ladakh, up to Khardung-la, along the world’s highest road open to civilians (the world’s highest road is in Ladakh too, but it’s only used by the military forces guarding India’s northern frontiers).

The chance, too, to watch a Hindi movie, all high drama, song and dance, produced by the world’s largest film industry. To go shopping for everything from hand-made leather slippers to mirror-worked skirts and tiny packets of spices, fresh from the spice plantations of southern India. To join in the frenzy that grips India whenever the Indian cricket team, the "Men in Blue", as they’ve been affectionately dubbed, play a match. To savour everything from the fragrant biryanis of Hyderabad and the melt-in-the-mouth milk sweets of Kolkata to the buttery Shrewsbury biscuits of Pune.

This journal, and some more to follow, will spotlight some of my favourite destinations and experiences in India. Obviously, I’ve not been everywhere - in fact, I’ve been to very few places in India- but whatever I’ve loved will appear in these journals. Great places to stay, great sights to visit, great moments to cherish. Whatever I write about is what I’ve done or seen for myself. It won’t be comprehensive, but it will be a glimpse of what India is all about.