P.S. Flackistillontour Pt I

• Why chocolate is better than Bollywood 
• Indian Love with no smiles (a rarity!)
• Baby in a hammock goes out the window

So I’m back in the west for a while.  Christmas is possibly the worst time to return from an Indian rural based NGO project.  Within 12 hours of getting off my plane I witnessed people fighting over a Turkey in a supermarket (Waitrose, no punches just a lot of superlatives); lucky for me I was still smiling from all the happiness that my 15 months away from such behavior has brought.

So firstly a THANK YOU for sharing the journey with me…….

Here's me on in my last week with some of the college kids at a gig in the local town....

and two of the funniest girls in India who I'll miss dearly Sujata (my sponsor child) and her BBF Renuka.....plus some random

A week before I left KSV I’d decided to organise a Bollywood dance teacher as a gift to the kids.  Not as easy as you’d think. Despite western media suggesting that India is full of Sangitas and  doing sexy bollywood dances around the streets that is far from the truth (public hip is only gyrating is only for the few travelled middle, upper classes and actors).  However, we found one.  Albeit a tubby middle aged guy who liked gold chains and spandex pants (a new concept for the kids).  He cost 5000r (£50).  That’s a crazy amount of money in rural India.  Yet all he did was dance in front of the kids, he didn't teach them. The kids, however, loved it.  It was a real goose pimples moment when you saw their little faces light up.  The volunteers loved it too, I spent a lot of my time helping look after the precious dance instructor.  Yet at one point when the floor filler Jai Ho came on I had about 8 kids hanging off me including one on my shoulders who was having so much fun that he trickled some wee down my back.  I gave my camera to a college boy and he took some videos (luckily not of me being wee’d on); despite capturing the moment he seemed to think that you needed to keep pushing the video button.  So this is a mashup of 1 second videos…….you should get the idea.

Over the next few days somehow the kids found out how much the teacher cost. I’m pretty sure he told them as he didn't stop talking about his spandex empire.  A few of them said to me that for 5000RS they’d have taught the class themselves and spent the rest of the money on chocolate.  Next time we’ll do that.  Dancing and chocolate with no spandex - result.

I've been to a few Indian weddings.  If India is a sensory explosion then the Indian wedding’s I’d been to earlier in the year had been Indian amphetamines.  The day after the Bollywood class we went to a local staff member’s wedding.  A Christian ‘love’ wedding.  I've never seen such scared, sad faces on a bridal party.  The sad truth of 90% of India where all of a sudden two strangers (I know this was a love wedding but they’d never even been in the same room together alone) were sat next to each other for hours with the daunting challenge of later seeing each other naked then trying that thing called sex that ‘everybody’ talks about yet the church said was sinister (reproduction = good, anything more = bad).  Blimey that must be a confusing day.  So I didn't really feel the love at the wedding.  15 white volunteers also attracted the wrong sort of attention as we were mere photo fodder getting more attention than immediate family and at one point being told to dance ‘we want the white people to dance’.  We danced like monkies in the corner whilst the paparazzi snapped away.

Me with the college boys class from KSV at the wedding

NOT THIS Wedding (just to prove that I don't normally wear western feckin clothes to an India wedding - we were ordered to!)

The happy couple

The one thing I did love about the wedding was compliments; the bridal party looked great and we all complimented them but I’m talking about the general compliments by strangers.  The female volunteers looked amazing.  Saris are so complimentary (and that works the opposite way for big aunties with their low flying nipples and unguarded growlers) but these girls are all slim and pretty.  Quite a treat for the eyes.  Us western lads had to wear western clothes.  It felt food to be out of dusty, muddy clothes although I’d grown quite accustomed to them.  However, the compliments given by the Indians to us westerners once we scrubbed up.  You always feel like a Hollywood star in India if you are white.  That day I felt like a superhero ;)

The girls in their saris.....

To leave India I had to take a few buses and a 10 hour train to Bangalore.  I’ve travelled a lot before and often spent my time thinking about what was going to happen next (which town, bar, girl, mountain).  Whereas India for me was so much more present and in those last hours I sucked as much of this amazing country in as I could.  I sat hanging out of the train door with my feet on the step watching the sunset and the farmers head home from a hard days labour in the fields.  It was stunning.  Then I got hit on the head by a plastic bottle, thrown out of the next carriage.  It was India!

I made friends with a family sat opposite me in the carriage.  Oddly their 4 month old girl was called Dixita.  They’d name her after the pop star Raghu Dixit who I’d been working with as a supporter for KSV.  A lovely baby, but as names go a bad choice.  Dick Shit Ah.  The family had an ingenious way of getting the baby off to sleep, a hammock tied up across the berths which she gently rocked in as her father showed me his brand new Samsung Tablet.  Usually a sure sign of a middle class Indian.  Their social education was soon confirmed, however, as, after changing the nappy in front of me they threw it out of the window.  This is India!!

The sleeper class baby hammock - amazing :)

Out with good friends in Bangalore......my first beer in a LONG time just before boarding my plane

Leaving the subcontinent after 15 months was hard.  I've been lucky enough to spend time travelling through SE Asia, South America, The Middle East and some of Sub Saharan Africa but for me India is the closest I've come to feeling like I’I've left this planet.   Oddly despite living through a few earthquakes and monsoon within my first 48 hours back a climatic Armageddon hit the UK & Ireland. 

Seriously......

A neighbour’s tree came down on our drive and I commented to said neighbour ‘everything happens for a reason’.   They looked very confused and it soon hit me that I was no longer in the East!

Oddly the biggest thing I noticed once back was the change in food.  My mum has crones so there is no spicy food in the house and having been used to spicy curry x3/day I had to get used to more bland cuisine.  

I’m not sure if this is a direct result but all of a sudden I was farting 'less than I was not'.  For the last 15 months (apart from when in a room with a lady) I fart more than I don’t which is kinda like having a jetpack on your back the whole time.  Every boy’s dream, every mans nightmare.  One advantage of being back.  The rest, I didn't like so much - more in Pt II.