The New India (it sucks)

I am soon to finish my tour of Gujarat and will be enjoying a brief, self-rewarded Christmas break in Rajasthan with friends before setting off on the next phase of this adventure. After a series of remote and/or fiendishly inaccessible historical attractions, I have since had the dubious pleasure of visiting Gujarat's major industrial metropolises. For a similar experience, I recommend taking a month-long tour of whatever places you wish in Europe, and then finishing it off with stops in Dusseldorf and Dortmund. These Gujarati cities are unknown to the world for their blandness, beheld only by business travelers and those passing through on a direct course connecting the nation's greatest cities and one part of the country to another. Eastern Gujarat is the Delaware of India.

My first stop was Surat, a large industrial town of 2.5 million people with the world's largest diamond business. I arrived via "sleeper bus", a misnomer that leads one to expect it might be possible to sleep on board. I finally did slip into an exhausted unconsciousness around 4am only to be awoken at 5, kicked off, and left to dazedly ponder my whereabouts, which I was able to pinpoint as precisely as "under a bridge somewhere." I somehow made it to a hotel, checked in, and collapsed on the bed. When I awoke I scoured the room for clues as to my location, finally discovering in the room service menu that I was in Surat. I have woken up not knowing where I am many a time, but never before in a Dry State.

My task for the day was to buy a replacement for my Indian phone's SIM card, which requires Indian government approval and therefore is impossible to accomplish sensibly. As a foreigner with few documents and fewer contacts, this became a labor of cutting red tape with a spatula. Though I metaphorically dodged rolling boulder traps and swung on vines across pits of snakes I was ultimately unable to clear the final hurdle: proof of my location in India. Needless to say, for an itinerant travel-writer this is not exactly easy to come by. I tried multiple ploys across the city to skirt this requirement but to no avail. I finally relented, conceding that my request was probably unreasonable. It was almost as though I were trying to purchase a number for a phone that would travel with me.

Over the course of my wanderings on this quest I saw a fair amount of Surat and was shocked by what I beheld. It was crowded, ugly, and aggressively fast-paced...but it was clean. There were no huge, perpetually windblown piles of dust in front of every sidewalk. There was no livestock roaming the streets. Traffic was dense and murderous but squadrons of white-helmeted traffic police ensured that it flowed continuously rather than degenerating into gridlock. Foul water and human feces were either rocketed into orbit or were carried underground through a system of pipes. I was at last in the New India, where industry, technology, and connection to the global economy brought wealth and modernity. Wealth and modernity turn out to be a noisy gray heap, but it's a noisy gray heap that works (sort of)(I mean, it's no Geneva)(but it's also no Agra).

Surat has large Indian shopping centers by the dozens. These cavernous, multi-level, semi-open edifices at first impress (my God, there must be thousands of square inches of open space!), but then you realize that it is just the bazaar built upwards. Access to upper levels is through dark and spit-encrusted stairwells and the jumble of shops is almost as confusing as ever. This is not the sleek design of the Western malls where a brand name and a carefully-selected display case lure you in. Instead the shops beckon with an avalanche of signs that clutter every available inch of space. A typical marquee does not read "B.K. Bhawani Office Supply Shop", it reads

B.K. Bhawani Store.
XEROX. FAX. ISD/PCO/STD. mobile batteries. chargers. print cartridges. office stationery and supplies retailing. Printing services.
B.K. Bhawani Store, 14/1 Shurav Complex, 4th level, Mirzapur Rd., Surat (Guj.) Mobile:943798453493

Its neighbor will go to even greater heights of redundancy with something like

Shri Krishna Memory Services
Offering:
DV TO CD
DV TO DVD
CD TO DVD
DVD TO CD
DVD TO DV
MEMORY CARDS
COMPUTER PRINTOUT
Shree Krishna Sales & Trading Corp., 23/5 Podrat Compound, Surat (Gujarat)

Repeated hundredfold, it serves only to obscure where you're going because it becomes a chore where you can only find the name of the store by completing a 150-foot Gujarati wordsearch puzzle. The bazaar mentality has also carried over in other ways too. Many of these shopping centers are filled entirely with one type of store, as if the city's priests had dictated that you could only lease property in the Surapatnam Shopping Complex if you were born into the Sony/Panasonic digital camera-selling caste. Worst of all are the phone-credit vendors who receive free signage from every brand they carry, ensuring that every commercial street in the Subcontinent has at least 5 shops whose facades look like this

BSNLVikaparayam Enterprises Ltd. AIRTEL Vikaparayam Enterprises
VODAFONE Vikaparayam Enterprises Ltd.
TATA INDICOMVikaparayam Enterprises LLC.
!dEAVikaparayam Enterprises Ltd.
...

As you can see, the Byzantine procedures of SIM card shopping have left me with some bitterness towards the merchant classes. It was probably this exasperation which pushed me to embark on a mission of documentary photography after sundown by standing (or rather, hopping about madly) in the middle of the most chaotic rush-hour traffic I could find. I had to delete dozens of unrecognizably blurry photographs, the products of streaking lights in which neither I nor my subjects deemed it prudent to remain motionless for so much as a nanosecond. Photography in the thick of urban Indian traffic is like trying to simultaneously play Frogger, Dance Dance Revolution, and Pokemon Snap in an unventilated basement lined with strobe lights. The only difference is, if you lose you have to let a Cubist sculptor redesign your leg and you spend the rest of your life wheeling yourself around on a skateboard and tugging at tourists' trouser cuffs for change.

After meeting a personal acquaintance (shout-out) who confirmed that yes, Surat is uncommonly functional and uninteresting, I made my way north by train to Vadodara. Vadodara, aka Baroda, is pretty much a smaller version of Surat that trades Surat's policy of actually having rubbish swept from the streets for the privilege of actually having trees. It is also home to a large and prestigious university, where the filthy street stalls make good business feeding students munching on fly-ridden ethnic food and studying from organic chemistry textbooks. I discovered that my hotel was quite close to the "Ladies' Residences" sector, where I also noted that the shards of broken glass cemented to the top of the compound walls were about twice as large and dangerous-looking as those elsewhere on campus. We all know what that means...The venue of tonight's Student Life orgy is going to have to be moved to the Faculty of Arts building.

I popped out of Vadodara as quickly as I could on a trip to see the ruined city of Champaner, former capital of the Sultanate of Gujarat and a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is allegedly devoid of tourists. I had to transfer to a second bus on the way there, and at first thought that this bus's charming aquamarine paint scheme would make up for the fact that it was apparently constructed of tin sheets recycled from a cannon-testing facility. That was until I saw that the vehicle's battery was actually just five car batteries looped together by jumper cables and sitting in a rusty open box on the floor next to the gearshift.

Champaner is not a hardly-visited spot.By "devoid of tourists" the guidebooks must shamelessly mean "devoid of white people" because there were tons of picnicking Indians and elementary school trips covering everywhere within an easy 5-minute walk of the bus stand. Here's why there's no Western tourists and the Indians go no further: it's a huge pain in the ass. There are magnificent mosques and temples scattered around but at some distance from eachother. In between are unmarked patches of countryside, ugly little villages, and random fences that make it impossible to move in a straight line towards where you're guessing the next attraction is. The "maps" the ASI has here and there are more conceptual than cartographic, missing key features such as 'roads', not being to scale, and labeling sites with uninformative captions such as "13. Mosque". When you finally do stumble into something it is quite lovely but the authorities are complete fools not to make the tiny investments necessary to make this a major tourist destination.

Perhaps the single worst bit of planning at Champaner was to locate the bus stand adjacent to a Degembara Jain temple with very low walls and a very tall nude statue, making it quite impossible for pious visiting Hindus and Muslims to catch a bus without first catching a glimpse of foot-long stone noodle.

Back in Vadodara a pair of students befriended me at the food stalls and invited me to join them in sharing some bootleg Gujarati whiskey. I declined, because Gujarati moonshine is so bad (it kills people) that for reasons of Prohibition and public health, the state assembly is currently debating making the manufacture of "spurious hooch" punishable by death. I am not down with drinking this shit. If whiskey will be the end of me it's going to be on my terms. Why die of methanol poisoning when you can die in an ill-considered feat of physical prowess? If I'm going to be killed by alcohol, it's going to be while bungee-jumping naked off a minaret with a rope of bedsheets, thank you. very. much.