The Critique Of Pure India

A.K.A. Ghostface Buddha's Guide To Travelling In India

First a note to my Indian readers: this is a labor of love; do not worry overmuch about the terms with which I describe your noble land to these Firangi worms.

I have begun penning a manifesto of sorts, a Compendium of Truth, you could say. Though I did not know it at the time, the first instalment of this work was my ethical treatise Ghostface Buddhism, which conclusively answered the age-old question "How ought Man to live?" Though no doubt ennobling, it did not answer the more wordly question that Ghostface Buddha has made it his life's work to address, "So how about that India?". I now proudly present to you Ghostface Buddha's Guide To Travelling In India, also known as The Critique Of Pure India.


The Indian's view of the cosmos is highly deterministic; so too is any adventure in this country. There are but three paths your life can take here, depending upon the station of your birth; that is, how much money you've got when you splash out of the spiritual darkness of the heathen foreign womb into the motherly arms of the Indian subcontinent.

If you are of the spoiled, dumbass strain of the larger hominid species Homo Hippis, you will come to India and immediately sport "Indian" clothing that no South Asian person has worn since the age of the last Levitating Sages. You will find many other pseudo-hippies and form a herd. You may even mate. You will cross the dessicated land together from watering hole to watering hole: the timeless migration in search of Bob Marley, tabla lessons, and pancakes.

If you are a wealthy, over-leisured jackass, you will also form a herd, crossing the parched, poverty-ridden wastes in an air-conditioned bus from one repository of medieval sculpture to the next. Men in safari hats will teach you to recognize the esoteric figures of Hindu art, such as cows. Men in turbans will serve you tea. Weeks later in your well-appointed home you will look up from your self-soiled hands and your glossy copy of Vanity Fair and lay eyes on the reproduction Chola bronze you purchased at the Sai Krishna Antiques Emporium. You think to yourself, "I am well-travelled, and aye, well-learned." Suddenly, you are gripped by a moment of guilt and self-doubt. "No!" you exclaim inwardly as you feel a spot of seminal fluid on an open magazine page nearby. "Not the latest Foreign Affairs!".

The third path is the most treacherous. If you find yourself walking it, you are in many ways like Ghostface Buddha. You are of no great means, yet you make ends meet, and you have come to sample whatever India has to offer, except perhaps opium. And fucking paan. I just don't get that shit.

Close your eyes and travel with me. Now open your eyes because this will require some reading.

You arrive at the train station. There is an entire village of peasants residing on the platform. They arrived here two days ago, all sharing the top of two overloaded tractor-pulled grain wagons and a single donkey, and they have been here since, apparently waiting for the day for which they have train tickets. Most of the adults are permanently sleeping on tatty blankets while their insectoid multitudes of offspring crawl over them like logs. A handful are awake, opening mysterious cement-shipping sacks to produce from them all 5 pieces of the village's metal cookware and about a month's supply of loose barley. A handful of women have been sent around the city to random roadsides, offering to sell 500 leftover onions for $0.20 per metric tonne.

You get on the train. It is crowded beyond all reason. You realize that not all human beings are identical, but they enough alike to tessellate. Through the forest of limbs and wobbling luggage you see the source of a warbling melody: a blind minstrel shaking a tambourine and singing a timeless tune from the hearts of the people in such a voice as calls to question the accepted theories of heightened acoustic awareness among the visually impaired. A saffron-robed saddhu squats in the hallway while seven small-town cousins huddle together, their closeness to one another made all the more urgent by the fact that they are hanging to the outside of the train. A sticky brown glob of fried dal falls on your head from the inattentive hands of a youngster fiddling with the tuning of his cellphone-radio up in the luggage racks. A smile beams towards you from between a tangle of sequin-studded jeans. "This is crowded train," the smile says, "you are seeing Real India!"

You arrive at the the terminus sometime the next afternoon. After fighting your way off the bus, repelling waves of maddened humanoid creatures who for some reason wish to board the sweat-rusted rattletrap without first allowing your escape, you burst forth into the city street and the blinding light of the Indian day. The throng is hardly any less dense, and are joined by a boisterous menagerie of camels, cows, and goats going whither they will at their own particular paces. You first cross paths with a wedding, where a single powdered transvestite leads a gaggle of flailing men who are far worse at dancing despite trying much, much harder. Cutting through the back alleys and jumping hopscotch-like around the open sewers and the piles of animal shit which have missed that half of the street, you make it to the next avenue, where a horde of drum-rattling and banner-hoisting men approach, signalling the vanguard of yet another utterly pointless political rally. "Wow, the Nationalist Progessive Aloo Paratha Party have snare drums!" you say, "I was wrong to be a Muslim Socialist all along."

The monsoon begins. There are torrents in the streets. As you struggle to make progress through the rushing channels it begins to not only rain with the power of the heavens, but also to rain coconuts. "What the fuck?!?!" You shout as you duck between the trajectories of the fuzzy but distinctly hard projectiles that are shattering against walls all around you and falling to be swept away by the currents forming eddies around your knees. A voice shouts through the pounding of water on metal roofs, and you see a man leaning out of a window. "Many coconuts are being thrown! Rejoice, sir! Surely we shall be safe from the floods this year!" You pause for a moment as a piece of driftwood floats by on the water that is rising to the top of your shins and wonder if you have time for sarcasm. "Doesn't it flood most years?" you ask with a smirk that is obscured, with the rest of your face, by drenched bangs. "Last year was bad. The Divine Mother was angry. This year, more coconuts will be thrown."

"You are lucky, sir! This is Real India!"

You spend the night stranded in a hotel, your laundry laid out in the hopes that the inevitable sweltering heat will dry them in time for your next nautical expedition to centers of public transport. There are roaches in the toilet. You are lucky; this means they haven't been eaten by mice living in the shower. The echoes of a thousand throat-clearings vibrate through the city. The Real India is purged of sputum.

Now you are on a bus. You take a seat. Somehow, a backpack can't fit comfortably on board but a used air-conditioner in a broken chicken-cage can. You cross hour after hour after empty brown fields. It is just brown, with ireegular outcrops of brown rock and brown farms. The monsoon is a thousand miles away, a thousand years ago, but the Suck, like God, is all-pervading. The weather is always terrible. You cower in the bone-slicing cold, flounder in the diluvian rains, or stew in the barbaric heat. Life moves in the bursts of heedless children, the walrus-like lounging of the men with their walrus-like moustaches, and in the interminable shuffle of the women engaged in "housework" carrying a pile of firewood across the poor land which looks increasingly like a desert. In the height of summer, countless piles of combustible brown cakes remind you that the earth is scorched and cow shit has become its only marketable commodity.

You reach a provincial crossing. A mere 20 buses pass through a week, yet there are 18 frenzied hawkers awaiting your arrival. All of them board the bus at once and scram "CUCUMBER! CUUUCUUUUMMMMMBEERRRSSSS!" All 18 vendors pass by. 5 cucumbers are sold. You decide, what the hell, to buy one. It is served in an old newspaper at $0.05 a pop. You are satisfied with the transaction and assume that people can now stop hollerin' about vegetables. You blink...you blink and no matter what kind of fruit or vegetable you have just purchased, the hawker whips out a bottle of red powder and coats your produce with the annual paprika production of a small Malayan isle. You claw your ears at the sound of a nearby mobile phone scratchily playing Hindi pop hits. There's always one. Then the bus's sound system turns on and drown out with an audio Uberblitzkrieg of its own, indistinguishable from the sound of a million distressed animals. This is particularly confusing, since the bus may actually contain distressed animals. A man with paan-rotted teeth shakes your hand and offers to host you for dinner and a night of rest at another, even more provincial crossing 50 miles into nowhere. As a Tata truck barrels headlong towards you and the bus swerves, only to narrowly miss a trio of buffaloes, he says "You must come at my house. You have taste the Real India!"

Seventy miles more and you are sure your ass bones have worn through your flesh and buried themselves somewhere in the seat "cushions". Finally you alight in a small village, and no more than a minute away sit the towering remnants of one of the mightiest empires to have ever ruled in this world. Your jar drops at the immense mass of stone and its exquisite detail, and wonder how the whole world has not come to see it. By a small subsidiary shrine you just make out the fringes of a conversation amongst people who have just noticed you.

"Noooo, noooo, you are too wrong! Loke, Stoke, And Two Smoking Barrels is too much better than the Reserwaar Dogs!"
"Have you heard the new Linkin Park?"
"Yes, he is a very good rapper, but I think he is almost like rock."

You can feel yourself gawping at the massive granite pinnacle which has loomed over the surrounding fields since before the invention of the words that are currently failing to come to you. You are unable to snap out of it, until you are interrupted by one of the garrulous Indian tourists. "Hello. Your name?" he asks as you half-listen. "My name is Some Bangalore Fucker" he says, or whatever. "Aaaahhh, come, come, my very touristic friend," he says with a hint of condescension as he himself stands beneath a placard of the State Tourism Ministry. "You must not see only the touristic sites. Come to Bangalore me with you. Can you have some cocaine together? I must show you the Real India!"


Awake now, my friend, from your journey through space and time and rejoin me in the present moment, for I have something I must tell you.... Don't come to fucking India. Seriously. What a pain in the ass. You are much better off staying at home. Might I recommend an alternative interest? Anime, perhaps? Here is Ghostface Buddha's Guide To Travelling In India: by far the best way to travel in India is to sit on you lazy fucking ass, read my blog, and let me do the hard bits for you. And when I leave India, still yet you may read these words and in them find Guidance and Wisdom. Fear not, for though we know not what realms and planes we visit upon departure from the soil of Blessed India, we surely know there will be a Second Coming, when Ghostface Buddha walks upon these trails once more, and the Cow shall be sent to realms and planes where it belongs: that scorching, acidic Abyss.... my stomach.

But what have we learned here, if we have learned anything at all? Where in fact does the Real India lie, and is it Good? We find our answer harmoniously in accord with the wisdom of the Ancients. There is no Real India. Verily, all is but an illusion, for surely no god would really make a country this fucking weird. This country can only be the product of thousands of years under the yoke of the warped and deluded human mind.

I reverse my judgement. Do come to India, because the greatest surprise of all is that, for better or worse, no other country has been made like it.