If you have just started following this blog, here is a little reminder: Dimitri (31) and I, Elise (29) have started in early March 2024 backpacking, through Asia and the Americas. I had been dreaming about this trip for years, I was not a seasoned traveller but we still chose to start our tour with India. Why? Because we were intrigued, and it made the most sense, geographical-wise.

[Note: article published with limited bandwidth – I hope that the lack of media won’t deter you from reading our thoughts!]

We landed in India on March 9th and we left it on April 18th. What a month it has been! I thought that it would be nice to wrap up on our first time cruising through the Indian subcontinent, now that we arrived safe and sound in Nepal (which was not a given – story to be shared in the next article…).

I have often read that India is the land of extremes: you can find the most beautiful as well as the most gruesome. When we experienced our first cultural shock in Madurai, I read a lot about how to cope with it. I wanted to be able to enjoy my time in these fascinating lands, but it was difficult for me to come over the mindset built by years of comfortable living in Western Europe. I found in one forum a sentence that stuck with me: “India is poor and dirty. Take it as a fact; then only you can get over it and enjoy all the greatness of this country.” Obviously, reality is more complex than this; at least, it clears it up from the start! Here is our take-away from a month in the mesmerising subcontinent.

India is a country moved by passion.

A book that I’ve read, Shantaram (by Gregory David Roberts), describes it accurately in stating that love was invented in India. Whether it is related to gods, food, cricket, cinema, love needs to be grandiose there.

Religions are everywhere, and an average Indian life is scheduled around all the rituals, the festivals and other rites that need to be performed. From the Brahmin singing all night in the temples to the calls from the Minaret, atheism is a non existing concept in India. We learnt from our time there that religious places often have the best sono systems!

Beside religion, cinema in India is the true depiction of passion. We went to see a movie in Jaipur, in one of the oldest, fanciest movie theater in India. The only movie screened was Mandhaan, a biopic about a famous Indian football coach, who managed to create a powerful national team and bring it to victory in the 60s. The genra must have been dramatic – oh boy, Indians do take this one to another level!

It was EPIC. The room was LIVING the movie. When the coach shot an insane curved ball (in slow motion, obviously), a little boy behind us screamed an admirative “Wooooowwwww!”. Dimitri and I could not stop laughing. When goals were striken for India, applauses broke in the movie theater. Finally, when India won, somebody launched an Hindi equivalent of “Hip hip hoorah!”, the rest of the audience doing the chorus. This is easily one of our best moments in India, and I expect no less the next time I will go see a movie!

India is resourceful.

Just coming back from this movie’s night, we were in a tuktuk when the driver was demanded by colleagues in need. The other tuktuk had a starting issue, and our driver ended up pushing it… with his left foot, while driving his own tuktuk to give it speed. Trust the process, once again!

We could always see hard working Indians in streets, shops, every hour of the day. We could not take one step outside train stations, without being offered tuktuk rides, guided tours, and whatever we desired. If you pass over the inventive scams (to each region their own, I strongly advise you to check on Internet before visiting a city – we avoided them all, thanks to this background check), we were amazed by how incredibly helpful people were. From the Tamil bus drivers that got organized to pick us up from another bus station, to the entire staff of a bakery that helped us finding our way in Lucknow, or the new friends that we made struggling, we hardly felt left alone with our issues.

A small note about hard work: we witnessed many people performing tedious tasks, which seemed real ordeals for the pampered Western Europeans that we were. Take the Chennai subway, where we watched a group of 10 people preparing a hole for a new station, emptying the soil with buckets. Bringing a machine would be too costly and people need to work, so it is what it is.

India is “not for the weak”.

When you visit India for the first time, chances are that you will spend more time in major cities than in the countryside or in the mountains. Forget then peacefulness, welcome crowds of people and honks at absolutely every single minute of the day. Forget traffic rules and pavement, welcome slaloming among cars, tuktuks, buses, animals, street vendors, holes and many more. Forget standard living conditions, welcome massive religious sites and individual mansions, a few streets from people living on the pavement. Forget environmental protection, welcome littering everywhere. Forget being anonymous in the street if you are white and “European-looking”, welcome intense starring, people asking you for pictures – always preferrable to the ones not even bothering asking you before sneaking one.

We were fortunate enough not to experience beggary too much, except for our last day before crossing the border to Nepal. We were waiting for hours beside a major road, and a group of children kept zooming around us, asking for money. It became so intense that a 8-ish girl wrapped herself around my leg, and wouldn’t move with any of my gentle pushes, and one boy grabbed Dimitri’s backpack from behind. I had to brutally push her away – not one of my proudest moments… The people around us hated it as much as we did, and shooed the children away. Quite a heartbreaking moment; we had been told though many times that giving out money/food would only turn out to making mafias more profitable. (If you want to know more about this, try googling “Why you should not give pens to children in India”).

When you read about Indian billionaires, profitable worldwide businesses rooted in India, inequality appears unjustified. As a white woman, who grew up in rich countries, in a favorable financial situation, I knew that I did not have the right tools to understand the mechanisms at work. So I read. And I asked around (shout out to my dear Rubina, who spent hours telling me more about her country). There is one fact that one needs to keep in mind with India: this is a subcontinent in its own, much more complex that a small European country, home to 1.5 billion humanbeings. Every policy that is decided within the federal states can only be applied to a sensible portion of this gigantic population. When we see how difficult it is to establish functioning laws in France, try doing it for 22 times more people. If you are interested in knowing more, I truly encourage you to leverage our friend Google (for instance here, from the Times of India: India can’t match China’s past 8-10% growth, Morgan Stanley says).

India is a world on its own.

I consider myself highly fortunate to have been able to see a glimpse of India gious sites that survived many generations of humans, we listened to many languages, we were welcome by warm-hearted people and we tasted incredible food.

Two crucial elements that we missed during our trip were nature and peace. We were craving for it when we left India (and we found it in Nepal, stay tuned!). If our footsteps bring us again to India, we will plan our itinerary utterly differently and focus more on less urban areas.

That’s a wrap on India – thank you for hosting us during this time! See you soon, in Nepal.