India trip updates - 2023 edition

Uber woes, teeth pulling, selling a house and temple run.....

I spent most of June in India doing various things. And I wrote about some of them….

👴🏼 Things that have aged me…..

1. Drinking

2. Stress

3. Waiting for Uber in Bengaluru

4. Bengaluru traffic

In the 5 days I spent in the city, I spent 30% of my waking time sitting in cabs. I spent the other 20% waiting for cabs. 

Getting an Uber in Bengaluru is an achievement of mythical proportions. "5 million people have taken Uber" says the app as it keeps searching indefinitely for one driver to accept the ride. "Do you know you can ride the Uber bike in Brazil" it adds, quite irrelevantly. Hey, Uber, can you stfu and just get me my cab for the ride now? 

Uber is just a symbol here. You can try Ola or any fancy sounding cab service for the same effect. 

When you do eventually get the cab, it's like a sweat lodge. The driver, of course, wouldn't turn on the AC. After all, turning on the air conditioning in that car needs someone to start a nuclear reactor in Russia and it’s not for someone trivial like you. I didn't even have the guts to ask the driver to turn on the AC because just getting a cab felt like a great privilege.

So I sat, sweating, in the muggy heat in Bengaluru, staring out at the concrete wilderness called the outer ring road wondering where it all went wrong.  

🕗 In coimbatore everything is 20 mins away….

On the other side of the sanity continuum is Red Taxi in Coimbatore. They, too, have an app. But you could also call them up the old fashioned way to book. 

The reliability of this stunned me so much and the fact that everything in Coimbatore was 20 minutes away meant that time had a whole new meaning here. Whereas in Bangalore I would back calculate in hours, “So, I need to be there by 9 am, which would take me an hour to go, so need to start by 8 am but then it would take me an hour to really get a cab, which means I need to start trying at 7 am.” Here, a 9 am appointment meant that I could literally book a cab at 8 and reach where I need to with ten minutes to spare. 

It also helped to have my dad’s TVS Jupiter that I could take when needed. 

🏍️ Driving a two-wheeler

Things that taught me the value of freedom in life: 

1. Listening to women

2. Reading about history

3. Traveling to other countries

4. Driving a two wheeler

The joy of driving a two wheeler on Indian roads is unparalleled. With the wind on your face, laden with local flavor and thick plumes of carbon monoxide, you can weave through the dense traffic like a ninja: a cut in front of a car; a swerve before an auto; edging out a van. When the road is jammed, you can squeeze through unnatural spaces, brushing past side mirrors and shirts of other men to move forward when everyone is stopped.

I used to drive a TVS victor for a large part of my life and while I enjoy driving a car immensely (more so than a bike), I still find the freedom of a small two wheeled scooter so powerful.

This is not to say I haven’t had my mishaps which include a handful of accidents, a couple of swipes on vehicles, close encounters with cops and once, being hit on the back with a lathi by a traffic constable in Hyderabad because I didn’t stop (stopping meant a bribe).

Like I said, it is freedom in its purest anarchic form. 

Renting a scooter is also my go-to mode of transport in Thai islands. It is an under-appreciated experience to drive a two wheeler in these amazing paradises, especially through the green and hilly heart of the islands, on largely empty and fantastic roads, and then emerge on to the azure sea.  

👨🏼‍⚕️ I went to the dentist

I was feeling good about myself and since I often feel suspicious when that happens, I decided to visit a dentist. 

So, this dentist has had a more recent history with the family. My sister, who lives in Australia, did the NRI thing of getting dentistry work done when she visited Coimbatore a couple of months or so back. She only had a limited time of a couple of weeks or so in which she needed to get two wisdom teeth pulled and two root canal with the fittings done. 

Between swollen mouth, pain, nursing a four month old baby and managing a 4 year old child she managed to pull this off. The dentist, too, apparently, pulled off quite a feat in which he compressed root canal timeframes using possibly quantum physics theories. 

Now, I neither had a pain in my teeth nor was I aware that I needed a root canal. I wasn’t really looking to do the NRI thing of fixing my teeth when visiting India. After all, Thailand is no dummy when it comes to cheap and efficient medical services. Rather, I had a unique issue of my upper and lower set of teeth grinding against each other. I had been considering if I needed to go through the pain of aligning them so late in life and have been evaluating things in Bangkok.

In any case, I decided to test the universe. All I wanted was some kind of consultation from this super dentist about this alignment issue and whether it would be worth it to even do it. 

What happened was something else. 

🦷 Crooked wisdom

As I lay there in that dentist chair and he began prying into my mouth, I realized two things with a sinking feeling: 

1. I couldn’t really communicate anything to him with my mouth open like that 

2. Once he had a looksie into my mouth, he was going to find things (as a dentist inevitably does). 

As he prodded into the disgusting innards of my mouth (that part I don’t envy the dentists for) and came out whistling.

“It’s quite bad,” he said. 

See, the state of your teeth, like feelings in a South Indian family, are fine as long as one doesn’t go prying.

Things unravelled quickly after this. 

I was asked to make an X-ray of my teeth which revealed the ‘issue’. The trouble was that, quite like my wisdom itself, my wisdom tooth was confidently crooked. It had grown at quite an errant 45 degree angle at the back of my mouth and was jammed into the molar next to it. At the point of contact was a dark patch which made the dentist tut with excitement, “cavity!” 

Wish we had similar x-rays for crooked points of views in our heads.

“You’re sure you don’t have any pain?” he asked quizzically. 

I shook my head. I haven’t had a tooth pain in many, many years. Disappointed, he shook his head, like that was a bad thing. “The cavity is quite near the roots,” he muttered.

My lack of pain seemed to reveal something deficient in my character. 

“You really sure?” he asked again as I left, having made plans for the next two weeks to visit him again. For a brief minute, I thought (quite foolishly), like I had some kind of superpower that didn’t make me feel tooth pain.

Boy, how wrong I was.

😮 Rumble in the jaws

So, over the next two weeks, I became clay and he, the potter. My mouth was the derelict building and he was the worker called in to slam it into the ground. He was Thalaivar and my mouth was the source of all the wickedness of the world.

Different specialists came for different sittings, starting with one who huffed and puffed his way to extracting my wisdom tooth. Something was cut, I spit blood and was then sutured back. Things were injected. A semi-trained intern lady holding the suction tube was scolded many times (to which she responded by angrily poking the tube deeper into my mouth).

I also realized the sheer fatigue of just having my jaw open for hours. Then things swelled up, like an operatic crescendo of pain. I dissolved effervescent pain killers at 2 am, groggy and disconnected. For about a week or more, I ate from one corner of my mouth like a pantomime cow chewing cud angrily. 

I made the discovery, much to my disappointment, that I did not have any tooth-pain superpowers.  

🏠 A house

They say, “Try building a house; Try conducting a marriage” 

No, it isn’t the catchphrase of the masochists association of TN but that’s kind of the point. These things are supposedly hard. 

But try managing a tenant who wants to live rent free in your house. It’s even worse.

2008. Protons circled for the first time in the Large Hadron Collider. Unknown to many, Satoshi Nakamoto published his white paper on Bitcoin.

I was in my early career post MBA (having just started working in 2007). 

Economically, the world was in shambles. A great recession swept over the world. But personally, I had started earning for the first time ever and it was a time to let go. Even as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, in the same eventful year, I bought a MacBook Pro, a new iPod touch, a new iPad, a Canon Powershot, a Wii, a PS2 and so on. 

I mean, I was going a little crazy. But so was the world. 

This is also the reason why, when we got married in 2010, N took a look at my bank account and asked, “What happened to everything you earned in the last three years?” 

Quite the magic indeed. Now, perhaps sensing this Houdini-like ability of mine to disappear numbers from my bank account, my dad decided that he had to intervene early by committing me to buying a house.

And so it came to be. He spent time and effort hunting for something in Coimbatore and did find one. This is how I came to own a house on the outer periphery of Coimbatore, en-route to Palakkad. 

In the last 15 years of its existence, I have ended up visiting the house exactly two times.

Once when it was being bought. And once, last month.  

🛒 Selling a house

Now, normally, I would have continued ignoring this house, except for the fact that since last year, the tenant began to get….untenable. At any given point he had 3 months of rent pending or due. 

It was a strange dance. Try being an eternal non-confrontationist and a nice guy and also giving someone a piece of your mind. It took all of my creative powers to come up with harsh sounding threats to throw at him. In response - crickets. Then a week later he’d inevitably come up with some excuse (father’s hospitalization, sudden business trip, daughter’s college admissions payment, sister’s debt, etc.) that sounded bad that I would feel sorry for him. 

He paid rent in fits and starts, months late and with a big fraction missing.

Occasionally, as life went on, I would forget all about it and then wake up panicked one morning, remembering that I needed to continue this dance and that a stranger was living rent free in the house for several months. 

I decided that life was too short for this level of mental agony over a few thousand rupees and so I told him to just pack up and leave. And he eventually did, in Jan of this year and since then, I had decided that it would no longer be rented out but rather spruced up and sold. 

As things transpired, the day I visited the house (second time ever), the neighbor eagerly gave us the contact of someone who wanted to buy the place.

This confirms a long held belief of mine that things in life move glacially most of the time and then very quickly for a short period. The big changes in my life have all been very quick and rapid decisions made instinctively. And then between these quick moments of decision and change lies all the normal everyday living.  

💤 Things that absolutely bore me

Look, I am mildly religious. What does that mean? I pray and visit temples every once in a while (a few times a year). I am neither too obsessed over god and religion nor am I fully atheistic. I am not a fan of rituals and while I do believe people have the right to engage in it, I don’t think they need to be bestowed with this pseudo-scientific explanations.

In any case, all this preamble is to give you context when I say there are three things that absolutely bore the shit out of me after they cross certain thresholds: 

1. Shopping in a large apparel / fashion / lifestyle shop (note that this is specific to apparel and beauty - I have a whole other vibe for electronic shops or, more weirdly, large grocery shops which I love visiting)

2. Waiting for my turn at a doctors / hospital

3. Visiting multiple temples in one day 

Now, on the first one, I have a choice (mostly) and avoid it unless I absolutely have to (recently I had to buy myself a couple of pairs of jeans to last the next few years). The second and the third are less easy to avoid. As I explained already with my dentist episode, when it’s time for you to see the doctor, it’s time. There is no fighting that law of nature. 

This leaves the third part - too many temples. Or, what I call an annual visit to Swamimalai with my family.

🤴🏽 Peak PS territory

Some background on Swamimalai and the larger area around it.

Swamimalai is famous for one thing only - the temple of Swaminatha swamy, which is one of Lord Muruga’s six ‘abodes’ littered all around Tamilnadu. There is nothing much else in Swamimalai, really. (Except for Sree Athi Ganesh Bhavan mess which has fantastic tiffin and filter coffee). About 20 minutes away is the bigger town of Kumbakonam which in itself is about an hour away from the bigger city of Tanjavur. 

We visit Swamimalai frequently because that’s our clan-god (if you’ve not heard or interacted with Indians having clan-gods, I can see how all this sounds right out of some fantasy novel).

Our journey from Coimbatore is always split into Before Trichy (BT) and After Trichy (AT) where Trichy happens to be the midway point (and the usual stop for lunch).

AT we enter the delta area of Tamilnadu. The transition is palpable. BT you are passing through the bustle of industrial TN from Coimbatore with shops and factories and then AT, things start slowing down. It feels like stepping into the past the moment you cross Thanjavur.

Here the river Kaveri meets the sea and you are greeted by large swatches of green fields and fertile territory (Fifth largest producer of rice in India). Any roadtrip here, you are constantly going along or over the great river or one of its many tributaries. When in spate, and at its widest, it is quite a spectacle (also an equally depressing dust bowl when there is no water).

If you’re fresh from your dose of Ponniyin Selvan movies, think of this area as peak PS territory - the heartland where Cholas built an incredible number of temples and structures.

Brihadisvara Temple, Gangaikonda Cholapuram

It is truly mind boggling number. Bagan and Angkor pale in comparison in terms of the variety, volume and scale of some of these temples. (The fact that millions of foreign tourists visit those places while many do not even know about these temples is a reflection of India’s terrible tourism industry)

Many of these temples have really huge complexes, with multiple praharas, thousands of sculptures, a million pillars, engineering artistry, stories on walls, and massive yet intricate Gopura towers. 

Except, when we visit annually, we don’t really have time to look that deep. Like a Chris Nolan movie, a clock begins to tick (cue a Hans Zimmer score) and the temples need to be ticked off.

It’s a literal game of temple run.

🏃🏽‍♂️ Temple run

Earlier, I mentioned how BT and AT defines our journey from Coimbatore in terms of physical transformation of our surroundings. But it’s not just the outside.

AT also brings a gleam over the eyes of my parents and older people in my family. In the next 24, 48 or 72 hour period, an itinerary that criss-crosses anywhere between 50 to 200 kms, with all the key temples to hit, is chalked out with the precision of an army general prepping war logistics. It is then executed with a zeal that far surpasses anything in my personal tank.

For instance, this time around, we visited fifteen different temples over two days.

For me, the process usually goes like this:

• After temple #3, my body begins to ache mildly (doesn’t make sense because I haven’t done much). I start yawning.

• After temple #4, my eyes go dead, like a zombie.

• After temple #5, I am just a walking piece of meat

It’s also physically tiring, these large temple complexes - you walk a lot, climb several steps and combined with the mental exhaustion of this mind numbing boredom, I feel drained.

But not my older parents. Despite the exhaustion and the sheer physical limits they are hitting, something akin to nuclear fusion seems to power them. A kind of feverish excitement and joy.

😵‍💫 We all get religious about something…

I can empathize.

This kind of hyper-excited energy happens to me when I am traveling - visiting new places and countries. I have spent 15 hour days roaming around new cities without ever feeling it until I hit the bed in the night and realize my legs aren’t moving anymore.

I guess we all have things that irrationally excite us. It’s when the mental starts overtaking the physical. 

But visiting temple after temple just isn’t my thing.

One day, I would love to visit one of these temples (ideally not crowded), and spend time in those quiet large courtyards. Maybe bring a nice camera to shoot the corridors. Perhaps I can read or write there and maybe spend some time looking at the sculptures. Use it a a space I can peacefully enjoy beyond just waltzing into the centre to perform a quick ritual.

Also, I have a separate gripe. And this has to do with my need to always side with the underdogs. This instinct gets triggered when visiting some of these temples. There are two kinds of temples - the popular ones and the neglected ones.

Some of these neglected temples are truly astounding - with incredible spaces, architecture, massive complexes that someone painstakingly built a thousand or so years back. On the other hand, the popular temples have long queues and crowds that jostle and push. Even if sometimes there’s is nothing much in the temple itself.

Why? They usually sell a better story - of a deity who can do wonders to you (or sometimes wreak havoc). And then the popularity feeds on itself. Everyone gets FOMO and wants to visit the temple because everyone else is doing it. The original social media influencer trajectory, I guess.

There’s a LinkedIn lesson in there somewhere.

Could be Worse,

Tyag

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