India trip reports: Part 1
Dark magic of shopping, delhi airport and...soaps
Something a little more personal. Mostly about Q4 of 2021 and trip to India, before, during and after. Part 1 here. Part 2 next week.
After nearly 21 months of accumulating sins by living in virtue-less lands, my feet touched mother soil at the end of last October. I mean, I went to India for a couple of months after an extended period away from it (longest in my life). This brought with it several fantastic things including:
Seeing my parents after such a long gap and spending quite a bit of time with them.
Finding a long-wonky cooker weight in Amazon and blowing their minds in the process.
Eating festival bakshanams
22 trips to Annapoorna (I’ve counted) in the 40 days I spent in Coimbatore
Watching about 20 movies across languages (even saw a couple of marathi movies and one oriya movie) as my dad unleashed the power of a new TV and all OTT logins being fixed by me. My conclusion - 70% of all movies suck. 20% are interesting enough. 10% qualify as good. I mean, this is just pareto but I am statistically reconfirming it personally.
A quick trip to Mumbai before Omicron scare and partaking in Chaat binges
Meeting some old friends, relatives and generally spending time in Coimbatore
But first things first.
Delhi 🤕
Reaching mother-soil required us to navigate the first big challenge - landing in Delhi. Vande Bharat flights from Bangkok dumped N and I there at night and not finding a decent flight out to Coimbatore and N not wanting to reach home at Mumbai at some ridiculous hour like 2 am, we decided to take a hotel for the night near the airport.
Anyway, Delhi.
Cue in ominous music and a wide shot of a foggy city that looks immaculately calm for all the chaos on the ground. I am not a fan of that place. It is reinforced every time I briefly go there. The previous time I went there for work (back in 2018), I had to cut it short when I started throwing up in the hotel room. Was it food poisoning or just my visceral reaction to the place? Who knows.
Not surprisingly, N and I found ourselves in the thick of chaos immediately:
And just like that I was back on edge, out of my comfort zone and trying to take deep breaths but only succeeding to fill my lungs with choking smog. Off to the hotel, a brief sleep and back early next morning, peering through the grey fog (everything looks grey near Delhi airport) and seeing a million people in Airport at 6 am (just a couple of days before Diwali).
Fought with jostling men in security line who assumed I was an idiot to wait in a line, pushed the bags of a man who just left it on the security check roller and walked away, politely guided three women trying to enter the men’s security check into the women’s section (they still didn’t get the message of one-at-a-time though) and then having said goodbye to N who was heading to Mumbai. I then promptly headed off to a food court and drowned the stress of over-stimulation in some masala dosa and coffee (yes, in Delhi).
I encountered Delhi again on the way back in December again in the form of a bored, arrogant and resentful immigration officer. He looked at me like I was scum and asked for a hotel booking. When I told him I live in Thailand, he refused to believe me for a whole minute. He looked at the stamped non-imm visa from multiple angles like he was trying to spot a fake. Kept asking me questions in his accented, mumbling Hindi even after I expressed my poor understanding and requesting questions in english.
“What do you do there”
“Product manager with a travel company”
Several beats as he tried to process whatever that could mean while being too proud to ask follow-up questions. Then, with the ultimate reluctance of a man forced to do a wretched thing, he stamped my entry and let me through.
So it goes.
Like I say, Delhi is a feeling. For me, it’s the feeling of something queasy in the stomach, ready to exit.
Shopping 🏬
Let’s back up even more to October of 2021 back in Bangkok.
N and I wanted to get some nice gifts to take back home. This, however, meant we had to do something completely alien to us - shopping. There are sciences and then there are arts but shopping is neither. It’s deranged dark magic.
The irony (of course), is that N and I happen to live in a mall-verse. Within walking distance are three planet-sized malls (with their own gravity and moon to boot), 4 country-sized malls, 15 city-sized malls and a bunch of older stranded malls that always seem to have the word plaza to suffixed their name. One of these planet-sized malls is Central world (about 400 mts from home), which Wikipedia says is about 550,000 square metres. About the size of Vatican city but home of a different religion.
Naturally, we jumped into this project of trying to shop gifts for people back home with the dumb confidence of a hungry monkeys living in a banana plantation. Some conclusions:
I hope N or I never have to shop successfully to save our lives, ever.
I have discovered a new medical condition. After walking through the shop aisles for about 45 minutes, my brain starts shutting down, I feel cold and my legs feel like lead. At this point, I am nothing more than a zombie staring at all the bright lights with no soul left in me.
There is not a thing in the best malls of the world that you can buy for a south Indian father. Nada. Zilch.
This last point can’t be stressed enough.
In general both our parents don’t have a lot of material desires. However, while mothers are always happy about new / interesting gifts (or at least pretend to be) and are open to experimentation, the fathers have decided that their life needs to be predictable to the last minute. They have a finite set of 5 things they use (or do for that matter) and nothing was ever going to change that. As a result, any gift you give is most likely seen as a strange curio from lands far away to be briefly looked at and kept in lock and key to be forgotten for the next millenia.
Lest the curse emerge.
Soaps 🧼
I am bad at buying things. N is arguably better or worse because she gets very decisive on what she thinks are good gifts and goes after them with her own inimitable unstoppable-force approach.
For example, soaps. Yes, soaps. At some point in the past, N and I bought fancy soaps from a foreign country (several years back) and a couple of things happened:
We were stopped at a security check in a French airport where the soaps in our backpacks triggered all kinds of plastic explosive alarms. We were surrounded by security and peeled out for deeper examination while others looked on suspiciously. Eventually a security guard found the soaps and then lifted them up victoriously. “C’est savon! Savon” she declared to the entire security area to much relief for French homeland security and much embarrassment for us.
When these soap-mules reached home, instead of applause we got some good old south indian sarcasm from both families about how we crossed seas to bring soap and how they need to now bathe several times a day to use all of this soap.
All this notwithstanding, N believes in soaps. Whenever I’ve tried to question this, she says, “everyone has to use soap” and shrugs. So we did buy soaps. Again.
Given that we were in a massage capital of the world, we also procured massage oils that smell amazing, lotions made of thai herbs, thai rice cakes and thai curry pastes. In essence all of our gifts can be consumed. The only exception: N bought handbags. They’re from Naraya and look bright and colourful which is about as much judgement N can give to a fashion accessory.
More to come in part 2 next week:
Philosophical question of whether a man can ever get bored of sambar vada from Annapoorna
About how India has zero chills about food - especially during festivals
Amazon India as a kind of a modern day genie
Mumbai trip, BARC and the excitement of Parag Agrawal (son of the soil) becoming CEO
Parrying unsettling questions about Thailand from maamas and maamis in Coimbatore
Youtube rabbithole of TN politics and conspiracy theories
Could be worse,
Tyag
😅