Mother India

“And with those words, audibly, the frozen part of your heart crumbles.”
— Haruki Murakami, "Kafka on the Shore"

Perhaps that's what I feel about India. The country is so diverse and complicated, that it's so easy to experience mood swings when visiting India. You wake up feeling great and hopeful that day would turn out to be a good day. But before even the first sip of chai of the day, you receive bad news after bad news that makes you think you might as well stay in bed, only as the day unfolds, the bad news turns out to be blessings in disguise that you're glad you didn't decide to go back to sleep that morning. That's India. You can't describe it with one sentence.

India takes before it gives. It takes your patience before it reveals its charms. It's chaotic, badly noisy and polluted but the food is great and cheap. The people have bad body odor and rude, but some of them are trying too hard to cater your every need.

Love it or hate it, it takes special characters to appreciate what the country has to offer.

A Great Beginning - One Can Only Hope!

I'm officially blogging again.

As the title suggests, this blog is mainly to record my travels. However, since I also need to vent every now and then and Tweeter's 140 limited characters are mostly not enough to accommodate what I have to say, so this can also be about anything.

I do travel writing for a living, why would I create another blog (mostly) on travels? Because when I get paid, I can't really say what I want to say, which is fine, as long as the money pays my bills! For example, I can't just say a certain airline company should seriously start re-training their cabin crew's English skills because their onboard announcements sound like they speak Urdu and they always say the English part of the announcements way too fast. And yes, cabin crew from most, if not all, national airline companies speak horrible English, while all they need to do is read - I repeat, READ from a piece of instruction paper containing (basically) the same information. They could have practised to say the correct pronunciation, but apparently they don't. Before moving on to the English version of the announcements, they would get nervous, sometimes even stutter - that's what I can conclude from the voice.

Imagine non-Indonesian speaking passengers traveling domestic for the first time. Listening to unclear information in a foreign country when taking a foreign airline service must be very frustrating. It is true that all the safety procedures can be read in the cards in the seat pockets, but when the plane stops for refueling, at least they need to know the amount of time they're allowed to spend for quick shopping in the airport so they wouldn't miss the flight. I don't know if their HR Departments are aware of this, but either way, this shows how low human resource standards are.

But what compelled me to finally create another (travel) blog after abandoning the old one(s) is the upcoming solo trip to India and Nepal. I'm going to spend 2 weeks on the road, mostly on my own, and as always, I would need to vent my thoughts, good or bad, inspiring or not, during what I imagine to be an epic journey.

Well, I hope so! Let's find out in 22 days from today.