Romancing a Woman in India

The role of women is just one indicator of the two Indias I have seen. If you are middle class and up, educated and even a bit worldly, you are likely of the Brahmin caste, (though not inevitably) and are more Western in your orientation. You are still arranging marriages for your daughters but it is likely that your daughter will have more than a little say in the choice. She may also have a career as a doctor or lawyer and may pursue that career even after marriage.

Our travels have been, I now see, through some of the poorest states and the richest states and so I contrast that first India with my observation of village life and in the comments and reminiscences about women that I have heard.

What made me start thinking about this is that we have only ever dealt with men, except in the international hotels where women are also employed. From what I have seen, for example, there are very few women shopkeepers in India, although I have run into a couple. This becomes comical when you are shopping for clothes. Some men love to shop but Cameron has always adopted a point and shoot attitude toward shopping that I have observed in other men too.

I find shopping relaxing and like to look at all the options, compare qualities, think about how the item will be used and whether it will be used at all. The shopkeepers here are very comfortable with Cameron’s notion of shopping but not so comfy with mine. They point and shoot and have little patience for the subtleties of good shopping or clothing detail and styling. They want you in and out with a favourable (for them) deal concluded and will want you to sit, drink tea and look at all the things THEY want to show you. They will never ask you the crucial questions that you are trying to answer for yourself before you buy an item. They are there to sell you on the excellent qualities of the item as THEY see it, and could care less whether you also deem them excellent, likely because you are a woman and how could you possibly know what is best for you?

That is the paternalistic side of this country. There is also this funny obsession with romance. As Vinesh tells us, 90% of Indian movies are about romance. Based on the Bollywood movies we have watched (or tried to watch – I am with Russell Peters on this one – acting talent, decent scripts and good camera work have nothing to do with Bollywood) the romance is very high school, based on notions of love that we all shed round about Grade 12. A recent movie line (this is true!), “There is nothing about you that I like. You are coarse and a murderer. But my heart tells me that you are the one for me – that I love you and cannot live without you.” Blechhh!!!

I speculate this is because most marriages are arranged and, although there is truly a decent case (really!) to be made for arranged marriages, most people are never allowed the simple, slavish, all encompassing heart ache of having loved and lost. Because it is not really part of everyday life, for the most part, people have to get their fix somehow. And because they have not really experienced it themselves, their perceptions of it will likely be what we would regard as shallow and wholly divorced from the reality of love. Of course, that doesn’t mean there is not a lot of extra-marital funny business going on – I have feeling that this country is a little like an Indian version of Melrose Place or more accurately for those who have seen this movie “The Ice Storm”.

You forget after awhile that you only ever talk to men.  Women seem to be backlit here, at least in the more traditional other India, at least from what I have seen. The concept of woman is wrapped in a golden aura that allows men to project anything they want, or need onto a woman.  She becomes that fragile flower.  I have heard “the ladies” described in the most romantic and flattering of terms. Can't deny all that rosey language feels good until you realize there could not possibly be a real woman under all that.

Yet in all our hours of driving through the countryside, I never once saw women gathering in the villages for tea and chat as the men do regularly. If I saw them at all, they were always engaged in washing, minding children, planting, buying food or walking in groups to work at a local factory. Apparently, all that veneration comes with a lot of plain, hard work and the fragile flower is made of steel.

Fort Kochi (Cochin)

Going to engage in a little blogger relations now. We are staying in the most wonderful boutique hotel in Cochin called Tea Bungalow. I mention it because those of you who are design inclined will love what they have done with the place. This used to be a home in Fort Cochin, the old part of the city and an ancient trading post, and then became the guest house for business guests of Brooke Bond, an old tea company which I believe is now part of Lipton’s. The house was vacant for about 15 years before it was bought by two wonderful young men and renovated “to a tea”. We stayed in the Cochin Suite – like so much of our sojourn in India we did not get to stay and do it justice – but it has a little private balcony that looks over the courtyard and a comfy bed – meant to ask them to change the pillows as they were too small and too hard but that is truly a quibble. To have such a little gem in the middle of an Indian city is like an oasis. They have only been in business eight months and are looking to build this into a going concern so if you find yourself in Cochin be sure to stop by or book a room.


Talk to Vipin Venugopal +91 93887 19677 – and for added pleasure, Fort Cochin is one of the most walkable places I have found in India with a lovely boardwalk by the sea and terrific small lanes with shops and handicrafts. Few autorickshaws, cars or cows to get in the way, just some lovely morning walking.  This church of St Francis has been just about every Christian denomination since its founding in the 16th century.  One thing you realize very soon about Kerala is that there is a profound Christian influence just not seen in the north.

Even we know the pace of this trip is insane. We have had more one night stands with cities in India than either of us care to remember. Most of my postings have been done on the fly, on a computer with a dickey keyboard.


During the 12 – yes 12 – hour journey from Madurai to Cochin, across the Western Ghats (means steps but they are actually low mountains) we saw some of the most incredible scenery. I wish it could have been a shorter trip – the last three hours were like a bad dream – but I would not have missed this country for the world. Spices have been grown here and traded for thousands of years. We saw tea plantations – hills and valleys as far as you can see covered in manicured tea plants guarded by a few lonely palm trees to hold the soil – the eunuchs taking care of the harem. Rubber trees are everywhere, looking like wounded accident victims off any Indian road you care to name, with the gashes and wrappings that allow the sap to be taken from the trees.

Our companions on this southern leg are a tag team of driver, Shuja, and manager, Vinesh. Shuja is young and quiet and his English is somewhat rudimentary so the office sent Vinesh who guides the trip and is responsible for our safety in what remains a volatile country. Vinesh is the one we talk to. Shuja smiles and opens the car door and listens, trying to improve his English. Vinesh is Roman Catholic and from Gujarat. Religion is one of the first things you find out about a person in this most religious of countries. Where they were born is the second.

He is two years into a BA in English literature and he has the demeanor of a poet. He tells us he likes the wordings of the Leonard Cohen songs we play. We trade music, his from India or from England where he used to have a girlfriend, ours from Canada or the States and sometimes England.

Vinesh and his family seem to me to be part of this new middle class in India, the kinds of people you see in the airports and our hotels, the kinds of people who would allow their son to have an English girlfriend and to be unmarried at the age of 27. He has taken this job because his family fell on hard times when his father died two years ago in a motorcycle accident. Since then he and his brother have been working and gathering the family assets so they could restart the family trucking business that became moribund with the death of his father.

Like Kimi, our driver in the north, Vinesh works hard, is smart and can manage situations as they inevitably arise. We have been very lucky with the people who have cared for us here and will hopefully stay in touch with both.

As for the south, it’s amazing the changes prosperity brings. In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, you don’t see the constant, grinding, crushing poverty that you see in the north. Food is easily accessible and cheap. There are long standing agricultural industries like rice, rubber and tea and spices. Chennai is the Detroit of India with Toyota, Hyundai and their parts suppliers all building cars there.

On our driving trip in the north I once saw a couple of small huts, painted, with well tended grounds and asked Kimi why more houses were not kept this way. Question was no sooner out of my mouth than I knew the answer – when your choice lies between starving or painting, survival will win.

Now, in the South, I see lots of brilliantly painted houses – so that is my leading indicator of prosperity here – a bright, clean colourful spectrum of blue, fuschia, chartreuse and pink.

Who painted these things?

Yesterday we took Kingfisher Air  from Chennai to Madurai. Now you know that I am not rabidly right wing but, in India I now know that private enterprise always works best. You may have read about our travails with Indian Airlines.  I also bemoan the lack of working fountains at government sponsored monuments in Agra and Udaipur which would have made the gardens and buildings so much more than mere monuments.  Not so with those attractions run privately.  There, by and large, the fountains work and some actual curation seems the order of the day with period furnishings and pictures and some attempt at context.  I am thinking of Mehrengahr Fort and City Palace.  But I wax on.  Take it from me.  In India entrepreneurship reigns, when unleashed from government.
But that is not what I wanted to write about.  Today I want to tell you about the wonderful temples at Madurai.  These are done in the South Indian style which is moulded and stuccoed and painted to beautiful effect.  The temples at Madurai are some of the oldest in India begun, in rudimentary fashion at 1600BC but most of what we see today was created on the same site between 700AD and 1800AD.

As with all Hindu temples, from what I can tell, there is a morning ceremony that greets the day and an everning ceremony that puts all the gods to rest.  We attended the evening ceremony and then I got up to take a few pics in the morning before we left for Cochin this morning.