Dear Ruperto,

I thought I’d send in a field report from the Exotic Rooftop Restaurant, Par Ganj, New Delhi, India. It’s been a while since we last visited, in 1996.

Getting online has been a quest in itself.

‘First World Problem’ I hear people say, with increasing frequency these days, of course I have first world problems as I come from   the first world, I’m hardly going to have bilharzia and be worried about people from the next village kidnapping my fifth child and selling him to the rebel troops.

So my hotel should have wifi. ‘Maybe is coming tomorrow.’ That familiar head wiggle.

It should have been working whilst I was during the session on how to use social media with campaigners for fairer conditions in the garment industry: not for the first time I find myself describing Twitter with words and mime.

I still think I spend as much time looking for places with wifi as five years ago, just with higher levels of reliance, expectation and disappointment.

Anyway to Connaught Place, the only street name  I could think of as I’m staying in the slightly weird diplomatic quarter where there are lots of parks and embassies and not much else apart from my hotel: obviously the charming/annoying haggle over fare  still exists.

But obviously, it being Saturday morning, it’s half day closing. I actually quite like that somebody [presumably British?] issued a decree to close the shops down for half of potentially the busiest shopping day. For almost an hour I wander, searching for a cybercafé [or what is known in many places these days as simply ‘a café’]. I can’t tell you if it’s changed much because I literally don’t remember it at all.

Languid dogs with skin showing from the beatings, paan spit marks, beggars and potbellied, dirty-looking men sniff, spit and vend snacks: it seems  designed to test Western sensibilities. In between big chain stores with welcomely aggressive aircon: M&S, Levis, and Benetton. Has anybody ever bought anything from Benetton?

Several false leads, it really looks like there should be a wifi-enabled café in this the upmarket centre of the capital of modern India . I ask several people who evidently have no need for a ‘cybercafe’ . The closest I get to the Internet is a tourist office where a young chap offered use of his terminal, the trade off being lots of spiel about tours, I need to do several hours of catching up with work stuff. And frankly I can’t remember passwords like I used to.

(reminds me of an awkward moment I recently had in Tanzania where a chap thought I was looking for a ‘wife’, rather than actual ‘wifi’)

I visit a number of Costa Coffees to no avail. What’s the point in globalisation if it doesn’t bring wifi to me personally?

Like a classic Westerner, getting all hot and sweaty: disbelief that a central business district won’t sell me over-priced bland coffee with annoying names in exchange for the Internet. I would have even broken my Starbucks rule but naturally it was closed for repairs.

I imagine lots of people – both Indians and foreigners – have sidestepped the need for a web café through using devices with a  data sim.

I think in 1996 it was still more normal to see a sign for  ‘fax service’ than for ‘internet service’, but Internet cafes were starting to emerge. Personally in 1996 I don’t think I would have had anybody to send an email to.

You went travelling, you vanished for those months you were gone, perhaps rejecting everything you once stood for upon your return, or practicing a new religion: there were no incremental selfies to warn people of what you were to become.

You just turned up at your local pub, looking completely different.

I was directed to ‘CCCL Mall’ by what young people inaccurately call a ‘random’, who seemed helpful rather than a hustler.

It was a short tuk tuk drive away: they still have these, but now they have a little electronic meter on them which as you can imagine are routinely ignored. I used to get really cross about rickshaw types ripping off foreigners and dual pricing in general, it’s one of those things that doesn’t seem to matter now.

Delhi traffic has got bigger: there’s flyovers and metros now and bigger cars. You still see Enfield Bullets and Honda Heroes with lots of people on them and bundles of stuff but there are all kinds of other vehicles too – the average vehicle size is increasing. Plus they still have cycle rickshaws and cows although fewer of them. In a tuk tuk in several lanes of traffic you feel like you are on a little boat in the ocean. Crossing the road is as much like frogger as it ever was, but now it’s speeded up a bit.

There are a billion or so Indians, and as they get richer I wonder where the extra oil will come from to keep them in their bigger vehicles, but then I do tend to worry about things.

Anyway, ‘CCCL mall’ turns out to be more of an ‘emporium’, selling the usual tat, big wooden elephants and tables that would look wrong in any room. I thought I’d been stitched up, but they did indeed offer wifi although clearly not without risk to data. If I want share my personal information with strangers, I’ll use a Western data mining company like Facebook, thanks very much.

I try approaching people who explain to me in English they can’t speak English, and that perchance for perambulatory advice I should seek an alternative source of information in order to achieve the desired effect both linguistically and geographically.

Or get approached by hustlers who clearly have no interest in my wish for a web café and who suggest a particular emporium instead. The classic foreigner in India problem: you actually do need some information but not from the people who are offering to help. When they ask what I’m looking for I tell them solitude. Look still cost nothing by the way, and England is still good country.

They are quite pushy – I think we got a bit freaked out by all this hassle and hustle especially in Kanchanaburi. It’s possibly a good place to have your first non European travel experience, everywhere else more or less seems a bit easier after India. I’m sure it ahem set me off on a quest to seek an end to injustice too.

I think I was angry then as I am now about the inequality of the place and people banging on about how spiritual it is, when even the spiritual centres seem incredibly materialistic places in which human suffering is routinely ignored.

The caste system still exists, as people kept reminding me; I spot a lady facing a window, her head on the ground, in rags, a parody of shame. It may be an act, either way it seems an inhumane way to go about earning a living, to make yourself appear as worthless as possible in order to receive the flick of a coin from somebody with greater life chances and more coins than you.

The British must have thought they’d landed on their feet, to find a society in which everyone knew their place, where there was a subservient underclass to do all the shitty jobs, and a built-in belief system that makes people think it’s not a problem because of a future afterlife scenario.

Maybe it gives people something to look forward to and all that, religious tolerance, bla bla, but really? I think it’s just a way of powerful people maintaining a status quo and a get out clause to do nothing to help the poorest people: a complete con.

That the Brits did nothing about it is not to their credit, but they can hardly be blamed for decades of subsequent apartheid-style discrimination, which continues in an era of economic boomtime.

So you have people who are basically living a post apocalyptic lifestyle, wild haired and eating out of bins, and people like me stepping over them guiltily, whilst looking for a way to connect with colleagues thousands of miles away using a network of linked computers using fibre optic cables and satellites or something. Captain Kirk.1 would have had something to say on the issue it were an alien planet I’m sure.

I have no idea where I am except that it’s Delhi, although spotting a sign for Par Ganj I head there. I associate this place with Westerners in specialist flowing cotton trousers, the kind of which used to be issued to anthropology students.

(notes: as I wrote that paragraph a couple walked past in exactly those trousers: him pink, her purple)

Where there are noserings, wifi and bottled water are sure to follow. I follow the sign, being mapless. You can’t buy a sim card without ID and a delay, so I have no information at all about my location – the horror – but walk on developing larger and larger sweatpatches like a character from ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’.

I end up, as is often the case, in an area of light industry. There lots of manholes you could vanish into and people building or welding stuff, a clinic that offers a stool test here, an amusingly named hotel there. I feel like a spoilt idle foreigner, which is accurate.

Once or twice people say things like ‘friend, don’t go there it is dangerous’ and given I’m carrying a laptop worth a few years’ street hustler salary, I take heed although somewhat conscious it could be a double bluff.

There are still lots of amusingly named shops and hotels – extremely sexy shop and shoppy shop could catch on in Europe I reckon. There is a guy wearing a t shirt which reads ‘I love the smell of bacon in the morning,’ although he really, really doesn’t look like he falls into that demographic.

There are people who seem to do nothing at all and others who are working their socks off. Smell-wise nothing has changed. Loud hawking? Check. Annoying loud horns and over-use thereof? Oh yes.

After an hour or two hours walking in gradually increasing heat I found the Par Ganj as we might remember the place. It seems batik will never die; the thing now amongst your travellers is rickshaws for all the shopping: you don’t ride the rickshaw, you put your stuff in the back. Still a silver bearded skinny old boy doing the humping, still generally twice the age and half the body mass of the person they are doing the humping for.

I witnessed an American woman flip out at an old guy whose rickshaw was full of bundles of something. She was really shouting at the guy for taking a wrong turning, and totally unembarrassed about using him much as you would an ox or a mule. I quite like the idea that some hippy emporium for floaty people in San Francisco will vend shawls based on such interactions.

I finally find my wifi and roof garden even though it is, despite assurances, so slow as to not really be of any use at all which is why I’m writing this instead of organizing my next set of training sessions as I should be.

Even in the tourist bit, after a while tourists start to really stand out. So many of them seem pale and miserable… probably avoiding smiling to avoid getting hustled but it’s nice to watch from a rooftop. Some of them look so nervous I want to hustle them myself. In my straw poll I notice that there seem to be more Asian tourists – Chinese and Japanese? And there are still plenty of Israelis amongst the Europeans and Americans.

Still lots of young women who wear very skimpy clothing too, despite the Lonely Planet telling them not to. There goes a lady who has gone the other way and whose head to toe neo Indian outfit including headscarf draws plenty of attention   . A couple of really old long haired anthropology trouser hippies stroll by. ‘Aren’t you bored of India yet?’ I think to myself although I imagine people are looking at me in much the same fashion.

I think that brings us up to now, although looking across I can see the Everest  Kitchen Roof Top, which looks somehow familiar. Is that where Des and the other one planned to by a boat and sail slowly down the Ganges?

I order the totally predictable fried rice with garlic and chilly for old times sake and listen to tourists in vest tops plan the next stage of their adventure as I plan my next moves, one of them is Skyping her manoeuvres in detail via a smartphone.

I’m partly disappointed because I think she should be enjoying the moment, and you wonder if this is the generation who will never miss a connection because they communicate electronically rather than through messages in guesthouses and hopefully-passed on telephone messages, but the other part of me is simply jealous of her connection.

 

Ta ta for now,

Nick

 

 

Update: there’s a metro! It’s brilliantly cold and pretty much full of men, despite the ‘ladies only’ section. I use it off off peak, but the jostle potential is huge. I hadn’t previously noticed the extent to which there are hardly any women in most of the places that you end up; perhaps the Delhi rape riots brought this to thought to the fore. So many men to so few women in public spaces does not seem healthy to me.

I also hung out at the Delhi Race Club  (1940) [sic], an unusual place. There was no race on the day I visited, in fact they only hold races on Tuesdays, which is brilliant. But there was still betting on horses: there are several betting booths inside a big warehouse type thing next to the actual course, apparently they bet on races all over India with results coming in via ‘teledex’.

 

I imagine this lack of betting shops is to do with an old skool colonial law banning betting shops: as with the half day closing, I imagine the Man will change all of this when it starts totting up the potential revenue streams, but for the moment the Delhi Race Club (1940) does a roaring trade in jubilation/misery.

What I like about the Delhi Race Club (1940) is that at the time when the British Empire was most at threat, as Nazi bombers circled Europe, and Japan was planning an invasion that would overturn the Brits in Singapore, Malaysia and parts of India itself [just] and arguably speed up the eventual collapse of the British Empire itself, there were some people who thought it was a good idea to open a race course.