What It’s Like: To Have A Poisonous Cobra On Your Back in Varanasi India from Andy Stoll on Vimeo.

(Click the Vimeo logo or on the ‘HD On/Off Button to click through to Vimeo and you can watch the clip in HD!)

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• See some of the most recent other ‘What It’s Like’ videos:
  • To Fire A Machine Gun In Vietnam
  • To Climb Down The Temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia
  • To Buy A Duck In China
  • What It’s Like: To Cook Chinese Cabbage In A Restaurant In Tibet.
• See the streets of India through the eyes of Guest Traveler and Photographer Shikha Khanna with her amazing candid portraits of Indian street kids.
• See some of my photo from Indian in a gallery called Indian Light.
• These videos are intended to give you windows into places, read about another window I found in Cambodia

Though India is a beautiful and amazing country, it is still very much a developing one.  It faces an entire slate of challenges, among others: overpopulation, ethnic conflicts, poverty, inadequate infrastructure, corruption, lawlessness and crime.  A quick trip around the country and you’ll see it all first hand and it seems much of the population seems complacent to do nothing to change it.

Touting itself as the “world’s largest democracy,” India seems to struggle between its traditional past and the modernity of its uncertain future, and it seems a lot of people don’t trust government, business or even the social sector to lead the country to change.

This is where The Times of India seems to be stepping in.

The newspaper’s multiyear ‘Lead India’ campaign (which often dominates the highly valued front page of the daily newspaper) involves a series of print, web and television advertisements and a reality television series, that are all part of an integrated campaign to identify and promote the best up-and-coming leaders in the country, while constantly peppering the Indian people with a populist message that hope to stifle corruption, promote democracy and inspire action in the common person.

What does it say about a country when its biggest promoter of change is not government leaders or social advocates, but a for-profit newspaper?

I think they’re on the right track, if only by representing the voices of much of the population.  Within the words of this campaign, you can hear the personal desires of many of the Indian people I came across as I traveled through the country’s bulging metropolises and small villages.

Does it sell more newspapers?  I’m not sure.

Does it affect change? Only time will tell.

Have you been to India? Do you live in India?  What do you think?

Leave your thoughts and comments below.

Text [this ad ran in the run-up to the national elections in the Spring of 2009]: “I swear. I swear that this time I will stand up.  Not for what I believe in, but for what I don’t. This time I will vote. Not for, but against. Against my own helplessness. Against my own laziness. Against two words called Chalta hai [an acceptance of mediocrity]. Against short cuts in queues. Against cheating in exams. Against Kharcha Paani [a bribe] in offices. Against powerless inquiry commissions. And powerful vote banks.  Against religion in politics. And against illegal constructions. And legal loopholes.  Against every cynic.  Every non-believer.  Against the belief that nothing will change. Against the feeling that my vote cannot make a difference. Against every excuse for not voting. And I will do this without fear or shame.  Because only by voting against all that is destroying our today, will I give my children something to vote for tomorrow.  Lead India ‘09. Let’s make this vote count.

Text at the bottom: The most important General Elections in our history are here.  And today. Lead India ‘09 takes a quite oath of its own.  To stir a nation’s conscience into overhauling the calibre of leaders we elect.  So if you are a straight-thinking citizen and believe you can make your voice count, join in and vote like everything depends on it, Because it does, log onto www.lead.timesofindia.com.

Text: “Imagine /  Bollywood is not called Bollywood / off-beat cinema becomes mainstream / A Hollywood movie copies a Bollywood storyline / We stop caring about The Oscars / The west adopts the Indian song and dance routine / Our family drama makes the Americans cry / Our movies make a hero out of a common man / The Indian Cinema that can be / The India that can be.

Television Commercial #1: Little Kid

Can’t see the video.  Click here to watch on YouTube.

Television Commercial #2: Shah Rukh Khan

India’s biggest contemporary movie star tells us to DO. Can’t see the video? Then click here to watch it on YouTube.

Campaign Overview From The Times of India

Can’t see the video. Click here to watch it on YouTube.

What you can do now:

• Do you think this can work? Is it effective? Leave a comment below.
• See more Lead India videos on YouTube.
• Visit the comprehensive Lead India website hosted by The Times of India.
• Read more about the Indian Dream and a generous helping of “F*ck Off’s” in the story My Name is Abhi…er, Brad.…
• See Indian Light: In our Photo Galleries.

“I am,” I reply.

“You are the first American I’ve ever met in person,” he tells me with an enthusiastic smile.

“Can I ask you a question that I’ve always wanted to ask an American?”

“Sure,” I say, preparing to make excuses for President Bush.

“Why are Americans so obsessed with the word ‘fuck?’” he asks matter-of-factly.

*   *   *   *

Abhishek, is a typical young, middle class Indian living in New Delhi, with a university degree, a strong command of English, a penchant for Eminem, a lust for Priyanka Chopra and the hopes of one day finding a happy Indian life in an arranged marriage with a beautiful wife, smart kids and a nice car.

During the night Abhishek changes his name to Brad, and becomes an even-keeled, calm customer service representative for Verizon Wireless (one of America’s largest mobile phone companies), using his tact, patience and masters degree to navigate a minefield full of ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that’s’ from a line of Americans, whose expectations of proper customer service far outstretch any customer service that ‘Brad’ will ever experience in India.

But he, along with thousands of other young Indians, put up with it because to them, the money they can make is the opportunity they’ve been dreaming of.

To achieve his dreams, he’s willing to put up with rowdy callers, four weeks of training (including a class on ‘How to Speak American’), overnight hours (due to the time difference between India and the the US) and a ‘western name’ in exchange for free meals, free rides to/from work and the $350 USD monthly paycheck he takes home for solving America’s mobile phone crises for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Growing up, Abhishek might have dreamed of being a banker, a doctor or an engineer, but being Brad pays better, so he stays.

As is widely reported, all across India groups of young, highly educated Indians (the best speakers of English), many with masters degrees, are clamoring for these jobs in orderly, clean and efficient call centers, funded by America’s biggest corporate names in insurance, banking, cellular service and more: GE, Verizon, Citibank, AT&T, Bank of America, Principal and more.

In Hydrabad, a friend took me on a tour of a call center taking calls from customers of an American health insurance provider, and on the streets I talked with dozens of young call center workers who, as a whole, were pretty enthusiastic about what these jobs could do to provide for their future.

This is the crux of a challenge many developing places face:  Low-skilled jobs with high demand & short-term high pay, are more appealing to the young, educated class then highly-skilled jobs that require a long (and expensive) education (doctors, engineers, lawyers, creative class jobs).  These call center jobs are a shortcut to their dreams of a ‘good life.’

India is still forming its modern identity and its newly emerging middle class of young Indians appear (to me) to be trapped between this desire to entangle their identity with the hip, (relatively) rich, middle-class American images they see on TV and the traditions and expectations of their older Indian parents.  The older generations often lived lives centered around parental expectations, arrange marriages and duty to family; Abhishek and his generation now shy away from many of these things in search of Hollywood-esque glamour, iPhones and the hunt to achieve that American-like middle-class life, as seem on TV—a life that seems now more within reach than ever.  The images on TV create dreams that, coupled with a call center salary, seem just be over the Verizon….er, horizon.

*   *   *   *

“I have one more question that I’ve always wanted to ask an American,” Abhishek later asks me.

“Sure,” I say, “What is it?”

“Do you know WWE Wrestling,” he asks?

“You mean Hulk Hogan and The Undertaker?” I say.

He nods politely, looking shy to ask his question.

He hesitates, “…Is it real?”

On my trip, I have learned, as travel writer Pico Iyer may have put it best, when “traveling…one must learn how to import–and export— dreams with tenderness,” so I pause and temper my answer.

“Is the WWE storyline true?

I don’t think so,” I say.

“Is what you see on TV real?” I ask.

“I believe it is,” I say with a quiet grin.

His shoulders relax and with a wide smile and a burst of excitement, he runs into the next room shouting at his roommates, “I TOLD you so! I TOLD you so!”

Many young Indians in pursuit of the new Indian Dream of middle-class life, as crafted by what they see on American TV, find these dreams slowly coming within reach—and many of this young generation believe these dreams are now very real and very possible, so they are willing to reach for it, even if they have to put up with the lot of us constantly telling them to ‘fuck off.’

• Leave a comment on this post below.
• Read my ironic discovery in trying to find “the real” while traveling in Welcome To The Real World
• Want to see the other side of shopping at Walmart? Read my post from China: Shopping for Less (ons)

I took this portrait at a wholesale spice factory in Fort Cochin, India (in the state of Kerala, one of the world’s ancient spice capitals). This woman kindly answered a few of my questions (through an interpreter), and I learned that she, along with 2 other ladies in this massive warehouse, were sorting piles and piles of ginger into big, medium and small sizes.

For their work they were paid about .50 US cents an hour. As I was leaving, my Indian friend suggested I give her a bit of money for letting me take her picture; not having a clue what “a bit” was, I gave her the Indian rupee equivalent of $5.

She smiled quietly, bowed her head slightly and went back to her work.

Photographed: October 22, 2007

• Leave a comment on this photo below.
• See more from the “In This Picture” Series from Vietnam and China.
• See more of my photos from India in my collection ‘Indian Light‘

Before we get to the why, let’s start with the how.

It all started six hours earlier when I remarked to Shanu, the owner of the guesthouse I was staying at, that I’d never experienced an Ayurveda massage, despite the fact I was now in India, the birthplace of the science, invented by the Ancient Rishis in the time of Lord Brahma (Ayurveda is the science of life span.).

“You want a massage?” Shanu asked.

“Um…sure…yeah, of course…um…yes, I’m in India.” I said with the unassertive confidence of a teenager ordering a beer on his first trip to a bar.

Of course Shanu knew somebody and, remembering my earlier insistence that I’d like to experience “life as the locals live,” he said confidently, “and it’s a REALLY local place, local massage, no tourists go there.

This led me onto the back of Shanu’s motorbike for a twenty minute ride away from the tourist town I was staying in, a walk through a series of cement alleys that cut between houses and ramshackle huts to what appeared to be some guy’s home.  As we knocked and walked in, I glanced through an open door leading to a side room, to see a contraption that looked just like a torture device straight out of the Dark Ages.  Shanu spoke to the woman, who appeared in the bedroom doorway, in Malayalam, the local language of which I understand none, besides “tastes good”).  After a few minutes of talking, he looked at me, “7:30?”

“Sorry?” I said not hearing him, because my ears were busy watching the Chinese water torture device still sitting in the next room.  “Do you want to come at 7:30 for a massage appointment?” Shanu asked through a heavy Indian accent.

“Um….I…umm….” I stammered, as the woman in the bedroom glared at me a bit.  “Of course…yes…I want a massage, 7:30 it is…”

Five hours later after again driving to the edge of town, down the cement alleys, past the ramshackle huts and back at the front door of the massage house, the time was now 7:30.

I was met by an old man with gray hair that still had wisps of black streaks that curled a bit over his eyes and across his extremely dark Indian complextion.  He led me to a room (past the Chinese water torture device) and had me sit on an overturned red plastic bucket.

“What kind of massage style was it again?” I asked, hoping he spoke English.

“Ancient Kerala martial arts,” he said. My back winched in anticipation.

A lone ceiling fan, with dust-covered blades, spun slowly above my head, casting ominous gray shadows on the dirt streaked green walls of the room.

“Oh,” I said, a bit nervous, “Me. First time to have.” I told him in simplified, broken English. “I had Swedish massage and Chinese massage before. First time for martial arts massage,” I remarked in what sounded like a poorly dubbed Hong Kong kung-fu flick.

“Take off your clothes and put here,” he said, pointing at a bent hook on the wall, making absolutely no effort to shield his eyes, leave the room or even break his glare at me.

“Right,” I said.  I imagined a drop of water rolling off the top of the Chinese water torture device in the next room, as the only sound to break the silence as now all my clothes were hanging on a rusty hook on the wall.

There I was, sitting on the bucket, totally naked, having reluctantly agreed to some sort of Jackie Chan-style massage from an old grumpy man in what felt like his hidden torture chamber in the bowels of his simple hut in the back streets of India. I had to smile, as the scene seemed pretty funny—and it was about to push the boundaries of the ridiculous.

He proceed to pull out a globular, ceramic container from high on a shelf on over the course of the next hour he covered me in massive amounts of coconut oil, flavored with what smelled like tumeric.  Covering every surface from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet, he methodically and meticulously massaged every muscle and loosened every joint.  Being it a “martial arts” massage, I expected a bit more violence in the room, but in fact it wasn’t too much difference from the Shiatsu massage that I once had at a sports health clinic in America…well, except now I was covered in 75 gallons of coconut oil….and I was totally naked.

I tell you that story, first cause its funny, and also because it was one of my first excursions on this trip into the world of holistic and herbal medicine.  Coming from the West in a country that is adamant about its “scientific proof,” I’ve never put a lot of stock in the fields of homegrown medicine.  In much of the developing world, which often doesn’t have access to clean drinking water, let alone expensive medicines, cutting-edge medical equipment and highly educated doctors, people must (and have for thousands of years) relied on homespun remedies to cure everything from an upset stomach to cancer.  Further, some of these cultures (particularly the Chinese and the Indians) have been developing these techniques over the last three thousand years, while many Western medical techniques date back to only the last century.

In China, I experience a few different forms of Chinese massage, from foot reflexology to a massage style in which they place a bag of really hot rocks on your back.  Skeptical about the foot reflexology (in which it is said most body aliments can be cured by touching specific parts of the foot or hand), I decided to give it a try and found myself in a local massage parlor in Beijing, being tended to by a masseuse from a small village in the Sichuan Province.  She spoke no English and didn’t have the patience for my terrible Mandarin, so we didn’t communicate at all during the two hour massage session—-except for one moment when, as I winced in pain as she was poking the bottom of my foot, she turned to my friend (who happened to speak the same Sichuan dialect) and said to him, “Tell him he has problems with his kidneys.”

“What!?” I said, shooting a look of horror at her.  She looked at me, smiled gently and went back to tending to my foot. “What does she mean by that!?” I demanded.  The woman didn’t answer.  For the next month every time my stomach hurt or I had a pain in my side I was afraid my kidneys were about to fail.

Elsewhere in China, if you are sick, you can simply go to the Chinese medical doctor, explain your ailments, then he measures out an assortment of herbs, twigs, bird’s nests, and other odds-and-ends, puts them in a sack and gives them to you.  Then you go home, boil the sack’s contents, drink it, and feel better.

Next door in India, nearly everyone knows that certain spices/herbs do certain things: Tumeric is good for coughs and asthma; phyllium husks are a perfect cure for diarrhea; yogurt helps calm an upset stomach.  All of which for me, at one time or another, proved to be true.

As I sat there lying on that massage table in Kerala, with the smell of the coconut oil filling the room, it was the first time I began to realize that these cultures with these medical practices and this knowledge—which are often written off by most of the West, has much merit to it.   Chinese and Indian cultures, both full of practitioners of such medicinal practices, are thousands of years old dating back to a few thousands years B.C.—that’s a lot of time to discover useful medical remedies.

We may be too quick to dismiss what seems odd and unfamiliar because we can’t immediately ‘prove’ its value, or it doesn’t fit neatly into our own cultural practices, though if we open ourselves it we’d find there’s certainly something to it.  It’s not weird, it’s just different.  And that’s why I travel: to get a first-hand understanding of such differences, as its the differences that keep our ever shrinking world interesting.

Besides when was the last time you walked out of the doctor’s office smelling like a piña colada.

Hand photo courtesy John Hayes under Creative Commons. Hand chart photo courtesy Cote under Creative Commons.

• Leave a comment on the post below.
• Read about a few of my favorite culture differences in
  • Trash Talking and
  • Sometimes the Smallest Culture Differences Cause The Biggest Problems
• See some of my photos from India in ‘Indian Light’

Here is a small collection of my photos from my first visit to India (you can see them all larger, and with captions, by clicking on the images below or going directly to my Flickr gallery).

• Leave a comment on the post below
• Read how my ‘friends of friends’ introduced me to India in ‘They Were Poets, I Didn’t Know It’
• See Shikha Khanna’s Guest Post of photographs of Delhi’s Street Kids.
• See my other photos from Japan, Beijing, Hong Kong and Vietnam

Name: Shikha Khanna

Hometown: New Delhi, India

Where she traveled: She’s traveled across India with camera in hand.

Where our paths last crossed: New Delhi, India

In past ‘Guest Traveler’ posts we’ve featured the writings of many (one of my favorite from Chen Luan in Shanghai), the videos of Davey Dance and the music of road warrior David Strackany (aka Paleo), now I’d like to share with you some guest travel photography from India.

Shikha and I met through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend and our mutual interests in photography and creativity helped forge a quick friendship.

Below is a series of some of her amazing photos of street kids in India.

The term ’street kid’ often draws up images of ragged clothes, dirty faces and outstretched palms, and when traveling (or living) in India, most people develop an indifference as a way to cope with the sheer numbers of such children on the street—after a while, the kids become invisible to most people.

Shikha’s photographs make these kids visible again, and remind me (and hopefully all of us) that behind the sooty hands and gnarly hair is infact a genuine child, smiling, happy and enraptured at times by the simplest of things.

I hope you find her photographs as inspiring and uplifting as I do.

All photography above our copyright Shikha Khanna and should not be reprinted,
reposted or used without the express written consent of the author. www.shikhakhanna.com

• Leave a comment on this post in the box below.
• Shikha can be reach through her website at www.shikhakhanna.com where you can also find more of her photographs.
• Suggest some to be featured as a future NoBoundaries.org “Guest Traveler” by contacting us.
• Read entries from some of the other “Guest Travelers” featured on NoBoundaries.org:
  • 陈峦 – Chen Luan, a friend from Shanghai on her trip to Lugu Lake in Yunan, China.
  • Nicole Bruskewitz saving turtles and backpacking the back roads of Central
    and South America for a year.
  • Richard Bitbaba, Iranian-born adventure traveler, takes on Mt Everest.
  • Davey Dance, a travel video series I guarantee will help you lose an hour of your day.

Turning down beggars is fairly easy when the beggar fits the caricature that the word conjures: a homeless, smelly, old, toothless man dressed in rags, with an open arm reaching up through venomous breath of stale beer and cheap cigarettes.  My ‘no beggars’ rule proves a bit more challenging to stick to when the beggar is a child, with her tiny hands extended from tattered clothes, snot running from her nose, repeating, like a broken record, the only English word she knows: “money, money, money.”  Although its often hard for me to resist the open hand of a child, I’ve learned to restrain the urge, although my heart sinks a bit every time I force myself to walk on by.

India’s major urban cities, with their overflowing cardboard shanty towns of twisted tin and crumbled lives, greatly test my #1 travel rule.  In many places, packs of street children haunt the tourist centers in search of handouts, while at nearly every intersection groups of soot covered children wander through the soupy, dusty humid air, amongst the traffic on momentary pause, reaching into every open car window.

In more than one instance, in seeing my non-Indian face, the kids (some as young as 3 or 4) have gathered in traffic around my open-topped rickshaw repeating, with out stretched grubby hands, “pawnee….pawnee.”

Pawnee being the Hindi word for “water.”

On one hand, giving it to them may lock them deeper into the cycle of poverty. On the other hand, their next drink may come from a sewer drain.

What do I do?

• Leave a comment on the post below?  What should I do?
• Learn more about the work to help the millions of children in poverty in India and consider making a donation to those doing good work through through Save The Children.
•  Go see Slumdog Millionaire, if you already, encourage a friend to do so.
• Read my post on How to Change The World: A Hand Up, Not Out

What then, do you do, if you don’t know anyone in the place you are going, and how does a guy whose never left his country have so many ‘local’ contacts? This story demonstrates how it typically works for me.

Planning and saving for my trip around-the-world took just under three years, and for just under three years anyone I met I asked, “I’m going on a trip around the world, do you know anyone that lives there?”

Now, as I travel and meet new people, I ask the same question.

In 2007, while volunteering at a Rotary youth camp in Hong Kong I met a guy name Chee-lung who invited me to speak to his Rotary Club, where I was invited to a party at the house of the renown Hong Kong artist Ray Yip, where, on that invitation, I met a young currency trader name Hitender.  Hitender, who presently lives in Hong Kong, actually had grown up in India and upon hearing of my planned trip to New Delhi, passed along an email address of a school friend named Shikha.  On the bus to Delhi, at a pit stop in Nepal, I contacted her with no introduction and mentioned I was coming through New Delhi (where I consequently didn’t know anyone).  She told me to call when I arrived,  and upon fixing an Indian mobile number, she was the first person I called.  She told me she’d meet me that evening at a book store in the center of New Delhi.  A few hours later after she’d driven through a horrendous rainstorm and the equally horrendous Delhi traffic, she picked me up on the side of a water logged street after dark. I, a near complete stranger.

“We’re going to a poetry reading,” she said, “and we’re late.”

“Certainly,” I said strapping on my seat belt.  At this point, I had talked to Hitender (our mutual friend) for just under an hour, and knew only a little about him and obviously the string of connections back to my volunteer experience at the youth camp, was something Shikha didn’t care much about.  So there I was on my second day in India, strapped in a car with essentially a stranger, headed to a poetry reading.

“How in the world did I get here?” I thought.  (I try to make sure I find myself asking this question often, it assures adventure and good stories).

Shikha, as I learned during the car ride, is a talented designer, photographer, and creative, who is playing an integral part in a movement to grow English language poetry in New Delhi, and we were headed to a reading to meet up with some of the other poets.  Her introductions led me to Kunal, a writer and college student who arranged an extra bed for me with his 7 roommates in his college apartment, and Amit, a poet laureate/farmer/rabble-rouser/son-of-freedom fighters/jack-of-all-trades, who was the leader of the poetry movement—consequently named Delhi Poetree.

Following Shikha’s introduction, for the next week, I crisscross Delhi a hundred times by rickshaw, guided by poet laureates, poet chefs, poet military officers, poet college students, poet radio hosts and poet photographers among others, to birthday parties, cooking classes, poetry readings, internet cafes, street markets, movie theaters, shopping malls, parks, temples, schools and restaurants, eating endless, endless Indian food from the simplest street stalls to the fanciest night clubs.

Its likely that without my poet guides, I’m certain I would have hated Delhi, with its massive over crowding, soupy gray air, deadly buses and trash strewn streets.  But my friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend connection, made my 10 days in Delhi an opportunity to see beyond the noise, pollution and grind of India’s pulsating capital city, to see and better understand what makes it tick, tock, burp and shine.  New Delhi is certainly an acquired taste, but their guidance made it a place I’ve come to appreciate for all its character, depth, flavors and tannins.

Its likely without my poet guides, I’d have horrible things to say of New Delhites, with their shifty rickshaw drivers, begging street kids and shady hawkers, but because of my friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend connection, I was invited into homes, shared meals, toasted birthdays and talked face-to-face with Indians of all walks-of-life, who were not afraid to talk frankly about the joys and tribulations of living life in this rising world power.

When asked ‘why’ I am spending these few years traveling around-the-world in the way that I am, I say it’s simply to understand how other people live in this world, and my time in New Delhi gave me an amazing opportunity to do just this.

I had originally planned three days in Delhi and despite the city’s abrasive exterior, the warmth of its poets made me stay for ten.  I’d like to thank my friends-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, who’ve been long since promoted to my ‘friends.’  Your warmth, hospitality and rickshaw negotiation tips, made my time in New Delhi one of the most memorable week-and-a-half experiences of my trip around-the-world.

The best way to see a new place is always with a local.  And even better if your local is a poet.

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• Do you have a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend to introduce to Andy? Contact him or recommend them on Facebook
• Read more about another friend-of-a-friend story in Beijing: Tool & Ice in Great Men, Great Wall, “Great” Shoppers
• Read a story about making some random friends in Cambodia in 1 Bus, 2 Motorbikes, 8 Cambodian Drug Dealers, and A Run For The Border

Playing Colors during Holi, the 2nd largest Hindu Festival in India. The streets are filled with revelers running around with water balloons, squirt guns full of colored water and bags of colored powders. You exclaim ‘Happy Holi’ as mobs of people splash and rub colors on any and all passers by, as a sign of the change of season.

(Bear in mind that I look like this after a 2 hour walk in the streets, the party goes on for about 7 hours in total.)

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• See what other things I’ve been up to recently in Around The World In Photos

2) I lived in the Tibetan refugee community of Munjikatila in Northern New Delhi for a few days, upon arriving in India.  One evening, I wandered into a random Tibetan cafe for dinner.  It’s important to remember that the Dali Lama is the most revered icon in their culture and most Tibetans keep a photo/alter to him in their homes or businesses, despite the fact it is illegal inside of the borders of Tibet (on orders of the Chinese government).  Despite its illegality, their reverence for him often overrides the law.  Outside of Tibet however, upon walking into this cafe, I found someone who this particular Tibetan family seemed to hold in a bit higher esteem.Even now, looking at this photo nearly a year later, it still cracks me up.

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• See other Things That Make Me Laugh:
  • In Japan
  • In China
• Read some short stories from Tibet
• Some other funny NoBoundaries.org posts that might make you laugh

[continued from Taken for A Ride Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |]  An hour later, I heard the key turn in the door, and I looked up from the book I had been reading on the bed.  In stepped the man in the polished shoes, with a wide smile on his face.  Latching the door behind him, he reached for something in his back pocket and leaning towards me, he pulled, from underneath the tail of his baggy shirt, a folded piece of paper.

Handing it to me, he said, “Good. Good.”

I unfolded the slip of paper and was greeted by the letterhead of a travel agency.  Reading further I realized it was, in fact, a confirmation for a plane ticket the following morning, a plane ticket to the city of Doha, in the country of Qatar, snug on the shores of the Persian Gulf.

As miraculously as I suddenly realized that I had not in fact been the victim of a a swindle, the man in the polished shoes decided it was time to go to great lengths to try to tell me, in his broken, modified and heavily accented English, his story.

“Doha, Qatar?” I said, “You bought a ticket to Doha, Qatar?”

Over the course of the next two hours, I tried to piece together the story of the man in the polished shoes.  He spoke in a slurred potpourri of Nepali and a thick stew of broken and bent English, as I tried relentlessly to decode his story with questions, gestures and clarifying comments.  The first thing I learned was his name: Binod.

Binod in our room in Nepal. (lower right) He shows off one of his sand hoods
and a photos of his wife (in his wallet).

Binod was born and lived in a small rural village in Nepal, the son of one of Nepal’s most famous tailors.  Binod, having apprenticed with his father for 15 years and now 31 years old, was a young tailor hoping to take over the family business, when just last year his father died of a sudden heart attack.  His father’s death brought bad fortune on the family as the business succeeded mostly on his father’s reputation.  Unable to make ends meet as a tailor and unable to find other work in Nepal, Binod was now forced in search of money to make sure his family could survive.  On a promise from a friend, Binod was told that if he could get to Qatar, the friend would arrange a construction job that would pay $350 USD/month (a small fortune in Nepali terms).   The only catch was, he had to get to Qatar on his own and he had to, after arrival, stay there for two years.

“TWO years!” I said,  “You won’t see your wife or kids for two years!”

He nodded.

Binod had scrapped and saved for many months, and kissing his wife and children goodbye, he had made the seven day journey from his village in Nepal to New Delhi, with the exact amount he was told it would cost him for a ticket to Qatar.  His problem arose when he discovered the plane ticket was $25 USD more than he had planned ($25 is a month’s income for many in Nepal).  $25 short at the final stage of his journey that had been over a year in the making, his only choice (after calling everyone he knew in New Delhi to see if he could borrow $25) was to return to his village and his wife and child, a failure, with few other options.

Binod told me of his grief over his father’s death and his frustration that he could not work as a tailor–a profession he loved–because most people bought cheap close from China nowadays and would not pay prices that would cover his costs.  He told me about life in Nepal, about his struggles to support his family after his father’s death, about his hope that he could be strong enough to care for his family without his father at his side.

“When my children cry, my wife is there to see them cry,” Binod said to me.  “When my wife cries, I am there to watch over her,” he continued. “But when I cry,” Binod asked, “who is there to watch me?”

As Binod told me about working as a tailor, he reached into his bag and pulled out a rain jacket he had made, showing me the stitching in the collar.  Pointing at my fancy rain jacket, he recalled the stitching he had seen earlier on the bus.  I felt like a fool that I’d ever thought he was convetting my rain jacket, when in fact he was just looking at the stitching.

As he continued talking about tailoring, he pulled out a simple hood with velcro straps from his bag.  Handing it to me, he explained it was a protective hood to guard against the stinging sand storms that occur on the high construction sites in Qatar.   He had hand-sewn three of the hoods, one for himself, and two he hoped to sell for extra money upon his arrival in Qatar.

“You like it,” he said.

“Yes, very nice,” I replied.

“For you,” he said, handing the hood to me.

I insisted I could not take it.  “You must keep it because you can sell it and make money.”

He shook his head, “No, for you.”

I waived him off. “No, you need it more than I do,” I said, realizing he wanted to give me something, despite the fact he had, by my standards, nothing.

He then reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of cheap plastic sandals,  “You like these?  You can have.”

“No,” I said, “you must keep them.”  “They look better on you,” I insisted, realizing it’s likely the sarcasm didn’t translate.

He kept insisting that I take something of his, and I, now feeling really guilty that I ever thought this guy was conning me, kept insisting he needn’t give me anything in exchange for my help.

According to the travel agent’s letter, Binod was scheduled to leave for the airport at 3am the following morning, so after hearing out his story, I offered to take him out for dinner.  We dined quietly on a bit of rice and curry in a little Tibetan Cafe and returned to the room.  I realized then that Binod had spent all of his money, except a few dollars, on the plane ticket—and it was unlikely he even had enough money for the taxi to the airport (let alone the room we were presently staying in).

After dinner, while Binod packed his things and calmly polished his shoes, I sat quietly on my bed and put his story into perspective in my head.  This man had traveled for 7 days, 49 hours of which was sitting next to me on a bus, with all the money he had in the world.   The money he had was an amount he thought was just enough to buy a plane ticket to a country thousands of miles from his home, where he’d never been, where he did not speak nor understand the language, all because of the promise for a job that may or may not prove true.  Having spent everything on the plane ticket, he would arrive in the far off land at the airport with only the clothes on his back, a rain coat, a couple of hand-tailored sand hoods, a pair of flip flops, a toothbrush, a bar of soap and the belief that the work could provide for his wife and children, whom he wouldn’t see for the next two years.

Had I not given him $25, his story could have ended very differently, as he would be forced to return to his wife and children in failure.

For $25, I could have bought a decent birthday dinner at a nice restaurant (interestingly enough, it was my birthday), a night at the movies or a half a tank of gas.  But instead, for the $25 that I’d initially thought I was being swindled out of, I bought a friend.

At 3 am, the alarm on my mobile phone went off to wake Binod, so he could catch a taxi to the airport.  I sat up groggy in bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.  My friend from the past two days was gathering his things, as I heard the pre-scheduled taxi pull up in the empty street below.  He walked over and tried to hand me money for the room, which I waived off, saying, “You might need that in Qatar.”  And though he insisted, I refused to reach for it and pointed him towards the door.  He nodded politely and quickly shook my hand as I wished him “good luck.”

Brushing some dirt from his shoes and smoothing the wrinkles out of his pants, he picked up his simple bag and headed towards the door.  Just as he was about to leave, he turned and looked me in the eyes.  Placing his palm over his heart he said in English, “Never forget you,” before slipping out the door.

My throat tightened up as I digested his words, as the door to the hallway slid shut, leaving me alone engulfed in the darkness of the room.

* * *
Postscript: Though I did not know it at the time of this story, four-months later I would find myself in Doha, Qatar, on a scheduled stop between Zurich, Switzerland and Nairobi, Kenya.  Walking around the city, I saw truckload upon truckload of Nepali, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men, working as laborers on the dozens and dozens of skyscrapers growing out of the desert.  As I sat before a beautiful desert sunset, under the shadows of the construction cranes, I looked up towards the towering steel girders in the sky, in hopes that my friend Binod was up there, working away in his Velcro hood, a little closer to his father and a little closer to his return trip home.

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[Continued from Taken For A Ride | Part 1 | Part 2 |]

As hour 34 passed on the bus enroute from Kathmandu to New Delhi, the 42 Nepalese men, the monk and this lone tourist, began to realize our bus wasn’t going to make our destination in the prescribed 34 hour time frame—in fact, we wouldn’t get there for another half day.  After a New Delhi sign whizzed passed my window and as the bus crept into an empty dirt parking lot, I realized that I had no idea where in the outskirts of this city of 20 million I was about to exit the bus seat that had been my home for the past 49 hours.

The extra time on the journey had allowed me a chance to make friends with some of the men on the bus, not using language (as we didn’t have much of a common language) but instead using magic tricks and bananas to break the ice.  By the end of the trip, a few of the men and I had establish hand signs for “food,” “bathroom” and a few other things, and they had pointed me to restrooms (typically a bit of grass on the side of the road) and even managed to teach me a few words in Hindi (including a few that got me some fresh rotis in a roadside stand that came complete with authentic live rats that ran over your feet underneath the table as you dined).

As I grabbed my pack and exited the bus, I was inundated by rickshaw drivers looking for a fare, and because I was the only non-Nepalese/Indian on the bus, I was descended upon like rats on bread.

Grabbing me by the arm, the man in the polished shoes, who had been sitting next to me for the past two days, brushed off the touts and said in his heavy, simplified English, “together room?”  At this point I was completely unsure of where I was, had no idea how many people in New Delhi spoke English, had very little money on me, and the man in the polished shoes was literally the only person I knew in this country of 850 million.  I decided, we’d be better together than on our own.

I followed the man with the polished shoes into a catacomb of narrow streets going from guesthouse to guesthouse in search of a room.  Turned away at nearly every door for over an hour, we eventually found a place and I was led up a narrow flight of stairs to a room with two single beds.  The man with the polished shoes dropped his simple bag in the corner and excused himself to the shower.  Padlocking my bag to the bed, I decided to head out in search of an ATM.

As I pulled the room door closed behind me and turned, I ran almost directly into the man who had checked us in, presumably the guesthouse owner, a towering, old Tibetan man, with a bald head and a white beard, who was dressed in a flowing starch white sleeping robe and simple slippers.  His dress and demeanor gave him a sort of Jesus Christ appearance, which led credibility to the sternness of his  fatherly voice that carried the authority of a divine-like proclamation.  “This is your first time in India?” his voice boomed, “Do not trust anyone. Everyone in India will trick you. Be careful with your money. India is not safe.”

I nodded politely, introduced myself quickly and, diverting my eyes to the ground, slipped by him and out the front door.  His height, dress, miraculous appearance and draconian assessment of India had me questioning whether he had in fact been real, or was just a creation of my over imaginative mind that had been running excessively in a cautiously high gear for the last two days, since I had boarded the bus in Nepal convinced I was entangled in a well-orchestrated scam of some kind.

The night before as the bus slip through the darkness of the Indian night, I had begun having short, simplified conversations with the man in the polished shoes sitting next to me.  I first asked him where he was going and he named a city I had never heard of, a city I presumed to be in India.  I had piece together that he needed to get to a travel agent to buy a ticket to get to his final destination from New Delhi.  When I asked him why he was traveling, he gave a confusing, awkward answer that I didn’t quite understand.  At one point, he pointed to my rain jacket tied to my bag and while inspecting the stitching, he asked me where I bought it.  It was obvious, I thought to myself, he wanted my jacket.

After I located an ATM, I returned to the room to find the man in the polished shoes, having finished his shower was, in fact, shining his shoes.

“Travel agent?” I said, “Go buy ticket?  I go with you?”  He nodded and we headed out into the street.  We were an odd pair, and we didn’t really talk much while visiting a few different agencies.  Each time he was quoted a price on a ticket out of New Delhi, he’d tell me, “Too much.”  After a two hour search through the narrow streets, the man in the polished shoes, looking quite dejected, pointed to a cafe, where we sat and had a cup of chai.

“What will you do?” I asked him, to which he shrugged and shook his head staring out into the cluttered streets beyond the cafe’s curtain door.  He clearly didn’t have enough money, and because I was well aware of my position as a “rich foreigner” and heeding the warning of the pseudo Jesus Christ, I was thinking I had to determine where and why he was traveling before I consider offering any money.

Miraculously, the man in the polished shoes spotted a tall man on a mobile phone across the street, exchanged waves and I came to realize he had spotted a friend.  The friend with the mobile phone approached with a smile, introduced himself in English and the two proceeded to chat for ten minutes as I sipped my chai quietly in the corner.  They were old friends from school in Nepal and the tall man with the mobile phone was now working in New Delhi—this encounter quite a chance meeting in a city of 20 million I thought, as my suspicion of the pair grew.  The tall man with the mobile phone insisted that he knew another travel agent that could get the man in the polished shoes a cheaper ticket, and we agreed they’d check it out.   I’d meet them back at the guesthouse.

Two hours later, as I sat in the room, the door knob turned and in came the man in the polished shoes, looking more dejected then before.  The cheaper ticket was still, it turns out, 1000 rupees too expensive ($25USD).  Without asking directly, I could tell the man in the polished shoes had considered the fact that I might be able to give him the money.  This, I was convinced was the heart of the scam.  When I asked his tall friend (who spoke much better English), why the man in the polished shoes was heading to the place he was, his response in English was awkward and a bit strange, which only led me to believe, I was in fact in the midst of tricky business.

“What will you do now?” I asked the man with the polished shoes?

“He does not have enough money,” his tall friend interrupted, “He can only buy a bus ticket back home.”

“And go 49 hours back to Nepal!?” I questioned.

He nodded, as his eyes looked sadly downward towards his polished shoes, now gathering dust.

My heart tightened a bit, although I was still concerned this situation seemed a bit too convenient to not be a swindle.

After a few awkward minutes in silence, the tall man made a phone call in Hindi, then shook my hand and excused himself from the room.  The man with the polished shoes, with his head lowered and his eyes saddened, said, ‘I go get bus ticket home.”

I hesitated a moment, then said, “I’ll go with you.”

We walked through the narrow dusty streets, as the setting Indian sun cast long shadows across our path.  Turning left we entered a shop with a large sign that advertised, “Buses to Nepal.”  The man reached deep into his pocket for his money and asked the woman behind the desk for a ticket to take him the 49 hours back to Kathmandu.  I grabbed his arm and said, “I’ll give you 1000 rupees, my friend, but that is all I can give you.”  He looked at me as if he did not understand, and I repeated myself.  He nodded politely as if he was expecting the offer, and though I had waited until the absolute last moment to offer my assistance, his unenthusiastic response told me that I had just bought his con job—-bait, hook, line and sinker.

Using a phone in the travel agency, the man in the polished shoes called his tall friend, who met us back in our room as I was handing the man in the polished shoes the 1000 rupees ($25) as promised.  For the very briefest of moments, I imagined them locking the door and robbing me for all the cash I had, while Jesus laughed a big ‘I told you so’ in the hallway outside.

After the exchange of money, the two headed out the door towards, what they said, was the travel agent, to secure a ticket for the man in the polished shoes to a town whose name I still didn’t know.  As the door slipped shut, leaving me all alone in the stark white-walled room, I thought to myself,  “One day in India and I’d already been suckered.”  I sat in the room sulking for the next hour, waiting for the man in the polished shoes to return, not angry that I’d been tricked out of $25, but angry because I had let myself be tricked.

[Continued in Taken For A Ride - Part 4]

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[Rupee photo courtesy of clappstar via Creative Commons license.]

[Continued from Taken For A Ride - Part I] 42 Nepalese men, a monk and I sat on a long, rickety bus as it weaved and lumbered through the grassy foothills of Nepal, as the sun lowered itself behind a curtain of distant trees.  We were on what was scheduled to be a 34-hour journey from Kathmandu, Nepal to New Delhi, India.  Whispers in muted Nepalese and Hindi and perplexed glances darted through the gaps between the seats behind me, as I’m certain the men (and the monk) were trying to figure out what I was doing on the bus, as I snuck back equally as puzzled looks trying to figure out exactly the same thing.

As night set in, we drove on over corrugated asphalt roads, motorcycles darted through the bus’s clunky shadow, and the headlights of the passing cars briefly illuminated the snoring group of men in the seats behind me.  I had heard stories of sneaking hands riffling through bags stowed under bus seats as their owners slept quietly above, and when I eventually fell asleep the straps of my small day pack and a plastic bag with a few snacks were wrapped tightly around my ankle.

The bus came to a jarring halt three times during the night, twice for a pee break (literally pulling off to the side of the road, where we all just lined up behind the bus to relieve ourselves in the brush), and once for a late night dinner stop at a road side food stand (the Nepalese equivalent of a truck stop), where aromatic curries, dhals and rice were scooped onto dented tin plates for around 1USD and steaming chai tea was ladled into small glasses for 10 cents.

A bit hungry, I stumbled off the bus, but because I couldn’t make heads or tails of how the food buying process worked (and no one seemed to speak English), I wandered around the parking lot for a few minutes a bit afraid I would be overcharged or served something that might make my stomach regret my decision to sit on a bus for 34-hours (I was also admittedly somewhat embarrassed I didn’t speak a word of the language).  As I kicked pebbles in the parking lot and my stomach growled quietly, most of the 42 men watched me as they scooped curries and rice into their mouths with their fingers.  Soon the driver honked the horn and we all returned to the bus—most of the men were soon snoring soundly to the hypnotic hum of the road once again passing under the bus’ balding tires.

I munched on a strawberry cookie in the dark, hoping I’d awaken the next morning to find some indication that this was in fact the bus to New Delhi.

One thing I had learned by this point in my travels was to always bring along some food to make friends while on public transport, and fortunately,  I had packed some cookies, bananas and some dried fruit for the journey.   This tactic to meet strangers flew directly in the face of the often quoted guidebook advice to ‘never accept food from strangers’ (as it MIGHT be laced with drugs).  I regularly ignore such advice, as I figure that scenario is quite unlikely, and it seemed the man with the polished shoes sitting next to me, had not read his guidebook either, because at our first stop the following morning, he returned with a handful of Nepalese sweets and handed one to me.  I smiled at him and said a polite, ‘thank you.’  He nodded quietly before smoothing the wrinkles out of his pressed pants.  Minutes later, I offered the man in the polished shoes a banana, which he quietly accepted with a nod.

As the clock rolled passed noon, 14-hours into the journey, we passed a sign for the approaching Indian-Nepali border at Sunauli and my stomach tightened, a bit out of hunger and a bit out of nervous anticipation for the upcoming border crossing—my first overland border crossing alone.  As we pulled into the border town of derelict buildings and shady characters (my honest belief is that nothing good ever happens in a border town), our bus was boarded by four customs officials who were out to prove my theory true.  They proceeded to interrogate the bus passengers one-by-one and then rifled through everyone’s bags.  One-by-one, nearly each man would hand over a handful of money.  One of the officers approached my seat and said something in Nepali, to which I replied, “Sorry?”

“Your bag?” he said as he pointed at my day pack full of expensive cameras and computer equipment.

“Yes sir,”  I nodded.

“Where you from?” he asked with a puzzled look on his face.

“America….The UNITED STATES of America,” I replied, hoping my emphasis would somehow imply the authority of an embassy official or something.

The customs officer paused, looked me up and down and then waved me off.

“Ok,” he said, before moving on to the man with the polished shoes.

As the interrogation slowly moved to the back of the bus, the man with the polished shoes turned to me and to my surprise said, in broken English, “Those men, bad men.”

As I later learned, Nepalese have visa free-entry into India and everyone on the bus was likely illegally smuggling things in (or out) of the country, as a way to play the currency and trade markets for a profit.  Because there was money being made, these corrupt border officials wanted their piece of the action.  So as each bus crossed the border, they’d simply decide how much money they wanted, board the bus and demand arbitrary fines to be paid in cash, on the spot, until they were happy with the amount of money they’d taken.  Once they wave the buses on, they simply divide up the take and slip it into their own pockets.  Operating outside the law, it seems, is standard operating procedure here, even if you are the law.

The customs officials yelled in the face of a skinny guy with long hair, sitting a few rows behind me, and then dumped the contents of his suitcase into the bus aisle.  The man in the polished shoes whispered to me,  “They want 400 rupees more.”

After a pause, the man in the polished shoes asked me in a hushed tone, “You have 400 rupee?”

“No.” I replied, obviously lying.

After another round of interrogations down the bus aisle, the three customs officers exited the bus, sliding the wads of bills into their breast pockets.

“Welcome to the Republic of India” read the road sign passing just outside my window…

[...continued in Taken For A Ride - Part 3 and Part 4]

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(Kathmandu, Nepal) I first began to suspect I was being conned as the taxi rounded the corner–after spending an hour stuck in a water logged traffic jam–and the driver stopped abruptly in front of a shop whose name had no resemblance to the name of the agency on my bus ticket.  The driver’s English vocabulary was limited to the words “fast,” “yes,” “go” and “WWF.”  He had brought me here based on a note I had handed him that had, scribbled in Nepalese, what I was told were direction to the location where I was to board a bus to take me on the 34-hour journey from Kathmandu, Nepal to New Delhi, India.

A day earlier a black haired Nepalese travel agent in a cramped office in a Kathmandu alley had provided me with the bus ticket for the mere rupee equivalent of $30 USD, and he insisted that the scribbled note in Nepalese contained directions for a taxi driver to get me to the appropriate bus agent the following day.

The note certainly got me to a bus agent, although I had a sinking suspicion it wasn’t the right bus agent, but despite my insistence we’d arrived at the wrong place, the taxi driver hustled me into the shop to meet a woman who spoke no English, she only pointed me to a bench in the corner.   After a lengthy wait I was hustled across the street to a rusty bus with a cracked windshield that was parked under an abandoned gas station awning.

The black haired Nepalese travel agent who had sold me the original ticket the day earlier, had also promised me that the $30 was buying me a ticket on a ‘tourist bus,’ a phrase that conjured images in my mind of a relaxing ride with a bus full of German, Dutch and Kiwi backpackers, all of us trading travel stories and drinking Cokes, as the Himalayan foothills rolled passed the tinted windows.

It seemed, upon boarding the rusty grey bus with the cracked windshield, that the black haired travel agent and I had quite different definitions of what consists of a ‘tourist bus.’

My bag, with all my worldly possessions, was shoved in the engine compartment at the rear of the lumbering bus and I was directed up its contorted stairs to find it completely empty—no Germans, Dutch or Kiwi backpackers to be found.

After a half-hour wait, and an hour past the scheduled departure time, the whoosh of the air brakes startled me, as the driver revved up and pulled his dinosaur into the middle of a muddy, jam packed arterial road—it seemed this tourist would be making the 34-hour journey to New Delhi alone—-if I wasn’t killed first.

Waiting for the bus’ departure, sitting in one of the 70 empty seats, I was so convinced I was somehow being tricked, conned or driven off to my demise, I quietly snapped photos of the bus, its license plates, its driver and the abandoned gas station’s ramshackle surroundings, complete with a group of gruff men placing burning trash in a barrel fire nestled under the gas station’s awning.

I was alone on a bus, not completely sure I even knew where it was going.

After reviewing in my mind how I got here, and convincing myself it would take quite an elaborate scheme for this all to be a setup, I settled in my upright seat with a book, and decided the only thing to do was to wait and see what happened.

Two pages into my reading, the bus came to an abrupt stop in front of a grey building, and out of it came a group of 42 Nepalese men and a monk.  One by one they climbed the bus’ contorted staircase and after perplexed looks of disbelief to see a young tourist, with an equally confused looked on his face–tucked in the corner of the bus reading an English language book–they all proceeded to stow their bags and take their seats—including a man with freshly polished shoes and well-tailored pants, who took the seat next to me.  None of them, it seemed, spoke a word of English.

34 hours on a bus, 42 Nepalese men, a tourist and a monk.  I was either being conned or I had inadvertently walked into the opening line of a joke.

[.... Continued in Taken For A Ride | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ]

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