Tag Archives: blogging

Bare your feet

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In India, I prefer to wear sandals because in so many places it is necessary to remove footwear, and putting on and off sandals is so much easier than doing the same for lace up shoes.

Just in case you are wondering why there is the requirement to bare one’s feet, the reason is to prevent bringing dirt from outside into the place being entered. It is also a mark of respect when entering a religious place such as a mosque, church, temple, or gurdwara.

In some homes, footwear is left by the entrance. This is also the case for some homes that I have visited in the UK. When I went to a junior school in London’s Belsize Park, The Hall School, we left the shoes we had arrived in at the entrance and then replaced them by another pair reserved for use within the school.

When we visited Gulbarga (in North Karnataka, India) recently, we visited what purported to be an Arabic restaurant, Al Makki by name. Its floor was covered with carpets, and guests had to sit on cushions that surrounded very low tables. The owner took one look at my wife and me, and took pity on us. He provided us with a normal height table and chairs. The food was delicious. We ate a mutton “handi”, which is a pilaff flavoured with dried fruit, fried onions, nuts, and mild spices. By now, if you are still reading this, you might well be thinking that I have strayed from my topic. But, you are mistaken. We were not allowed to enter Al Makki until we had removed our footwear.

To conclude, my advice to people visiting India is: wear footwear that is easy to remove and replace.

A bigger audience

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During the 1970s and ’80s, I used to take pictures on my film camera using colour slide (diapositive) film. To enjoy these, they were best projected onto a good quality screen

Setting up the projector was quite a nuisance. Finding an audience amongst my friends was not always easy and, if they were willing to watch my slideshows, keeping them awake was also often difficult.

Turning the clock forward to the present era of digital cameras and the internet, the situation has changed. First of all, pictures may be easily uploaded on to the internet. Secondly, the existence of social media websites allows a far larger potential audience for one’s photos than ever before. Pictures can be posted on websites which are viewed by those with special interests or on others, like Instagram and Facebook, which allow the non specialised viewers as well as experts to see the images.

A wonderful thing about uploading one’s photos is that there are opportunities for viewers to comment on the pictures. This, I find to be very valuable. Other people point out things that I had not noticed or understood. I like this.

Unlike slideshows of the past, audiences can enjoy as many or as few of the uploaded pictures as they want without having to look at numerous slides politely whilst dying of boredom!

Nature’s artwork

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This wonderfully coloured fish was swimming about in a fish tank in the lobby of a hotel in Gulbarga on Karnataka (India). It illustrates the immense variety of the natural colourings of animal life, which rivals the many attempts of artists to produce original creations

A creature of God’s making

Colourful:

Nature’s original art

Overload

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“Incredible India” is a tourist promotion slogan. And, it is totally justifiable.

The truck in my picture is not unique. We saw many similarly loaded trucks on a short journey through northern Karnataka, and on many other road trips.

India is not simply incredible because of sights such as overloaded trucks, the wealth of colour, bustle, fantastic food, and the Taj Mahal. It is incredible because of its unending variety and generally very friendly people. Rich in history, the country has a very vibrant present.

Please note that I write this not as a promoter of tourism, but as a lover of a great country that survives despite itself.

On the Indian road

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One of the multitude of things that attracts me to India is that often one can see something which remains unchanged over many thousands of years alongside something that has only come into existence very recently.

There is no better place to experience this than on the open road. Bullock carts share the highway with the latest models of automobiles.

In market places, goods are weighed on scales if a design that would not have seemed unfamiliar to people many hundreds of years ago, but the merchant prepares a computerised bill.

You can talk to a scientist who is making ‘cutting edge’ discoveries. During a short conversation, this person will switch with great ease between modern and ancient concepts without any problems.

For me, one of the great joys of India is the seemless coexistence of the past and present in everyday life.

Hindu burials

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Death is a morbid but fascinating topic, as is disposal of the dead. Many people living outside India, including myself, believe that the corpses of Hindus are only cremated. At least, I believed this until about 15 years ago, when I visited a Hindu burial ground in Bangalore.

In a Hindu Burial Ground in Bangalore

I have visited two Hindu cemeteries in Bangalore, one of them being next door to a major electric crematorium in the city centre. When I have asked about Hindu burials, I have been told that some sects of Hindus favour burial rather than cremation.

Recently, I read an article about Hindu burials (in Calcutta) by A Acharya and S Sanyal in the “Mint” newspaper (Bangalore), dated 24 Nov 2018. Here is a brief digest of the points contained within it.

1. Certain groups of Hindus are traditionally immersed or buried.

2. These groups include:

A. Saddhus or ascetics who perform their own mortuary rites when they become saddhus, and are considered to be dead to the social world, living ghosts one might say.

B. Some young children, especially those who have not yet developed visible teeth. Also, some parents prefer to bury their dead offspring, rather than watching them being cremated.

C. Lepers. It used to be feared that a leper’s body might release an infectious vapour during cremation.

D. Some members of the following communities prefer to bury their dead to avoid the dominating behaviour of the Hinduism of the Brahmins: dalits, Vaishnav, Hela, and Kaburpanthi.

3. Sometimes, burial is cheaper than cremation. In Calcutta, burial can cost half of the charge of cremation.

4. Burial of Marwaris and Vaishnavites is more costly than for others because these two groups bury their dead with lots of salt, which they believe speeds disolving the flesh off the bones.

This newspaper piece has helped me to understand the existence of cemeteries where Hindus are buried. I assume that at least some of what has been written about Calcutta also applies to Bangalore.

On a parting note, I used to believe that the traditional method of corpse disposal amongst the Parsis was to feed their dead to the vultures. A Parsi friend of ours died in Bangalore, which has Towers of Silence for the corpses of Parsis, was buried in a Parsi cemetery in Bangalore. I have visited that cemetery, which is located in the district if Malleswaram and is for Parsis only.

All of this goes to show that making generalisations about India is inadvisable. So, before you assert that Hindus do not eat beef, hold your tongue! Some sects of Hindus have eaten beef since time immemorial. If the present government in India bans the consumption of beef, it will not be only Christians and Muslims who will be affected, but also several million Hindus.

The whole tooth

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I often wonder why dentists all over the world advertise their practices with a whole tooth, crown and roots.

Most people, apart from some with knowledge of anatomy, are aware of teeth being more than what can be seen in the mouth: the crowns of the teeth, which are covered with off-white enamel. Unless they have a tooth extracted, the majority of people never see the roots which help to keep the teeth on the mouth.

A more appropriate symbol for alerting people’s attention to a dental practice is a row of tooth crowns arranged as a smile.

Although the whole tooth might be the truth, a row of teeth as seen in the mouth should make more sense to someone seeking a dentist.

Photos taken in Hyderabad, India

Two professions

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We made several visits to Central Europe in our car during the mid-1990s.

CZECH

Twice during those years, we drove to the Czech Republic, entering it from the eastern edge of what had formerly been prosperous West Germany. The Western part of the Czech Republic, which had been the largely German-populated Sudetenland before 1945 is thickly forested with tall dark pine trees. We were dismayed to discover that for the first ten or so kilometres beyond the border, the roads through the Czech forests were lined with ‘gentleman’s’ clubs and prostitutes.

When we were in the middle of one forest, the rain began pouring down. At the corner of a road junction in the middle of the wood, we saw a young lady dressed in a shiny red jacket with matching short hot pants. Our three-year old child saw the woman, took pity on her, and said:

“Shouldn’t we offer her a lift.”

The innocence of our child was touching.

Hungary is south of the Czech Republic. In the late 1990s, we drove into it from Austria. For the first few kilometres of Hungarian territory, we saw no prostitutes, but numerous dental surgeries with signs both in Hungarian and German. Often the dental surgery was in a little compound that included a restaurant and a food shop. The presence of so many dentists offering their services so close to the border with Austria suggested that dentistry in Hungary was good value compared with that in Austria. And, while a member of an Austrian family is having his or her teeth repaired, the rest of the family could enjoy a good Hungarian meal and buy some tasty souvenirs to take back home.

Dental tourism is still popular in Hungary. English newspapers frequently contain adverts encouraging people to obtain supposedly cheaper dental treatment in Budapest.

The proximity of Bohemian prostitutes to the Czech border and Magyar dentists equally close the Hungarian border made me consider a possible uncomfortable comparison. I wondered whether people ever see some similarity between the two professions. I hoped not!