Made-up Indian joke #2

"Waiter, waiter, why has this sweet bread put me in a daze?"
"You must be having kulcha shock, sir."


DO YOU SEE.

Signs I have seen #192

"The food was delicious, but the presentation was poor."

Made-up Indian joke #1

Here's the first in a daily series of genuinely groan-worthy gags I've been "working on". I hope you're ready. At this rate, I reckon I could get a high-paid job as a cracker joke writer. I don't think they have crackers in the Subcontinent, so I may just jump off a cliff instead. Anyway, here you go.

Q: What was the name of the Hindu god's Star Wars-related one-man show?
A: Hanuman Solo.

India part 16: Navsari

In summary, Navsari was all amazing hospitality, children's birthday parties, weddings, and strange beaches that your feet sank into. The Mahatma, who trod some of these beaches during his salt march, probably had more important things on his mind than weird sand.

And it wasn't a very Christmassy Boxing Day, but it was a very Indian Boxing Day.

India part 15: Mumbai

The good thing about flying, apart from the substantial carbon emissions of course, was that it gave us the chance to meet a very strange man on the way. He was American, a Vietnam veteran who seemed to be having flashbacks while he regaled us with self-regarding stories and told us about his battle with cancer. He worked for General Motors and, it seemed, had been on more flights than we'd had hot curries.

Despite getting the Chennai-Mumbai hurdle out the way, we still had to sort out the train to Navsari in Gujurat, because we were planning on spending the festive season with our friend Rakesh and his family. This meant a few more early starts spent hunting for internet cafes. On the plus side, it also meant I got some fine early-morning photos of pigeons hanging out next to the Gateway to India, which lay just a few blocks from our hotel.

The place we were staying had the most genial manager of all time. It was almost painful how genial he was. He also loved to use your name and did so as frequently as possible. When Sarah complimented the Indian railways: "Thank you for saying that, Sarah, because some tourists say they are dirty, Sarah." The other great thing about the our hotel was its proximity to my favourite restaurant in Mumbai, the brilliantly-named Food Inn.

Visiting here gave me the perfect excuse to tell Sarah the joke I made up about the place eight years ago, though she'd heard it many times before.

Q: What does the sign above the toilets in the Food Inn say?
A: 'Food out.'

HAHA. On our last day in the city, as is tradition, we appeared in "a Bollywood movie". The Bollywood movie in this case was actually an Aids awareness advert for Unicef. Normally I don't like to talk about my work for charidee, but since I feature so prominently at 0.25 (one of the hands), 0.27 (the only one wearing a stupid stripey shirt), 0.28 (standing behind the Nigerian "I know" girl) and 0.34 (running a stall), I thought I'd better own up before I start getting recognised in the street.







I spent the wages I most certainly didn't receive what with being on a tourist visa and all that on a few books. Here's what I bought.

Just kidding.

India part 14: Chennai

"Beach is Marina Beach, M-A-R-I-N-A," the guide told us, as the tour bus made its way through Chennai. "Is biggest beach in the world, is number two ranking," he added confusingly. The man had more than one odd habit when doing his voiceovers, despite appearing normal in casual conversation (we also spoke informally about cricket, of course). He peppered his utterances with the word "sir", even when addressing a large group of both sexes: "On the left is old secretariat, sir..." And he'd pause in odd places, like a teacher who wants the class to chant the answer: "Secretariat is now using for the purpose of..." Pause, then firmly and clearly: "Library. Is now using for the purpose of library."

The tour stopped at this rather wondrous thing, which shall remain nameless because, um, I've forgotten its name.

And we dropped by the bustling Kapaleeshwarar Temple to leer at some more gopuras.

We also met a man from Mumbai with the most extraordinary toupee - the hair at the back was barely even touching his scalp - and a younger gentleman from North India who was very quiet and who wore a Bluetooth headset over his right ear for the five-hour duration, without receiving a single call. At his request, we both had our pictures taken with him.

We arrived at Marina Beach as the sun was setting, and strolling along, he promised to show us "something beautiful" and marched us across the sand. I wasn't holding out much hope; his claim was belied by the guidebook's description of the beach: "Its location just a little downstream from the port which belches out waste and smelly fumes, combined with its function as the toilet of the fishing community detracts somewhat from its natural beauty."

We walked anyway for at least 15 minutes, but the scenery remained similar and unremarkable: happy families frolicking, nagging beach urchin children each with their own monkey, a consistent trail of rubbish, and so on. We eventually got out of him that he was taking us to a fish market, but we couldn't really see it, even in the distance, though he insisted we were nearly there. I was worried the coach would leave without us, and then more worried when it crossed my mind that he was probably the kind of quiet guy who always minded his own business, kept himself to himself, and then turns out to be a serial killer, and furthermore that the pictures he'd taken of us would end up in some macabre basement collection. In his favour, however, he did seem genuinely surprised when we pointed out there was only 10 minutes left to return to the bus. As we hurried back, I saw a woman on the sand weeping into her hands, while the man she was with tried to comfort her, muttering under his breath.

Mad Men's Peggy Olson spotted in India

Below: a photo of a photo I spotted at the Viceregal Lodge in Shimla, where many of the discussions about Indian independence took place. What's remarkable about it is that it appears to show India's first Prime Minister, Jawarharlal Nehru (in office between 1947 and 1964), absolutely cracking up at a joke made by none other than... Mad Men's Peggy Olson! A new direction for season five, perhaps?

India part 13: Mamallapuram

Back in 2003, I made up a terrible joke about this place, despite not even paying it the courtesy of a visit. It went something like: Idiot 1: "Excuse me, which member of your family will be doling out our drinks?" Idiot 2: "Mamallapuram." If the captive audience weren't utterly incapacitated by laughter at that, Idiot 1 would then add (referencing a slightly more obscure Indian town): "Yes, but Kanchipuram?" I had a lot of spare time in 2003. Of course, now it's officially called Mahabalipuram, which renders this joke as arcane as this paragraph is pointless.

Our arrival at the fabled place was amusing, since the state bus we were riding on didn't appear to stop there - so they dropped us and our backpacks off at the side of the road on the highway. Luckily it wasn't too far, and it felt cool strutting into town like we'd walked all the walk from Pondicherry.

But on to more important matters. If you wanted to start a mobile ironing business, you'd want to use the coolest, edgiest font possible, right?

The main reason to visit Mamallapuram - apart from getting your ironing done by a hipster - is the Shore Temple, which is sadly not in a great state, thanks to wind and sand and sea erosion. Here it is.

Much better are the Panch Rathas, named after the famous Ramones song 'Sheena is a Panch Ratha'. We visited on a Saturday, so the place was filled with Indian tourists posing in front of the monuments in increasingly hilarious ways. Here are a rare couple of pictures which doesn't feature any of them, for better or worse.

Which is best? The elephant on the Arjuna's Penance carving (c.600-700 AD), or a reclining Ganesha from Mamallapuram's Le Yogi restaurant (c. probably about 2005 AD)? There's only one way to find out...

Mmmm, my most memorable moment in Mamallapuram was hiring bicycles and cycling along the Kovalam Road towards Chennai, where you can see (and hear) the stone-workers chipping and shaving their sculptures by the side of the road. After nearly giving up about 10 times, we eventually reached the Tiger Cave, where there were some more Indian tourists pulling wacky poses. But you don't want to see the Tiger Cave - it looks more like a dragon, anyway. Here's a Shivalingam and Shiva's vehicle, Nandi, the bull, instead.

But it wasn't all frolicking about on bikes gazing in wonder at temples. Says my diary:

Imagine getting up early and exhausted to book Glastonbury tickets, but finding all the internet cafes in town are closed, then there being a power-cut just as they open, and then treading in a cowpat. Oh, and now imagine the reward for all this perseverance isn't actually to get to go to Glastonbury, but instead getting a ticket for a 25-hour train journey. WELCOME TO MY WORLD.

We never did get the tickets I was after; it was nearly Christmas, and the waiting lists were so huge, even the usual Tatkal option (an emergency quota of tickets held back and released at 9am two days before the travel date) was out of the question. We ended up having to shell out to get a plane from Chennai (our next destination) to Mumbai anyway. This saved us a day of travel, but made rather a nonsense of the Rs250-a-night hotel room (approx GBP 3.50) we stayed in when we arrived in Tamil Nadu's capital. Budgeting in India is quite a mindfrog: you can easily find yourself spending twice as much on a meal as you do on a night's accommodation, if you're hungry but don't care about sleeping on old sheets.

India part 12: Pondicherry and Auroville

After a lurching four-hour bus journey from Ooty, during which I saw a hotel called "Hotel Cheap and Best" - say what you mean, guys! - we stopped in Coimbatore for some food in a disastrous restaurant where they didn't have any steamed rice (only egg fried rice - in India!), Sarah was accidentally served a meat dish (some of which she unknowingly ate) and the air conditioning was so freezing, I was worried we'd wake up in the year 2195 with only Michael Jackson and Walt Disney for company. The waiter actually asked for a tip at the end. "Not this time, I'm afraid," I chortled.

The food wasn't all that bad, though, and once that business was over with, we hopped on a local bus for about half an hour to get to an obscure railway station nearby called Podanur Junction. You really prove yourself as a Proper Traveller taking local buses in India: the best technique for locating your ride is to stomp around the bus stand ignoring the stench of piss and repeating the name of your destination with a rising inflection to as many people as possible until you're so sick of the sound of the place you're trying to get to you want to give up and go home. And if one of the people you ask happens to be a drunk or a simpleton, you just have to make sure you ask enough sober or sane-looking people to redress the balance. Often the temptation is to give up and get an autorickshaw instead - but if you succeed on finding the right bus, you're rewarded by incredibly cheap fares, half a buttock's seat room, and long, meandering conversations with the locals. On this one, Sarah met a sweet young guy who worked in a clothing factory and dreamed of becoming an Oscar-winning film director. Awww.

Referring to my diary, it seems I wrote nary a thing about Pondicherry and Auroville, but I remember eating lots of quite pricey food and enjoying walks along la tres belle promenade (the town is a former French colony) while small children tried to get Sarah to buy purses. I also had a couple of conversations in very bad French with two old locals, one of whom called me a liar when I told him I didn't speak the language and then dropped in an au revoir at the end (bit harsh, non?). The other guy was blind and told me a story about "la guerre" which I didn't understand.

Ah, yes, and how could I forget this? We saw a Mollywood film star! Mollywood - not to be confused with US journalist Molly Wood - is what they call films in Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala. Fact fans, prepare yourself for a treat: Malayalam is also the only language named with a palindrome. I once tried to explain this incredibly interesting titbit to a friend and clearly didn't do a very good job, because they initially thought I meant every word in the language was a palindrome. This is most certainly not the case, and would be utterly barmy. Anyway, here he is: Mammooty!

And this is him on Wikipedia, if you don't believe. Arguably just as cool was this guy:

And this guy:

We also dropped by the utopian town of Auroville, which is best known as "the place with the giant gold golf ball", no disrespect intended. [Subs, please copy-paste some paras about Auroville from Wikipedia, thnx.]

Equally remarkable for me was this amazingly green moss. Probably just an alien lifeform plotting to take over the Earth, though.

Then we were, in the words of Jay-Z featuring Swizz Beatz, on to the next one, heading to the local bus stand to try our luck again, and making sure we didn't drop any crisp packets on the way out, because this rather fatalistic sign was already very angry at us.

India part 11d: Ooty finale

Not sure why I have so much to say about Ooty, but there you go. We finished up with a day trek up into the tea plantations, with a guide who also had some beef with the Lonely Planet, although this time, it was more to do with vanity - I think they'd just omitted to mention him by name in the latest edition. Still, a nice fellow. We were promised scenery which "looked like the English countryside" and actually, that turned out to be not such an outrageous claim.

But things quickly changed to this:

and this:

For several kilometres of the hike, we were followed by four friendly dogs. "They are here to protect foreigners," said the guide, although the huge quantities of bisuits he fed them might also have been an incentive. Here's one of them admiring the view from the top, which would probably have been stupendous had it not been for thick, thick clouds obscuring absolutely everything.

And, to conclude, I am legally obliged to post the following picture as a kind of obligatory offering to the internet godz.