I Want My Money Back
13 Aug
Seems like each time I go to India, I don’t get my money’s worth. I mean, the Western media constantly sells us the idea that if you go to India you’ll find yourself, failing which, at least some semblance of peace after the requisite soul searching. Well, Hollywood, I want my money back. Each time I go to India, the only people who seem to get any soul searching done are my girls back home, without having to spend any time, money, or effort to come all the way to India, join an ashram, or talk to Standing Babas.
How does Hollywood expect us to find ourselves, when we’re so busy out here? I’m too busy trying to keep my life in the mad traffic, staying out of the trajectory of yet another fast-spinning neighbourhood/backlane cricket player, holding on to rickshaws that go against traffic and almost defy gravity, and staying out of the shitting distance of the thousands of holy cows. I don’t have time to find myself, or anything luxurious like that. Or maybe I need to pay the Oshos and the Hare Krishnas to find it for me.
Anatomy of an Indian heartbreak: in my vast experience, goes something like this – a sucession of awkward 600 rupee calls, an awkward presence at the airport gate, an awkward drive from Changi to Clementi, and the awkward silence that is the first night home in my bed without the person I’d waited a month to see, not tonight or ever again.
Darjeeling, Agra, Goa, Meghalaya – each of these places contain pieces of my heart. I think I need to see a shrink, and the first thing I’ll say to her is: nobody ever leaves me because I’m always the heartbreaker – but it’s only when I go to India, karma gets back at me. And of course I just had to round up my trip and misery by ending in Bangkok, where you and I found each other in Sukhumvit.
750 rupees for the Taj Mahal, and 700 rupees for that phonecall, so I guess we’re even now, and 18 months is dead in just an hour but you know I had to save myself for “release”:http://popagandhi.com/6/release/. As though the weather agreed with me, it began to pour outside the moment I stopped crying, though that didn’t do any good because all I thought was of you and Palolem.
