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It’s hard to say when my deep love for India first began, or how. After spending a substantial part of my adult life in that country, I can hardly remember what it was like before I first went, before I knew that of all the countries in the world, India and the myriad experiences I would have there would touch me in such tangible ways.
But I can try. If I had to pinpoint exactly when I fell for this giant of a civilization, I can think of exactly two situations; situations whose accompanying emotions remain fresh in my mind.
The first was when a school project at 13 saw me venturing off the beaten path of Little India’s main thoroughfare, and into the arterial lanes attached to Serangoon Road. It was so real, so honest, so full of life — that I kept returning week after week, in my school uniform, to wander these streets, and to talk to everybody I met. I have never really stopped that practice. From the fraud that is the parrot astrologer woman outside Komalas Vilas, to the Dravidian supremacist language teacher who tried to teach me all I had to know about love and sex from the Thirukkural, to the lovely Pakistanis and North Indians I now call my friends at Usman in Desker Road, Little India was the first place I had ever been to in Singapore that felt decidedly not like Singapore.
The second was when the usually boring programs on Discovery Travel and Living featured a lone female travel host entering a typical Tamil vegetarian breakfast joint in Coimbatore, one not terribly unlike what I usually have breakfast at in Little India, and she was regarded with such fascination that an entire crowd of men followed her around. She didn’t really care for the attention, but was not perturbed by it either; instead she carried on eating (with her hands), her dosa and idli. I’d known by then that I wanted to be someone like her — unflappable and adventurous in a completely foreign place — but seeing her do it on TV made me realise it can be done, that indeed, I shall.
10 years later, I was indeed in such a place. In Coimbatore, at that. Just a few days before I had started a journey — not just any journey — but the most incredible motor rally I had ever heard of, and driven an autorickshaw from Chennai as a participant of the Rickshaw Challenge. And here I was too, eating paratha and dosa with my hands in a place as far from Shenton Way as it could be, just as I’d dreamed of, years before. And it was one of the best parathas I’d ever had.
“How do you know where to eat, what to eat, and how do you find such awesome places.. in places far removed from where you came from? There’s no guidebook for that,” I’m often told. “And why would you want to go to a place like that?”
Off the map, off the grid, off the Google results — it’s those places with no good guidebook, or any at all, that make me want to be there. They reinforce your sense of detachment, of being foreign, of the existence of something bigger: of a culture and a city waiting to be discovered, without your prior conceptions in the way. Although I’d been to South India many times, and to India an even greater number of times, I’d never been to smaller Coimbatore, Chidambaram, or any of the smaller cities and towns or villages with no names. Yet each and every time my senses never failed me, and this time was no different. Whether it was Coimbatore, or Chennai, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Kottayam, Hyderabad or Bangalore, I enjoyed the uniqueness of each city and their superb cuisines. I had the best parathas ever at Subu Mess in Coimbatore; queued up for 20 minutes to enter a hole-in-the-wall shack in Puthur village, 15 km outside Chidamabaram (which had the most awesome Tamil seafood I’d ever had); in Tuticorin, I discovered the locals had an Indianized version of the French macaron with cashewnuts; in Kottayam, scared and delighted my hosts by eating a whole spicy fish at every single meal, more than the fish-eating locals would; and finally in Bangalore, chased down the dosa of my dreams at Central Tiffin Room in Malleswaram.
Few of these experiences are in guidebooks, yet they’re from the best and most accessible information that few travellers bother to use — and free too. Just ask a local. Then follow your nose.. That I’ve brought with me from Barcelona to Bangalore, Taipei to Thiruvananthapuram. I’m curious about what people do in their hometowns; how they live, how they spend their time, how they drink tea, whether they prefer coffee, where’s the best biryani or beer in Hyderbad or in Berlin, what they think about the world. The rest of the stuff: best places to eat, secret local spots, and where to get the best deals — are just what happens next.
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