teenager giving moneywell dressed man in park

Teenager giving moneywell dressed man in park windows#

The barefoot holy men, the elephant god shrines bedecked with wreaths of flowers.

The women's long, black hair and gilt-edged saris in deep blues and pinks and reds. The smells: cardamom and incense and rubbish and diesel and jasmine and urine and woodsmoke a stream of olfactory commentary about every street you traverse. Technology and rising wealth have brought change since then, and yet so much is as it was. Twenty years ago India was, for me, like being dropped on another planet. Many channels have singing and massed choreography there are ads for home loans and mobile phones and face cream. Twenty years ago I stayed in $1-a-night dormitories this time hotel rooms with televisions offer me another window into India. I see slums with rows of satellite dishes on collapsing roofs. I see Indian labourers with one hand balancing a bucket of bricks on their head, the other hand holding a mobile phone to their ear. In this 10-day trip, I use Skype, Facebook, Twitter, email, text and mobile phone calls to communicate with home, and within India. Twenty years ago I travelled alone around India for six months, and I collected mail in three places. Out the windows, small Hindu shrines flash past, with rubbish and mountains and a train station where people carry suitcases on their heads, no hands. They see barefoot kids who snatch empty plastic bottles to recycle, and the young couple opposite me, well-dressed Indians from Mumbai, who wave at the computer.

For them, their iPad blinks up with the interior of an Indian train carriage, and my boys see men in white kurta pyjamas asleep on bench seats, and chai wallahs passing up the aisle, followed by men selling ice-cream and omelets and idli. The screen flickers and lights up to show my husband and two sons, in our Melbourne home, casually bare-chested before a wall of books.

Teenager giving moneywell dressed man in park windows#

I'M on a train to Mumbai, warm wind rushing through open windows as nearby passengers lean over to watch my laptop. Hectic scenes of beauty and chaos intertwine in the Indian city of Mumbai.