Jail Break

In prison Bablu, looked after me. He was in there for raping a Japanese girl. He told me they’d been together for 2 weeks, had a fight and she’d gone to the police shouting rape. All I know is his version of it, and that in prison you accept the version people tell you about themselves because that’s all there is.

He, his gang of mates, and his dad (in the next wing for murder over a property feud) kept me sane, clean, fed and more.

Bablu asked me for a Japanese dictionary so he can learn the language while he’s inside. He likes Japanese girls, and I figure not having a language barrier would help prevent any future “misunderstandings”. Ok it’s morally complicated, but apart from my rather lame justification, he helped me out when he could have written me off as a suicidal murderer, so the least I can do is give him a dictionary. It’s not like I’m supplying him with a box of Rohipnol. I asked my mum to pick one up in Istanbul and bring it because I couldn’t find anything here in India.

Yesterday I finally met Bablu’s mum and gave her the dictionary. A formidable woman who has forged herself a career in politics so she can look after her husband and son in prison, and her other son in long term traction after a car accident. She’s a broad, beautiful woman with a glare like a tiger set to pounce. It was the day Bablu was to be released from prison on parole for 21 days. The first time the 23 year old has been out in 4 years.

She puts on makeup, perfume and is dancing in the car on the way to Ajmer court. At the court there’s a hitch with the paperwork. “Andy, Come” she shoves me in the back of the car and we set off. An hour later we are still driving along the highway. We’re on our way to a village to get a signature from a guarantor. I’m the only one that seems concerned that we won’t make it back in time. The driver has his foot down, so when the truck in front unexpectedly switches into our lane its lucky he can skid enough speed out of the car that only the bonnet is crunched under the high truck chassis. Another 10mph and our heads would all have been separated from our torsos.

The truck continues oblivious to the impact at the back, but as soon as our driver has it together he accelerates round the truck and pulls it over blocking the 2 lane highway. In a second the 3 guys I’m with are out of the car, dragging the truck driver from his cab giving him a brutal beating in the process. I’m momentarily distracted from the pain of the violence by the fact that everyone is punching with open hand slaps rather than fists, but I’m impressed by how hard the slaps look, as hard as any punch.

As soon as I’ve snapped out of my interesting cultural observations about how seemingly calm natured Indians unleash such venomous anger, I wade in too, to protect the drive who is visibly petrified for his life, tears streaming as he gulps to breathe in through the shock. I get in between the mob and the driver, getting a few misdirected slaps myself.

“This guy almost killed us Andy, come.” I’m being wrenched to the left by the mum.

“OK, wait, he wasn’t trying to kill us, it was an accident” I get another accidental slap from the right.

Eventually it all calms down so they are talking to each other and the driver is only getting slapped every now and again. A cop turns up and everyone agrees to leave it there, perhaps motivated by the fact that no one has a driver’s license or insurance.

But even as a believer in non-violence, I have to concede that it’s a great system. No insurance forms to fill, no no-claims bonuses lost. You have a prang, beat the shit out of whoever is responsible for 10 minutes and then everyone climbs into their vehicles and forgets about it.

Five o’clock rolls around and we aren’t back at the court in time, not by a long way. I call Bablu to break the news. He’s livid. The next day is a bank holiday and then it’s a weekend, so it means he has to stay in prison another 4 days until Monday. I can hear all same the rage in his voice that I had when my bail hearing stretched over the weekend and I had to wait another 2 nights for the decision, but my 4 days inside don’t compare the 4 years he’s been waiting. If only the prison system worked as fast as the roadside justice.

Om or OMG!

In Delhi, I met a middle aged Italian lady that had been coming to India for 15 years. She was at pains to point out to me that she wasn’t a “Friketone”, an Italian word for crusty hippies that have been growing their hair and smoking charras in India since they arrived here in the 70’s. She clearly wasn’t but with her flowing colourful clothes, she was obviously a modern day Friketone eulogising about the power of Indiahhh. Our conversation coincided with me reading Karma Cola which is a fantastic critique of how East doesn’t meet West, and how neither really understands the philosophy of the other and left me really cynical about westerners enlightening experiences in India.

Pushkar is a Mecca for modern Friketoni, emerging in the morning from their lakeside hotels, gushing with the glow of delirious contentment that comes with being immersed in the Asias spirituality. Coincidentally it’s the same glow people have when they go on holiday to Benedorm or the Gambia, and don’t have to worry about the day to day chores of life, so I’m not convinced it’s the first touches of enlightenment. I mean sure, there’s a lot wrong with the west, and developing countries have an emphasis on community and social support which deserves to be celebrated, but do you have to wear stripy trousers to celebrate it. I haven’t seen any Indians with natty locks or dressed as circus clowns.

A lady my mum befriends Gloria, is a bonafide modern day Friketone, everything in Indiahhh is wonderful, awe-inspiring, glorious. Her bright turquoise silk blouse shimmering with sequins certainly is. She’s a vegetarian because the human body isn’t evolved to eat meat, believes that Jesus was a shaman that lived in India for most of his life, and that being here gives her a openness and freedom to connect with her spirituality. I think it has more to do with the fact the only thing she needs to do all day is order another mango lassi from the waiter.

Pushkar is a vegetarian town, which I don’t mind, but I’ve been dreaming about a T-bone steak for a few days now. I make the mistake of telling Gloria who gives me a lecture about sacred cows, Karma, and rebirth. Its a fundamental western misconception that Karma is about quid-pro-quo payback, although I first encountered the word on the cover of my mums hidden Karma Sutra where, eyes bulging, I learnt about 69ers, so I can sympathise with the you-scratch-my-back-i’ll-scratch-yours confusion.

Here’s my enlightened interpretation of Karma. Karma is the sin of getting sucked into trying to enjoy life, because fundamentally life is shit, and you should try to get through it as painlessly as possible. Just endure it, and when you die you might be lucky and get released from having to be reborn. Ironic then that eastern philosophy appeals to westerners precisely because they want to be reborn and immortalised in rebirth, life is pretty good in the west. Karma is actually about not succumbing to the vanity or the pleasures life can offer because it’s pointless and just puts you a step back from the release.

I’ve noticed Indians don’t smile much. Yet they are happy. Its trite to say that Indians are poor but happy, while westerners are rich and miserable. I don’t have the stripy trousers to pull that hippy crap off convincingly. But there is a contentment which I thinks comes from this idea that life is to be endured, rather than the western idea that life should be conquered. Not being goal driven or striving to achieve, with all the successes and failures that brings, is wonderfully liberating. Just imagine it for a minute.

I watched a young rural girl, maybe 14 years old spinning a wheel on the bellows for her blacksmith farther. All day she’ll spin it, for days, weeks, months, probably years. She will spin that wheel til she gets married off. I stare into her dark eyes transfixed and confused trying to understand what ambitions she has, what she hopes for her future and what she is doing to shape them into a reality. Maybe she chooses her favourite sari when she knows she will see the boy she hopes will marry her? Maybe she day dreams about studying to be a neuro surgeon. Maybe she’s been so conditions not expect anything from life she doesn’t have any ambitions. I don’t know. But I struggled to imagine how anyone cannot have ambitions and dreams and want to do something to make them happen.

Then prison made me realise that perhaps it’s possible. First I realised I am petrified of routine. The idea that I’d have to spend weeks fruitlessly doing the same thing day in day out makes me physically dizzy and tremble. Seriously, I have shock like symptoms when I think about it. Routine is the enemy of ambition. I can see now that this phobia has impacted on my personal and professional life too over the years. Where I’ve reproached others for being staid and homely, I can now see that I was the oddball. But the thing that really threw me was that the prison was full of people who could accept that routine. Maybe through conditioning of Indian society, or maybe by their time already spent inside, they lived a mellow existence governed by routine and repetition, devoid of any weighty ambition, other than waiting for the moment of their release.

Even when I was paragliding around Pune, the first few days were frustrating because I couldn’t catch the lift everyone else was getting, then I caught it and flew for 3 hours. Amazing. But now I’ve flown that site, I don’t see the attraction of going back there. I don’t know it can give me much more as an experience or as a classroom. To go back would be to return to the routine. Next site please.

The result is that I am always throwing myself into new, unfamiliar situations. And unfamiliar situations are hard. They inevitably result in mistakes and the hassle that goes with correcting those mistakes. But I’d rather that hassle than the horrific prospect of routine.

I’m loathed to admit it, but despite my best efforts, I’ve had an enlightening experience in India, not in an Ashram, or under the fug of Bang, but on wing 15 of Ajmer Prison. I even have a mantra I learnt there; “Shanti. No stress.” I’m a frigging Friketone!

What to do, what to do?

“Andy Pag, Eco Hero”, “Eco Warrior”, “Environmental campaigner”. Even “Activist” no less! No wonder my friends can’t stop taking the piss. They know none of this is true. I’ve been a petrol head since I was 21. I love cars, bikes, trucks, anything that propels itself. Planes, oh my god, planes. Don’t get me started on planes. I’m in total awe at a machine that can lift off the ground and go anywhere it wants. Microligths, paragliders, jet fighters, helicopters. The sight of a 747 roaring off the tarmac into the air, oh wow, look at it, so big and free.

The sad thing is that most things that propel themselves run on fossil fuel, so it’s hard to love the machine without loving the juice they run on. We’ve been digging the stuff out of the ground, burning it and letting whatever’s left float into the atmosphere for the best part of 70 years now. That’s a fact. Rising levels of CO2 in the air are a fact, Greenhouse gas inducing climate change is a fact. People argue about how fast it’s happening and how significant it will be, but regardless, it’s a fact,

I’m not particularly happy about it, but what I’ve read, and what I’ve learnt, makes me think it’s a pretty serious threat. Not everyone agrees, fine. I’ve been wrong about other things and I might well be wrong about this. But I don’t want to be the one that’s to blame if it does go pear shape. I want to do something to help, not so I can say that I’m the one that saved the world, but so no one can point at me as say you’re the one that destroyed it.

So what can I do about it? It’s pretty hard to be carbon neutral, unless you sit in a cold dark room, without eating or breathing. And actually, as individuals, we don’t need to be carbon neutral. We can emit some carbon, as long as it’s no more than the planet can recycle. Scientists can work out what the sustainable level is pretty accurately. It’s not a lot though, and it requires changing the way we do things, and the unpalatable conclusion I’ve come to is that we have to give up a lot of things, particularly consumption of energy and raw materials. (And that needs global relationships with more social justice, but that’s another rant for another day)

I’m doing this trip around the world, primarily because I want to drive around the world. I want to discover the countries and places along the way for myself. But there is an obvious hypocrisy of contributing to climate change while trying to understand how the world works. Not everyone sees it like that, fine, but I do and this is my journey. So that’s why I’m trying to run the bus on waste based fuels all the way. It’s not a perfect solution, there are things about the way I’m doing it that don’t add up, but there are some things I’m doing that really make sense and work well, and that I’m immensely proud of.

I don’t want to give up now, not because I think my journey is of worthy global importance, but because I’ve put this much work into it so far, I’ve come this far and I now more than ever, I really believe it can be done. I don’t want to see that hard graft destroyed without good reason, and I really want to get back to London and be the guy that drove around the world on chip fat. Pride, pure and simple.

The hardest part is dealing with intransigent people who put up barriers, which most of the time have no relevance. Well I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this phone business. The longer it goes on for, the longer it looks like it will go on for, and it’s all pointless. The police know it, the newspapers here know it, I know it, so in the words of one of the regulars from Radio4’s Down the Line, “What is point?” really? Other than to save the embarrassment of a few police officers that screwed up, (again)? Hey we all screw up. Admit your men screwed up SP Tak, and everyone else admit that it’s OK they screwed up. They're only human doing a tough job in an uncertain world. We all make mistakes, what sets us apart is the integrity of how we deal with them. I only have 2 weeks left on my visa and have to be back in Pushkar right slap in the middle of the 2 weeks, so really I can’t do anything or go anywhere. I‘ve taken the bus to Mumbai to get some fuel from a biodiesel sponsor, Royal Energy, who filled my tank for me, but it was a long way in the wrong direction and the only way to get down there and back for this pointless hearing on the 10^th was to fly back.

Thanks to this arrest, I've lost a lot of money, squandered a lot of time, and now I've even lost any chance of hitting the 2 tonne target. Great.

So this weekend I head to Delhi in the hope of being able to get a 3 month visa extension. I’m not optimistic, but having been impressed by the Mumbai mindset maybe I am about to be impressed by Delhi’s.

Exit Rajasthan

I’ve been writing blogs about the trial and investigation but already having seen the benefit once of self censorship of others on this trip (see Iranian posts), I’ll follow their lead and post them when this is all over. In the meantime some banal observations:

I hit the road thinking I’ve fixed a fuel leak that has dribbled oil over the hotel car park and at my first stop realise the leak is bigger than ever. I find the split hose and replace it. Feels good to be back on the road and back on top of the problems the bus throws at me with unerring regularity. Covered in black wax where the vegetable oil has disolved the rubber tubing I join the Sunday truck drivers at a pool by a cafe, strip down to my pants and wash in the cutting heat of the sun along side them.

The road conditions improves steadily until I am on the Express Way. It’s a like a motorway but another perfect example of Glorious Maharajah Class (see previous post). I manage to avoid hitting anything for over 1000km and arrive in Mumbai, and make straight for Juhu beach. I have all sorts of images how this beach will be and the feel of the water on my body. Of course, it’s a city beach in an over populated town. The water feels like hepatitis.

The next day I stroll to the top of the beach, spying a quaint fishing shanty town. Fishing villages are only quaint from a distance. The world over, when you get close they are smelly and dirty. The villagers take a shit in the tidal flat of the beach, digging a hole in the sand while they curl them out, to reach water to clean themselves. It’s a great technique, and I stare in studiously at the 10 or so bare arses taking a morning constitutional to make sure I haven’t missed any nuance of the methodology.

Mumbai is a peninsular town. In that sense it’s like Dahkla (Western Sahara/Morocco) and Nouhdaibou (Mauritania) on the west coast of Africa. You have to have a reason to go to a peninsular town, they’re not a place you stumble across on your way to somewhere else. Dahkla has two river valleys to cross as you drive out to the peninsular road which are stunning, and made even more beautiful by the fact that the nearest town is so far away, that by the time you get to them it’s always around sunset, so the moonscape shapes of the rocks glow orange in the refracted setting sun light.

Nouhadibou used to be a compulsory stop on the journey through West Africa, as that was where passport control was on this bottle neck section of the route, a good 50km off road in the wrong direction down a cul-de-sac peninsular. I got to know it well in the days when it was a lost outpost with indecipherable attitudes, and loved it for no other reason than I understood it, and could function there when so many other Europeans couldn’t. After the first few journeys I got a sense of how it worked, and felt like a king each time I arrived there. Momo and Ali, friends there, would help me sell my smuggled whiskey to the Korean trawler men, and fix up any problems with whatever crappy car I had. Then we’d head to Manguette’s restaurant in the Senegalese fisherman’s village for Djebu Djen (Senegalese fish and rice). The smell of decomposing fish guts in the gaps between the corrugated shacks wasn’t enough to keep us away from the best lunch in all of West Africa. One year Manguette had died, another year the fisherman’s shanty town has been cleared, and now there’s a new passport control checkpoint at the border and a tarmac road to Nouakchott which means there is no reason to go to Nouahdibou anymore, other than to reminisce with Momo and Ali about the bad old days.

I’m learning how things work in India, and starting to feel like I know how to function here, but it’s been a baptism of fire and I’m a long way from being on top of the system, or even wanting to be. There is definitely two Indias, symbolically represented in my mind by Delhi, home of the state, and Mumbai, home of enterprise. I hate big cities, but I really like the energy of Mumbai. People here get on and do it. Whereas in the north, cumbersome self inflicted bureaucracy paralyses people into inaction. We try to get a SIM card for my Mum in Johdpur, but no one wants to do it because they aren’t quite sure what documents they should photocopy, and are scared that something is wrong and it comes back to haunt them. It’s easier for them to just say no. This is a great example for THE reason India is holding itself back economically, politically, socially and in so many other ways. The procedure is given more importance than life’s needs which gave birth to the procedure in the first place. Everyday I’m thwarted by the intransigence of people scared to do something which is out of their ordinary.

I don’t know why it should be. Maybe it’s the fear of the accusation of corruption or incompetence? Maybe a lack of trust put in subordinates? Or perhaps it’s the thought that the state can take it all away from you in a minute? Maybe it’s just bad managers within organisations? Whatever it is, it’s easy to criticise as an outsider, but harder to offer solutions. A friend on facebook reminds me it’s a bureaucracy that manages a population of 1billion people and in that context it works pretty well. It’s a fair point but that’s Delhi thinking. Mumbai thinking would look for a solution.