As with my opinion piece on the UAE, I find myself starting this round-up of India with a big fat waiver. India is a vast country with an awful lot of people in it. Obvious as these statements sound, you really have to go there to understand them fully. Committed readers will already know that you can sit on a moving Indian train for over seventy hours and still not be at your destination. As such, read this post knowing that we’ve not travelled all of India. Nothing like it, in fact.

What I can tell you is that after spending a month and half here, I do feel somewhat qualified to give you my opinion on the place. The India that I have seen is a dog-eat-dog developing society. And it shows. There’s a lot of poverty here and also a lot of wealth. It appears that the majority of people look after themselves and their immediate family and that’s about it. You look after you and your own and to hell with everyone else. Think I’m being unfair and unkind? Possibly, but as a tourist touring the tourist strip it can sometimes appear that each day is just about not parting with every last Rupee in your wallet as the eager touts try to part you from them. Ripping off tourists is absolutely fair game here and we grew tired of the number of times an auto-rickshaw driver quoted a price of one hundred for a trip worth thirty. Bear in mind that thirty was still the inflated tourist price, the locals paid more like ten. (How do I know this? In Kolkata, Claire and I ventured into the suburbs where–judging by the stares we got–no tourist had ever ventured before. For a mile ride, the cycle-rickshaw driver was thrilled that he got the five Rupees that he requested, without bartering.)

People tell me that the government is corrupt and really couldn’t give a monkey’s about them. It seems that while laws and rules exist they are seldom enforced. Things are left to rack and ruin and it seems that scores of people needlessly suffer and die on an almost daily basis. Traffic flow is abysmal; people don’t care which side of the road they drive on, just so long as they get in front of the car ahead. I reckon that I’ve been driven the wrong way around a roundabout more times than the right way. The sound of car and auto-rickshaw horns fill the air and the interluding silences are rare and worth savouring.

I won’t forget the colour. The Indians are a colourful bunch and the women think nothing of wearing bright orange saris and, the men, day-glo yellow tied head scarves. Once past the touts and street sellers, the people were genuine, helpful and certainly very interested in us. On more than one occasion we found ourselves in rural locations where it was obvious that the locals had not seen many white people in the flesh. In Africa, this inevitably meant that we had our hair pulled, hands grabbed and made to hold babies. Over here we were encircled by a large group of silent men who would simply stare at us, completely straight-faced, watching our every movement with intrigue. We had to raise the first smile to break the cultural barrier which, once down, opened up some really memorable experiences. Like drinking chai tea in front of and audience of fifty men.

The transport, whilst mostly unclean, is frequent and reliable. The trains make crossing large areas of land possible whilst lying down. The auto-rickshaws make nipping into town and between the various tourist sights a speedy, if a little nerve-jangling, experience. The cycle rickshaws at least provide an income for the poorest folk and we tried to use them wherever possible — sometimes not realising how far apart things were! (In these cases, we tipped well.)

It’s time to mention the dirt, rubbish and smells. Don’t bring your Sunday best to India: my Mum gave me a white cotton shirt in Abu Dhabi. I feared that it might not look the same after a a month here. The whiteness didn’t even last two days and no amount of washing will ever restore it to its former glory. India has all the dust of Morocco with 1.8 billion peoples’-worth of rubbish thrown on top of it. And then they pee on it.

In parts, it’s really bad and difficult to get past this: we found ourselves bemoaning this more than anything. Once I saw a shopkeeper empty his rubbish bin onto the street, just a little to the left of his store front. Separately, our reasonably educated driver from our midrange hotel threw a plastic bottle out of the car window into the countryside. Upon seeing our shocked faces he attempted to calm us with, “don’t worry, in India there’s no fine for this”.

I read a newspaper article which stated that in 2005, over 50 million people in India did not enjoy the use of a private toilet and so would have likely defecated out in the open. Ignoring for a moment the difficulty in actually measuring such a statistic, let’s put that into perspective: the population of the UK is a touch under 61 million. Using my twisted logic that means–in absolute terms–that 5 out of 6 people in Britain would be pooing in the street. Add motor pollution, countless rats, completely “different” hygiene standards and you’re describing just about any Indian town or city. It’s a miracle that neither Squiffy nor I got sick — we are the only people we know that went to India for over a month and didn’t.

I want to write some more positive stuff here and it’s quite difficult. Seeing Jodhpur’s mountaintop fort and the city’s blue wash buildings reveal themselves at sunrise as monkeys swing between them is mesmerising. The Taj Mahal is stunning and a must-see. The Pushkar Camel Fair is biblical and I don’t expect to see anything stranger than a decorated camel in my lifetime. And that’s it for me. Rightly or wrongly, I just can’t get past the dog-eat-dog and the dirt. Shame.

And yet, having been only out of the country for a little over a week, reviewing the beautifully colourful photographs that I took, “rangss’s” insightful observation is already beginning to ring true:

“Don’t come to India because you will hate it and when you leave it, you will miss it.”