Bija Andrew Wright 11 January 2010 Stories and Appreciations 1,275 views One Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

In the month or so before I left for India, I updated my Facebook status as I went through the arrangements — visa, tickets, arranging hotels and trains, immunizations, etc. Some of my friends replied to these as if to say “bon voyage,” as if they assumed they’d communicate with me less than before. But I knew there would be no goodbye, no period of incommunicado longer than a plane ride. On the Internet, I didn’t go anywhere.

I packed my netbook, digital camera and iPod. I also made copies of my passport so that I could buy a mobile phone once I got to Delhi. From my hotel room, I made a video blog about my first night, then posted a birthday message to a couple of my friends. Once I got the phone, I updated my Facebook settings to send my updates and messages to it.

Of course, as the intensity of jet lag will attest, India is nearly an opposite time zone from most of my friends. I sent an email from the hotel before going out for sightseeing, then checked again after I got back and felt a little snubbed that no one responded. But then I thought: While I was having a full day of adventures, most of North America was sleeping. It felt to me like a miraculous return to the connected world, escaping the bazaars and traffic jams of India — only to find that nothing happened at home.

The Akshardham Temple is one of the newest and largest temples in India. It’s part of a complex of attractions I came to think of as Walt Hindu World. There are massive lines and security checks to get in, and all electronics must be checked at the door. At the time I was there, the temple itself was closed for maintenance. No mobile phone and no entry to the sanctum; I was forbidden to contact my friends or the gods. Instead, I had a kind of dream-like wander in the blazing Delhi sun, looking at the exterior of the temple and getting only a commemorative 8×10 photo.

The other attractions of the Akshardham complex were open, including exhibits that narrated the life of Swami Narayan through films and dioramas. Groups of visitors, alternating Hindi- and English-speaking, filtered through to watch animatronic mannequins act out scenes. Then there were displays about Swami Narayan’s ethical teachings.

Finally, there was a boat ride, an Indian-themed Tunnel of Love in which a speaker-system on each boat tells of the significance of each element of Indian history. Because I had no note-taking device with me, I have to rely on my memory to say what exactly I learned from the boat exhibit. If I recall correctly, it said that Indians discovered the Pythagorean Theorem before Pythagoras did, defined Newton’s Laws before Newton, invented the Murphy bed before Murphy, and invented cake mix before Betty Crocker. Or something like that.

One room of the temple’s ethics display encouraged vegetarianism, and featured pictures of cheery animals. Above a cutout of a duckling, there was a word balloon and the passage, “Mama, why do humans eat us? We don’t eat their babies!” My thought upon seeing it was, “David Wahl would think this was funny.” I told him the story on Facebook through a series of message blasts, in which the phrase “animatronic swami” amused him even more than the duck’s vehement denial of baby-eating. He then bought the rights to animatronicswami.com, with no idea what to do with it.

It struck me that I was experiencing a new kind of travel: connected escape. As I traveled, I never left the virtual space where I could be observed and contacted. My journey was an open book. It made me a little resentful of certain old friends on Facebook who had never uploaded self-pictures. I uploaded a picture of myself from a third-world country; is it so hard?

I want to describe it by coining the world “twacation,” but it turns out, that word’s already been coined by certain Twitter-addicts to describe a planned break from Twitter itself. I’d call that a “twabbatical” or “cold twurkey,” but I’m not the one who makes the words go. And my alternate coinages, “twavel” or “taking a twip” make me sound less like a tech-savvy insider and more like a toddler with a speech impediment.

The brevity of Facebook and Twitter makes for a condensed kind of travel writing, but the visual and interactive elements add richness to it. Travel writing brings out the wordsmith in all of us, the kind of writing described by “waxing,” effusive and boundless. But in 140 characters, you use shortcuts, and those can make for a fascinating puzzle. I sat next to a Muslim man on the train from Rajgir to Patna, and when I asked him his name, he told me it was Muhammad Ali. That allowed me to tweet, “Muhammad Ali bought peanuts and shared them with me. When I offered to pay, he said, no, you are my brother.”

However, the short space can lead to poorly chosen words. The day after the Krishna Festival in Mathura, I had a long wait between the hotel’s check-out time and the time my train left, and the museum was closed. So I set my status to reflect that I was bored. My friends and readers were amazed and mock-outraged, telling me I couldn’t be bored in India, that it was entirely against the rules. But travel brings out the range of emotion: A sixteen-hour train ride is boring, even if it’s going through exotic lands.

Having declared my boredom to Facebook, I took a cycle-rickshaw to the train station. I checked my train’s status at the inquiry booth. The station was more crowded than when I arrived, with people sleeping on the floor and a throng of people at the booth. One man at the front of the mob was clutching the steel bars above his head, as if desperately attempting to climb through. They shouted out at the attendant, who answered with a nonchalant point of a wooden wand. From the board behind him, I found my train had been canceled. I had tempted fate by saying I was bored.

An hour later, I had a ticket for unreserved class on a different train, and went by the platform to wait. Three beggar children saw me and swarmed around me. The boys had swirly moustaches grease-painted on their cheeks; two of them did a magic trick for me, and the other tried to entertain me with a Michael Jackson dance. At least, I think the intent was “Michael Jackson,” but the effect was more “humping my leg.” The train came, and I tried to work my way into the packed unreserved carriage, but the crowd inside regarded me with puzzlement. They waved me over to a reserved AC car, where the attendant was happy, for a small fee, to find me a seat.

I summed up my experience on Twitter: “In India, anyone can be famous for fifteen rupees.”

Sometimes virtual home just wasn’t enough. One morning, I realized I’d missed American breakfasts and that I wanted to start my day with coffee and donuts instead of porridge and chai. I found out that the Ramada Inn Varanasi was a short walk from my own cheap hotel, and they had a breakfast buffet. I piled my plate high with goodies, asked the barista for a cappuccino, and sat down to eat when my phone beeped an incoming text message. “Craig Symons has commented on your Facebook photo,” it read, referring to a picture I took along the way, “OMG Drew, you’ve lost weight!”

It gave my donuts an extra frosty layer of guilt. Which is okay, because that’s how I have them back home.

- Bija Andrew Wright

PHOTO BY RUSS BOWLING