TAPLOID
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Created and written by Laurent Sauerwein
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| SOUTH INDIA: A TRIP IN TWEETS |
| September 2009 |
I'm with my wife on a trip in South India, and about to start posting short BLURBS, written on the road, 140 characters at a time.  |
| We left Pondicherry at 9:30, destination Elephant Valley near Kodaikanal, up in the western hills of South India. 450km, 8-hour drive.
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| So, this is our South India trip in tweets - not your regular travelogue, or slide-show. Nothing to SEE in fact. Read on. Imagine.
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| Beyond the usual lapidary headline with a link, I try to open a STORY in every tiny tweet. 140 characters. Not more, sometimes less.
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| Traffic on Indian roads is quite original. They drive on the left, but ALSO on the right and in the center too. All coming toward you.
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| Small lone character sitting in the shade, at the foot of a large unfinished construction, overwhelmed by what's left to be done ABOVE.
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| UNFINISHED, many things are in India. To some it spells despair, to others it means room for hope. For all, it simply means work to be done.
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| COWS are sacred in India. They're everywhere and their horns are often painted. Red, green, blue or the colors of a political party.
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| The sacred cows of India belong to people. Bought and sold, they wander freely all day and find their way HOME in the evening.
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| Every small Indian town seems to have its SPICK AND SPAN College of Engineering or Universal Teacher Training Institute. Booming business.
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Miles of delicate FLOWERS border the
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| INDIA - She is walking fearlessly, feeling the wind of speeding trucks, with nothing on her feet and a bundle of dry wood on her head.
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| NEW concrete box-like house near Trichy, Tamil Nadu, South India. All in vivid colors: tacky orange, acid green and dark deep blue.
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| The highway ends many times, with a sign: DIVERSION. It's like a series. Bumpy roads make you long for the next episode.
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| The highway is a boon and a calamity, BOTH.
It cuts the landscape - and villages - in two. Walking accross is dangerous but frequent.
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| Villapuram, South India - He is sleeping, collapsed on a SANDPILE inside a filthy ruin, his arms thrown above his head. He could be dead.
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| HERDS of tiny light-footed black goats move 'en masse' over the fields and spill into the streets, like the shadow of a cloud.
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| Several large GRAY concrete skeletons of buildings alongside the road. "The students already paid, but the school isn't finished."
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| Schools are everywhere, girls with braids and ribbons, and boys in NEAT uniforms. Education is a priority in the world's largest democracy.
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| SIGN on the highway: "4 laning in progress". And suddenly it's crazy 4-way traffic. Watch out, a big red truck is coming straight at us!
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| Trucks are lorries. Gas is petrol. Stores are shops. The British were here once. They left WORDS, cricket and mixed memories.
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| வணக்கம் means WELCOME in Tamil. It is pronounced Vanakkam. The language dates back to 3000 BC (some say 5000 BC). It is spoken very fast.
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| ICON - He is barefoot, dark skinned, standing in the street with long black hair and just a white loin cloth, talking on his cell phone.
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| Tweeting on the Indian road. 140 CHARACTERS for how many miles? No, take your time. One character = one human being. Infinite equation.
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| Luscious green palmgroves, spicy idlis for breakfast, scarlet sari on dusty road. BEWARE of total immersion and seduction. Use your head.
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| In 10 years, 50 million farmers fled the countryside to become destitutes in city SLUMS. Agro-multinationals do not help (gross euphemism).
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| 150000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in the past 10 years, mostly after FALLING behind in payments to voracious local money lenders.
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| Carrying a load of WOOD on her head, a woman holds with difficulty her green, partly undone sari, baring the dark skin of her body.
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| Deep in the shade of a thick palm grove, a small glowing hut, a goat and a dog, both black. A woman throws wood into the FIRE.
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| We're not tourists. We LIVE part of the year in India, which means that we don't really tour. We simply live, work, and let it all sink in.
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| INDIA - 10 crammed into a speeding, noisy, HONKY-TONK, honking, 3-wheeled motorized rickshaw, made to carry only 4 plus the barefoot driver.
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| A man urinating, unabashedly projecting an ARCH of piss from the top of a small hill on the side of the road.
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| Piss and crap, and not just cow dung: HUMAN. With very rare public toilets, it's everywhere. India is not for the squeamish.
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| India is not for the faint-hearted. Delicate beauty and filth, extreme poverty and growth, social change and inertia: SPLENDOR and SQUALOR.
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| LUSCIOUS GREEN are the mountains and forests of the Western Ghats in South India, less affected by drought than the rest of the country.
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| Bad luck for a truck: PUNCTURED tire just before a curve on the mountain road. The driver is crouched, traffic-side, his life at stake.
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| At every twist and turn of the road, in the dark, deep, silent Shola forest of South India, a sign says "PLEASE HONK".
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| We didn't see any ELEPHANTS in Elephant Valley, but it doesn't mean that they are not somewhere around the posh mountain resort.
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| In Pumbarai, PERCHED in the mountains, a small temple to Murugan, brother of Ganesh, both gods. Hindus have millions of gods to choose from.
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| HIGH in the mountains of Tamil Nadu, Chinnabalu the farmer raises carrots, potatoes, beetroot, garlic and cabbage in his terraced fields.
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| Chitra, his wife, pushes long thin logs into the fire. Surrounded by family, she offers us TEA with a hauntingly beautiful smile.
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| We would never have met these gracious mountain people without our friend and able driver THARANI. He has known and loved them for years.
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| Thar's little cell coverage up in them South Indian hills. So I can't tweet from my iPhone Peripatetic Publishing Platform. Have to WAIT...
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| OPTICAL safety: stark black and white wobbly checkers painted on tree trunks lining both sides of the road to Koddaikanal, South India.
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| We looked for 'kurinji', a mountain plant which blooms every 12 YEARS. People pointed in various directions. No luck. Blooms next in 2018.
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| Difficult to find a plant on the Indian mountain side if you don't know what it LOOKS like. Out of cell coverage no checking on Wikipedia.
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| Couldn't find blooms-every-12-years 'kurinji'. Just as well: you'll have to IMAGINE it. Or check fathomless Wikipedia: http://bit.ly/m82nM
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| In Pumbarai, up in the mountains, there are NO DESKS in the classroom. Young students are taking a dictation with notebooks on the floor.
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| No rigid ROWS in small Tamil mountain village classrooms. Kids are scattered or in circles, but teaching methods are alas less creative.
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| Life on the FLOOR in India: to learn, but also cook, eat, sew, work, play, make love, sleep, dream, give birth, watch TV and die.
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| MONKEY running away with a full bottle of orange soda snatched from a distracted tourist. Will he know how to twist the top off?
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| Ah, for a cool glass of water. No, it's a metal cup in India. But that's GASTRICALLY unsafe. Ah, for a bottle of mineral water then.
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| In the VALLEY, mountains are close. In the PLAIN, mountains are far. Right now, we're in between. Can't think of a word for it.
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| Funny, as you drive DOWN the mountain roads, the temperature goes UP. Go figure.
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| Blazing hot and dry today, the vast Southern city of Madurai was born, they say, from the perfumed drops which fell from SHIVA's hair.
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| It's in Madurai that GANDHI announced that he would wear only KHADI, hand-woven cotton, until India had won its independance.
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| A Hollywood movie on HBO in our hotel room in Madurai, South India. The movie is in English, and so are the subtitles: teaching you to read.
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| Three 12 year-olds piled up on a WOBBLY bicycle, defying the odds of heavy traffic and bullying yellow trucks blasting ear-busting horns.
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| Polychrome statue of a Tamil public figure wearing dark glasses, looking at the passers-by in Madurai with HIDDEN eyes.
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| LOUDSPEAKERS, on Hindu temples and Muslim mosques blast music and calls to prayer. Apparently whispering doesn't work. My cultural bias.
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| Men and women WHISPER their wishes into the ears of a sacred stone cow in the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai.
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| The gently busy Meenakshi Temple has four soaring towers covered with thousands of colorful gods, many so high WE can't see them.
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| The 1000 Pillar Mandapam (hall) in the Meenakshi Temple is a quiet place. ONLY 985 pillars actually.
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| The huge Meenakshi Temple of Madurai has a gentle, FEMININE quality. Intense, casual, generous spirituality. Individual yet warmly shared.
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| KHADI, hand-woven cotton. Supreme elegance of simplicity and a highly symbolic reminder of Ghandi. Sold in State stores.
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| U won't find a lot of abbreviations in this modestly tweeted tale. Dont hav 2 uz em. And I actually enjoy the PAIN of doing without.
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| SWARMS of cycles, motor or pedal. Most bikers don't wear helmets, a few do, and some have one just plonked on the handle bar.
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| In Madurai, you see more HELMETS on motorbikes. If you are caught without: 100 rupees fine ($2). Second offense: $6, "except aged people".
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| Neat multicolored PYRAMIDS of piled-up motorcycle helmets for sale on the side of the road to and from Madurai. Thriving business.
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| Light bulb! <-- meaning brilliant idea. If someone invented ventilated helmets, it would save MANY LIVES in the tropical world.
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| On the rear window of a small Hyundai car, PICTURE of a life-size soccer ball shattering glass.
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| BUSINESS PLAN - 1 lakh down, borrow 2 (@ 1.5%). Buy Tata mini-truck. Carry wood, vegetables. Pay bank 4500 Rs/mo. Live on 5000 Rs ($103).
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Leaving Madurai. Chettinadu is our next destination. NO RUSH. Instead of touring frenzy and surface circuits, we try to travel in depth.
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| POPULATION of India: 1.4 billion. But you don't think of that when Sadhana, 2 years old, looks at you, smiling, straight in the eyes.
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| Women walking miles back to their villages, each with a heavy cardboard BOX on her head: a free TV set, courtesy of the Tamil government.
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| MORE Hindu temples, a few mosques and Christian churches. Today people walked behind colorful FLOATS representing Ganesh, the elephant god.
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| There's TRASH all along the road, at least in populated areas: everywhere except in the rice paddies and up in the Tamil mountain forests.
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| IDLI, a small cake of steamed fermented lentils and rice you dip in a couple of spicy sauces. Luckily idlis come in pairs. Breakfast bliss.
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| MIRAGE on the hot tar road to Karaikudi, where we might have lunch. 40° C out there, A/C and many bottles of water in the car.
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| A/C is not precisely eco-friendly, I'll grant you. But these long drives across South India would have been LIQUEFYING hell without it.
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| Relief: SMOOTH highway to Trichy, except some people don't seem to have grasped that it's 2 lanes one way, 2 lanes the other. Chaos lurks.
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| THE BANGALA is where we had lunch in Karaikudi. In a beautifully breezy dining room, served on a banana leaf, the best meal we had in India.
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| Flat countryside. Suddenly a big rocky mound, like a giant elephant's head. Night FALLS at 7 pm. Sweet early oriental dreams.
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| TWILIGHT glimpse in Indian town - Traffic stalled to let by a bus, a truck and an elephant, in that order.
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| We got back to Pondicherry at 11pm. Small shops still open, people busy under NEON lights, sleeping cows and mischievous wandering dogs.
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| A few more bumps on the earth road and we're safely back in our little home in Auroville, surrounded by the sleepy tropical forest.
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