My final India blog of 2025
Concluding my seventeenth visit to India, I hope my blogs will impart to my blog readers my interest in this fascinating country. In fact, Susan and I are even thinking of traveling there again in March of 2026. Stay tuned for more blogs! I’m at home in Reno as I write this final blog about our recent five-week visit to India. There’s no place like home. Nonetheless, as we have rain and potential snow in Reno, I miss India’s pleasant warm weather at this time of year. (Some months are too hot!) I miss the fresh tree-ripened fruits in India. Yes, we have bananas, grapes, and oranges, which are all quite good. It just seems like they taste better in India, since they came straight from the farmers. (This perception applies to German beer as well. Drinking German beer in another country, it never seems as good as when it is consumed in Germany.) One feels quite safe in India. Many years ago, I encountered a gang of pickpockets who, as a group, would create a melee of activity when boarding the train. As they surrounded passengers in the chaos, they would try to grab any loose purses or wallets. But there is a minimum of violent crimes, at least in my personal experience visiting India seventeen times. Meanwhile, what was going on in the world at large while I was in India? In the aftermath of the recent India-Pakistan military conflict, there was a suicide bombing in North India. “2500 Kilos” of explosives were discovered in the home of a Muslim Indian doctor with contacts in Pakistan. So the threat of an all-out military exchange between Pakistan and India is conceivable, including nuclear bomb exchanges. Both nations have armed themselves highly. An Indo-Pak war would be mutual suicide. Meanwhile, at home our commander-in-chief is bombing fishing boats while threatening Venezuela and Liberia with invasion. The shutdown? “Who cares?” Thus my cutback on news consumption has made my time in India feel like a real vacation. But my final two weeks were busy with bookings and recording. Susan and I had such a good time that we hope to come again this coming March (this is soon, considering that we cannot visit in Fall of 2026 due to having booked a Longitudinal World Cruise). As long as one can ignore the bad events in the world, vacations and adventure traveling present an expanded universe of cultures and places. Except for the NPR hourly summaries, my time in India was a vacation from the stream of international and local news that I consume all day long at home. One link to home in Reno has been our NPR radio stations KUNR & KNCJ. We typically listened over breakfast in the mornings, sometimes listening all morning to the evening programs running 12 hours earlier. I even heard myself on air in the rerun of the previous week’s Saturday Night Jazz. We know almost all the station employees, so it was great to hear our good friends’ voices and feel close to home even from the other side of the world. Madurai During our last week in India, we flew for two hours to the south Indian city of Madurai. Madurai is a significant city in southern India. Susan and I received a lovely referral to friends of a friend, leading to a wonderful experience in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the state in which Tamil is the language as well. Madurai is famous for a group of ornate spectacular centuries-old Hindu towers. During our four full days there, we were able to tour the temple complex, present a public concert, and take a day trip to the coast and another spectacular temple. South India was a stark contrast to Mumbai. The residents of Tamil Nadu speak Tamil, a language completely different from Hindi, India’s predominant language after English. Tamil employs a completely different script from Hindi. Madurai was not nearly as crowded as Mumbai. The pace of traffic was slower, more relaxed. I told Susan that this was the feeling in “old India” before modernization. On my first visit to India in 1971, Mumbai (then known as Bombay) was slower-paced, more like the current Madurai. In Madurai we had the best masala dosas of our lives. Masala dosas are a staple of the southern Indian diet. They consist of a rolled crispy crepe with a filling typically of potatoes, onions, and spices. South India is more predominantly vegetarian than north India. The dosas and other tasty vegetarian dishes are very inexpensive. We went out to dinner with our friends. The total bill for five people was only the equivalent of eleven dollars! When I commented on that to our friends, I was told: It is inexpensive for you. But many poor Indians can’t afford to buy meals in restaurants. It was a stark reminder that there are millions of poor Indians living in poverty. Without education, they can only perform manual labor jobs. The poorest of the Indians are the rural farmers and laborers. Many can only afford a subsistence level of existence. That’s why so many of them are drawn to Mumbai and other large cities, because in the cities they can earn more cash than on the farm. Mumbai has one of the world’s largest slums, Dharavi, housing over a million people. We didn’t see any slums in Madurai.
