The jewel in the crown....

In the early morning polluted sunshine the train tracks stretch south to lands I will never visit.

My relationship with India has been infrequent but never boring. 30+ years ago I contracted salmonella down in Karnataka but it didn't entirely poison my fascination and liking for the massive conundrum that is India. It has changed - but not essentially - through the years. This remains the place of great beauty and greatly beautiful people. But where disorder reigns. Where many things are achieved, but never completely....

I am sitting for a spare half hour in the garden of the hotel. Myna birds are cheekily eyeing up my biscuits, and far above kites are circling. Looking for the decomposing. It is very beautiful but decomposition is never far away.

As I have discovered elsewhere - maybe top of the list would be in Hong Kong - it is possible to be in the midst of a culture which you will never understand or inhabit.

As Paul Scott said in his incomparable "Jewel in the Crown" series-

"That MacGregor and Bibighar are the place of the white and the place of the black? To get from one to the other you could not cross by a bridge but had to take your courage in your hands and enter the flood and let yourself be taken with it, lead where it may."

Which is beyond most of us.....