Visiting India for the first time? Take a guidebook.

Calcutta

Guidebooks are necessary - as a sort of safety net - in most destinations, so anybody that tells you to throw your guidebook in the bin is mistaken – to put it politely.  The complacent individuals who dish out such advice probably spent their time in some easy coastal tourist trap, on package tours, or never really bothered exploring the country in any depth. A good guidebook gives well over a thousand pages of information, if just five percent of it proves useful, that is still a sizeable chunk of valuable data.

  There are several decent publishers of guidebooks for India. None of their products are perfect; all have their foibles and errors: in one famous publication (LP), I noticed that they even had a state capital wrong. Yes, they are also pricey and heavy; nevertheless, when all is said and done, they are a necessary evil. Size here really is everything: India is vast and complex, so any guidebook worth its salt has to be sizeable.  Publications that run to just a few hundred pages and are replete with large text and too many cute glossy pictures, may make nice editions to your bookshelf or coffee table, but they won’t help you much when you are there.

  Don’t think you can simply purchase information on the ground either. Guidebooks published in India are, from what I have seen, embarrassingly inane. For example, I once purchased a Calcutta guidebook at a train station bookstall. I sat myself down on a plastic chair and thumbed through it in the vain hope of finding out exactly where it was all happening in crazy Calcutta. Amongst other fascinating information, it informed me that coal was the “major mineral resource in West Bengal, of which 92% falls into the non-coking variety, 7% is the blendable grade and 1% is medium coking….” and thus it continued. I skipped the next five pages on rock phosphate and tungsten-ores until I got to the smaller accommodation section. The names of the selected Calcutta hotels were listed alphabetically along with their addresses, without recommendations and with no indication as to room prices - which rendered the information useless. Likewise, there were no details of restaurants, bars or bowling allies and all the other stuff those fickle and frivolous tourists such as I would wish to know about. On the other hand, had I wanted to know the whereabouts of the “West Bengal Ceramic Development Corporation” or the “Directorate of Smoke Nuisance”, I would have been well catered for by this fine publication. It is a paradox that India does not produce the best tourist information about India - but it’s a fact: even the best locally produced publications are inadequate. Part of the problem may be that homegrown Indian authors cannot properly understand our peculiar foreign tastes and the unfamiliar challenges we face.

  Even if you intend to take pre-paid guided tours everywhere, some unscrupulous and imaginative Indian travel agents, or touts, will make up stories regarding certain destinations just to make a sale! So even with prepaid tours, it is always good to cross-reference with a guidebook!