Baggage - Travel Light

   The essence of India is the rejection of material encumbrances so get with the program! On a less metaphysical level, heavy luggage will be a real pain in the butt. With a load of twenty or thirty kilos, you would have a dredful time getting on and off boats, walking up hills, hiking moderate distances and hotel hunting. At train stations you will be at the mercy of porters who will at best rip you off, at worst, run off with your luggage. Taxi drivers will use your bags as an excuse to charge you more, and may even refuse to retrieve them from a locked boot unless you cough up. Moreover, the fewer luggage items you have, the lesser the challenge of guarding against thieves.

  India has a vibrant Capitalist economy and there are shops everywhere, so you don’t need to buy everything at home. Our problem is mainly psychological. We all tell ourselves we need so many items, when in truth we could quite happily do without them. Aside from certain objects discussed below, in essence, you only need three or four changes of clothing, with a week’s worth of socks and underwear. If one day you run out of clean clothing, then pick up a cheap hippy-dippy item at a local market. It will probably fade and fall apart after a month - but who cares. You can get cool, comfortable clothing tailor made there for very small cost and have a bit of fun choosing your own designs and fabrics. Silk is often fake (more about that later), but Indian cotton is satisfactory and inexpensive. If you are very tall or "plus size" you won't find much in the way of readymade clothing and you will have to seek out a tailor. These are plentiful and usually use antique-looking peddle operated machines, which save on electricity bills and power cut stoppages.   

   Even if you like reading, do not worry too much about packing books. Pack one juicy title as a back up, but if you take more, all of a sudden you will be carrying an extra kilo. There are many second hand bookshops in India and you will be amazed at the wonderful smudged and creased tomes travellers have left behind over the years. There is also a vibrant English language book publishing industry within India. It churns out everything from racy novels to politically incorrect reprints from the Raj era. The trick then, is, to buy books as you go, and after that, recycle by selling, gifting or abandoning.  

  Newspapers and the likes of India Today (their vesion of Newsweek) are really dirt-cheap. As India is a fairly democratic open society, many articles are remarkably honest and hard hitting. The most astonishing news articles are often the tiny one or two paragraph affairs buried amongst the inner pages: tales of bizarre village life and suburban mayhem, which rarely make it onto the internet. A few months of reading these, will tell you more about modern India than any book.