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.

Torch

  Up to half the nation’s output of electricity is stolen through illegal hook-ups. Slum dwellers just find the nearest overhead power cable, sling a metal hook over it, then run a wire from the hook to the home. Sometimes inspectors arrive to disconnect these, in which case people simply wait for a few hours until the inspectors have gone then throw over another hook. Up until 2003, this was not even a criminal offence. In some areas, politicians refuse to allow the disconnection of certain villages - even though nobody has paid a Rupee for power in years - simply because the villagers vote for his party.

  You may well ask what all this has to do with you, well the short answer is that all this free electricity for the underprivileged has bankrupted the Indian electricity industry and they cannot afford to keep up with demand. So, more than just a few times, you are likely to be plunged into darkness by a local power-cut.

  These power-cuts are often referred to as ‘load shedding’ - which happens when demand exceeds supply. In the major cities and the Goan costal strip, power supply is pretty good, but elsewhere there might be two or three power cuts a day – in most states. A power outage might last five minutes or five hours. They tend to happen most when you are watching a good TV movie and are just ten minutes short of the ending, or when you are walking through a dodgy area at night. 

   In a nutshell, you will need a torch, but don’t go all cheap on yourself and buy something Made in China for a couple of dollars. The second you drop it onto a concrete floor – it’s history. Neither should you go to the other extreme and bring something like a big metal Maglite: a torch should not be a cumbersome part of your gear. A reliable bright and robust product, which fits in the palm of your hand, such as a MityLite Magnum, will do. For optimum reliability, go for flashlights that use LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) instead of conventional incandescent bulbs. The LED light is also white, not yellowish like filament bulbs. Use only alkaline or lithium batteries for flashlights; never use old-fashioned zinc-carbon batteries.