Until one month ago, I’d never visited Bangalore. Having been away from India for a year, I wondered how she’s looking these days.

I took a taxi from the airport and the city seemed peaceful, even serene. The airport itself was stunningly modern and would not be out of place in Western Europe. In contrast, the Bombay and Delhi airports can only be described as Indian circles of hell, as gruesome as the cities themselves. (I once stepped in cowshit at the Departures gate of the Delhi airport. Why are there cows at the airport?)

So far, things didn’t seem very Indian, in the way I remembered it. Could things be different here? I thought. Certainly this was different from Delhi. Signs were in a language I’d never seen called Kannada. The roads were clean and orderly. The weather could not be better. Palm trees swayed as only palm trees can. The city seemed to have its act together. Bangalore was becoming a major centre of IT wealth. Maybe some of that bounty trickled into public works projects?

Then our taxi went under a highway and back up, and we passed a slum. Then another slum. Tarpaulin roofs and mud roads, and skinny faces watching the traffic go by.

Nope, still India.

Bangalore does, in the developed areas, bear some passing resemblance to civilization, and in remarkable ways even surpasses the civility of our own. I am always remarking to my friends that the upper castes of India are more colonial than colonial England ever was. The Raj-era retreats and country clubs are still used for their original purpose, only now by wealthy Indians. Polo is played, and the sport of cricket, the “gentleman’s game”, is revered nation-wide. Club waitstaff are roundly and ritualistically abused, and seem to enjoy the pleasure. Our society has come to see such things as staid, aristocratic frivolities only to be enjoyed ironically, but India doesn’t. She appreciates the finer things, and I love her for it.

The financial area of Bangalore, the famous MG Road (MG = Mahatma Ghandi) area where I work and live, is a messy, incoherent, beauty-free urban patchwork, marred by incredibly poor upkeep. Walking on MG Road is a chore. The crumbling sidewalk disappears into a muddy puddle, or worse, a gaping hole you could lose an ankle to. Not to mention the myriad squishy things your foot could land on. In India you quickly learn to watch your step at all times.

That said, Bangalore’s residents are a happy bunch, and the city swarms with life. Much of that life is in the form of suffocating traffic, but nonetheless. While the city lacks any trace of man-made beauty, there are bushy trees and reasonably well-kept green areas everywhere. The best I can say is that Bangalore is unpleasant much of the time, but not most of the time.

The bar scene in Bangalore operates under a principle of compact and efficient party maximization. This is because all bars in Bangalore close at 11:30 PM, leaving little time for languid, prolonged tippling. In the English fashion, the Bangaloreans indulge ferociously over very limited time periods before the last-call bell rings (or all the lights are shut off—bar managers are equally fastidious). Service is instant, and in some places, prices rival New York. Pub music tends to the retro, mostly in the form of soft 80s pop: Stevie Wonder, Dire Straits, Madonna, a trend I quite like (the ability to talk to one another over bar music is a dying luxury). India’s relationship with Western pop culture is charmingly dated in places; mostly they are au courant, but every so often you hear a “Hey, you should check out this great movie called The Usual Suspects…” comment.

Indian booze, sadly, remains terrible.

The food is excellent. A love for fiery curry helps; I’d hate to be one of those “it’s too spicy” people here. A curious phenomenon of Bangalore restaurants is that after the meal the waiter gives you an elaborate feedback card to fill out before they give you the bill, with an astounding panoply of irrelevant questions such as Anniversary, Occupation, Spouse Name, Children’s Names, Mobile #, Address, Email, etc. Nobody flinches at filling in every box.

Bangalore has yet to absorb its rapid gains of wealth. Certain streets are well-kept, busy, and filled with slick, modern shops and restaurants. Duck down a side street and you’re in that other India of crowded roadside dhabas, sickly fruit vendors, oxen, and temples. It is a confusing sight, stemming from the insatiable Desi taste for poor public cleanliness.

The rickshaw men are the biggest cheats I have seen in India. While getting the “white guy price” is normal across the country, the going rate appears to be triple that of other places. Most rickshaws are adorned with Karnataka flags and few drivers speak any language but Kannada; the nationalistic fervour of Bangalore seems to emanate chiefly from its transport industry. There are daily political rallies (one last week shut down the entire north end of the city for seven hours) and it is not uncommon to see a convoy of painted cargo trucks filled with flag-waving patriots, their tinny speakers blasting unbearable Kannada music, shouting slogans through megaphones seemingly with the goal of maximizing noise.

Finally, Bangalore is an IT city. Therefore, I lack the source material to give comment on the attractiveness of its women. Any evaluation would be disqualified for insufficient sample size. Suffice it to say that, not unlike “Man Francisco”, Bangalore is a place for a man to write code and win wealth, not find love^*.

^* (I’d make a joke and call it “Mangalore” but there’s already a place called Mangalore. I’d hate to see their women.)

Hello, faithful readers (you’d have to be faithful still to be checking this ghost town of a blog).

As I’ve hardly heard from most of you, owing to my rather abrupt disappearance from the blog world, I thought I’d post a quick update on what has happened since the previous posting, oh so many moons ago.

After a few more months of travel, I made it back home safe and a little too sound. I loafed around my parents’ home for a while and took stock of things. The biggest difficulty I had was remembering how to speak English with other English speakers. A year of speaking to foreigners has a strange effect on the dialect, as you tend to use the barest vocabulary imaginable, and sometimes even deliberately mangle the grammar by simplifying it (”I go to hotel room, yes?”), so as to not confuse those who only know a few sentences.

I soon reacquainted myself with Western life, which turned out to be a little like slipping back into a warm bath from which you only made a desultory effort to get out of the water. “I think I’ll get up now… ohh, ahh, maybe not.” Progress was rapid; I was back to wasting time reading web sites and newspapers in no time.

It was time to get a job. A friend called me up from New York. His company was hiring. Two days later I was on a plane. Back on the IT scene with a vengeance. We worked hard and lived a New York life. It was sweaty, great fun, and just what I needed after a year of meandering.

The company then offered me an assignment in the India office, and I accepted. Which brings me to today, where I write this from an apartment in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, in a room with a bed, a desk, two chairs, and an electrical system that appears to be haunted by ghouls.

I plan to start blogging again, which is not the same thing as actually blogging again, but you know, “the best laid plans”, etc. Over time I’ll post the rest of my journal entries from my trip, which include more India, as well as Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar, as well as a couple places in the UK. I am also posting pictures sometimes.

JJI Cafe became our usual hangout. Each new day started with a JJI Special (eggs, Tibetan bread, stir-fried vegetables, and hot chai) and ended with a Tibetan thentuk or momo soup at the very same table, overlooking the valley. At night we’d go downstairs to the owner’s apartment to watch a movie or have a jam session (everyone in Dharamsala seems to be a musician).

One day some friends brought along a monk named Sonam, which means “fortunate one” in Tibetan. He wore a maroon fleece over his robes, with big floppy sandals, and a messenger bag filled with books. Sonam shook my hand silently, turning the corner of his mouth up into a smile. He was looking for a private English tutor. Teaching engagements in Dharamsala are fairly ad hoc, staffed by itinerant backpackers in their spare time. No time commitments, no curriculum, no obligations. Just sit with the monks and talk.

I was tired of travel already. Not tired of Asia but of moving around so much—a day or two in each town, see the sights and get out. Travelling this way allowed me to cover a lot of ground and keep my days busy, but it had become a little tedious. I certainly was not so smitten with sightseeing that I could justify quitting my job and hopping on the first flight overseas for it. Any traveller will tell you that sightseeing is only the backdrop; the main course is everything else.

I came to appreciate the cardinal rule of travel: don’t overplan (that is, if you plan at all). Most fellow backpackers I’d met in India had no idea what they were doing, no direction whatsoever, claiming to be in India just “to exist for a while” (you hear that phrase a lot). India is the perfect country for drifters; it’s cheap, slow, and endless. Plus they give you a six-month visa, renewable ad infinitum at the Indian embassy in nearby Kathmandu.

So I said Yes to staying in Dharamsala and teaching Sonam for a while. Why not.

We were to meet daily on the patio of Nick’s Restaurant over a pot of ginger-lemon tea, and read from the books in his messenger bag: a children’s adaptation of Siddhartha, a grammar book, some pro-Tibet political pamphlets, and several notebooks filled with assorted English phrases, all given him by previous teachers.

At our first meeting and I asked him some basic questions. He spoke enough English to make conversation. He was born in a small village in the east of Tibet and had come to India when he was eight years old via the familiar Himalayan hell-passage, suffering severe frostbite from which it took him months to recover. He spent the next seventeen years in a monastery in Karnataka state in south India, studying the Tibetan canon and meditating in the sweltering heat, rising at 4:30 AM each day for hours of tedious morning chanting, taking breakfast and lunch but no dinner. He had met the Dalai Lama eight times, and spoke of him like an old buddy. Sonam was twenty-eight years old; he and I were born only eight days apart. Aside from us both now being in McLeod Ganj at the same time, our lives had been different in every imaginable way.

Sonam had a curious demeanour. While I was eager to accommodate him and make him feel comfortable, he watched me with some good-natured suspicion. Rapport was difficult; he smiled at everything. He understood my words, but not how I said things. Even the simplest Western conversations have complexities that never really occurred to me until I was presented with this blank slate.

He picked up a spoon, slowly, carrying it without any wasted movement to the tea glass, stirring it three times, then pulling it out and laying it precisely on a napkin. All his movements were careful and deliberate. Grasping the rim of the glass with three fingers and raising it to his mouth, he sipped perfectly, and then set the glass down on the exact same spot, and turned the glass clockwise to face him. He turned each notebook page with similar care, easing each page gently over the metal binding, and wrote with the smoothest hand, even in English (Tibetan uses a different script, as does Hindi, both of which he spoke fluently).

I offered him a bite of my brownie (Nick’s Restaurant is famous for them), and he firmly shoved the plate away with a smile. Always with a smile. It would appear offering sweets to a monk is a faux-pas. I began to feel like my cordial affectations were indecipherable to him. Why would I give a brownie to a monk? I felt like a fool.

When I asked him what his long-term plans were, he said, learn English. Nothing could happen until he learned English, and his plan was to spend all his time learning English.

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

He said this in a way that made me the silly one. A monk living in poverty could be perfectly happy with his life the way it is, he was telling me. The cultural gap between us yawned. The idea of having such genuine and bone-simple conceptions of one’s future just sent my head spinning.

My mind now erased of good conversation topics, we moved on to the reading. He preferred Siddhartha so he opened it to the appropriate page. An American lady gave him this book, he said. I saw her address in Georgia written in his notebook, under the words “SONOM, YOU ROCK!” [sic]

“She crazy girl, very loud” he said, with a laugh.

He wanted me to read each chapter first, out loud, and then he would follow, and he’d ask about the words he didn’t know and I’d draw him a picture or explain it in simpler terms and he’d spend the rest of the session blurting out these words at odd times, sometimes scribbling them on his hand, getting me to re-pronounce them, over and over. Sonam practiced English every night by himself, reading each page out loud ten times in a row.

We read a chapter of Siddhartha per day. After two or three sessions I could see that he didn’t understand a word of it. I figured every Buddhist monk knew the Siddhartha story but he wasn’t following a thing, didn’t know what a naga was or why the Prince fled his father’s palace.

It didn’t take us long to become friends. At the end of every session he always tried to pay for the tea without me noticing. It became a little contest between us (I knew that he had almost no money, so we didn’t get carried away). He once asked me how much it was costing me to travel around the world. I told him the amount I had saved up, and he could not believe the number. Couldn’t even understand the number; he’d never heard of a person having a sum of money that large. What strange place did I come from? What was my life like back home? He wanted to know everything, but he hadn’t the slightest interest in trading places with me. There was only one place in the world he wanted to be other than Dharamsala, he said, and that was Tibet.

He drew me a little floor plan of the apartment he shares with three others: one small room, one hot plate, and enough floor space for all to sleep, but no bathroom. Instead, they walked to the other end of McLeod Ganj to use the public toilet (yes, Indian public toilets). His living expenses were about thirty dollars per month. He cooked all his own food, and showered once in a while at a friend’s place. And he was as happy as could be.

I saw Sonam often around McLeod Ganj, and he walked along the road with me, ignoring the beggars as I did, asking me about my day and how long I was staying. He always wanted to know how long I was staying in Dharamsala. Sonam was always laughing, except when the topic was my departure, when he became very serious. In fact he’d been asking me for weeks, always trying to figure out exactly how long we had left.

The day before I left McLeod Ganj, Sonam stood up from the table and looked me in the eye. He produced a white scarf, and put it around my neck. He then knelt, put his head down reverently, and handed me a beaded bracelet, a “mala” used in Tibetan chanting. He said something in Tibetan, stood up, gave a prayer-bow, and thanked me for helping him with his English. Stunned, I could only slide the mala on my wrist with a smile and thank him quietly. He was clearly dismayed that I was leaving, and frankly, so was I.

Perhaps my definitive memory of Sonam was when someone in our group got a laugh by teaching him a kind of “gangsta” hand gesture. You make a gun with your two fingers and thumb and flick your wrist while making the appropriate goofy facial expression and you say “Yo!” Sonam took this gesture very seriously. He asked us over and over to show him how to do it. And for the rest of the day, whenever I looked over at him, there he was, this maroon-clad, shaven-headed monk from east Tibet, studiously practicing the gangsta hand gesture to nobody, out loud, ten times in a row.