Tag: Life in India

Why India? 2

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Why move to India…

I fell in love with India, its culture, people and places from afar and planned to visit in the 1970’s when I took a year off from my university. (I made a bit of a habit of taking years off).

True or False

True

I was a bit of a wus and not an adventurous traveller. I’d got as far as Turkey and the message from those who’d travelled overland from India was that it was particularly dangerous at that time to go to India, via Pakistan as they had just hanged Bhutto. So my visit to India just didn’t seem destined to happen.

Would I even manage to get to India in the next decade?

Nope

I hooked up with Liz and Ben in my late 20’s (We’re in the 1980s now). Liz had already lived in India for a couple of years in the early 1970’s so with one kid already (Ben) and potentially another one to come (Ol), India, was most definitely not considered by Liz to be a suitable place to take a young family.  Her experience of India was as a hippy  and she wouldn’t reconnect with India for many more years.

So that means I wasn’t also going to get to India, not yet anyway.

Farrell Factoid

I have subsequently met many people who have found a love for India (not least the visitors to Mysore Bed and Breakfast). There are of course many different attractions and often its difficult to define what it is that they particularly like. For many people they are inexplicably drawn to India, it has a sort of magnetism from a great distance. Maybe it is the free flow of ideas crossing the ‘bridges’ west and east (especially Britain and India) that stimulate people’s interest, there has of course been many exported ideas (and zero) for hundreds of years. There’s been icons such as the Beatles, the travelling Yogis, the hippies themselves, Yoga, whatever, there is an incredible range of things that we’ve heard about that help feed our seemingly insatiable desires for India, India things and Indian-ness.

Michael Wood in his book (Big Recommendation) to accompany the BBC series ‘The Story of India’ writes of becoming ’emeshed with India’, ‘the great privilege to be welcomed into another culture and to spend time in it, especially one so rich and diverse and perenially illuminating’

Of course many cultures and countries could fulfil this but

…what is so special about India?

I’d have to wait, quite a bit longer to find out.

Horse Riding in Mysore

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I sometimes think that Vasanth, who I first met ten years ago and now co-ordinates our transport, used to dread my return trips to Mysore. I’d often arrive with an idea for a new project. One such project was my interest in horse riding. It actually lasted a few trips. We searched far and wide for opportunities for me to go horse riding. Vasanth was convinced we’d get nowhere. I was beginning to believe him. He found tourist horse riding trips in Srirangaptnam, nope not my ‘cup of tea’, we even visited the stables at the horse race course. Nothing! I was sure, there had to be something.

Then one day, we had one of those typical India experiences. I was leaning over a garden wall admiring a small traditional Mysore house. The lady came out and we got chatting. I complemented her on the house and garden, as you would, and happened to mention our search for horse riding.

” Oh” she said,”you should go meet my father, he’ll be able to help.” He was an officer in the Mounted Police. Well, sharpish we headed down there and tentatively entered the grand horse-shoe-shaped archway entrance and result! our project was a complete success.

it works out that the Riding School of Mysore was with the mounted police. I kid you not! After a meet with the Commandant I became a visiting member.

It worked like this:

if you wanted a ride that morning, a member would go to the horse exercising and practice fields before 6am

It would still be dark but one could hear the movement of men and horses, with snorts and neighs…. As the darkness was broken by sun rise and any mist began to lift, there were up to 50 men and horses lined up on parade. The officer on duty would check all his men were in line and in horsey attention, then ride and report to the commandant, who by now had arrived and was smartly facing his men. The officer reported on who was and wasn’t there and the plans for the day.

Impressive!

Once the ritual of being ‘on parade’ was completed Commandant Shetty would turn to whoever had arrived from the ‘Riding School’ and after a short ‘how are you?’ informal sort of conversation, would call over sufficient men to give up their horses for the members of the ‘School’ waiting there.

It was absolutely amazing. Who would have believed it possible to go borrow mounted police and horses to go riding in a morning. If just one person had turned up, more often than not, you’d do left to your own devices to ride your horse alone in one of the fields. Otherwise a policeman might lead you in an improvised lesson.

I subsequently discovered that many locals learned to ride in exactly this way.

One of the many unique ways of life in the city I would later adopt and move to.

I was reminded of  all this on reading this article about …..

The Mounted Police in Mysore