The terrace – 1st floor

As I write this, I’m sitting on the little terrace of my apartment in A-Block, Defence Colony, New Delhi. In the end, the decision was straightforward.The Defence Colony apartment ‘ticked all the right boxes’, as my helpful real estate agent put it, now some 12 months ago. The most important tick beyond the Colony itself was the terrace.  From my vantage point, I look into the trees which line a small park opposite me.

India is such a large country with a broad sweep of history – civilisation after civilisation have left their marks, often etched in monuments, landscapes, temples, cities and so on. So much to see, so much to do, so much to ‘experience’.

But the Defence Colony (or Def Col as it’s known) park is also fascinating.  It’s a point of intersection of people’s lives, relationships, networks and living and the vignettes of people’s lives which unfold tell a lot, away from the monuments. These vignettes are important for travellers who want to understand rather than merely ‘pass through’ to tick off something, somewhere.

The A block park

The park itself is quite small – probably less than an acre I’d say.  It has a perimeter path as well as paths that bisect it from north to south and east to west.  It is essentially a park split into quarters.  The grass is lush, and always cut.  There are gardens and hedges along the paths as well as some trees along half of the perimeter. Seats are dotted about, and at one corner (the furthest corner from my terrace) is a crumbling fountain – a relic of a time when Delhi had lots of water and, I presume, someone to look after the fountain.

There is a man who looks after the park – watering it, weeding it (though I haven’t seen him mowing – perhaps that’s someone else’s job).  He always says hello to me, no matter where I see him.  In fact, even if I don’t see him, I will usually get a ‘Good morning/afternoon/evening sir’ shouted from the park.  When I ask him how he is, he is always ‘very fine’.

There is the woman who walks around and around the park, for her daily exercise, sari flowing.  It takes approximately three minutes to get around the park, and she goes around and around and around. And she’s not the only one.  Many take their exercise there by walking around and around. These are safe places for walking – no cars and motorbikes to threaten you (walkers are very low on the road pecking order). Plus, the park is a respite from the Def Col dogs who rule the streets.  They don’t bite (that often).

Then there is the very old, frail man who walks, supported by his son. He only walks around the end of the park where I am – he probably can’t go much beyond that. But a member of his family is there to look after him, to keep his routine alive.

Recently I’ve loved the frail winter sun and the light of spring – and sitting reading the paper in the park.  People come out like lizards – find some sun, sit and reheat. A favourite is to sit and talk, but also to sleep – stretched out on the grass, perhaps on a rug of some kind, perhaps just on the grass.  Too soon people will be sitting in the park in the deep shadows of the trees so as to get some relief from the heat. The park is a place to escape the inside at least for a little while. We move from the private to the public.

The park is also a place to do homework.  School children often can be seen with their books discussing their homework (perhaps – or their lives, their friendships, their plans, their social activities, boyfriends/girlfriends.  Who would know.  But they certainly use the park for it.  Perhaps it’s an escape from nosy parents, and the homework is a pretext). The park is an extension of the closed-door of the teenager’s bedroom.

Then of course, who could forget the games the park attracts – boys playing cricket, girls playing tag, parents and children playing, grandparents playing with grandchildren, little children learning to ride on the paths.  The park is their the backyard.

Delhi is an amazing city with its civilisational markers throughout. There are various itineraries to be had – 48 hours in Delhi, 3 days, 5 day tours and so on. There is a pulse to the place that is extraordinary.  As one of the world’s great mega-cities, you’d expect nothing different.

But while here take the time to also observe the little things – the interactions of the people who make up this city. See what people do.  You may not have a little terrace, but you can find a vantage point just about anywhere.  All it needs is the right mindset and the time to take your time. Then you will find the threads of our common humanity – the commonalities of interactions and everyday life – that express themselves in families, friendships, pushed boundaries and youth. What a great LoST experience.

There are a number of reasons I’m uncomfortable with the term.  First, if some experience is ‘authentic’, it means there are experiences that are ‘inauthentic’. But how can that be the case?  All experiences occur and therefore are ‘authentic’ to those who experience them.  The fact that some experiences fit a closer sense of our (travellers) expectation may make them closer to what we want to get from them, and what we want to see or experience, but this doesn’t make the experience any more authentic or inauthentic from the perspective of those who we interact with. It is in the context and in the interpretation of the experience.

This therefore raises the possibility that as travellers (remembering that almost by definition, we are outsiders), our search for an ‘authentic’ experience starts to impose our notions of authenticity onto other cultures. This can be very dangerous in the sense that the cultural exchange occurring between traveller and local begins to get defined by the outsider.

To give an example, I remember someone telling me once about a trip they had been on.  They had paid to have a tour of a long house in a south-east Asian country, and he had paid to stay for one night there. His experience, as he described it, was both positive and negative.

It was positive because he was in the longhouse, he interacted with an extended family who cooked for him, provided local drinks and accommodation in a room.  He was able to observe and experience everyday life of the extended family for the tI me he was there.  The trip to the longhouse by boat was part of this construction of ‘authenticity’.  He took pictures of the family in their ‘traditional’ dress, cooking their ‘traditional’ food, using their ‘traditional’ methods, in their ‘traditional’ house.

It was negative because the family, for all this ‘traditional’ hospitality, wanted to sell him souvenirs, and this was not ‘authentic’.  They also asked for tips, again not ‘authentic’.

Secondly, the search for authenticity has embedded in it, I would suggest, an assumption that cultures are static things. This of course depends on how ‘authenticity’ is constructed, both by the traveller and the local. So when we search for a sense of authenticity, we may well be assuming that authenticity is there for our benefit as travellers and is somehow frozen in a romanticized view of what we want and expect. As soon as we do that, we start to impose a set of assumptions on living cultures and living people.

Of course, this is not always one-way.  I remember working in the buffer of a protected area in South Asia a few years ago, a park that was trying to attract ecotourists.  My concern was the park management’s concept of ecotourism was quite broadly defined – at the time, there was a big push by governments to have ecotourism implemented and, as with lots of things, when you push for a quick implementation you lose the reflection, the dialogues and critical discussions and the cooperation required to make things work well.  So I was a bit worried about that.

A village had just formed a dance/cultural entertainment group to entertain the ecotourists who were to come and I happened to be there during one of their early performances. There were a few people in the audience – perhaps 6 – and they were all westerners.

Group members began to dance, women dancing on their own, men dancing on their own.  There was a description of the dances by one of the group’s members, with the narrative focusing on harvests and long-life and good fortune.

Then, as the night reached its end, the men and the women danced together, and once that had finished, the dancers went and got members of the audience to dance with them. The narrative for this was one of tradition – that this dance was not often seen by outsiders, rarely performed beyond the confines of the small village and family networks within other villages.

And yet, they were dancing with members of the audience.

As you could imagine, there were cameras flashing during the night, but especially when the westerners were brought up on stage. My heart was very heavy.

Afterwards I spoke with some of the members of the group and asked them to describe their ideas for the dance group.  What they wanted to achieve was to both maintain their cultural traditions, but to also generate income for the village and for village facilities.  The group was set up as a cooperative and profits went to village enterprises rather than individual households.

I understood all this, but not about the dance with the audience.  I asked why, if the dance was so seldom done, so special, it was being performed with audience members.  The person I was discussing this with smiled and said ‘Brian, that’s just a story. It’s to keep the tourists happy. We just made it (the dance) up as we went along’.

I laughed at the thought that the audience members, happy in their notion of ‘authentic’ would be showing pictures of dancing that they were privileged to see – dancing that was seldom performed, and they happened to be able to see it.  They would have felt special and would have showed their images and constructed their own stories and narratives of this cultural exchange, not knowing that their stories were based in their own construction of their experience.

And for the dancers, they were dealing with authenticity on their own terms, rather than on the terms of the travellers. They knew what they wanted to achieve – improvements in village facilities.  They found a way to achieve it, and they recognised that they didn’t want or need to sell out their own cultural ideas, values, changes and aspirations, to the authenticity assumed by the tourists looking at ‘the other’. The dancers engaged with the complexities of this exchange, and did it on their own terms.

For me, this is an important story for LoST travel. We need to move well beyond notions of ‘other’ and notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’.  As LoST travellers our aim is to recognise the dynamics of our interactions and to reflexively understand the assumptions of our interactions.  For us the focus is not on the journey or the interaction, but on the package of journey, interaction, ethics, assumptions, expectations (and how they’re formed) and our aims for our interactions.

Photo: Eurovelo

I really, really like the concept of Eurovelo. How good to have a highly planned and organised series of cycling routes across Europe – 14 long distance routes covering over 70.000 kilometres.

Eurovelo Hungary
Photo: Eurovelo

These aren’t only great for slow travel opportunities, and aren’t only good for low-carbon travel, they’re actually contributing to significant savings in health care I would think.

In the context of LoST travel it’s straightforward – planning for sustainable travel.  And, because the routes travel through cities, towns, rural landscapes etc, there is integration into local economies as well as urban ones.

Check out the eurovelo website and also search Eurovelo on you-tube for inspiration.  There’s plenty there!