A Partial India

In October and November 1986, I went to India for the first time.  It was an important experience,  which I tried to capture as it happened in one of my black travel notebooks, now online as three blog posts.  They are essentially unedited transcriptions of what I wrote as I journeyed.  As such, I hope they possess a certain immediacy and freshness.  But they are also necessarily unstructured, other than by each day's itinerary, rather long, and therefore perhaps rather hard to read.

The experiences of those three weeks were so rich for me I decided to re-work my notes into shorter, more digestible pieces, which together form what I called A Partial India.  Partial, because they obviously captured only a tiny part of the vast land, its people and civilisation; partial, too, because it was born of my gratitude for the experiences India gave me.  

A third of a century later, it describes an India which no longer exists, if it ever did.  Given my inevitable lack of comprehension of India's subtleties during that first journey, perhaps this is the best I can now hope for: that the evident non-existence today of the land I described will make Partial India of mild historical interest to others.

For want of anything better, I organised my memories under arbitrary alphabetical headings, which are as follows:

A is for Agra
B is for Books
C is for Camels
D is for Delhi
E is for English
F is for Fatehpur Sikri
G is for Gandhi
H is for Horns
I is for Incense
J is for Jaipur
K is for Kashmir
L is for Large
M is for Mosques
N is for Nights
O is for Ochre
P is for Poverty
Q is for Queuing
R is for Raj
S is for Shangri-La
T is for Trains
U is for Udaipur
V is for Voyaging
W is for Work
X is for Xenophilia
Y is for Yamuna
Z is for Zenana

Brexit Vote: Please Write to Your MP Today

As people may have heard, there is a rather important vote on Brexit tomorrow.  It's going to be very close, so I would like to urge everyone in the UK to write to their MP, asking them to vote against what is in every respect a terrible deal.  

It will not only harm the economy, and the most vulnerable people in UK society, it will also open the way for a catastrophic, crash-out "No Deal" Brexit, with no way for Parliament to stop it.  In short, it's a trap, and one that some foolish MPs seem content to walk into.  

FWIW, here's what I've just sent to my MP.  Please feel free to adapt it for your own communication.  You can find your MP's email address at the wonderful free site WriteToThem, which you can also use to send your message.

This is just a quick note to ask you to vote against the UK government's proposed Brexit agreement tomorrow.

I think you already know its deep problems -  not least the fact that it simply delays, but cannot prevent, a No Deal Brexit, which seems favoured by extreme Brexiters.  But I would also like to urge you to talk to other Labour MPs who seem willing to vote for it in the mistaken belief that it is what their constituents want.

As you know, the present deal will result in a massive hit to the UK economy, which will affect the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society.  It will lead to workers' rights being eroded, along with crucial environmental protections being jettisoned.  Throw in the fact that a US trade deal will see much of the NHS privatised, and the cost of drugs greatly increased, and it is hard to understand how any Labour MP could contemplate voting for this terrible deal.  I hope you can help them to see this.