Category: India

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Not India

Ayutthaya, Thailand

An important fact about Thailand is that it is not India.

My first travel abroad was to India, and it’s the only place (well, plus Nepal) where I’ve done extended backpacking. I now realize that the Indian experience is where a lot of my travel apprehension is coming from.

Here’s an example. I’ve spent two days riding a rented bike all over Ayutthaya, one of the most famous and popular tourist spots in the country. Not once has a beggar approached me, and the most aggressive selling I’ve encountered came from a woman who waved some postcards at me. When I tried to buy a hat in front of the temple, the woman selling it quoted the price as a reasonable B200, and I sort of weakly attempted to haggle before paying full price. The prices for entry to monuments are clearly marked, and that’s what you pay.

None of this is true in India, or at least it wasn’t when I was there. If Ayutthaya were in India, each monument would have an army of aggressive beggars out front — children, cripples, old women — and an army of tuk-tuk drivers chasing after you, and a bunch of guides who keep trying to follow you around and get you to pay for their services. The entry price would be marked as, say, 200 rupees, and the guy would insist that the sign is out of date and you need to pay 500. And buying a hat? It would have gone like this:

Merchant: How much you like?

Me: No, just tell me a price.

Merchant: Anything you want.

Me: OK, thirty rupees?

Merchant: What! How can you say that! No, no! What talking about, thirty rupees?

Me: So how much then?

Merchant: You say good price.

Eventually the guy would either name an absurd price, or I’d just give up and walk away, feeling like we’d just had some kind of uncomfortable argument. The walking away might or might not bring the price down to something reasonable. There would be little chance that I could just buy a hat at a fair price without a whole psychodrama and a high risk of failure.

Thailand just isn’t like India that way. It’s not assaultive or confrontational. In fact, Thais seem to shy away from confrontation. They are polite. They don’t honk their horns, an oddity in Asia. They let me merge with traffic pretty easily on a bicycle. They take no for an answer. When I asked about a bus to Lopburi at my hotel, the manager said I should just take the train — there wasn’t even a thought about making the extra dollar by booking me on something I didn’t need.

I mentioned to my UN friend that I hadn’t yet worked out, in my few days in Bangkok, what drives Thai people, what motivates them. She said what drives them is sanook, a Thai word meaning something like fun or the good life. There’s maybe a Southern European quality to Thais that contrasts with the Northern European qualities of the more driven Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese, those cultures that absorbed Confucianism as an ethos. I think in the long run that I prefer life among the Confucians — I like the energy and ambition — but it’s comfortable here, and easy. It might be less so in some of the other countries of the region, or in other parts of Thailand. We will see. But so far, Thais have been kind and friendly and easygoing, and it’s a welcome relief from what I was braced to expect.

Scattered observations

If we assume that my trip to Southeast Asia will last 200 days — a big if — then already I’m about 6% done. I have been to two places, Bangkok and Ayutthaya. At my current rate, I would see maybe 40 places in all of my travel. Is that a lot? Not enough? I’ll probably pick up the pace a bit at times, but also probably wash out and stay for a while in other spots.

In Thailand, there’s a belief that when you build a house, you disturb the spirits that were living on the land, so you have to build a spirit house and each day give flower garlands and food to the spirits who live there. The spirit house shouldn’t fall within the shadow of the main house. You see these spirit houses everywhere, including one with a cross and a Virgin Mary statue at the ruins of the old Portuguese cathedral in Ayutthaya.

The Thai word for five is “hah,” similar to the Korean “o”. When Thais want to show that they’re laughing in a chat or a Facebook comment, they write “555.”

Thais drink root beer, or at least they sell the stuff here. A&W. I hear they have it in Indonesia too. If you order a soda in a cafe, you order by color, not flavor: red, orange, green. No one seems to know what green is.

Thais eat with a fork and spoon: fork in the left hand, used roughly how we might use a butter knife, spoon in the right hand as the eating utensil. Chopsticks come with noodles.

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Travel and frozen time

I know what India’s like. I know because I’ve been there.

That’s how I tend to think, anyway. But do I really have any idea what India is like now? I first went there in 1997, spending four months backpacking alone around the Subcontinent. I returned for another six months in 2002, and then I made a brief, two-week visit for business in 2009.

I still describe experiences and memories from that first trip as if that’s just how things are done in India. Yet that trip was 18 years ago. Back then, cassette shops sold music, Internet cafes connected through dialup twice a day to send and receive emails at their own POP addresses, and typists plied their trade (they’re still around, but a dying breed). No one talked about an IT revolution in India — the dot-com boom hadn’t even hit America yet. Business, it seemed, ran on hand-written ledger books. This was the very end of the Congress Party’s long era of dominance: the BJP was running hard, and they won enough seats to form a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee just a month after I left the country, and the country tested its nuclear weapons a few months later.

Change, in other words, was coming, if you could see the signs. I gathered some sense of the political shift during my travels, but I had no idea about the economic and technological revolution that would transform the country. When I came back in 2002, Internet cafes were everywhere, with uninterrupted power supplies and Internet Explorer 5. CDs had replaced cassettes. Indian Railways was so effectively computerized that a clerk gave me my change when I switched my ticket time and the new one turned out to be cheaper.

I saw further changes when I went back to India in 2009: shopping malls, an emerging security state in the wake of the Bombay attacks, greater ambient wealth. India still felt very much like India, but it wasn’t quite the place I experienced back in 1997.

My frozen home

This frozen-in-time quality is typical of travel accounts — I grew up on my parents’ tales of what Europe was like, as their late-sixties experiences receded ever further back in time — and maybe even more typical of how expats and exiles think of their former homes. It’s funny to me the extent to which parts of Flushing feel more like the Korea of 2001, or even earlier, than like the Korea of today. Restaurants like Kum Gang San cater to Koreans of a certain age, and of a certain Korean era. My parents’ New York City, which they left in the 1970s, is not the New York City I live in.

And very soon, I’ll be talking about a New York City that will be frozen in time.

I’ve been here since 1993, which is quite a while. I’ve seen in change. I’ve called in a dead body in Hell’s Kitchen, and done it on a payphone. I used to go to the 2nd Ave Deli on Second Avenue, and I used to ride the Redbirds out to Jackson Heights for Indian food and not Tibetan food. I remember Pearl Paint and the Twin Towers and the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Ave and the old, hideous Columbus Circle and tokens. A lot has changed.

And it will keep changing without me, after I leave. In a few years, I will be telling someone about New York, and all the hipsters in Bushwick or how Citibike works or how much fun it is to get some ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and go to Columbus Park to watch the old men gamble and the old ladies sing, and some actual New Yorker will interject that actually it’s not like that anymore, that they cleaned up the park, changed the bike laws, and moved all the hipsters to Brownsville.

The passage of time

I suppose this is also just a function of getting older. When I was a kid in the eighties, I imagined that the styles then in fashion, music, film, whatever, were just the defaults. I’ve now been around long enough to see things I remembered from the first time come back into style and then go out again. I am aware of the passage of time in a way I couldn’t have been when I was younger.

But then there’s New York. I’ve been here long enough that it’s my home and nowhere else is, but I’m leaving. And New York isn’t a place you can hold onto. It moves on without you. It does not, frankly, give a shit about you, especially if you’ve gone off to live somewhere else. You keep up with New York, not the other way around. Quicker than most places, New York erases and replaces the things you knew.

Well, quicker than most places in America, anyway. Eventually I’ll be settling in Seoul, a city that changes even faster than New York — where you can leave for three years and not be able to find your old neighborhood because the whole thing has been bulldozed and replaced.

And in the meantime? I’ll be traveling, gaining new slices of experience, and trying to remember later when I talk about them to say, “This is how it was then,” instead of “This is how it is.”

Posted on

Travel and frozen time

I know what India’s like. I know because I’ve been there.

That’s how I tend to think, anyway. But do I really have any idea what India is like now? I first went there in 1997, spending four months backpacking alone around the Subcontinent. I returned for another six months in 2002, and then I made a brief, two-week visit for business in 2009.

I still describe experiences and memories from that first trip as if that’s just how things are done in India. Yet that trip was 18 years ago. Back then, cassette shops sold music, Internet cafes connected through dialup twice a day to send and receive emails at their own POP addresses, and typists plied their trade (they’re still around, but a dying breed). No one talked about an IT revolution in India — the dot-com boom hadn’t even hit America yet. Business, it seemed, ran on hand-written ledger books. This was the very end of the Congress Party’s long era of dominance: the BJP was running hard, and they won enough seats to form a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee just a month after I left the country, and the country tested its nuclear weapons a few months later.

Change, in other words, was coming, if you could see the signs. I gathered some sense of the political shift during my travels, but I had no idea about the economic and technological revolution that would transform the country. When I came back in 2002, Internet cafes were everywhere, with uninterrupted power supplies and Internet Explorer 5. CDs had replaced cassettes. Indian Railways was so effectively computerized that a clerk gave me my change when I switched my ticket time and the new one turned out to be cheaper.

I saw further changes when I went back to India in 2009: shopping malls, an emerging security state in the wake of the Bombay attacks, greater ambient wealth. India still felt very much like India, but it wasn’t quite the place I experienced back in 1997.

My frozen home

This frozen-in-time quality is typical of travel accounts — I grew up on my parents’ tales of what Europe was like, as their late-sixties experiences receded ever further back in time — and maybe even more typical of how expats and exiles think of their former homes. It’s funny to me the extent to which parts of Flushing feel more like the Korea of 2001, or even earlier, than like the Korea of today. Restaurants like Kum Gang San cater to Koreans of a certain age, and of a certain Korean era. My parents’ New York City, which they left in the 1970s, is not the New York City I live in.

And very soon, I’ll be talking about a New York City that will be frozen in time.

I’ve been here since 1993, which is quite a while. I’ve seen in change. I’ve called in a dead body in Hell’s Kitchen, and done it on a payphone. I used to go to the 2nd Ave Deli on Second Avenue, and I used to ride the Redbirds out to Jackson Heights for Indian food and not Tibetan food. I remember Pearl Paint and the Twin Towers and the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Ave and the old, hideous Columbus Circle and tokens. A lot has changed.

And it will keep changing without me, after I leave. In a few years, I will be telling someone about New York, and all the hipsters in Bushwick or how Citibike works or how much fun it is to get some ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and go to Columbus Park to watch the old men gamble and the old ladies sing, and some actual New Yorker will interject that actually it’s not like that anymore, that they cleaned up the park, changed the bike laws, and moved all the hipsters to Brownsville.

The passage of time

I suppose this is also just a function of getting older. When I was a kid in the eighties, I imagined that the styles then in fashion, music, film, whatever, were just the defaults. I’ve now been around long enough to see things I remembered from the first time come back into style and then go out again. I am aware of the passage of time in a way I couldn’t have been when I was younger.

But then there’s New York. I’ve been here long enough that it’s my home and nowhere else is, but I’m leaving. And New York isn’t a place you can hold onto. It moves on without you. It does not, frankly, give a shit about you, especially if you’ve gone off to live somewhere else. You keep up with New York, not the other way around. Quicker than most places, New York erases and replaces the things you knew.

Well, quicker than most places in America, anyway. Eventually I’ll be settling in Seoul, a city that changes even faster than New York — where you can leave for three years and not be able to find your old neighborhood because the whole thing has been bulldozed and replaced.

And in the meantime? I’ll be traveling, gaining new slices of experience, and trying to remember later when I talk about them to say, “This is how it was then,” instead of “This is how it is.”

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[i love my india]

This video from India’s Got Talent, passed on by a Facebook friend, is a great example of what I find so compelling about India: the passionate mix of high and low, sacred and profane, beautiful and silly, devout and camp, until you’re completely unable to tell which is which.

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[chaos in mumbai]

So when the situation in Thailand went pear-shaped, I started looking at other places to go. One of those places was Mumbai.

Then, of course, Mumbai was struck by a horrific series of terrorist attacks, which are still unfolding. They’ve targeted places popular with Westerners, which means places I’ve been. I’ve met people and relaxed in the Taj Mahal Palace lobby, even bought a shirt there. I’ve caught trains at Shivaji Terminus.

And Leopold Café! Friggin’ Leopold’s! For a New York equivalent, it’s as if terrorists attacked not just the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Central Station, but also Katz’s Delicatessen. It’s just wrong — and yes, I know that the whole thing is about as wrong as can be, but bringing Leopold’s into it is so dementedly off-script for this sort of thing. It’s horrible, and I’m sad.

Meanwhile, Thailand seems to be moving towards a confrontation with the protesters who have shut down the airports. Will I still be going there? We’ll see. If there’s not any actual fighting, and the airport is open, I probably will. And if things suddenly get nasty again? Well, “I was trapped in a foreign land by a military coup” would be the most interesting excuse I’d ever given for missing work.

We’ll see.

Update: A Mumbai Chabad House has been attacked as well, and there are hostages inside, and probably some people have already been murdered. Horrible.

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[dreaming of fluorescent pepsi in the night]

So where were you last Tuesday night?

Seven years after the definitive where-were-you-when moment for Americans under sixty, it is with great relief that there is now a new moment to talk about. For the past week, conversations have turned to the election, which has unleashed a giddy elation in myself and countless others.

As for me, I was at a house party in a high-rise on West 42nd Street, where I stayed to watch first McCain’s and then Obama’s speech. At around 12:30, I headed out, planning to walk back to Times Square and take the subway home, but soon it was clear that something extraordinary was happening. Packs of people streamed by, chanting and waving Obama signs. Strangers were smiling and talking to each other, even embracing. A black woman threw her arms out and howled, “I’m goin’ ta work naked tomorrow!”

Times Square was still packed when I got there. The big screens around the square were all showing the results still coming in, and Obama’s picture kept drifting by on the giant LEDs. I called my sister, then my parents, then some friends, to let them hear what was going on. “YES! WE CAN! YES! WE CAN!” “O! BA! MA! O! BA! MA!” “YES! WE! DID! YES! WE! DID!” Fire trucks drove by and honked in rhythm. I talked to a man from Guinea who was texting his friends back home. They were still celebrating, though it was nearly morning there.

I bought a T-shirt that said President Barack Obama. I cheered and I chanted with strangers. I stared at the monitors and talked shop with strangers about Senate races. At last I headed home, by cab, sharing my joy with my Senegalese driver. It was a beautiful night.

*

The next day, I bought my ticket for Thailand. I’ll be going on December 20, returning on January 4. At first I agonized over how I would book internal flights for when I arrived, but yesterday I decided to let that go. I’ll just show up in Bangkok and figure it out. There’s always a bus to somewhere.

Bus travel, of course, is unpredictable. I have been battered and bruised on buses, ridden on the roof over mountain roads, crossed the United States with Euro-hippies, been awakened by snapping fingers in my face and a man barking, “Tea, toilet!” But what comes to mind most viscerally for me are two experiences. In one, I am riding through Bridgeport, Connecticut, gazing out the window at a bombed-out husk of a city, and listening to “Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997,” by Beck:

I was born in this hotel, washing dishes in the sink
Magazines and free soda, trying hard not to think

The other memory is of India, staring out the window of a night bus — god knows where — listening to Dig Your Own Hole by the Chemical Brothers and watching these islands of fluorescent light drift by, illuminated roadside bhatis with walls of turquoise and pink, hand-painted Pepsi logos, and skinny, mustachioed men with bushy hair, bushy mustaches and dhotis.

In each case, the memory mixes music, bus travel and alienation. Buses, it seems to me, are an ideal environment for feeling alienated, with none of the romance of trains or the sense of occasion that still clings to air travel even in the age of the flying cattle car. Buses rattle and bump, stop unpredictably, go off course, get stuck in traffic. And music is ideal for creating a contrast, or an emotional frame, for absorbing images that are somehow surreal and out of context.

And so I’m sorting through my music, trying to figure out what goes on my iPod for my trip to Thailand, and contemplating a bus trip up the country, from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, with stops in Ayuthaya and Sukhothai and who knows where else. What will settle into my memory this time?

My first little taste of adventure travel was on a Green Tortoise bus down from Oregon, and it sold me on the notion. I soon spent ten days crossing the Northern US with the Green Tortoise, and then another fourteen days heading back across the South. After college, when I leaped blind into India, I experienced bus travel in whole new ways: riding the roof with a couple of cackling old men on the road that winds over the mountains back into Pokhara; wrapped in a shawl, trying to sleep as the cold desert wind whips through the empty window frame of a night bus to Jaisalmer; pressed up against a man smelling of sandalwood and sweat, trying to tune out the high-pitched warble of distorted Hindipop. I have been bounced and battered in a sleeping compartment with no seats. I have been awakened early in the morning by snapping fingers in my face and a man barking, “Tea, toilet!” I have

Bus travel is unpredictable. Some of the best and worst travel experiences of my life have involved buses. My first trip, down from Eugene, Oregon to San Francisco, was a revelation: my first time jumping into a travel experience with no clear idea what it would entail. I sat on the back, on the mattress platform, while an impromptu bluegrass band struck up, and then sat by a river at the Oregon campsite stopover and shared stories with probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.

Over the next couple of years, I twice crossed the United States in Green Tortoise buses. Then, after college, I made a grand, blind leap into India, where

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[springtime in new york]

It’s spring, and a lovely one. The weather is delightful. There are cherry blossoms on the trees (well, the cherry trees), and whole streets are paved in petals. The magnolias too are in bloom, and the dogwoods, and the tulips are getting slightly obscene. 

My life here continues apace. All is well at Google — I’ve had my first guest come in to ooh and ah at the wonders of my Googley life, and if you’re nearby, you’re more than welcome to swing by sometime for a free dinnner on Uncle Google. And this weekend I’m finally going back to the All-Night Concert of Indian Classical Music, an annual event held at St. John the Divine’s Synod Hall. I went once years ago, discovered a love for the bansuri, India’s wooden flute, and left at around 5 a.m., by which time I was seeing spots. I was younger then, too. We’ll see how far I get this time. One advantage is that I won’t be on my own (at least for the first few hours), as a Punjabi friend of mine will be joining me. And she may even know something about the music, which would be a welcome improvement over my admittedly blissful ignorance.
See you on the other side!
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[happy diwali]

DEEPAVALI NEE (MP3)

DEEPAVALI DEEPAVALI (MP3)
Balasaraswati
Old Telugu Songs

THE DIWALI SONG (MP3)
Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson
Nirali Magazine

Tonight begins the festival of Diwali (or Deepavali, or Tihar), the South Asian festival of lights. This seems like a perfectly good excuse for digging up a few Indian songs from various corners of the web. I don’t know much about any of these songs, but here goes.

“Diwali Di Rat Deevay,” by Bhai Kanwarpal Singh, is part of Gurmat Sangeet Project, “a grass-roots level effort dedicated to the preservation and propagation of the Gurmat Sangeet tradition, which can be traced all the way back to Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the founder of the Sikh religion.”

“Deepavali Nee” is on a website called TamilBeat.com and seems pretty contemporary, but I couldn’t find anything beyond that. Info is welcome.

“Deepavali Deepavali” is a mournful song, which seems odd for the holiday, but it’s part of a movie and presumably has something to do with the plot. Sung by Balasaraswati, a famous South Indian dancer (or at least I think it’s the same Balasaraswati; for all I know, finding Balasaraswatis in Hyderabad is like finding guys named Anthony in Brooklyn).

And finally, we come to The Office and its loopy celebration of Diwali. Have a happy, happy, happy, happy Diwali!

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[swastika hysteria]

Fashion house Zara has gotten itself into trouble by accidentally selling purses with swastikas on them in the UK. Denis Fernando, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism, responded forcefully: “Fascism and racist symbols are sometimes legitimised in popular culture, this is one of those times.”

Except it’s not. As a nice Jewish boy with a swastika on my living room wall, I’d like to explain.

Like most people in the West, I grew up associating the swastika strictly with the Nazis, and I was appalled by any display of it, in any form. It had a kind of radioactive power that compelled disgust — an entirely appropriate response to any attempted glorification of Nazism, however crude. When my German-descended high school classmate drew them on his desk (in pencil, crookedly and backwards), I took it as a personal insult, and that’s how it was intended.

It was my trip to India in 1997, just after college, that changed my perspective on the swastika. Again and again during my four months in the Subcontinent, concepts I had never thought to question turned out to be completely contingent on cultural context, and swastikas were no exception. In Nepal, I was amused to find that the swastika was included with the hammer and sickle in a pro-communist graffito, a juxtaposition unimaginable in the West. In India, I saw swastikas branded on camel’s butts, put on goofy stickers for kids, painted on people’s faces. I even saw snacks arranged into swastikas. Three years later, in Korea, I became even more used to the ubiquity of swastikas, which tended to mark Buddhist gathering places or shamanistic fortune tellers’ shops in otherwise nondescript streets of three-story brick suburbia.

The swastika on my wall is on the palm of the Hindu god Ganesh, in one of four extraordinarily beautiful posters I picked up for a few dollars on the street in Mumbai back in 1998. It’s a symbol that can mean death, horror and destruction, but also means welcome and good luck to millions upon millions of people in our world. (In this respect, it’s not unlike the cross or the crescent.) Ganesh’s swastika is not the Nazi black outline on a white circle in a red field. It’s red, trimmed with gold, hand-painted with affection. Likewise, the Zara swastikas were a cheerful green, enclosed in a red sunburst.

What interests me in all this is the way this fundamental shibboleth of Western culture makes absolutely no sense in the context of a globalized world. This won’t be the last time some Asian swastika sneaks its way into the West. At the same time, the whole Danish-Muhammad-cartoon crisis makes it clear that these kinds of misunderstanding can run in every direction. What is necessary on all sides is a ratcheting down of the knee-jerk rhetoric, a consideration of context before the declarations of outrage.

I recognize that this won’t be easy. Some jackass is always willing to scream bloody murder just to get attention. But we should remember that any symbol sent from one culture to another is in need of translation. A swastika from India is no more an obscenity than a Vietnamese person named Phuc.

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[yesterday’s news]

Today the first of my purchases from Thriftbooks arrived: the 1996 edition of the Lonely Planet India, complete with a business card for Ashoka Arts of Udaipur1 (which I have visited) and someone else’s notes on when to go see the Taj Mahal.

Now, why would anyone want an outdated travel guide? Simple: to reconstruct a journey taken in the past. The 1996 edition differs considerably from later versions, and it’s the one I hauled around with me during my baffling, overwhelming, life-changing slog across the subcontinent back in 1997-98.

Ever since that trip, I’ve wanted to write about India in one way or another. I have taken a number of disappointing stabs at an India novel, but I think that the processes I’m going through in my life right now — the hard struggle to face my fears and my shame squarely, to take a rigorously honest look at myself and my life — may open the door to better, truer writing.

India will almost certainly be a part of that. It has to be, I think, considering its importance in my life. And so will Judaism. I remember Björg, my Faroese traveling companion through Rajasthan, telling me she’d never heard anyone talk so much about being Jewish. Why was it that after four years of going to college three thousand miles from my parents and sleeping with exotically Scandinavian-named women, I still felt it necessary to go on a Grand Tour of a country that celebrates exactly the kind of idol worship Abraham found objectionable? And why, once I was there (and in the company of another Scandinavian), could I not stop talking about what it meant to me to be a Jew?

These are questions I wouldn’t even have been able to pose until quite recently. The whole Jewish thing, wrapped up as it is with all my parental angst and fundamental sense of dislocation and alienation, was simply too frightening even to look at. That may sound silly, but there it is.

And so I’ve decided to get myself copies of the Lonely Planets that guided me through that journey: not just the India guide, but also the one for Nepal, and for trekking in the Nepal Himalaya. If nothing else, this new-old Lonely Planet has confirmed for me the existence of the Peacock Hotel in Pushkar2, along with its location — issues that remained vague for me even though I stayed there, no doubt because of the bhang lassis I consumed each night during my visit to that pleasant little town.
—
1. And I quote, all sic:

Mfrs. & Exporters of : Painting on Silk, Wood, Paper and Marble
96, Patwa Street Near Jagdish Temple
UDAIPUR-313 001 (India)
We Accept All Credit Cards & Foregin Currency


Ashoka Arts A Mile Stone in the Field of Paintings.

  • See How Artist Make Paintings with Natural Colours.
  • A Co-operative Orgnised by the Artists.
  • A Reflection of Indian Culture & Historic Background.
  • Most Economical & Best Quality Painting on Marble, Silk, Paper on wood.
Ashoka Arts
Best Miniature Paintings,

2. “On the outskirts of town is the Peacock Hotel, a good choice despite being rather far from the lake. The rooms surround a large, shady courtyard, and the swimming pool and jacuzzi are a big drawcard. Singles/doubles cost Rs 50/80 with common bath, Rs 120 for a double with bath attached, and there are more upmarket rooms at Rs 300/450.” I remember neither pool nor jacuzzi, but then, it was seriously cold during my visit.