Just got back from a movie - nearly three hours in a language I don't understand, in a ratty old cinema called the Regal - but until the last half hour I was having a grand time, cheering with the audience at witticisms and noble sentiments I couldn't understand but somehow got anyway. The film was called "Guru" and told the story - so far as I could tell, and I'm sure I missed most of it - of the rise and fall and rise again of Shakti Polyester Corporation (a true story, I learn from imdb.com), interwoven with the sad but justified slow death of a conniving belly dancer, and starred stars I recognized, and featured its share of bizarrely wonderfully irrelevant music and dance scenes. I had a ball!
I haven't told you about our group though, have I? Well, last night we met on the roof terrace of the hotel here, 10 of the 12 of us in the group, including 2 Aussies, 6 Brits (conveniently 2 posh girls, 2 middle class girls, and a young working class couple), a Dane, myself, and our guide - who's French. A pretty young crowd, and all of us but the Dane India novices. As our guide reminded us that we were on an adventure tour which involved fewer comforts but in exchange more contacts with the culture - just to make sure we knew what we had signed up for - and as we went around the table and gave inert little accounts of who we were and why we here (except me, I had to make people laugh), and then as we sat around a table in a nearby restaurant pretending to be friends already, I felt it was the start of a television reality show. Who will survive?
Amazing, really, since I've only ever seen about three hours total of reality shows. And yet as I recall last night on the roof terrace I'm seeing the hand-held camera swooping around us, and imagine our guide Catherine confiding to a camera what she expects from this quiet one and that squeamish one, that keen one - and the one who had to make people laugh. India will bring out things the members of this innocuous seeming bunch don't know about each other, and may not even know about themselves!
Except for the cameras (perhaps I've internalized being constantly watched), it's all true!
We're off early tomorrow morning for Agra and the Taj Mahal (!) and another, grander, Red Fort; from there we head to a village called Chanderi for two days. The hotel in Agra may have internet; the lodging in Chanderi almost certainly not. So it may be a few days before I check in again.
