Category: India

I lived in India for a year and studied Indian culture at university.

Améliorer — indianiser — les plats tout prêts [fr]

[en] Fusion food, my style. How to indianize "ready-made" stuff.

Si je faisais les choses bien j’illustrerais cet article avec une série de photos. Mais ce soir, j’opte pour “faire” plutôt que “ne pas faire, mais bien”.

J’aime faire la cuisine. Parfois, cependant, il faut faire vite, et les rösti tout prêts de la Migros, c’est vachement pratique. Avec quelques petites épices indiennes, on peut égayer ces plats “tout prêts” achetés au supermarché. Toutes les épices (sauf si je précise) se trouvent dans votre petit supermarché indien du coin.

Quelques exemples.

Purée de pomme de terre en flocons

Au lieu de faire chauffer l’eau avec le beurre, faire fondre le beurre doucement dans la casserole. Faire revenir 30 secondes des graines de cumin (toujours cumin d’Orient, attention, le cumin noir n’a rien à voir avec!), des graines de moutarde noire, un peu de urid daal. Ajouter un oignon de printemps coupé en rondelles, des tiges de coriandre hâchées (ça se congèle bien) et un peu de turmeric. Saler. Ajouter l’eau, faire bouillir comme normal, ajouter le lait, puis les flocons.

Rösti

Dans une petite casserole, faire revenir graines de cumin et de moutarde noire, feuilles de curry (ça se congèle, comme ça on en a toujours en stock), puis pâte au gingembre et à l’aïl (idem), oignon hâché, et finalement un peu de goda masala (j’en ai un stock si vous voulez) et de la poudre de piment. Ajouter tout ça aux rösti une fois qu’ils sont presque prêts.

On peut bien sûr aussi les égayer “à la suisse”: rajouter lardons, oignons, morceaux de Gruyère (au dernier moment, sinon ouh là le fromage fondu partout dans la poêle), oeuf…

Raviolis en boîte

Mettre du beurre dans la casserole, faire revenir graines de cumin, graines de moutarde noire, feuilles de curry. Ajouter du turmeric et quelques gousses d’aïl en petits morceaux. Ajouter les raviolis, les faire chauffer, et terminer avec beaucoup de feuilles de coriandre.

Chicken Tikka Masala tout prêt

Je trouve la plupart des repas indiens tout prêts de la Migros un peu fades, mais le Chicken Tikka Masala est pas mal. Une fois que vous avez réchauffé le plat, ajoutez un oignon de printemps, une échalotte, ou un petit oignon rouge hâché, un peu de jus de citron, et des feuilles de coriandre. Miam!

Autres idées

On n’est plus dans le “tout prêt”, là, mais quand je fais une saucisse à rôtir ou une sauce bolo, je l’indianise aussi.

Pour la saucisse à rôtir, j’ajoute des graines de cumin et des graines de coriandre en plus de l’oignon et de l’aïl à caraméliser.

Pour la sauce bolo, je commence avec une base cumin + moutarde noire + feuilles de curry et oignons + piments verts + pâte au gingembre et à l’aïl avant d’ajouter la viande, la tomate, etc.

Pour les soupes, idem. Balancer quelques épices “exotiques” au moment opportun lors de la préparation, ce n’est pas compliqué et ça donne une “super bonne soupe”. Ajouter bêtement du curry en poudre “suisse”, si vous n’avez pas les bonnes épices sous la main, est aussi un bon truc (y compris dans la bolo).

Vous voyez un peu l’idée? Le choix des épices, il faut expérimenter un peu. Le trio de base c’est graines de cumin, graines de moutarde noire, feuilles de curry — mais on peut en enlever un ou deux, ajouter d’autres choses, bref.

Amusez-vous bien!

Cockerel, Anybody? [en]

[fr] Plein de nouvelles!

So, what’s up?

I’m in the UK. I’m helping Aleika find a new home for one of her cockerels, Hercule Poirot. He’s a super-good-looking guy, and he takes his job with the hens very seriously.

Hercule Poirot Head Shots 4

Do you know anybody in the UK who has chickens (hens!) and would like a stunning rooster to look over them? Do let me know.

I have had a week of holiday planned here for months, and in between Safran’s death and Somak’s appointment as Professor of Physics at Presidency University, Kolkata (so… back to India for the three of them!), we decided I would be taking Quintus back with me.

Quintus in Birmingham 6

Do you know any good people in Calcutta/Kolkata? I’m particularly interested in getting in touch with

  • people who are into organic farming/gardening in the area
  • expats who have done the move from the UK sometime during the last three years or so (moving companies! shipping! organisation!)

For those who may not know, Bagha was also initially Aleika’s cat, and I adopted him when they moved from India to the UK, coming back home from India with him in my luggage. So, a little sense of déjà vu here 😉

On the work front, the OrangeCinema Official Bloggers project is underway. I spent a few days grading final reports for the course on social media and online communities I co-direct in Lausanne (some excellent, I have to say) and we’re preparing to welcome students for the third year of the course in September. I am looking for more writers for the ebookers.ch travel blog, and eclau is looking forward to everyone in Lausanne hearing more about coworking through the opening of a second space there, La Muse (which started out in Geneva). I will by the way be attending the Coworking Europe Conference 2012 in Paris (and probably speaking, will confirm in a couple of weeks). I have rekindled my enthusiasm for organising Bloggy Friday meetups (please do come to the next one, July 6th!) There’s more to say, but this is becoming a long paragraph 😉

What else should I tell you? I’m reading Drive, by Dan Pink, a fascinating book on motivation — and you should too, whether you’re interested in how your own motivation works, or in how to keep other people motivated (I’m thinking of taking a Sagmeister). I’ve started a group on Facebook for people in and around my area (and a bit further out) who like growing stuff on their balcony and elsewhere. I’m in the process of figuring out how to continue juggling judo, sailing, and singing (answer: be super organized). On the way to Birmingham, I stopped by for a day to stay with Steph and meet Emile The Cat.

Emile The Cat 1

I might not have told you, but Steph is my organisation inspiration (amongst many other things, which include being a very good friend!) and so I seized the occasion to face my calendar head-on and get a few holiday/travel dates sorted out. Short version: I don’t have a week-end available until June 2013 (don’t panic for me: it includes week-ends I have blocked out as “must stay at home and relax”).

I’ve also been realizing what a long way I’ve come regarding my organisational and time-management skills. Oh, I still fall in the pit every now and again, but a few discussions lately with people who seem to share the same core issues I have (had?) with time management, procrastination, perfectionism made me realize how far I have traveled.

I’m sure there was other stuff I wanted to say/blog about, but that’s the lovely thing about a blog, right? I can just write about it tomorrow, or the day after, or when I think of it. “Just.”

Back From India [en]

[fr] Je suis rentrée d'Inde!

I’m not good at transitions, at changes of life rhythm.

Switzerland to India and back is a big transition, and not because of the temperature gap. Everyone knows there is a huge difference in culture and lifestyle between these two places of mine.

But there might be an added twist. I don’t know if it’s personal to me, or if it’s something others experience while navigating between India and “The West”. When I’m in Switzerland, my life in India seems very very far away. It feels unreal, almost fictional, or like it’s somebody else who is there when I’m there, not really me.

Pune Tulsi Baug 2012 11.jpg

What about when I am in India? India feels very normal. Switzerland is very far away, and my life “at home” also fades away into some degree un “unrealness”, but with a different quality. Put side-by-side 35 years in Switzerland and 1 year in India, I guess it explains it.

(Come to think of it, my time in India is adding up: 11 months + 6 weeks + 5 weeks + 5 weeks + 2 weeks + 6 weeks… we’re approaching a year and a half end-to-end.)

Put simply, I feel there is a rift between me-in-India and me-in-Switzerland. I’m not exactly sure what it means or how to deal with it. I’m almost sure, though, that it does have something to do with the very strong feelings I have about India and Indian culture when I’m not there. It doesn’t mean I’d like to go and live there for good, or even for an extended period. But sometimes I feel a bit like I’m caught up in a one-way love story with the place.

Anyway, here I am in the plane, typing this during the hour-long layover in Frankfurt (thankfully they don’t make us get off the plane). I did not plan my time in India exceedingly well (more about that in a bit), but I did plan my return well: I have 5 full days with no serious work commitments so that I can “land” in peace, and then I ease back into my work life by attending the Lift Conference. Most of my work stuff is currently under control, either because I dealt with it before I left, or because I stayed on top while I was traveling (blogs like the Ebookers Travel Blog and the Paper.li still need an editor even when I’m in India, right?). So, I’m happy with myself about that bit.

What I’m less happy about is how I approached my time in India — but thankfully, the stress I got myself in led to an important realization. You see, my now-annual India retreat is my big chunk of downtime for the year. So I spend all year thinking “oh, when I’m in India, I’ll do… all sorts of things”. Examples of things I planned to do in India:

  • read a huge amount of books
  • write a lot (fiction and for the blog… you can see how well that turned out ;-))
  • put all my photos online, and catch up with the backlog
  • work on my Hindi
  • see a long list of people
  • eat a long list of things
  • learn many more Indian recipes from Nisha
  • do a long list of India-specific things.

What happened with that is that when I arrived in Pune, I started feeling very stressed. There was actually humanly not enough time for me to do everything I had unrealistically put in the “when I’m in India…” box. I understood this during the return journey from Mahabaleshwar, so early enough in my trip, thankfully. I started writing down the list of everything I expected myself to do, and quickly understood why I was feeling so stressed. As I couldn’t extend my time in India (specifically Pune!) I started chopping things off the list. It helped a lot. For my second week in Pune, at the end of my stay, I actually decided to plan my time a little (as much as India allowed) and everything went much better. I’ve learned for next year: diving in without any structure is not a good idea when there are things I actually want to do!

Sometime during the last weeks, I read this article on the absence of work-life balance: there are always piles of things we “wish we had time for” but in practice, even when we do have time for them, we don’t do them. We’re fooling ourselves. I need to think more about this, because I spend a lot of time trying to make more space for things I think I want to do, and failing quite a bit.

So, I didn’t read much this year. I read American Gods. That’s pretty much it. And as you can see, I didn’t write any blog posts (well, barely). However, I did quite a good job on the photos, including catching up with some of last year’s. I saw almost all the people I wanted to see, bought enough stuff to bring back to get me into trouble at the airport (Kuwait Airways: 7kg hand luggage and 20kg in the hold… even though they didn’t enforce the 7kg hand luggage limit on the way to India — I hate it when airlines are not consistent).

I think I had a really nice time. I had some adventures, which I tweeted about when they happened. Come to think of it, maybe this is one of the reasons I blogged less? I had an Indian SIM card with data, which meant that I pretty much stayed connected on Facebook and Twitter and Path. Aside from that, I have to say that having a local phone number and data connection made my life a thousand times easier (think: suspicious-looking rickshaw-driver and Google Maps, for example).

I might or might not write about these in more detail at some point, but just to give you an idea:

  • a day trip to Mahabaleshwar with a bunch of scientists
  • frogs in the kitchen in Kerala
  • swimming in the Arabian sea, both in my clothes (Kerala) and in my swimsuit (Goa)
  • many days of rice and sambar and fish/chicken curry (very nice but a little repetitive for me!)
  • trying to teach a bunch of Hindi-speaking Delhi guys a French song
  • huge piles of seafood
  • being climbed all over by a two-year-old in the train (I was not in the mood)
  • drinking 80-rupee masala chay (in a teapot, probably justifies the price)
  • a whole afternoon/evening of listening to students in Western classical music perform (very nice and completely unexpected!)
  • car encounter with a roadside tree-stump (nobody hurt but the car)
  • a very long day trip to a waterfall which turned out to be dry (food not included
  • unexpectedly really liking Goa (large quantities of seafood helped, so did the Portuguese architecture)
  • things turning out all right when I didn’t expect them to
  • experimenting the 2×2 sleeper bus: one berth, 1m80 by 1m20, me, and some unknown Indian guy (more horrified than me, probably)
  • no major stomach issues! yay!

Of course, aside from the adventures, there was also things like eating lovely food, discovering new Hindi music, spending time with nice people (old friends and new acquaintances), taking lots of photos, relaxing, enjoying the warmth (specially when Siberia decided to move to Lausanne). I think I had a really nice time and am coming back relaxed and refreshed (once I’ve got over the jet lag and lack of sleep from travel).

Amit Gupta Needs You, and Other South Asians Too (Join the Marrow Registry!) [en]

[fr] Amit Gupta, celui qui a démarré Jelly et Photojojo (entre autres), court le risque de mourir de leucémie aiguë s'il ne trouve pas un donneur de cellules souches du sang. La chance de trouver un donneur pour quelqu'un d'Asie du Sud est très faible -- c'est pourquoi l'entourage d'Amit (et tout internet s'y met) remue ciel et terre pour encourager un maximum de personnes du même groupe ethnique de s'enregistrer comme donneurs.

I should have blogged about this weeks ago. I’ve been anxiously watching the countdown of the time that was left to find a bone marrow donor for Amit Gupta.

I’ve been checking Facebook and Twitter in the hope that I would see good news announced.

The countdown now says 0.

Amit Gupta Needs You!

It doesn’t mean it’s too late, but it means that if there is no good enough donor amongst the people currently in the registry, Amit will have to take his chances with extra rounds of chemo (with possibly lasting damage) to survive the acute leukemia he was diagnosed with only mid-September.

If caucasians have a roughly 90% chance of finding a matching donor should they need one, chances are much slimmer if you’re South Asian (1 chance in 20’000 of finding an exact match). The reasons, it seems:

  • the huge variety of HLA profiles (a set of genes) amongst South Asians
  • a general reluctance to register and if matched, to donate (50% or more of South Asians back out once matched).

Heck, if the Ugly Indian can keep a street clean in Bangalore, can he not join a marrow registry and possibly save a life?

I have to say that when I first heard that Amit needed a marrow donation, I imagined the procedure was something like a spinal tap. It isn’t. The donor’s stem cells are usually taken from the blood stream directly, or if needed from the hip or pelvis, not the spine. All in all, the procedure is close to giving blood. Not a huge deal, to be honest.

Team Gupta’s next move, Clark tells Wired.com, is to make sure people are aware of how simple and painless the donation process is. Marrow is extracted from the arm and generally takes six hours or so. The procedure is about as invasive as donating blood — it just takes longer.

And to join the registry, all you need to do is send back a cheek swab. It’s really easy.

Here’s how to help if you live in India.

Even if you’re not a match for Amit, you might be a match for somebody else whose life depends upon a bone marrow donation.

As for me, well, there’s little chance I may be a match for Amit (obviously). I looked up the Swiss Marrow Registry to sign up, and was quite disappointed to see that my heart operation seemed to rule me out. I checked with them, though, and it’s on a case-by-case basis. In my case, there’s happily no reason to rule me out on the basis of the operation I had over 30 years ago.

So, who is this Amit? I don’t really know him, though I had a couple of e-mail exchanges with him when I started the eclau Jelly. Yup, he’s behind that. And he also started Photojojo, which you should definitely join if you’re into photography.

But this goes beyond Amit: it’s an issue for the whole South Asian community. If you are South Asian, in India or elsewhere, please do see what you can do to help.

The Ugly Indians Are Cleaning the Streets of Bangalore [en]

[fr] A Bangalore, un groupe de volontaires nettoie et reprend possession des rues remplies de détritus. Tout ça en s'organisant en ligne, bien entendu. Ça rappelle un peu les Riot Wombles des émeutes de Londres.

If you’ve been to India, you know that the streets there are not a model of cleanliness. As for myself, coming from very-clean Switzerland, I always had a hard time with the idea that the accepted thing to do with your plastic cups when you’re travelling by train is to throw them out the window in the countryside.

20040202_street_life_117

Not in Bangalore, but a very typical sight in India, sadly.

Well, it seems that there are non-Swiss people who also think like me: The Ugly Indians (don’t just click on the link; go through the first pages of the site and take the tour of their work — it’s very well done).

It’s a grassroots citizen mouvement, which reminds me a lot of the Riot Wombles in London and elsewhere in the UK, concerned citizens who showed up in the aftermath of the infamous riots with brooms and buckets to clean up the mess.

The Ugly Indians are anonymous and self-organizing. They decide on a spot to reclaim, clean and prettify it, identify the main sources of “dirtification”, and once reclaimed, keep it that way. Less broken windows.

Read the piece the BBC did on The Ugly Indians. Like them on Facebook. Share with your friends, in India and elsewhere. Most importantly, read through their success stories — it’s incredible what they’ve accomplished!

Living in India, and feeling inspired? You just have to e-mail them.

Eat, Pray, Love: Damn You, Elizabeth Gilbert [en]

[fr] J'ai aimé Eat, Pray, Love plus que ce à quoi je m'attendais. Le trip "spiritualité indienne sauce occidentale", je m'en passerais, mais il y a plein de bonnes choses -- outre l'écriture, que j'aime beaucoup. Pour plus de détails... lire l'article complet en anglais!

Damn you, Liz Gilbert. I didn’t want to like your book, but I did. I even like you (well, the narrator you). Yeah, of course I can relate: 30-something heartbroken woman finds peace and love. Which single woman in her mid-thirties wouldn’t?

It annoys me, though, that you found them through faith, because I can’t do that.

I don’t doubt that you had a life-changing experience. I’m not either against religious or spiritual paths journeys per se, as long as they actually serve to grow us as human beings. But like the friends you mention near the end of your India book, I *cannot* believe anymore — believing there is a God or some other power, personal or not, is too incompatible with my worldview. A part of me would *like* to believe, so that I could find the peace you found. But I’d be faking it, right? Because another part of me is *certain* that there is nothing up there — or in there, aside from ourselves.

Bangalore 016 Gandhi Bazaar.jpgTo your credit, you do not proselytize, nor try to tell us that your way is The Only Way, and that we should all be doing it too. You bear witness of your own personal path, which involved a spiritual adventure in an ashram in India. I can appreciate that. But I have trouble relating to that aspect of your journey. (There is the Siddha Yoga issue too, which bothers me, but that I won’t delve into here.)

Also, whether you want it or not, your spiritual journey is coloured by a very specific — and modern — Indian school of thought (and by that, I don’t just mean Siddha Yoga). You acknowledge that, but in some respects you are blind to it, for example when you serve us truths about Indian spirituality or religions in general — you are talking from the inside of a specific religious tradition, not giving us access some kind of general truth. It’s a mistake many make, and I guess I can forgive you for it.

I personally believe that our conversations with God are conversations with ourselves. I believe we are much bigger than we think, and probably much bigger than we can ever know. And I say this not in a “mystical” or “magical” or “supernatural” sense, but in a psychological one. So for me, any religious or spiritual path is no more than a path within and with ourselves, using an exterior force or entity (“God”, “energy”) as a metaphorical proxy for parts or aspects of ourselves which are not readily available to our consciousness. Yes, it’s sometimes a bit complicated to follow for me too.

So what I can relate to, clearly, are your conversations with yourself in your notebook. I know I am a good friend. I’m loyal. I can love to bits. If I open the floodgates, I can love more than is possibly imaginable — just like you say of yourself. But I do not let myself be the beneficiary of so much love and care. “To love oneself,” not in a narcissistic way, but as a good friend or a good parent would. I know this is something I need to work on, I knew it before reading Eat, Pray, Love, but your journey serves as a reminder to me. It’s also reminding me that meditation (even when it’s not a search for God or done as religious practice) has benefits — and that I could use them.

So, thank you, Liz Gilbert. We may differ in our spiritual and life aspirations, but your journey has touched me, and inspired me. I didn’t expect it to. Thank you for the nice surprise. And damn you, because now I can’t look down quite so smugly anymore on those who rave about your book.

I'm Home [en]

[fr] Je suis rentrée. En Suisse, il fait gris et froid et Bagha est mort. Retour à prendre au jour le jour, en me félicitant d'avoir prévu une reprise en douceur après ce mois de décrochage.

I’m home.

Back in cold grey Switzerland, back to my dead cat and other losses that were put on the back-burner while I was in India.

Sorry for the gloom. There isn’t even snow to make things a little fun and exciting.

To be honest, I don’t feel really home. “Home” has lost a bit of its “homeness” without Bagha.

Part of the love I’ve had for my cozy flat these last ten years was because Bagha was here. Not all of it, but part of it. I used to always look forward to coming home after a trip, because it would mean being back with my cat. I missed him when I was away.

OK, maybe I’m painting the picture a little rosy in hindsight. Maybe I didn’t always look forward to coming home from my travels. But I was always happy to see Bagha again. I always looked forward to that.

Of course, it’ll get better in the coming days. I’ll see my friends again, rediscover the comfort of Swiss life, get working on my projects here (both personal and professional).

And scatter Bagha’s ashes in the garden.

Even now, all is not bad. It’s quiet. I have privacy. There is cheese.

I miss India already, though. You know, Nicole, I think I understand what you meant a couple of months back when you told me that you loved and hated it here, because I think I feel the same about India. I love it there. But some things also drive me nuts and make me thing “OMG I’m so glad it’s different at home”.

I’m going to spend more time in India. Two weeks scheduled in October (Delhi, Hindi tutoring) and most certainly January 2012, like this year. I have plans. Go back to the lovely homestay in Mysore. Visit a village near Pune where a friend has relatives. Go to Goa (yeah, even though it’s your cliché tourist destination). Spend a couple of days in Mumbai with Reality Tours and Travel. Plan a trip to Rajasthan (a lead and contacts showed up a week ago). In Pune, visit Parvati temple, the Aga Khan Palace, and one of the hill forts without giving up halfway there. Take Marathi classes. I could go on.

India is huge, diverse, exciting, chaotic. It’s a mess. The disregard for safety and rules can be maddening, but it’s also a healthy release from our coddled and controlled lifestyle here in the West.

I’m home now. A little anxious about how the next days will go, but I’ve decided to take it day by day. Today: unpack, check the state of my bank account and bills to pay, make a few appointments, go to judo. Tomorrow: go to a few appointments. Wednesday: dive into three days of Lift.

Indian Stretchable Time [en]

[fr] En quelques mots? Pas envie que mes vacances se terminent.

You what what they say about time in India: IST doesn’t stand for Indian Standard Time, but for Indian Stretchable Time. I think it’s pretty obvious to anybody who spends enough time here that the perception of time is very different here than in Europe, for example.

Pune 142 Laxmi Road Shopping.jpg

Holiday-time is also different from work-time. Days stretch ahead when your holiday is long enough. You forget what day of the week it is. You lose track of how long you’ve “been here”. You spend a whole day in Lightroom and fooling about online without worrying about being “productive”. You get up when you get up, don’t worry too much about mealtimes (especially if that is taken care of by your hosts), forget about your upcoming plans and deadlines.

And suddenly you realize there is less than a week left before you’re back in Switzerland, back to work-life, back to processing e-mails, back to a catless flat, back to earning money and paying attention to how much you spend, back to the cold and grey winter, back to everything you left behind.

Let me say it clearly: I don’t want my holiday to end and I don’t want to go back.

Of course, I look forward to seeing my friends again — but I’ll miss the people I love here. And I am very grateful I took example (partially) on danah and decided to send all my holiday e-mail into the black hole — meaning I will be coming back to work without an e-mail backlog to catch up on.

But right now I really don’t want to go back to my life.

We had a really nice time in Bangalore and Mysore. My Bangalore photos are online now, but I haven’t got around to sorting through the Mysore ones yet, or writing all the articles I want to write — as if putting it off was going to extend my holiday. (Articles? Bangalore Walks, Hillview Farms Homestay, Security Theatre in India, some thoughts on Indian culture in the light of independence and colonial legacy, a whole bunch of Indian recipes…)

I’ll go back to reading my book or hanging out on Quora now, while Nisha makes lovely-smelling chapatis next to me and the dogs nap on the cool stone floor.

Choc culturel à Bangalore [fr]

Cet article a été initialement publié sur le blog de voyage ebookers.ch (voir l’original).

Après plus ou moins 14 mois en Inde si l’on met mes séjours là-bas bout-à-bout, j’ai vécu la semaine dernière un de mes plus grands chocs culturels indiens: Bangalore.

Bangalore 126 Fancy Buildings.jpg
Tout en vitres et en hauteur.

Après Pune, Bangalore est immense, moderne, et ressemblerait presque à l’Occident. Grands boulevards (même s’ils sont surchargés de voitures), bus neufs climatisés roulant à toute vitesse (autant que les embouteillages le permettent), tours vitrées chatouillant les nuages, population jeune et habillée à l’occidentale, arbres majestueux, restaurants luxueux et chers, immense chantier du futur métro en plein air au-dessus de l’artère principale de la ville, aéroport à faire pâlir certains d’Europe… Certes, on trouve à Bangalore des coins qui me font penser à Pune. Mais ma petite semaine sur place m’a laissée presque un peu déboussolée.

Bangalore 076 Street Views.jpg
Rickshaws rutilants et bien alignés près de Commercial Street.

J’ai commencé à mieux comprendre cette ville lors de mon dernier jour sur place, à l’occasion du Victorian Bangalore Walk auquel nous avons participé (fortement recommandé, je vous en reparlerai). Bangalore, comme les Etats-Unis par ailleurs, est une terre d’immigrés. Au tournant du 19e siècle, les Anglais y installent leur centre militaire (cantonment) pour l’Inde du sud. Forte population Anglo-Indienne, donc, afflux par la suite d’immigrés du reste de l’état du Karnataka, installation précoce de l’électricité (1906), arrivée d’entreprises comme Tata et Texas Instruments, sans compter les prisonniers italiens durant la deuxième guerre mondiale qui ont grandement contribué au développement du football dans cette ville… Quelques éléments d’histoire disparates et un peu en vrac, n’empêche: Bangalore est une ville qui s’est développée à travers ses immigrants — et ça continue aujourd’hui. Moins de 30% de la population de Bangalore parle le kannada, la langue locale.

On comprend donc mieux l’occidentalisation rampante, l’esprit entrepreneurial et le développement fulgurant de Bangalore, centre de gravité technologique attirant entreprises et cerveaux du sous-continent et d’ailleurs.

Mais qu’on ne s’y méprenne pas: la ville reste indienne, surtout dans ses infrastructures. Coupures d’électricité, maisons construites les unes sur les autres, ascenseurs et connexions internet en panne, vaches déambulant sur des routes souvent en mauvais état, rickshaws et leurs mythiques conducteurs (surtout ici!), offices postaux inintelligibles aux non-initiés, et surtout, mondes parallèles qui se côtoient sans jamais sembler se toucher, ou tout juste du bout des doigts. La nourriture y est excellente, et Bangalore recèle bien entendu des quartiers de petites ruelles (surtout dans la vieille ville) et des marchés détendus où il fait bon se balader, comme le Gandhi Bazaar dans le Basavanagudi.

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Gandhi Bazaar.

Je vous l’avoue, j’ai de la peine à l’aimer, cette ville trop occidentale à mon goût, même si pour beaucoup d’indiens elle représente le futur, le progrès, et la direction que doit prendre leur pays. Mais je ne doute pas qu’il doit faire bon vivre dans cette métropole multiculturelle, pour qui a un revenu lui permettant le train de vie qui s’y étale.

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Panneaux d'affichage.

A visiter? Oui, certainement, surtout si le côté “rustique” de l’Inde vous intimide un peu et que vous désirez conserver quelques repères en matière de confort occidental lors de votre séjour.

Depuis ici: