Nick Lovegrove

After two and a half years in India and now back in the UK, sitting in my old bedroom in my parents’ house, i feel the need to write about my time there before it all becomes a distant memory. In short, it was great. For those of you with short attentions spans, you can stop reading here. For those that are curious, nosey or bored, read on…

There were loads of reasons why i fancied living somewhere abroad for a while and, without a doubt, it turned out to be the right decision. After sniffing out possible options (and then turning down jobs in Shanghai, Delhi and Mumbai) i plumped for Bangalore. Not the most obvious choice given the relative fame of the other options but – having been to Shanghai – i knew i couldn’t live in such a bewilderingly huge urban sprawl. Google told me the other two would be unpleasantly hot.

Ah, the weather. I just as well gloat about it now and get it out of the way. The weather turned out to be one of the, if not the, greatest thing about living there. Bangalore has an almost perfect climate with only a month or two each year getting hot enough to feel the need for air conditioning and perhaps another month or two where you might need to wear a jacket out at night.

I’ve now realised that every British winter feels as if it’s a fight against nature, a battle to make it through to the sunshine and longer days of spring. Year round warmth removes that annual struggle and (as corny as it sounds) allows you to just get on with life. It’s only when you move somewhere that doesn’t have bad weather (in the UK sense) that you realise how much it dominates your existence at home. Never waking up in the dark, never having to consider what to wear, never shivering whilst waiting for a bus, never having to heat your home, being able to eat outside almost every evening etc etc. I still don’t consider myself as much of a sun-worshipper but i would never have guessed what a positive impact it has had on my mental well-being.

I thought i might miss the changing seasons and unpredictability of British weather. Bollocks to that. Quite frankly, the pleasure of waking up pretty much every morning and opening the doors on to a sunny balcony shits on a walk through the park on a frosty morning. I know i’m going to seriously feel the cold for the next few months and will probably moan endlessly about it. Apologies in advance.

The thing that sealed the deal when plumping for Bangalore was that my Dad spent quite a bit of time in the city when he was a child. I grew up with him recounting stories of his life in the Raj – being shot at by snipers in what is now Pakistan, riding on an elephant in his back garden, flying kites in the valleys of the Himalayas, all of which have stuck in my mind over the years (probably due to repeated retelling). Even Hindi words like ‘challo’ and ‘jaldi’ became part of the family lexicon, so it seemed natural to try and follow his footsteps.

Until the age of 16, he was a boarder at a school in Shimla however the family home was in Bangalore (a mere 5 day train journey away) and he spent 2 years attending Bishops Cotton school in the city before he joined the British army just after the war ended. Me being able to travel along a street that he used to cycle up everyday on his way to school (over 60 years before) creates a strange echo of history that was really satisfying but also made me miss him dearly.

My parents visited me in 2010 and although Dad didn’t recognise much of the city anymore, we did visit the site of my grandmother’s former house.  Located in one of the former colonial areas of the old town, almost every Raj-era house in the surrounding area has been knocked down to make way for apartment blocks – apart from this one, which although falling apart and greatly modified, is still standing. Being in the ‘legendary’ Prime Street with him and finding the very bungalow that he called home is a treasured memory.

The job turned out to be an almost entirely great experience. When I arrived, the college was still being built, there was only 5 other members of staff and a grand total of 4 students had signed up. Since then, a core group of us managed to set up a reasonably respectable design school from scratch with next to no help from head office. With the exception of the curriculum, almost everything else had to planned. What time should classes start in the morning? What should the marksheets look like? What do we put on the walls? Having that much freedom, with nobody more senior than you to say “no” (apart from for financial reasons) was a great challenge and i’m really proud of what we achieved. Although it was far from perfect process, i think we managed to create a unique personality for the college and hopefully it will go from strength to strength over the coming years.

Having a great bunch of people at work really helped, particularly in the first year. They know who they are so I won’t thank them individually. As someone who finds it hard not to be sarcastic and tends to find the faults in any given plan, the overwhelmingly positive attitude of most of staff was a real breath of fresh air from the UK, where moaning is a national pastime. Shambu (a tiny little Nepali guy who’s job was to supervise the cleaning ladies), big Ramesh (our boss’s driver) and little Ramesh (our amazing tea boy, who now has his own Facebook fan page) are some of the happiest people I’ve ever met, despite earning barely anything in Western terms. This positivity is everywhere in India, perhaps understandable given the consistent high economic growth over recent years. Yet there is also something to be said for the (massive patronising cliché alert) simpler life that the majority of Indians lead.

India (and more specifically Bangalore, which is much more down to earth than Mumbai and Delhi) hasn’t adopted the rush for bling and brand-names that other rapidly developing countries like China have. For almost everyone, the focus is still on the family. Most people in the UK would probably say that their family is the most important thing in their life, yet until you live somewhere where the family unit really is sacrosanct, it becomes obvious how much people in the west are distracted by work, friends and attempting to gain status through possessions. I’m sure I’ll be sucked back in to a consumerist lifestyle over the next few months but i’m certainly going to try to keep things simple for as long as I can.

Living somewhere where the vast majority of people behave in a remarkably similar way and abide by ‘the norms’ is going to seem really dull. Foreign tourists coming back from India will always have wonderful and strange tales of the crazy things they saw or people they met. These daily wtf moments are one of the best bits of living in India. Sometimes they’re funny (our cleaner turning my Bolognese sauce into a curry because it wasn’t spicy), more often curious (watching cows undo tied-up plastic bags with their mouth), often scary (a father and his 4 kids, plus baby, on a scooter) and generally just odd (an auto-rickshaw with so many chrysanthemum garlands on the windscreen the driver has to have his head sticking out of the side in order to see where he’s going).

Despite the constant crazyness, I found life in India incredibly easy. I’m pretty sure my life will never be as easy as it was there until I’m retired. Partly, this was because all the practical, day-to-day stuff was a doddle – a easy and quick commute, lack of stress at work, not having to worry about money etc. (Sorry to mention it again but the weather really helped too.) There’s also barely any crime and more importantly there’s little fear of crime. I wasn’t particularly scared of trouble when I lived in Peckham, yet being able to go anywhere without any fear of trouble is such a blessing.

The easy life was also due to having people around you to do all the mundane crap that clogs up your days. I had: a cleaner that comes twice a week (and also cooks a decent curry), a dhobi wallah in the basement (to iron shirts for Rs3/4p each) and an office boy (runner, in UK media speak) to go to the bank, post office etc; also almost everything can be delivered to your door (including cold beer). Most foreigners, including me, initially go through a period of guilt about employing people to do the jobs you don’t want to do and paying them next to nothing. Yet after you get to know the individuals, you quickly realise that they’re simply grateful to have a job that feeds their family. Also, nobody seemed to harbour any bitterness about the brutal colonial rule that the British inflected upon the nation for three centuries.

During my time there I also found myself feeling guilty about my ‘escapist’ lifestyle. Whilst I was there, the concerns I would be dealing with at home – family issues, politics, the financial crisis etc – seemed a world away. Running away and living the ex-pat life is perfect way to ignore these problems – and also make you feel like a selfish twat. It was strange not to have a meaningful engagement with the place that you live or be able to develop long-term relationships with the people around you. Everything is temporary, which suits the inner teenager in us that wants to avoid responsibility but i’m not sure i could carry on living a nomadic life. I certainly don’t feel any great affection for the UK (it’s a pretty average country in European terms) but I know it will be my home for the foreseeable future and I think I’ll take more of an effort to try to change the things I disagree with from now on.

As a country, India is simply amazing, as those of you who have been there will know. Luckily, I managed to travel round a fair bit. From the near empty beaches of Kerala and Goa to the crumbling history in Kolkata and the epic scenery in the Himalayas to the buzzing nightlife in Mumbai, it’s difficult to appreciate how much diversity there is in one country. Although I never made it to any of the traveller hotspots like Agra and Rajasthan, being a tourist is so damn easy (as long as you’re not in a rush) i know I’ll be back to visit , hopefully into my old age.

I was genuinely sad to leave. There feels like so many things left to do, sights to see, people to meet and projects to complete. I never made up to Ladakh, i never finished my Kannada font, i never got around to exhibiting my illustrations and i never managed to persuade a club in Bangalore that i was worthy of a gig. However the decision to return home was been made for me. For the last couple of years, i’ve increasingly wanted to attempt a MA. The cost of studying in the UK has been rising rapidly, i simply can’t afford to wait and see how much they put up the fees for Masters courses. My degree course in Visual Communication was bafflingly vague and I really feel an urge to learn all the specialist stuff I missed out on. The idea of being a teacher and then heading back to school is great and i can’t wait to really stretch myself creatively. I also know I’ll make the most of it, which I almost certainly wouldn’t if I had tried it any earlier. Hopefully, the qualification should make getting a teaching job in the UK easier (that is if anyone can still afford to study design subjects by the time I finish).

Lonely Planet’s recent list of the Top 10 cities for 2012 placed Bangalore at number 3. Whilst this is blatantly nonsense (for a visitor, it’s not even the third best city in India). I found it a really easy city to live in. The lack of anything decent to do at the weekend and the ludicrous traveling times make it a difficult city to love, yet it was extremely good to me. I can’t recommend moving abroad enough; having made the leap, the idea of spending your whole life living in one country now seems to me as old fashioned as never leaving the place that you grew up.

Bye India, until next time.

© Nick Lovegrove 2010