"In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing"
- Appolonius Tyranaeus
OK, so this is the first time I've been in India. It's fascinating. The whole place is teeming with life - all sides of life. I think in all the places I've been this is the one where I have seen bare humanity in all its brutal horror and in all its shining glory. A land of contradictions like nowhere else I have seen - ornate, bristling wealth alongside some of the most desperate poverty I have seen outside Africa. And so head-fuck random - on the bumshaking 8-hour drive from Cochin (a fairly big town in the laid-back southern state of Kerala) to the hospital where I'm on elective, I saw temples sixty foot high, children playing cricket in the road, padi fields with the light on the water making it shine like it was made of light, banana trees, lakes and rivers, big dusty towns, and once, opening my eyes to see an elephant walking alongside the car so close I could have reached out and touched it. I gasped in genuine delight and the driver rolled his eyes with a little smile on his face, like London taxi drivers do when tourists stop and take pictures of themselves next to red English postboxes.
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