India

Having spent 6 months working and travelling in India, I have many stories to tell about the country. I have therefore divided the articles into several sections:

• Daily Life & Work - experiences throughout my everyday life and work in Gurgaon, an business and technology hub near Delhi.
• North India - stories and photographs from my travels in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
• South India - stories and photographs from my trips in Mumbai, Goa and Kerala.
• People & Culture - observations about Indians, their character, habits, religion and culture
• Books - reviews of interesting books about India and the South Asia region
• Useful Tips - a section for those who are planning a trip to India (otherwise don't bother)

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Often, people ask me questions like: "What is your favourite place in India?" I find that I simply cannot give them the answer they want to hear - a name of a city or a state. What I love most about India is the immense variety of landscapes, cultures and people. If you go from north to south, you will see some of the highest mountains in the world in Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal, Nepalese-looking people in Himachal Pradesh and in the Northeast, Buddhist communities in the mountains, Sikh temples and people wearing turbans in Punjab, arid deserts and camels in Rajasthan, colourfully dressed Rajasthani women in skirts and saris, muslim women wearing burkhas on the streets in Old Delhi, Hindu women wearing salwar kameez across North India, young girls wearing mini skirts in the posh clubs in South Delhi, landscapes that look like a blend between the tropics and a desert in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, beautiful Mughal monuments such as the Taj Mahal in Uttar Pradesh or Humayun's Tomb in Delhi, slums outside the airport in Mumbai or near the railway tracks north of the Nizamudin station in Delhi, glamorous shopping malls in Mumbai or Gurgaon, laid-back beaches in Goa with sea-facing restaurants constructed out of bamboo and only minimal tourist infrastructure catering mostly to "hippies", the lush tropical vegetation and rice fields in Goa and Kerala, where everything is growing wildly and the landscape is an incredibly bright shade of green right after the monsoons, the Portuguese churches in Old Goa, which is a place where time has stopped, the backwaters in Kerala where boats transport coconut and where men are wearing nothing more than a sarong covering their privates, where people speak the incomprehensible language that is Malayalam and where all food is infused with coconut ... That diversity is what makes India so special, and it is what makes it impossible for me to choose my "favourite" city or place. Even though India was not the easiest place to live in sometimes, with its incredible poverty and minor daily inconveniences, it is a very real, unpretentious place which will always have a special place in my heart. There is no other place like it.

Deepak Chopra on why India appeals to his soul

Incredible India

The Indian tourism department has managed to capture this sense of diversity with its "Incredible India" campaign. There are many adjectives that you could use to desribe India - beautiful, ugly, rich, poor ... and none of them would manage to describe all that diversity. "Incredible" is a word that does apply to India as a whole, and I think it's very clever to describe the country this way. I am including one of the official India tourism videos here. Just like Bollywood movies, these adverts are airbrushed and only show the bright side of India, without its harsher realities. Nevertheless, it's still quite interesting to see.

Incredible India- Sare Jahan se Acha