India is a developing country. And we are meant to be aware of it. But the vast difference between the lands of plenty and our land of plenty -- of people, that is -- only come home to me when I travel to USA or Europe with my four-year-old daughter. She is a child of the developing world. And for her, the thrills of going on a holiday to Sweden is not to see a new place or, as she lives in crowded Bombay, run in large open spaces or see the reindeer in the zoo or take rides in Disneyland. No, she thrives on the sheer modernity of these places. She is entranced to the point of dumbstruck by the shiny chrome elevators that zoom upwards, the maze of escalators, the moving sidewalks, the trams, the candy dispensing machines, the automatic doors, the ticket-operated subway barriers, the self-service cafeterias, the children's amusement centres... So many buttons to push and levers to operate and she wants to manipulate them all. She laughs in delight seeing 3-million-dollar cranes moving a tree. And makes me stand at the edge of a street corner for 25-minutes to watch Manchester trash being loaded into a garbage truck. The crowning joy of this trip was to use a department store bathroom that had automatic toilet seat changers. With a grinding drooom one toilet seat magically disappeared into the tank to be scrubbed and shampooed and a new one popped out. And my normally sombre daughter stood and giggled her head off. It is then that I realise how strange the modern world is. And actually how sane living in India is. Step out of Manchester or Tallinn airport and machines actually take control of your existence. For instance, learning the art of getting around London involves mastering a series of machines from trolley coin release buttons, to lifts, escalators and subway fare machines. Fly into the West and you are delivered into a rushing, faceless world, far from the warm, curious faces of India. In London the tubes are full, but nobody looks at another, even though they are not reading newspapers or novels or looking out at the black subway tunnels. My daughter asks me, puzzled, "How come nobody talks to me here?" Like my daughter I am awed by the plentifulness of these places. Disembark at Stockholm and there are card phones for your use and pay laptop computers to surf the Net and a bewildering array of stores and goods. Airport personnel zoom down quiet carpeted corridors on indoor jeeps and one-wheel scooters. The children's play area is sumptuously equipped -- a television, a slide, computer games and more. But except for the friends and family I met, I exchanged words with about 10 people -- the immigration clerk, of course ("I know you have an Indian passport but that does not mean you live in India," he says with a mild smirk), the airline personnel, the cabby, the subway ticket seller... The people you are meant to talk with -- the taximan or your fellow passenger on the train -- are wired to somebody else. The Croatian/ Bosnian cab driver talks in his incomprehensible lingo into his hands-free mobile set to his girlfriend or wife. He does not even acknowledge you and just sticks his hand out in the end to take money, like a machine. The woman executive sitting beside you on the train between London and Manchester... ditto. And of course the population is so scanty that there is virtually nobody else in the train compartment to talk to! I flew out of India a day after the BJP lost the confidence motion by one vote. I flew into a news vacuum. For the next 15 days travelling through UK, Sweden and Estonia, I found it impossible to get Indian news. Nobody who was not Indian knew whether election had been announced or whether Sonia Gandhi had become prime minister. I took to scanning Swedish language newspapers for words like Indisk or Indusk, or some picture of Manmohan Singh. And then finally in some small town in central Sweden I was told that the Italian woman, the Gandhi, could not become prime minister. I marvel at the importance of the Internet for getting news on India! Though news on India was not to be had, you could bump into Indians everywhere. Indians have established their niches all over. In fact I am struck, each time, by how many parts of the once-white Europe and largely-white USA are beginning to resemble an international airport. You arrive in England and you are meeting a whole variety of races you have never set eyes on before. Caribbean faces with lilting accents, tall fair North Africans, Kosovans, Ukranians, Iranis, Japanese, Latinos. And most of them are not tourists! Irani Kurds are making pizza. Filipinos handle immigration desks. Central Africans clean the airports. Pakistanis man the airline counters. The Yugoslavs drive taxis... Travel Editor Vaihaysi P Daniel swears that there is no place better than Bombay. Don't miss her Estonia Diary next week!
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