Perfection Not Required

My thoughts, feelings and travels — mostly unfiltered

Quitting India

Note: this post opens with some political opinions on the Iran war. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip straight to Goa.

My trip draws to a close. I am in an Uber traversing the narrow Bombay streets on my way to the airport. It is 9:54, but my flight is at almost 3 AM. I am starting early to make sure I have some time for duty-free shopping before takeoff.

I had a direct flight to JFK, but alas, the fates saw to intervene. Who am I to complain — millions have it infinitely worse right now. Still, I am a tad annoyed that we will be stopping very briefly in Rome. The plane, as far as I can tell, will not even unload. Maybe it’s just a refueling stop. Clearly we are avoiding airspace in the Middle East.

While I was relaxing in Goa this week, war broke out in Iran. It is hard not to think of the US and Israel as the (largely unprovoked) aggressors here. I won’t dwell on politics, except to say: really? We didn’t learn from Afghanistan and Iraq that this never works?

And the people here, well. No one I’ve talked to, despite the general support of Hindu nationalists for Israel — game respect game — seems to support what the US is doing. Stay in your own lane, seems to be the sentiment. Perhaps my sample is unrepresentative.

Regardless. Let me tell you about my week in Goa.

Goa

I arrived in Goa on Friday (so a week ago, now). I stayed at a hippy resort on Palolem beach in South Goa. To be honest, ChatGPT recommended the resort to me. I’m not sure why I trusted the robot so much: I guess I was just overwhelmed with planning. There was nothing wrong with the Art Resort Goa, per se. In fact, it reminded me a little of Cazadero Family Camp, where I’d spend a week each summer as a kid sleeping in tent cabins and roaming around the redwood forest. Substitute tent cabins for simple, freestanding rooms and redwood forest for beach and dirt for sand, and you start to approximate Art Resort Goa. Except ARG had none of the tight-knit family spirit Caz had, and what music there was was often unimpressive. Every night, one to two old white guys or a young, long-haired Indian would take the stage at the ARG restaurant (outdoors, of course) and play middling classics to a crowd of British couples, Israeli families, and scattered Indian tourists. The fare was incredibly bland, ranging from rock covers of Bruno Mars and Daft Punk to Sweet Caroline and Hindi-accented Stairway to Heaven. The only highlight was Monday night, when an older Canadian man competently covered Green Day (Basket Case) and Neil Young (My My, Hey Hey). What can I say, I like what I like.

Anyway. The Art Resort Goa served its purpose: it was an affordable room just feet from the beach. I could walk outdoors, pass one row of cabins, walk down some steps, and be in the ocean in 1 minute flat. Awesome. The water in Goa is so warm I could stay in it indefinitely. Palolem beach is clean and calm and not too crowded. The sunsets, often immersed in haze — though not smog — were spectacular. There’s something for me about being in water like that that feels vital: perhaps simply the unusualness of it for me is transporting, makes me feel both relaxed and moved. Truly do we need anything else but to float in warm water, eat decent food, and get a good night’s sleep? ARG provided all those things.

Though, those nights: I didn’t always get a good night’s sleep. Being in ARG for six nights, I figured I should try to meet some people. I had wanted to spend six nights relaxing in Goa at the end of my trip so I’d feel more refreshed coming back to the US and to work (more on that later), but alas. Goa was only somewhat restful, and I had multiple nights where I was up well past 2 AM.

First, Monday night. I was hanging by the bar at ARG. I’ve learned traveling that at least for me, the best way to meet people is to wait for an opening. Someone has to be ready to be met: you can’t just force your way in (though perhaps I’m just not confident enough to try that). An older couple, the man with long gray hair and the woman petite and brightly dressed, approached, and I gave up my stool for them. This created a natural opportunity to talk, and I asked where they were from. They were visiting from the UK, where the man, Philip, is a truck driver, and the woman, Nina, seems not to work. Nina, in fact, was Russian. Phil had met her on a beach in Goa some 15 years ago “when she was still a cute little thing,” he told me.

Phil, I learned quickly, was not constrained by normal standards of propriety, in the way some Brits seem to react against their country’s propriety by becoming especially ill-mannered. I usually don’t care about this kind of thing, and I didn’t that night either, at least not at first. I joined Phil and Nina at a table with some of their friends — as they’d been coming to Goa for at least 15 years, they knew people. These friends were two middle-aged British man and a young Latvian woman — maybe university-age — who one of the men introduced as his “Goa daughter.” After talking for a while, we walked over to a bar, El Diablo, that Phil seems to suggest was a wild place. All I saw were older British people talking, seated in front of the bar. I talked politics with one fairly knowledgeable older man, and then Phil made a couple remarks that really were fairly offensive, and it was time to go to bed. The clock said 3 AM.

The next night, I was back at the ARG restaurant listening to more British dad rock. I finally plucked up the courage to impose myself on a group talking at the bar, one headbanded white guy and a couple trendy-looking younger Indians. These were Pawani and Parth, a sister and brother from Delhi, and Dan, from London. The Delhi-ites both worked in advertising, and Dan was an engineer of some kind (not software) doing occasional remote work for a friend in the UK. He had spent last year in Australia and this one in India. He was living just over the state line, 30 minutes to the south in Karnataka. The siblings came down from Delhi every year. This time they were celebrating Pawani’s thirtieth.

After an awkward introduction, I settled in nicely with the group. We sat on the beach drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, talking about religion and culture. Pawani complained that Indian men don’t try hard enough: they all develop paunches, she said, and expect their wives to wait on them hand and foot, in addition to giving them a dowry and paying for the wedding. This was not for her, and she wasn’t planning to get married any time soon. But her mom was pushing her. “30 is basically an old maid,” she said, half-joking. We consoled her as best we could. She joked that she was going to start dating women.

The next night, the siblings, Dan and I met for beers and then dinner. After the beers, however, Dan discovered his motorcycle was gone. The shopkeeeper whose shop he parked in front of had told him not to park there, but Dan had ignored him, noting that another motorcycle was parked right next to his. When Pawani pressed the shopkeeper in Hindi about what had happened, he pretended ignorance — twice. We walked a few blocks and Dan came back with a policeman. This time, the shopkeeper talked and the bike was found in a nearby courtyard, behind a locked gate.

Bike secured, we went down to the beach and had a dinner of tandoori, curries, and naan. Dan and I talked about tech a bit, and we parted earlier than the night before, around 1.

By now it was Wednesday. I spent my last day in Goa alone, finishing the Machine Learning textbook I told myself I’d read in prep for my new role at Slack. This had been a less fun part of my time in Goa: spending around two hours a day reading about machine learning system design. Still, I felt it was important to show up to my new role having done some prep. We’ll see if it pays off at all — the book was pretty high-level. Mostly showed me how much I don’t know.

Thursday morning I woke up at 6 to catch my flight to Bombay.

Wrapping Up

I am now at the Bombay airport, getting ready to fly home after six weeks in India. I spent the last day and a half in Bombay, but really, it’s hardly worth commenting on: I mostly shopped so I’d have some keepsakes to bring back home, for myself and the fans. You know who you are ;)

So what do I think of this trip, now that it’s almost over? And how do I feel coming home?

First, let’s try to tackle some more tractable questions.

How did my packing work out?

I came to India with a single large backpack stuffed full of everything I thought I’d need for six weeks. The backpack clocked in at around 25 pounds. It’s sort of a fancy backpacking backpack, all black and unzipping down the middle like a regular suitcase, but with the same waist support a backpacking backpack offers.

This worked great. In fact, I overpacked: I took various health/medical supplies, like LiquidIV, that I didn’t even need to use. I could have used one more pair of light pants, but that’s about it.

What did I lose?

Hard to go on a six-week trip and not lose anything. This one was no exception. I lost:

Total cost of lost items: $15 (shirt) + $40 (pillow) + $45 (flask) = $100. I’ll live.

What did I read?

I read a bunch while here. I wrote about almost all of it:

Highlights?

Lowlights?

What would I do differently?

I wish I’d spent more time further north, near the Himalayas. That area looks beautiful. I don’t know why I didn’t consider it more fully. I think I underestimated how much I value nature and overestimated how much I’d want to engage with India’s (obviously interesting) history. I could have dialed this more towards nature, and the Himalayas would have been a great place to see amazing natural beauty.

I wish I’d flown less: my path across India was more jagged than it had to be. For instance, I went to Agra before Varanasi and then had to fly from Varanasi to Jaipur, whereas if I had gone to Varanasi and then Agra, I could have taken the train from Agra to Jaipur.

Both these mistakes, I think, came from an over-reliance on ChatGPT for trip planning. It was convenient to outsource some of my planning here, since I was overwhelmed by the number of decisions I needed to make. But I think talking to people who had done a similar trip in great detail would have been much more useful than talking to AI. ChatGPT was still useful, but I should have interrogated the plans it drew up more thoroughly. Instead, I saw they roughly matched my specs, and just went with them.

But that’s OK: no trip is perfect. I saw a lot, learned a lot, had a lot of quality time with my mom (who I normally see a just two or three times a year), and met interesting (and colorful) people. Despite the chaos and grittiness, I will miss India: well, I’ll miss not working more than anything, but I’ll also miss the vibrancy of a place that feels itself up-and-coming, where much feels still possible and unformed. I will not miss the incessant honking of tuk-tuks or the way beggars come right up to you and touch you, as if demanding you see them and give them money. I will not miss the traffic, which follows no discernible rule except that where there is space, your vehicle can go (though, by the end of six weeks, I was much more confidently navigating said chaos). I will not miss the water, which I couldn’t drink…

Typing this out, I realize I am perhaps ready to come home. New York is certainly a very imperfect place, and I don’t even know if I want to be there, but it is an easy place to be, for me at least. That’s one thing I really learned in India: how easy we (or at least I) have it in the US. Yes, my life is easy.

Even New York, the city that never sleeps, will feel quiet after India. I’m ready for that right now, but I’ll feel like something‘s missing too. India gave me a sense of scale. This, I might say, this is America’s greatest city? A mere 10 million people? That’s nothing. And we think we are the center of the world?

#India #Travel

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