De gustibus et coloribus

Although partners will usually not appreciate you bringing this up in the heat of a battle, I do believe that it's more important to ask the right questions than to give the correct answers. So when I say "Where do you think Fred will spend his summer holiday this year?", the correct answer is not "Malaysia!" but the right question is "Why Asia again?". And I'm stressing the word 'again' here, because I may still haven't found what I'm looking for, but I'm pretty sure of one thing: if I am really meant to find it in Asia, someone did a terrific job hiding it.

I will not waste your time trying to explain what attracts me in our world's greatest continent - de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum - but let me at least give you a modest piece of advice: there is a first time for everything, but don't let India be your first travel destination in Asia, as this would be the equivalent of letting a rock festival be your introduction to outdoor camping. And then again: once you start thinking it through, there's not really that much difference between traveling India and attending a rock festival.

To start it of with, it's not like you can just walk into these places. Rock festivals require you buy an entrance ticket, and in order to get into India you need to apply for a visa: both are too expensive nowadays, and unless you really want to try your luck you'd better not buy them from a Pakistani in the street, as official documents are rarely made in Bangladesh. Moreover, and this will be confirmed by anyone who has ever had a serious bowel obstruction and therefore spent a few hours on the toilet with a new book and a fresh toilet roll: bringing the appropriate pieces of paper is by no means a guarantee for succes.

At the gates of the festival camping, your luggage is usually screened by a team of security agents holding at least a bachelor's degree from the MacGyver Institute of Technology: anything that even remotely looks as if it could serve to build an improvised crossing between a hovercraft and a nuclear warhead launcher is held behind and thrown into a container. Drugs (don't tell me MacGyver was sober when he opened a sound activated security lock by filling four glasses of wine at different levels and playing the tones in ascending order), knives, BBQ-sets and bottles of alcohol: I suppose sometimes even garbage men enjoy extra legal advantages. At the border, it's not just your luggage that will be scrutinized: you also need to get through the immigration officer, whose intense stare is switching from your face to your passport as if he's playing "find the seven differences". Next time I need to go to a photographer for passport pictures, I seriously consider wearing comfortable clothes for a long-haul flight, in order to make it a easier to look like myself.

Once you've made it inside, it feels like you just set foot on another planet. A crowded one, that is, because the first thing you'll notice is way too many other people. In front of you, behind you, to your left and to your right. Depending on your moves, they may even end up under you or on top of you. I guess most people are not too familiar with Kepler's sphere packing problem, so allow me a few lines: back in 1611, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler posed a famous problem, asking for the most efficient way to pack equal-sized spheres together in a large crate. Should you pack them in identical layers, one on top of each other, with each sphere in one layer sitting right on top of the sphere directly beneath it? Or can you get more spheres into the box if you stagger the layers the way greengrocers stack oranges? It took mathematicians nearly 400 years to find the solution to this question, but the answer has always been out there: replace 'sphere' by 'personal bubble' and 'box' by 'festival ground', and you've got yourself a groundbreaking paper.

Now, the good news is that you can get used to this unnatural proximity of unfamiliar people, the bad news is a rather bizarre cosmic principle, which says that during your favourite band's gig, there will always be a taller person right in front of you, ethusiastically clapping the rhythm with both arms pointing towards the sky. Not only will this guy be blocking your view, he will also force your nose to be trapped inside his armpits. Sweaty armpits, of course, because the security dork at the entrance decided to classify his deodorant as potentially dangerous.

Needless to say that in India, the very concept of packing people in public places is taken to a whole different level: I remember taking a bus from Mahabalipuram to Pondicherry which was so crowded that I was no longer able to tell where my body ended, and my neighbour's began. Distraction was somehow provided though, in the shape of a colourful Bollywood flick on the shabby television screen at the front of the bus, but that didn't really work for me: I'd read in my guidebook that Indian movies are full of sexual references, and the last thing I needed was collective arousal...

There are more analogies to be found, for example when it comes to food, but that will be for next time. And it's about time you start using the comment box - right?