Small-town blues

When I was a mere child, relatively, I spent a summer working on a cattle station in Far North Queensland in Australia, for reasons that escape me now. Suffice to say that it was both an eye-opener, and one of the most brutal and terrifying places I’ve ever been. When I get around to writing my autobiography, there’ll be a chapter on Escott Station, and it won’t be cheerful reading.
But one thing that has stayed with me is the feeling I got when I made it back to Brisbane. Now, Brisbane in the mid-1980s was not the dynamic, get-up-and-go cosmopolitan world city that it is today. Back then, it was Cow Town. But to a rube like me, freshly in from months in the sticks, it was a place of astonishingly urbane sophistication. I’d spent an age in a place with a single copper telephone wire, 1,000 miles from the nearest church or bar, with a population of 40. 
I remember clearly being astonished by escalators, car parks and restaurants. Traffic lights were a renewed revelation. Crowds were frightening. But obviously it all wore off pretty quickly, and cities became my natural home again.
But I’d thought that maybe the same thing would happen again over here in India. I’ve spent the last few days in Bombay, population 20 million, after living in Thiksey, Ladakh, population 2,500 for the last few months. So I was ready for some cognitive dissonance, with all of the world, good and bad, outside my hotel room. In Thiksey, there is a shop, but the man who runs it is not well, so it barely opens. In Bombay, you can get almost anything (except steak).
But no, being in Bombay was the same as being in Thiksey. Just another place. Small town; big city: same same. Shame really. Now I’m sorry I made you read all of that.

In other news, WAR! Indian and Chinese troops apparently clashed only a couple of hours drive from here just the other day. I got very excited about this, journalistically. Until I read the wire story, which said “Chinese troops threw stones at Indian soldiers near Pangong Lake…” Throwing stones? The two largest countries in the world, both armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, and they’re chucking stones at each other like schoolboys? Perhaps this’ll be followed up by a round of pigtail pulling, or some super-tense international ringing-the-doorbell-and-running-away. It’s certainly more charming than the current impasse on the Korean peninsula.
And I also laughed yesterday, Indian Independence Day, at a half-page ad on the front page of the Times of India, which read “Mahatma Gandhi believed in himself. He believed in you, and me, and India. In our skills and ability to match up to the best of standards worldwide. Jaquar salutes that spirit of Indianness. By adopting the highest quality standards in our products, Jaquar has become India’s most trusted bath fittings brand.” Bathos, that is. There isn’t much I can add to that.