Itinerary of a trip to India 2001-2002

Trip to Southern India, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, 2001-2002 itinerary
Day	Date	Visit	Night	Km	hrs
1	22 Dec	Arrive Delhi via Paris	Delhi	0	0
2	23 Dec	Shopping, flight Chennai at 16:45	Chennai
3	24 Dec	Chennai, city tour	Chennai
4	25 Dec	Kanchipuram, Mahabalipuram	Mahabalipuram
5	26 Dec	Visit Mahabalipuram	Mahabalipuram
6	27 Dec	Depart to Pondicherry, visit	Pondicherry
7	28 Dec	Depart to Chidambaram, visit	Chidambaram
8	29 Dec	Depart to Gangaikondacholapuram, Darasuram and Kumbakonam, arrive Tanjore	Tanjore
9	30 Dec	Brihadeeshwara temple	Tanjore
10	31 Dec	Depart to Trichy, visit Srirangam en route	Trichy
11	1 Jan	Depart to Madurai, visit Meenakshi Temple	Madurai
12	2 Jan	Vishnu temple and Alargarkovil as well as the Tirumala Nayak Palace	Madurai
13	3 Jan	Depart to Periyar	Periyar
14	4 Jan	Boat ride Periyar, depart to Kumarakom	Kumarakom
15	5 Jan	Kumarakom, sunset cruise	Kumarakom
16	6 Jan	Depart to Cochin	Cochin
17	7 Jan	Visit Cochin	Cochin
18	8 Jan	Cochin	Cochin
19	9 Jan	Flight to Delhi and connection to Europe	In the air
20	10 Jan	Arrive Europe

Book Review: The Idea of India (1999), by Sunil Khilnani, ****

Synopsis

A key book on India in the postnuclear era, with a new Introduction by the author. Sunil Khilnani's exciting, timely study addresses the paradoxes and ironies of this, the world's largest democracy. Throughout his penetrating, provocative work, he illuminates this fundamental issue: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?



Review

The author tries to encapsulate the idea of India in five chapters:

Democracy (how this was possible in India, and in fact how democracy made India possible!);

Temples of the future (on growth after WW II);

Cities (and the role they play in changing India);

Who is an Indian (the most complicated of all chapters!)

The Garb of Modernity (on ongoing change)

A useful bibliographical essay completes this articulate book.

These are important aspects of what makes India, of course, but hardly the only ones and perhaps not the main ones. Most people in India still live in the countryside.

In my view the main drawback of the book is its excessive praise of Nehru. Yes he did keep India united after partition and preserved democracy but his autocratic economic planning delayed India's development, which really took off after the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty came to an end with Rajiv's resignation in 1989 and assassination in 1991.

In any case, there can hardly be any such thing as "the" idea of India. A better title might have been "One Idea of India".

See my other reviews on India in this blog.

Book Review: In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (2001), by Doug Stanton, *****

Synopsis

The USS Indianapolis was the last ship sunk during the Second World War. Savaged by a salvo of torpedoes from a Japanese submarine, the warship, one of the fastest in the US Navy, sank in a matter of minutes. One thousand two hundred men went into the water, and only 321 were to survive. This is their story. On 30 July 1945 the Indianapolis was returning from the small island of Tinian, having delivered the components of the atom bomb ‘little boy’, which was to decimate Hiroshima and bring on the end of the war. As the torpedoes ripped into the side of the ship hundreds of men were killed. Those lucky enough to survive were to face extremes of physical and mental hardship in the water. Many were left to float in the ocean with little or no food or drinking water in deteriorating life jackets and, most chillingly of all, open to attacks by sharks...

Book review: The Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (1999), by Hugh Thomas, *****

Synopsis

After many years of research, Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. The Atlantic slave trade was one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures. Between 1492 and about 1870, ten million or more black slaves were carried from Africa to one port or another of the Americas.

In this wide-ranging book, Hugh Thomas follows the development of this massive shift of human lives across the centuries until the slave trade's abolition in the late nineteenth century.

Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, he describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time but to answer as well such controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated. Thomas also movingly describes such accounts as are available from the slaves themselves.

Book Review:The Floating Brothel: the Extraordinary True Story of An Eighteenth-Century Ship And Its Cargo of Female Convicts, by Sian Rees, *****

list of names of convicts shipped to Australia

Synopsis

In 1789, 237 women convicts left England for Botany Bay in Australia on board a ship called The Lady Julia, destined to provide sexual services and a breeding bank for the men already there. This is the story of the women aboard that ship.