VIDEO: Riding a Train in India

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Ryanne and I spent a month in India. We took a 48 hour train ride from Mumbai (aka Bombay) up north to Dharamshala, where the Dalai Lama lives with a community of exiled Tibetans.  I always want to avoid making a place like India seem exotic, but the way their urban and rural life has collided really makes for an intense experience. The concept of privacy is non-existent, and organized chaos is the rule of the street. India is both exciting and tiring to deal with. Watch for the cows.

videobloggingweek2007

Comments

[Lisa]

Hey Jay

Are you likely to be archiving your posts in any other form than QT7 anywhere anytime soon?

Lisa

[Jim Long]

I love India. I've only been there once and it was for work. We were "in the bubble" and keeping long hours so we couldn't really get around that much. Your video was great, like the title of your blog, it helped me live your moments. Very very cool.

[Rupert]

Have had a lot of friends traveling in India this winter, and have talked to them about Swajana and about their own picture/sound/video of their trip. One of the fantastic things about Swajana is that it humanizes and strips away differences and 'otherness' in a way that you very rarely see with western TV shows about the east, which are always either going for the exotic angle or unable to get the right access.
Westerners' personal reactions to first arriving in India are intense (and continue to be so, I guess) as outsiders. I've heard so many people telling me about their culture shock - but this is the best recording I've seen of it. You can see it in both your eyes and faces, and I like the way your to-camera pieces are intercut with a lot of moments caught on the fly, not a bunch of the carefully framed kooky / sensationalist shots you'd see on a TV show about a trip to India. That said, I *love* the slow-reveal zoom-out of the guys soaping up next to the train platform.
And i love that Ryanne gets irritated with you filming her. Boy, am I used to *that* at the moment :)

[ryanne]

holy shit
that really took me back!
the colliding busses, waiting forever for a car.
but so grateful to have a car to ride in to darmasala
wow what a trip. seriously.

[thomas]

wow... crazy stuff... that culture clash between old world and new is nuts.

but, now that you've observed that over there.... can you extrapolate those patterns onto what you may have seen in the US? my only real experiences have been parts of canada and mexico, but ya know Columbus has OSU's research farms with cattle and everything within view of downtown, and i was very comforted on my last trip to NYC to see mennonites, junk trucks carrying junk probably worth more than the truck, etc, etc... has that been more apparent or less or who cares? -- great stuff as always, thomas

[taxiplasm]

when I tell people I'm from Texas, some used to ask if horses just walked around in the streets, and I used to say, "of course not! where in the world would animals like that just roam the streets?" -I guess that cow proved me wrong.

-taxiplasm