Last days of the trip I spent rediscovering Mumbai, which I kind of ran away from in my first day in India, hoping to catch a more relaxing country-side beach-side chillout. To get a good overview of Mumbai, my dad resulted to having a private tour-guide join us, who thankfully was English fluent and quite friendly and helpful in meeting our strange requests. We started our day at the northern outskirts of Mumbai, visiting some of the local churches, sea-side views and local dirt-museums.      …

Freedom-house, “an independent non-governmental organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world”, issues an annual report called “Freedom of the World” detailing ranking for freedom in countries around the world. The report ranks every country on a seven point scale in two categories - “political rights” (PR) and “civil liberties” (CL), 1 being the highest and 7 the lowest. To discuss democracy in East-Asia in one of my courses I made a summary of the report for East-Asia, and I thought I’d share it with you. Following are the rankings for the East Asian countries from best ranked to lowest, first score is PR followed by CL and the change from last year (up for improvement, down …

From Bangalore, our final stop before heading back to Mumbai was Cochin. My dad was hoping to spend a quiet weekend where there’s somesort of a Jewish community, and Cochin certainly has the longest history of a Jewish community anywhere in India with the tourist attraction “Jew-town” (a name I feel utterly uncomfortable with, bringing up Holocaust connotations). To further enrich our Christ College experience at Bangalore we talked to this lovely Indian woman on the phone who owns a homestay option in Cochin and her driver picked us up from the airport. The house was gorgeous, British colonial style, lots of space, expensive looking furniture and design. …

Bangalore, as a general example of southern Indian cities, is a reminder that India can be different. More modern than Mumbai, more open than Delhi, cleaner than any of the other cities, Bangalore was a refreshing look at big Indian cities. Boys and girls holding hands, the ladies dressing up with cleavage, and all in-general looking a lot livelier and happier, it made me think that if there’s one place in India I can ever think about staying for long, it’s probably going to be the southern area. The first day, off the airport, we spent chilling out in the Mahatma Gandi Rd shopping and restaurant area, also visiting the nearby Bangalore parks. …

Udaipur has great potential - with two lakes in the middle of town that almost looks picture perfect. Some day, when the Indians decide they want to clean up the lakes, it’s going to be a great city to live in.    But right now, hate to spoil it to you, there are some serious problems with the lake water, something that has sadly proven an issue all over India. What’s most shocking, or sad, is seeing the locals do everything with that water, from washing clothes to bathing and the occasional teeth brushing. It made me want to …

The trip wasn’t well planned. We were too lazy to plan anything ourselves and ended up totally relying on agents that seemed like they knew something but as we executed their plan we always found out that they had their agenda. The drive day from Jodhpur to Udaipur through Ranakpur and Kumbhalgarh was a bit insane. The Indian roads really aren’t a pleasure to drive through especially for a whole day, and our driver was behaving strangely. After a motivation-less day for our driver where he was trying to convince us into shortcuts he suddenly regain his energies through a friend he met in our last hotel. Thing is, drivers are either taken care of by the hotel we …