The countryside town of Bolpur in West Bengal has been showing us a slightly more relaxed version of India for the last few days.

People didn't really know what to make of us, with reactions going from full on stares to school children giggling and pointing. We stayed with the friendly family who run the Bonpulak guesthouse (a real "guesthouse" - staying in someone's spare room - rather than the purpose built cheap hotels of Thailand), and we took turns to make their youngest son laugh. The town itself was simple, dirt earth for pavement, black stained concrete walls, elegantly saried Bengali women cycling. Outside the town, India's natural beauty took over, verdant green fields and villages by little lakes. One afternoon on the town's main road we walked only a few feet away from an old man, in only a loincloth, knelt and bent over flat on the ground - and his head completely buried in the dry roadside earth. His scrawny neck disappeared into the ground, his body was motionless, as if dead, then as we watched his right arm came up and scratched his bum for a while.

Bolpur isn't the middle of nowhere town that it appears, however. We had come to the area to see the tree laned university haven of Santiniketan. It had been founded by Rabindranath Tagore: Author, philosopher, philanthropist, Nobel prize and knighthood winner and general all round hero of Bengali culture. The university grounds were indeed pleasant, the museum of Tagore's life was so inspiring I bought a few of his books (currently proving hard going, I must confess), and Gari and I chatted to a boy going to school there.

But the more memorable experience of our time in Bolpur for me, turned out to be our trip to the village workers' collective at Ama Kutir. As the only visitors that day (we saw but a handful of other Westerners in our three days at Bolpur) one of the managers took us round the various workshops that constructed the centre's handicrafts of leather goods, batik, clothes and weavings. Everyone grinned at us, demonstrated their techniques and happily posed for Gari's videocamering; afterwards we sat with a couple of the weaver women and drank chai in the sunshine.
Ama Kutir made me wonder how difficult / expensive it would be to set something up like this elsewhere, to help other village communities the way this centre has. The keys to the centre's ability to produce in quantity seemed the manually operated machines (like weaving looms and block printers that stamped designs on the thin leather strips) and the simple production line (division of labour): for a leather covered box, one team cut the sheets of leather, another pressed the raised design onto the sheet, another then painted it, and another glued the finished sheets on to the card box. The centre produced some goods for Unicef and some for local hotels, but surely, there must be other options to widen its customer base. We bought quite a lot from the village showroom, I departed still looking longingly at the leather seated wicker stools, which, at five pounds each, were a wonderful bargain, but impossibly unwieldy to carry with us.
Perhaps one day.

I noticed two feelings growing inside me in Bolpur. The first was a deepening revulsion for packing my bags up and catching trains. Doing this again for the I-don't-know-how-many-th time just left my soul feeling parched and tired. The second, perhaps contradictory emotion, is something of a springtime in my feelings towards India. Perhaps I speak too soon, but I find myself less bothered by the things that bothered me initially, and am developing a great deal affection for the strange uniqueness of India: The chai-wallahs, calling out in train aisles and town squares the mantra of their sugary milk tea: "chai, chai, chai"...); the wandering Hindu holy men with their intense coffee wide eyes, red ragrobes and occasional Posideon long trident; a national train system that is routinely reliable and pleasant in every way, apart from the ticket buying process, which is always a torturous unpredictable nightmare; the pedal rickshaw drivers who do an inhumanly draining job for little money, and who usually are able to move Gari and I at little better than walking pace ("Like walking, only less comfortable"), and who invariably, at the end of our journey, claim we agreed a higher price than we did. There follows a piece of theatre, with a semi circle of onlookers clustering around to see whether we will pay more, the driver in mock pride and anger waving away the money we try to get him to take. Our best solution is the more simple - one of us places (or throws) the originally agreed amount on the seat of the rickshaw and we walk off.

Daniel, 25 September 2004, Varanasi