The final hoot came from Ferguson who answered an enquiry about what Scotsmen really wear under their kilts with a tale of playing football in a kilt. There could be no finer Indian moment than an assortment of Scottish authors – Andrew O'Hagan, Alexander McCall Smith, Niall Ferguson and William Dalrymple – bantering over Scotland's possible position as "the Belarus of Western Europe" – to the huge amusement of the standing-room-only audience. On my last visit to the state, I also caught the wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, choreographed by that number one India-fanatic William Dalrymple. It's India at its most colourful, most exotic, most alive. Like many India fans, Rajasthan still comes way up towards the top of my personal India hit parade. That "wow" feeling could always hit you at any moment. For all the advances, it may still be frustrating and exasperating, but no way is it ever boring. Since there wasn't time to get one, the trip was cancelled.ĭespite the trials and tribulations India can still throw at you, I never fail to remember that it has the same essential virtue a well-known gentleman tagged on London: when you tire of it, you tire of life.
In other words, I needed an invitation from India. When I turned up with forms, photographs, flight bookings and a company letter despatching me to the sub-continent, I was informed that my trip required "pull" as well as "push". But I didn't manage to make a third trip which required a business visa. Last year, I made two trips to India with tourist visas. The licence Raj may be on its last legs, but India can still win medals in bureaucracy and paperwork. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing it was to wrench telecommunications out of the dead hands of government management, the useless old "licence Raj". Today, my mobile phone works everywhere I go. At the end of this frustrating experience, the bill would equate to the price of a whole day's meals or even more. When it finally crackled into life, you were often unable to hear a thing. The following day, you would turn up, but then wait hours for the connection. At the time, to make a call you first had to make a booking at a telephone office. Every time I try to decipher some computer or phone problem with a call-centre techie who is clearly somewhere in India, I think back to when I was researching that first guide. Telecommunications are the cutting edge of India's technological change. Today, the Indian roads are crowded with international marques I even had a ride in a shiny new Jaguar XF (Jag is, after all, Indian-owned) on my last trip to Mumbai, although I can't see its cruise control getting much use on the dreadful road network. So for years the most popular car in India – virtually the only car in India – was the Hindustan Ambassador, essentially an early 1950s Morris Oxford enjoying a spell of Eastern reincarnation. Once upon a time, India tried to make everything for itself, even if zero imports also meant zero exports. As I checked in at the tiny airport at Khajuraho, south-east of Delhi, last year I had to thread my way through a herd of goats to get to the terminal door. However, plenty of airports are still stuck in the past. Standards at some Indian airports have made great leaps forward. These days as you fly around India, you're no longer restricted to the vagaries and discomforts of flying Indian Airlines.
Coming back from Surat a couple of days later, I was even more surprised to find that seating lists were still pasted up on the carriage side. You may be able to book train tickets online, but taking a train north from Mumbai to Surat in Gujarat on a recent India trip, I was astonished to be asked to fill out a scrappy paper form, in duplicate, before I was permitted to buy a ticket. India has gone through even more changes than Lonely Planet in those 30 years – although I'm often surprised how much of it, from the point of view of the traveller, has simply stayed the same. Its publication kicked off a period of frenetic growth, and before long we were sending out a stream of writers to cover other "big" destinations. Sales passed the million mark quite a few editions ago. Now, 30 years on, we've arrived at the 14th edition of the India guide – and these days it's an ongoing battle to keep the length from straying too far beyond 1,000 pages. India: A Travel Survival Kit became a critical success as well as a popular one when I shook hands with Lord Hunt, leader of the successful 1953 Everest Expedition, and took home the Thomas Cook Guidebook of the Year award. Fortunately for the financial health of Lonely Planet, it was an instant hit, and our sales doubled almost instantly. We finally got the first books on the shelves in late 1981.
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