Fort Cochin, Kerala

February 16th - February 19th.

Kerala is marketed at tourists as God’s Own Country. Catchy slogan. It is written everywhere. On posters by the side of the road; on buses; In hotel foyers, beside the potted plants; in shop windows; on the back of auto-rickshaws. Everywhere you look, you are informed that you are standing in the country chosen by God. What God was that I found myself wondering? Surely not the God of Judaism. He dwells in the chosen land. Allah perhaps? I don’t think it likely it would be for a Vedish deity. It seemed to have a Christian feel to it. The Portugese, among others, brought the Good Word to India. But before that, much before, Syrian Christians were in these parts. Along with Rabbis and, by and by, Muslims. India has a great history of racial tolerance. Prince Gautama Siddhartha aka Buddha actively encouraged all religions: The way to Nirvana can be reached through many paths. Islam initially had the same belief. Western Christianity never embraced this concept.

I took a train from Varkala to Fort Cochin. It was a pleasant enough journey once I’d fought my way through a throng of striking transport workers to get to the platform. I also had to push past a gauntlet of police deployed in response to the strike. One of them told me this was the warm-up for the proper demonstration in two days. The train ride took about 5 hours. It was through the day so I did not get to fully embrace the experience an Indian train journey. The sleeper train would have to wait for a little while. I met a nice couple from Scotland who were doing a whistle-stop tour of India. They’d originally planned to get just see the north. But like any good holiday it had warped itself into a fully-fledged trek around the west coast of the country. They got off at Alleppe bound for the back-waters. I got a bit hemmed in by an Indian family that invaded my booth for an hour or two. In hindsight I think I had probably stolen their seats.

I arrived in Fort Cochin in the late afternoon. I caught a rickshaw to the Hotel Marcus had already headed for. Rickshaw’s are funny vehicles. They are pretty much lawn-mowers with three wheels and handle-bars on. They then have telephone booths laid on top of them with a divider in the middle to effect a front and back seat. You get in the back – usually – with your luggage – usually. I say usually because I have seen, with my very own eyes, 7 people in one of these things. 4 in the back, although 2 were actually hanging out either side, and 3 in the front, 2 sitting behind the driver. I have also seen (and had) luggage on the roof. Zippo’s Circus could learn a lot from Auto-Rickshaw drivers.

After getting stung for the fare – but being too tired to care – I arrived at the hotel in Fort Cochin. It was a pleasant enough place. The area was geared up for tourists and there were plenty about. There were a couple of roads teeming with cafes and restaurants. I dropped my bags in and checked in and met up with Marcus. We went across the road to a restaurant and grabbed an early dinner. We then sat and proceeded to get spectacularly drunk. Fort Cochin was a step up on the nudge-nudge wink-wink tea malarkey. Here you get served “special” tea in teapots with china mugs. It’s still good old Kingfisher lager of course.

There was no particular reason for this afternoon’s session apart from we could. I love impromptu accidental boozy afternoons. Good company, good conversation, and cold beer. The afternoon gave way to evening and then to night. The helicopter peddlers strolled past launching there cobalt blue copters into the evening sky. The moon was waxing in a clear and starry sky. People lazily strolled by us smiling affably and sometimes stopping to eat or drink in this roadside café, Marcus and I ended up having a very interesting debate regarding the nature of free will, and if, if one assumes thus, it does exist in the first place. There have been a number of great thinkers who postulated that we may not have free will. The universe may be, by its very existence, deterministic. We may believe we have the freedom to choose our thoughts; to make decisions; to act; to change our minds, however this may all be an illusion created by a reality that has already been decided for us. The interesting question would be how to prove – or disprove – the hypothesis. Despite our drunken state we did come up with a couple of ideas that stuck in my mind. If the universe is deterministic – who is determining it? It could be that the natural order of things in the universe is functionally deterministic. Moreover it could just happen to be a reality that has predetermined everything along a time line and we all have the rules of how to act and think encoded in the fibre of our being. It could also be that a deity has a hand in this design; a divine nob-twiddler as Mr Dawkins puts it. This line of thinking also begged another thought: If the universe is deterministic and something is controlling it, then believing that you don’t believe in the entity that is determining the illusion of free will you are under the impression you have, is a pretty good cosmic joke.

Lying in bed after chatting I came up with another idea that if something is pre-determining the thoughts and actions of everything we do – wouldn’t it be cool to sabotage the whole thing. By this I am expanding on a scenario here. If we were to use Arthur C Clarke's third law that Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Now imagine if we were all part of some scientific experiment for a young entity’s science-project (this is, of course, making massive assumptions: That there is such a civilisation, that they have procreation and linear growth, that they have schools, that they have science-projects, that the young entity is actually working and not out scrumping for space-apples in the local cosmic orchard (yes, what a stereotypical cosmological pastiche but you get the picture)). Imagine that our reality is part of a supremely advanced software simulation (yes – imagine they have Microsoft). Wouldn’t it really scupper things if everyone in the world decided to top themselves at the same time. Of course you (the human race) would never know for sure but imagine the look (assuming it had one) on the young entity’s face (and yes assuming it had one of those too). “Mummy, Mummy, my science project world has just committed mass suicide!”

“That’s a shame dear, did you leave it too close to the radiator?” (assuming of course they feel cold, have sibling bonding, use language… etc)

It would be priceless (assuming they had a economic society) unless of course the entity intended us all to do this in the first place. Of course we’d all be dead and never know. But it would be a grand cosmic joke.

Anyway I woke up the next morning with a hangover and thought that was all a bit silly.

The next day was a very quiet one. We headed down the river to see the Jewish Synagogue. No offence to Jewish people but this one was crap. We walked along the estuary of the river and watched the fishermen trying to net a catch of fish en masse with a very large net that resembled an upside down clothes-line and took about 30 men to operate. There weren’t too many fish at the end of it either. Fort Cochin was beginning to get on my nerves.

We decided to quit Kerala and head north, missing out the state of Karnataka, to Goa. We also decided to make use of the internal domestic flight system. Domestic flights in India are very, very, cheap. It cost us 35 quid each to fly from Cochin to Goa. We booked the flight for the day after tomorrow. Marcus had fallen ill again. Badly. So he spent the next 36 hours in bed. I chilled out and read. We did make it out for a quet walk that evening to see the national elephant parade. All over India elephants were marching in full regalia up to the temples of Ganesh. It was pretty impressive seeing these graceful and ancient looking beasts standing so elegantly amid the noise, drums, and music. We had planned to get a taxi to the airport early on Wednesday morning. However the strike was planned that morning. We didn’t realise but it affected all forms of transport except for aeroplanes. That meant we had to travel to the airport the night before and stay over in an overpriced hotel.

Still we were at the airport bright and early the next day and ready to fly to India's famous party state.