The Chaosity of Jaipur

With Canberra undergoing a spell of cataclysmically gloomy weather – it was overcast ALL DAY - I decided it was best to go the cinema in an attempt to avoid the ensuing melancholic mood and to try and forget that such bollocks weather has the audacity to exist. So I took my mum to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

The exemplary cast includes Professor McGonagall (aka Maggie Smith), M (aka Judi Dench) and other fine British actors, so I wasn't worried - like I often am - that I will be subjected to a movie that I know I hate within minutes of its onset but have to endure for another two hours.

The flick is set in Jaipur, India and is about a group of retirees who, for numerous reasons, retire to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which they believe to be a newly restored hotel. However, the establishment has in fact been rather significantly airbrushed in its promotional material by its entrepreneurial manager in an attempt to 'outsource old age', in the same fashion as companies outsource phone calls to exotic call centres and I often outsource cooking to a local Pizza Hut. They should have just checked TripAdvisor.com, but anyway.

I lived with my family in India for a few years as a youthling, so mum and I sniggered throughout the ‘quintessential India' scenes that are included for comic relief, but actually provide an honest summation of the idiosyncratic chaosity that is India.

When people tell me they are travelling to India, by choice, I do try my best to hide my utter disgust, but I silently sneer at their ignorance of the poverty and smell and disease and suffering and the general pandemonium they will encounter on their journey. I am also confused by the popular movement these days that has convinced some people that India and such places are great to find oneself. India is not a place to go to find oneself. Do the people in this picture look to you like they are finding themselves?

As much as I mock the country, most of my favourite childhood memories were formed in and around New Delhi. I’m thankful that I was a child growing up before helicopter parents started ruining their kid’s childhood, so my parents didn’t overprotect us, but just let us be kids.

Touching things you shouldn’t touch and eating things you definitely shouldn’t eat are a rite of passage for a kid growing up; it’s all just a part of the process of building resistance to all types of bugs and disease.

Sure, there was the time I was bitten by a rabid dog, and the time I grew hundreds of warts on my hand overnight from doing something that I probably shouldn’t have been doing, and the time I grew a tapeworm in my stomach, and I endured every type of Asian stomach bug about five times, but these afflictions are the reason why I’ve never had an upset stomach, food poisoning or gastro since. Lifetime immunity idol. *knocks on wood*