Orissa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhubaneswar

Bhubaneshwar has a most unusual characteristic for an Indian city - it feels shy. It has the mildly self-effacing look of a new and carefully planned town: the streets are straight, extremely wide, regularly planted with broad leaf trees. My road has an intriguingly rare feature, a cycle path! Of course most cyclists still use the road, but a few intrepid explorers test the newfangled notion now and then. To add spice, the occasional motorcyclist uses it too. Alongside is an equally rare contiguous footpath.[1] My road includes most of the city's 5* and 4* hotels, so its unusually clean and tidy, the cycle path is unique, and there are no roadside stalls: still straight, wide, tree shaded roads are prevalent throughout town.

The architecture is mostly very new - a lot of it looks as though it's been built out of lego. Unusually for built up areas in India, there is space everywhere. The roads are wide, and houses and shops are set well back, leaving broad walking areas. There are open fields between buildings. Everything seems to be scattered, I found a small enclave of bookshops, but they all sold only reference and academic textbooks: most commendable, and typical of many Indian towns, but not good for poolside reading. Apart from that, there are scattered jewellers, chemists, and food and clothing market stores almost everywhere - but few collective shopping or eating areas. This has the unfortunate side effect that walking distances between any 2 points of interest (shop, restaurant, tourist office, internet cafe) measure well into the several kms, so as I'm already all walked out from Pondicherry and Chennai, I'm taking a lot of rickshaws.

Official statistics (2005) put the population at under a million. Even allowing for some pessimism in the figure (Indian censuses notoriously underestimate local population sizes), Bhubaneswar is still a small city as state capitals go in India, not much more populous than Gangtok, and with much more land. Overall the spacious layout gives a feeling of wealth - even the railway flyover slum has an unencumbered tarmac raod through it and more-or-less solid houses, as well some identifiable empty spaces for recreation. However Orissa is supposed to be one of the poorest states in India. My suspicion is that the wealth here is a symptom suggesting that central government and NGO money which was intended for the country poor has been redirected towards the capital, particularly areas frequented by the state government officials.

Which leads me to another novelty: almost no one here speaks English! Including the police officers and the rickshaw drivers, highly unusual for a major city. Town-schooled children are the best source of translators. I assume that most adults in the city have migrated here since adulthood and have had almost no contact with tourists. Rickshaw drivers also often don't know where almost anything is, including hotels and restaurants, particularly not my hotel and often not my neighbours either. While my Hindi isn't very good, and my Oriya non-existent, I know from listening to conversations that "Hotel", "Ginger", "Hilton", and "Swashti Towers" are actually pronounced the same in the local vernacular. Maybe it was my accent at fault? Ah, it turns out that "Trident" is pronounced "Tree-Dent" (I'm at the Hilton Trident)

There are not many tourist visitors, the majority of foreigners in town work for the oil industry: apparently there are at least two separate companies working rigs off the coast in the Bay of Bengal. Anyhow, they don't use local transport, they have hired cars and don't often stray far from the 5* hotels.

[1] Indian pavements take no prisoners and are frequently interrupted with kerbs which are at toddler scrambling height. I would hate to try and use a wheelchair in this country.

22 Mar 2008