Here and There Read Online Free PDF

Kipling was born nearby, in the art school. And when the British left, Bombay reverted to being a city of Parsee mercantile wealth, and Indian snobbery. Then along came Bollywood, and it got a whole lot sexier. Now it’s got music and advertising and banking and financial services and a middle class that has reached some sort of delicate tipping point against the teeming penury. It is a city that is glowing with energy. It is a mesmerising attraction for India’s rural poor, who arrive in their thousands every day to camp in packing cases, a ghost city that fills in the gaps between the real concrete-and-glass city like human ivy. They’re here for the chance to be part of it, to jump aboard the spinning generator of light, power, wealth and discontent.
    None of these are reasons you’d generally go to visit a city. As a rule, we visit metropolises that were once great but have now settled into old age, a charming decrepitude, so that we view the spoils of enthusiasm as nostalgia. But you really should go and see Bombay. This is a city becoming, shrugging off its past and bursting into the future. It’s riveting and enthusing just to be stuck in its traffic jams for a few days.
    And if you want to get a head-full of the sublimity of humanity, then come and look at Bombay as a natural wonder, a human Niagara, a rainforest of CVs, a Grand Canyon of ambition. And if that’s not enough, then there’s the best street food in India. And if you want to shop, there’s the finest shopping in India, including the marvellous antiques market on Mutton Street. There’s a sophisticated nightlife that’s as expensive as Tokyo and as sexy as Rome. There’s cricket at the weekends played against a backdrop of colonial Gothic steeples. And there’s life, pulsating and grasping and dreaming with great politeness and vanity. If you’re fed up with being made to feel guilty for being born human, then go to Bombay and be reminded what a brilliant, breathtaking species we are. In the end, that’s the distinction between those who travel to see nature and those who travel to see people. The one is ultimately all about you. The other is all about everyone else. Wilderness travellers are self-regarding bores. Humanity-commuters are the storytellers.

Call of the wild
    On big-game hunts in the African wilderness, there is a tangible sense of being part of the rough and violent scheme of nature.
    Africa is the great divide for many travellers. For the worldly, Africa contains more places that they don’t want to go to and more things that they don’t want to see than anywhere else in the solar system. I suspect you could divide the globe into two groups: those who wake up every morning thinking, ‘Thank God I’m not in Africa,’ and those who look out of the window first thing and think, ‘What I wouldn’t give to be in Africa.’ Admittedly, the second group is a whole lot smaller than the first. I know because I’m one of them. And like the members of some geo-religious sect, we fall upon each other’s necks when we meet because most of the time we’re having to explain to the incredulous and the repulsed what we like about the Dark Continent.
    There is a third group: those who wake up and say, ‘Oh my God, get me out of Africa.’ I know that however frightening, threatening and distasteful it can be to visit Africa, it’s nothing on how tough it must be to live there. Of all the seven continents, Africa has the worst reputation. Ever since my first visit 25 years ago, I’ve missed it. A year without a trip to Africa is a year without a particular flavour of heat, sense of colour. And this year, although I’d been to Algeria, I’d not set foot in black Africa. It didn’t look like it was going to happen, and then a friend said, ‘Why don’t you come and join me in the bush in northern Tanzania for a week?’ and I