September, 23, 2025
He said Rajasthan. A young man from Rajasthan offered landscaping services at my door. A wonderful place that we visited a few years ago with a guide, Shyaam. The memories that popped up overwhelmed me and I engaged in a discussion with the fellow at the door about the desert and the havelis in his home state. One highlight of our trip was Jaipur.
Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, is a city with a population exceeding two million. The drive from Agra took more than six hours. On the way, we stopped to have a thali lunch. They served it on a large metal plate (they also call the plate a thali), on which they arranged many small dishes around the edge, filled with ingredients such as yogurt, dal, vegetables, and chutney. Rice and chapati went in the middle of the thali dish. Eating was done with your fingers; these highway restaurants had a sink at one end of the room where you washed your hands before and after eating. Shyaam explained that the idea behind thali was to offer six different flavors: sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent, and spicy on one plate. According to Indian food customs, a proper meal should perfectly balance all these flavors. I was unsure what perfect balance meant among flavors, but we enjoyed the meal and improved our eating skills with our fingers.
The highlight of our stay in Jaipur was seeing and experiencing a Bollywood movie at the Raj Mandir Cinema. The movie house was a large circular building similar to an opera house, where there must have been at least one thousand seats, all occupied, quite a contrast to the smaller theaters we are used to in Canada, which are hardly ever filled.
The film had a cute and typical storyline: a boy falls in love with a girl who rejects him. Both the boy’s and the girl’s families reject romance, and the boy loses sleep, his job, and upsets his family. There are fights between the boy and the girl’s friends in various locations where the boy gets beaten up, but his disheveled hair and clothing are still picture-worthy. The girl’s and the boy’s relatives try to stop the relationship. Then the girl makes a telephone call, after which she disappears. Boy tracks down the baddies and rescues the girl who cries. There were singing and dancing events in various locations, but ultimately, the girl falls for the boy, and the relatives decide the boy is not so bad. The story ends with a large wedding with lots of singing and dancing. This storyline is, apparently, quite typical of Bollywood movies.
What I found more interesting than the movie was how the audience reacted to the scenes with clapping, singing, approving comments, and a loud reception. There was cheering when the boy enticed the girl and booing when the villains lost fistfights. At the wedding at the movie’s end, the entire audience was on their feet, cheering. It was a genuine experience in audience participation and quite a contrast with what I am familiar with, where even people with a cough are shushed by the other moviegoers.
We stayed at the Bissau Palace. The descendants of the royal family ran the hotel/palace (and lived on-site), and the hotel was one of the very few in Jaipur recognized by Indian authorities as a genuine Heritage Hotel. Set back from the iron gates within a village-like compound, it featured a temple, shops and a sizeable pool. The exterior of this century-old building needed some paint and maintenance, but the ramshackle look added to the charm; in fact, renovations would ruin the vibe. But our room was faultless and spotless, featuring hand-painted ceilings, lead-light windows (decorative glass supported by lead cames), and old-fashioned wooden furniture. And the food was native Indian to our liking.
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