John was back in his usual place in the front row of the baritones. As one of the more conscientious members of the choir, he had informed me, his conductor, that he would be away for two weeks.

            “Business or pleasure?”

            “Business – several places, mostly the Middle East including some time in Dubai.”

Having spent a week working in Dubai during the early 1980s, I was now interested in his reaction to a place which I had found full of fascination and exoticism.

            “So, how was Dubai, John?”

            “Couldn’t really say – I didn’t see much of it”

            “But didn’t you walk along by the Creek and watch the dhows being loaded up for their journeys across the Arabian Sea to Bombay? What about the little flat ferries to take you over to the Palace side of the Creek? Surely you wandered down the Gold Souk and window-shopped? You must have seen the Royal Emirates Golf Club with the clubhouse designed to look like a cluster of Bedouin tents. What about the mosques and the muezzin’s call to prayer – the enforced siesta between noon and four o’ clock; the wadi-bashing ...?!”

John stopped me. “I saw the road from the airport to the hotel, I had meetings each day in the hotel, ate in the hotel – and then was driven back to the airport. This was a business trip not a holiday!”

            I often recall that conversation when I set off on my own “business trips”, excursions which, over twenty years have taken me to almost as many countries, into homes, schools and colleges within those countries as well as introducing me to so many people with whom I am still in contact and who I count as friends. These folk have been prepared to show off to me, and latterly, my wife, the delights of their city, town or village, have been unstinting in their generosity, kindness, advice and local knowledge, and have provided the basis for an understanding of their country and its culture, which could not easily be gained through standard tourism.

            The job of an itinerant music examiner is, superficially, a straightforward one. Syllabuses are drawn up by various examining boards in Britain and distributed  world-wide to English-speaking teachers through a network of Representatives. The teachers prepare their pupils and, on the appointed day, present them to the examiner. The logistics behind this simply-explained operation are, of course, far from simple and it is a tribute to the boards concerned – in my case, Trinity College London – that candidates by the hundreds of thousand meet up with examiners in hundreds of centres all over the globe to take their Grade One Piano or Grade Eight Flute or Performer’s Certificate Violin or their Diploma in the Teaching of Singing, in an operation of mind-boggling complexity yet one which is achieved with apparent smoothness and calm. I am often asked “Why don’t other countries have their own system of examinations so that candidates can avoid paying – through the fee structure – to import examiners from Britain?” In fact, some countries do just that – Australia, for example – but such is the reputation for high standards and impartiality which has been built up from 1877 when London’s Trinity College of Music pioneered the concept of a system of graded exams in Western music, that the British boards have become the benchmark of excellence world-wide.

            Many friends and relations have, over the years, suggested that the material I bring back in the form of stories and anecdotes from these “business trips” would form the basis of a readable book but it was not until I had been engaged to make my second trip to India, in 1999, that I considered the idea seriously. The examining day can be a taxing one and the notion of sitting down in my free time to write up a detailed diary such as would be needed to complete a reasonable record, to say nothing of the back-up research required, was one about which I had doubts. However, for this trip I knew that my wife, Pat, would be with me and that, while I would be at work, some of her time could be spent in keeping such a record. There were to be occasions when this became a chore but the amount of detail I have been able to recount is due in no small part to the assiduous way she approached her task. Besides, 1999 was “auspicious” (a word we were to hear a great deal from our Hindu friends) in that it was twenty years since my first overseas examining tour (to New Zealand). Further, this present tour was to be a long one (sixteen weeks) which would include a diversion into Nepal for exams in the capital, Kathmandu, would take us from Darjeeling in the extreme north to Trivandrum in deepest Kerala and would, I knew, satisfy a great deal of the curiosity and fascination I had developed for the Indian subcontinent from my earlier (much shorter) solo trip in 1981. Reading The Raj Quartet, Bhowani Junction, The Great Railway Bazaar plus Vikram Seth,  V.S.Naipaul, Mark Tully, James Cameron and Anita Desai would never be the substitute for the “real” India.

            But what is the “real” India? To some, this would mean experiencing life as it is for 85% of the one billion population i.e. in a village with only basic provisions in term of water for drinking and cooking plus, possibly, some electricity. It might mean travelling on dangerously overcrowded and poorly maintained railways or staying in mosquito-ridden hotels or using squat-toilets. It could mean being “intrepid” in terms of any or all of these arrangements. Of course we could not avoid bearing witness to the poverty, the filth, the overcrowding, the stench and the noise often all around us. But the India we dealt with was largely one of excellent hotels, convenient (if at times hair-raising) travel, punctual planes, an easily obtained variety of food (especially for our vegetarian diet), a smiling work-force in the service industries, a pleasant climate (only occasionally too wet or too hot), delightfully open and polite candidates, unforgettable sights, sounds, smells and scenery and, above all, wonderfully welcoming smiles and immediate friendship from the local “reps”.

            Thinking back to my previous tour in 1982, I remembered how easy it was to lose touch with world events. Television was not then available in the hotels and ploughing through The Times of India seeking European, Australasian or African news was somewhat gruelling. But on this trip, with access to satellite television (including BBC World News and CNN) in almost all of our hotels and being able to buy, in the larger cities, two-day-old English newspapers (£3 for a Guardian was a bi-weekly treat in Chennai) we became very focused on world affairs and, from the diaries, we can look back on a series of significant world events. Reading the local and national view of these dramas and crises in The Hindustani or the Shillong Courier was to appreciate a different perspective.  During our stay there was the military coup in Pakistan (an event which understandably took up a good deal of column inches in the press), the Russians invaded Chechnya, we watched reports of the bloodshed in East Timor after the Indonesian elections; there were floods in Vietnam, the train crash at Paddington, the Egyptian airliner crash in the USA, an earthquake in Turkey; the Anglo/French beef war surprisedus in its pettiness, we watched Mandelson and Aherne signing the new Constitution in Ireland, Lord Archer further disgracing himself, and the other Lords voting to abolish themselves; the Australians held a referendum on becoming a republic, the New Zealanders had a General Election; we watched the remarkable World Rugby Cup, a test series between Australia and Pakistan (always exciting but how much of it was fixed?), countless one-day internationals and the India versus New Zealand test series. On October 13th, there was the Indian General Election with Mr. Vajpayee of the Bharatiya Janata Party being returned. The date was most “auspicious” – the party’s first attempt at government (in 1996) lasted for thirteen days, the second (1998) for thirteen months. Looking at the country’s political instability since the Congress Party lost its hold on the nation in the early 90s, the prospect of this government completing the cycle and remaining in power until 2013 seems remote. Later in the tour, the Orissa cyclone dominated the news world-wide and we were able to read more details than would have reached the UK about the incompetence, political squabbles (between state and national government departments) and corruption which prevented much-needed available aid reaching the victims. Does every four-month period of world history bring so many calamities and upheavals we wondered?

            Before we left England, friends who were already India-philes, gave us a publication by the Indian Tourist Board that they had found useful on their two previous trips. On the front cover, the word India had been stretched into an enticing sigh as one thought of the delights in store conjured up by the excellent photography within the pages of the brochure – “Indiaahh!” An effective marketing ploy became for us an expression not only of joy but also of  frustration, excitement, fear, surprise, disquiet and a hundred and one other emotions as we experienced life in this astonishing country. What follows is not just another travel book about a country that, above all others, attracts travel writers like Hindu pilgrims to the Ganges; it is not a diary, although events are dealt with in chronological order. Rather it is the experiences of an ordinary middle-class English couple to life in (largely) middle-class India, a country about which most people have opinions but very little knowledge, a country so contradictory that even the knowledge assimilated over four months can appear inadequate for anything other than a passing understanding of the country, its ethos, its people and their way of life. But it is a country which one cannot ignore and which, if nothing else, can and does teach one to look again at ones own life concepts, philosophies and values – a country which, in this respect, is to be highly valued.