 At Cairo’s Khan al Khalili market, only one Indian is your passport to bargains, goodwill, cups of piping hot Turkish coffee and a hookah – ‘Amita Baccha’ – Amitabh Bachchan to you and me. 
Have you noticed how India follows you wherever you go? Reinvented, remixed, regurgitated, a little bit of India keeps popping up to greet you as you journey to the distant corners of the world. Even when you are travelling to escape India, says Geeta Rao
 If you’ve paid a lot of money to travel abroad the one thing you want, is to feel you are abroad. Or you want your money back. Visiting London for example is like going to South Ex in Delhi – it has become such a close extension of India. What do you do in a country where chicken tikka is rated the national dish and every McDonald’s is serving chicken tikka in a roomali wrap? Or when you hope to catch a truly British West End musical and you get Bombay Dreams…boy-meets-girl Bollywood style? You want your money back pronto that’s what you want. But there is no escape. In bits and bytes, in perceptions and reality, by migration or transmigration, India pops up wherever you go.
At Cairo’s Khan al Khalili market, only one Indian is your passport to bargains, goodwill, cups of piping hot Turkish coffee and a hookah – ‘Amita Baccha’ – Amitabh Bachchan to you and me. Street boys and shopkeepers yell his name, some even naming his movies in Arabic. The names make no sense but the posters look familiar. And the welcome at Khan al Khalili is certainly Big B sized. And in Morocco…it is clearly Shah Rukh Khan. I suppose it can be traced back to a smart distributor of Indian origin. In Rabat or in the medinas of Casablanca or with taxi drivers ferrying you around, Shah Rukh Khan is always by your side even if you think you left him safely behind in ‘Mannat’ in Mumbai. Between Berber and English, Shah Rukh Khan is our shared language evolving into a basic grammar.
A British title in an Indian body greets me courteously in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. “I am Lord Hartlepool of Harpool,” says an elegantly clad Bengali gentleman as he serves me a hot naan. He is from East Bengal. We are sitting in his restaurant, a Bangladeshi curry joint which he started after he migrated from India. He obviously made a fortune from running it and bought himself a title but prefers to continue working in his restaurant.
Parisian newspapers had exulted in John Galliano’s collection inspired by Bollywood. The sort of stuff generations of Bollywood designers have been making for generations of movie heroines but, Galliano’s was a remix without the key element of Bollywood design – the discreet filmi padding that is mandatory for all Bollywood heroines. Jhalli (only a Punjabi word can describe this taste) pink sarees with big butties, mix and match blouses, lace borders – kitsch, glitz and terribly filmi. ‘Gulabi, ferooozi, turqueez,’ is how the local tailor masterji living in Vasai or Bhayander or Mira Road would have described it.
Sometimes, you don’t have to travel to a place to be reminded of India. An American colleague meeting me for the first time in Bangkok gushed, “Oh, you remind me so much of New York!” I must admit to preening a bit at this, thinking it was my attitude that makes me sooo New York. “It is your accent,” she continued insouciantly. “It reminds me of all those Indian taxi drivers back in Queens.” I rest my case.
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