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GOING NATIVE

Photo: S.S. Kumar

UNUSUAL QUEST Chloe has her reasons for coming to India

She’s just moved to Chennai after a three-month stint in Kanchipuram with a non-Governmental organisation called the Love Care Centre, which looks after young children from Manipur, providing them shelter and an education, which they otherwise might not have got.

Chloe helped out in a number of ways, including pitching in to help out with ‘administration,’ she says, with a faint air of disbelief. The experience was an eye-opener, “and not in the way you might think,” she hastens to add. It was not the culture shock and the poverty that was she was struck by, she says; it was the happiness and cheerful acceptance of their lot despite their want that was a revelation.

Chloe, in a sense, isn’t your typical backpacker out to see India on a budget, or one of the new breed of foreigners brought here by the growing business opportunities. She had her own reasons for coming here: for one thing, her grandfather had been posted out in India during the Second World War; and two, she confesses, because of the Brit psychedelic rock group, Kula Shaker. More specifically, the track ‘Govinda’ from their album K, with its swirling guitars and traditional Indian sounds, the lyrics in Sanskrit; the whole thing whetted her appetite for India.

The soft-spoken young graduate, with a degree in American history and literature, from the town of Lowestoft, Suffolk (that’s East Anglia, to the northeast of London, she explains) served for about 15 months as a civil servant before chucking up the job. “I wanted to do other things, not get stuck in the civil service,” she explains.

Chloe is now interning with an English newspaper from Chennai (she started off a fortnight ago) and plans to return to England in June. “I want to do a Master’s in Law back home. I’m working out the funding — you know it’s costly, and unless you’re from a minority, scholarships aren’t easy to come by,” she says.

Chloe has found time to travel a bit: Bangalore, Mysore and Ooty (“I didn’t like it much”) and Madikeri, which was a lot more to her liking. “We trekked for a whole day with a local guide and didn’t come across any people,” she says, with a feeling of wonderment. She’s enjoyed her stay immensely, “The people are so warm and so friendly here, unlike people back home in England.”

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