What India Broke in My Assumptions
(updated July 2026)
When I was a kid, India existed in three images: an MC Solaar song, Raj from The Big Bang Theory, and yoga. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to give the impression of knowing a country I had never set foot in.
When I announced my departure, everyone had their own version of India. A dangerous, mystical, poor, noisy country full of cows and incomprehensible traffic. As often happens, people mostly spoke of what they imagined.
I stayed for three weeks, and the first thing that struck me was that nothing really fit into a single image. Yes, there were cows in the city, dogs sleeping next to them, horns everywhere, and traffic that seemed to operate by invisible rules. But there were also incredibly varied meals, people easy to approach, complicated trains to book, and situations where I understood absolutely nothing about what was happening.
I thought I was prepared. In reality, I was mostly prepared to recognize the clichés I already had in mind.
The most brutal gap was economic. With a few euros, I could eat at a restaurant, sleep in a room, and still keep some money for the day. This difference quickly gives an impression of rather indecent wealth. You think you understand the standard of living because you convert everything to euros, when you still don't understand the salaries, the constraints, or what that sum truly represents for the people living there.
I also arrived with five hundred euros changed into rupees, mainly in the form of 500 and 1000 rupee notes. Bad timing: the government had just announced their invalidation. Overnight, a large part of the country's cash had to be exchanged.
Queues in front of the banks sometimes crossed the street. The rules changed, the amounts were limited, and foreigners could sometimes get through faster. I spent several days gradually converting this large bundle that had become almost useless.
It was absurd, but also very concrete. A currency can seem solid until the moment a political decision suddenly changes the value of the banknotes in your pocket.
The rest of the trip was a bit like that. Things I thought were simple became complicated, and things I imagined difficult became surprisingly easy. Booking a train could be an ordeal. Talking to someone on the street sometimes took thirty seconds.
I could tell you about pakoras, thalis, four-euro hotels, trains, tuk-tuks, temples, horns, and invalid banknotes. But what I mostly remember is the feeling of spending three weeks dismantling my own shortcuts.
India didn't teach me what India was. Three weeks is obviously not enough.
It mainly taught me how much one can arrive somewhere with a ready-made idea, and then spend the whole trip realizing that it doesn't hold up.