Team Swachh, or, What I’m Doing in India

Blog Post by Rose George

I first came to India in 1999. I know the year only because during my trip I had a phone call from my friend Simon Winchester, who asked me to accompany him on a trip from Vienna to Istanbul (the trip became this book). I accepted, even though I’d contracted giardia from drinking from a local well in rural Rajasthan at my friend Prakash’s place (because getting mineral water involved asking Prakash to drive me for half an hour and it just seemed simpler to risk the well. Wrong.) 

I remember sitting outside the offices of whichever airline I was flying home with, feeling hideous and full of gas and pain from the giardia. Home then to England, some antibiotics so powerful, I couldn’t stomach tannin for years (and I’m pretty sure they are responsible for my somewhat delicate stomach even now), and then straight to Vienna. But the reason I know the year is because part-way through our trip we found ourselves in Montenegro, I think, or perhaps Sarajevo, and Simon realised that NATO troops were about to enter Kosovo, and that his old friend General Sir Mike Jackson was in charge. So he got a media pass, and so did I, and that’s why I know the year and the month, and why, whenever I’m referred to as a war correspondent, I point out that I have only been to war once, for one day, and that I’m probably the only war correspondent who had a badge saying “Conde Nast Traveler.” Read more