Reigning Miss Universe Jennifer Hawkins made her first-ever trip to India last week, and expressed to Sify News an eagerness to “to touch and feel” the country.

What has so captivated the 20-year-old Australian? A report in The Daily Telegraph allows us to rule out India’s rich historical heritage:

This week, (Hawkins) flashed her winning smile and laughed when she was asked whether she would be visiting the Taj Mahal.

“The Taj what?” she replied.

“The Taj Mahal, India’s most famous tourist spot, the monument of love, in Agra,” she was told.

“Oh, really?”

To be fair, perhaps Hawkins is a preoccupied academic who is more impressed by cultural observations than crowded tourist destinations:

“I love the way Indian girls dress up. I’m fascinated by different cultures and clothings here,” she said. “I have a video camera and I have captured people around the streets. Like one man I saw shaving on a footpath.”

The Daily Telegraph: Jen’s in Taj with culture
Sify News: I want to touch and feel India: Miss Universe

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I’m off to India and Turkey for a couple of weeks today. I’ll be livin’ la vida Sepia: riding the Delhi subway; hanging out in Barista, Bangalore, and the new Indian malls; watching a Govinda caper with jeering rickshaw-wallas in the upper stall; eating at the original Bukhara Grill and trying Indo-Chinese cuisine; buying clothing which flatters the desi palette; checking out the WiFi at the airports; and generally basking in the economic liberalization everyone’s been banging on about.

I’ll also be doing a literary tour of Bombay. After having read New York novels for fifteen years, it was a relief to anchor the figurative Manhattan in plaster and stone. And after seven Rushdie novels and an entire oeuvre of diasporic literature, I’m tired of names without faces: Colaba, Bandra, Breach Candy, Cuffe Parade. I feel like the clerk in Hyderabad handling parking tickets from the midwest, I’ve got an intimate map of a terribly remote place.

I’m halfway through Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, a tome about the seamy side of Bombay, its ganglords and dancing girls in modern-day slavery. It’s quite interesting, though leaden in parts; it’s not always deftly written, but it’s a fascinating read. What’s most useful, though, is local knowledge; the best spots for vada pav, Maharashtrian food, sherwanis and Bom Bahia sunsets.

Know of a quintessentially Bombay experience? Help me pop my Mumbai cherry by leaving it in the comments.

The Times of India reports that U.S. pop singer Christina Aguilera will make her first-ever visit to India during the early weeks of December.

According to the story, Aguilera said, “India has always captured my imagination with its myriad cultures and spiritualism. I am looking forward to my visit with great enthusiasm to feel the color and vibrancy of this great country.”

Where does she plan to find such “color and vibrancy?” In Sahara Corporation’s planned tourist city of Amby Valley. The 234-acre destination outside of Lonavala includes golf courses, lakes, spas and dance clubs.

Sahara has hosted other celebrities in Amby Valley, such as actress Goldie Hawn and tennis pro Anna Kournikova. Aguilera and her family will be the company’s sponsored guest for three days, but the 23-year-old singer is not slated to perform during her stay.

In a reversal of travel protocol, the trip marks the first time that Indian residents are expected to receive vaccinations for a visit by an American traveler.

The Times of India: Christina to visit India

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The NYT on desis in Trinidad:

When slavery was abolished on the island in the 1830’s, the planters looked to India for workers, and the first ship, bearing more than 200 Indian indentured servants, arrived in May 1845. Over the next 75 years, some 143,000 Indians came to Trinidad, mostly from Calcutta, and mostly Hindu.

On one man’s struggles in the name of religion:

The Waterloo Temple was first built near the coast in 1947 by a devout laborer named Seedas Sadhu. Problem was, he didn’t own the land, so the bulldozers rolled in to level his creation. Undaunted, he commenced a 25-year project of hauling rocks and concrete several dozen yards offshore at low tide; there he single-mindedly set about constructing his own island where a new temple could stand unmolested… the Trinidad government commissioned a more permanent artificial island, connecting it to the mainland by a pedestrian causeway.

Seeda-sadhu is an ideal name for a priest. But since his artificial island was constantly eroding, maybe it should’ve been Sisyphus. Another devotee built a supersized statue of the monkey-king to rival the Bamiyan Buddhas:

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