Travel Throwback: True grit in big cities

Seen Slumdog Millionaire yet? The much-acclaimed movie, directed by British filmmaker Danny Boyle, is a gem set in the slums of India. It intersperses shots of India’s tourism icon, the Taj Mahal, with seamy, steamy sections of India’s cities that tourism promoters generally prefer to keep out of the limelight. Slumdog Millionaire also gives insights into India’s underworld, the abode of ‘dacoits’ (as India terms armed bandits), organisers of professional begging rings and other exotic lowlife.

The underworld holds a certain perverse charm for Australians, as evidenced by the phenomenal ratings success of the television series Underbelly. In real life, few of us want to live next door to a king of crime, yet reading the local crime news in English-language newspapers when on the road in Asia and elsewhere adds a certain zest to your travels. Some criminals – major and petty – seem almost like villains out of Batman. Nobody wants to fall foul of these strange and shady characters, but somehow knowing that they are out there adds a certain frisson of excitement to your journey.

In India, for instance, you learn that bands of colourfully dressed outlaws have roamed the central part of the country for centuries. Few of the bands survive (fortunately for travellers) and Indian police last year finally put paid to one of the few remaining examples. Shiv Kumar, a bandit chief, was reported to have ruled the ravines and forests of central India “through a mixture of fear and love for three decades, with many hailing him as a modern-day Robin Hood”.

Eve-teasing in India (BBC)

A more minor pest encountered on the streets of India is the ‘eve-teaser’. Eve-teasers are constantly cropping up in headlines in Indian newspapers. “Eve-teaser thrashed at Nav Gujarat College” trumpeted a headline in the Times of India a few weeks ago. Eve-teasers are groups of young men who loiter outside women’s colleges, at bus stops or wherever women gather, passing lewd comments, whistling, heckling and pinching bottoms. They exist in other countries too, but only India calls them eve-teasers.

One of the most slippery forms of petty criminal is the “oily man burglar”. Malaysian police caught one red-handed (or oily-handed) last November. Oily men grease themselves from head to toe with oil before setting out burgling. They work naked, making it almost impossible for householders to grab them. The 1956 film Sumpah Orang Minyak (The Curse of the Oily Man) brought the Malaysian variety into prominence. Oily men are notoriously agile – you never can be too careful.

Fashions in petty crime come and go. In the Victorian London of Charles Dickens, criminals included footpads, ‘magsmen’ (travelling operators of gambling games), ‘macers’ (professional card cheats), ‘shofulmen’ (counterfeit coiners and their distributors) and fraudulent beggars with supposed wounds concealed under filthy bandages. Charming.

Times have changed. Bag-snatchers operating from motorbikes and motor scooters do a roaring trade, particularly in Italy. Sneak thieves who crawl on their underbellies along the floors of railway carriages to seize backpacks and bags operate in Asia, usually at night, when passengers are dozing.

A few decades ago, watch snippers preyed on people travelling on public transport in Asia and South America. Standing passengers holding on to straps would inadvertently expose their wristwatches. Like lightning, a watch snipper would slice through the watch-strap and make off with the watch. Fortunately, watches have become so cheap that it’s no longer worth the watch snipper’s effort. So relax and hold that strap with confidence.

Feb 2007