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Little India Travel Guide
A veritable slice of India in Singapore, the district affectionately called Little India is a beautiful chaos of shops, sights, and sounds. Though admittedly a watered-down version of the original, it has somewhat retained a genuine Indian identity where one can experience that colorful culture tightly packed in a single attraction.
Since it is primarily a shopper's paradise, the main thing to do at Little India is to look around, haggle with the vendors, and then buy whatever it is that has caught one's fancy. It should not surprise anyone, then, to see strings of stalls lining the streets, animated vendors hawking their goods, and the latest hits from the so-called "Bollywood" of India blaring from every corner.
Probably the highlight of any visit is catching a glimpse of the bizarre Thaipusam Festival, held every full moon of the Thai lunar month-January or February. An exciting celebration to its core, it commemorates the birth of Murugan, the son of Shiva, with the devotees undergoing self-mortification by piercing hooks to the skin, or even driving small spears through the tongues or cheeks. It is said that the greater the pain one suffers, the more merit he gains from the gods.
The Hindu celebration known as the Deepavali, aptly known as the "Festival of Lights," is the most popular among these festivals. During the event, devotees light diyas, small pots of coconut oil with cotton wicks, as a symbol of the triumph of good over evil inside a person's psyche. Yet another thing one must not miss is partaking of the Sunday evenings in Little India, when just about every worker from the vicinity joins to engage in blissful revelry and merry-making.
In spite of all these activities, the Little India experience might not be complete without trying its strange specialty: the fish head curry. A delicacy unique to the area, it consists of a large fish head (usually red snapper) that is slow-cooked for hours in a thick and spicy curry sauce until it literally starts to fall apart when eaten. Most of the locals will advise tourists that the best part of the dish is the gelatinous muscle behind the eyeballs. Now that's a treat!
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