Traveling to a different country is difficult enough, imagine having to do it again and fearing you'll hate it even more the second time around. This was an interesting read that did not hide the fears and observations a tourist has when leaving their home. Throughout this adventure and self discovery journey, one feels as if the main character was holding nothing back, thus giving one pages of laugh out loud, gasp until you can't anymore and "what !?" moments that were quite unexpected.

It is fantastic to experience what is it like to visit a country in which the rules are completely random ( to us at least), cultural and religious aspects are included to highlight the beauty behind the diversity the population has.

Will you like this book?

The author Sarah Macdonald's hates India and vows not to return again. But she is forced to come back with her boyfriend who is a reporter and is posted in New Delhi. The rest of the book, accounts the time she spent in India.

Condescending, arrogant and prejudiced, that's what I felt after reading the book. She rants only about the negative facts about India and none about any good memories. I may be biased since I'm in Indian but definitely there are various other ways an individual can describe people & culture of other countries.

The book also sends out a wrong message whoever is planning to visit India.

A dry read, but memorable. If you plan to go to India, you may not want to read this - or read it and wait a few years for some of the overly biased negatives to dissipate. The book is basically a travelogue of a young woman's adventure to India, and her side-quest to 'find her religion' which really ends up being 'none of the above.' After reading this, my impression of India is: steeped in religions, customs, traditions and culture, dusty and dirty while simultaneously vast and beautiful, extremely hot and poor, speckled with wealth and well-hidden gems.

I didn't really like this book. I was looking for a good travel book about India to accompany me on my trip to India. This book is not a great travel book. The stories were not that compelling. The writing wasn't awesome.

That said, this book was interesting and did add to my trip. The book is written by an Australian journalist who is forced into early retirement because her boyfriend moves her to India so he can take this great job. So the author is stuck in an apartment with disposable income and time to kill. The journalist in her is restless, so she begins to explore the country that she know nothing about - specifically, the diverse religions that flourish in India. She goes to explore Christianity in southern India. She returns home to recuperate. She goes up north to seek out the Dali Lama. She returns home to recuperate. She goes out west to investigate Jainism. She returns home to recuperate. And on and on the book goes. On each trip you learn a little about the geographic, religious, and cultural diversity of India.

I did not see very much of the ugliness of India described in this book. I liked the book overall, but found it hard to slog through and overall kind of depressing. I also found the author to be very self absorbed. I know she went to India for love of her man, but she could have tried to have a more open mind about India. There is a lot to be said for the old saying "Bloom where you are planted." I did not live in India, only visited for about 9 days, but I really like India and the people I met there (the food is another story, it is just not my thing.)

Sarah Macdonald was able to backpack around India in her young twenties but swore on her middle finger when she left, she would not return, due to its poverty, the massive smog, and the horrible heat. It is with some humor she is informed by a stinky man in the airport he foresees her return; Argh! She comes back eleven years later, for love, she quits her dream job to join Jonathan in New Delhi. She has a rich array of experiences. It was hard though, for me to stay focused with her story after her initial interesting few chapters. I am confident that if I could get over whatever was blocking me here I would have continued enjoying what seemed like a richly presented book, however I could not finish. I really liked the cover, and her spunky attitude!

This book taught me so much about the faiths, cultures, and castes throughout India. Some of the stories are so incredible that they're hard to believe. My favorite aspect of this book is the author's humor. It was SOOO funny! She amazes me that she had most of her adventures completely alone until she made friends. Really great look inside India for someone who has never been. I'll have to take her word about the intensity of living there! The last paragraph of the book is the best

I'm actually surprised I disliked this book as much as I did! I expected an hilarious account of a girl travelling to India, a place where she'd been to previously but never wanted to return to. Well, she did and she did do some travelling but it wasn't hilarious by any stretch of the imagination... She used to be a radio host in Sydney, so I figured I'd really relate to her humour but hm, there just wasn't much of that.

Since I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, what I must credit to her was her ability to put on an Indian English accent! That was hilarious at first but, unfortunately, the funnyness of it wore off after a while.

Her openess and honesty to share her feelings and struggles relocating to India for her boyfriend's sake, later husband, was somewhat refreshing but at the same time I found her incredibly naive, not just about India but about the world in general. And her jumping to conclusions and from religion to religion felt superficial and without any real insight.

Her explorations of different religions felt like nothing more than someone dabbling in a bit of religious experience. She ultimately failed to really connect with any of them, and just returned to Australia and that was it. Again, her understanding of cross-cultural issues and religions was naive and shallow. If it had been hilarious, at least that would have made me laugh, and I might have been inclined to overlook the superficiality of her journey more generally.

I also didn't appreciate that she constantly harped on about how dirty India is - admittedly, I haven't been to India but I would expect it not to be as clean as Australia in any shape or form. Of course, it would be a culture shock but you'd think after a year or so she'd be used to it a bit, wouldn't you? but nah, she keeps going on about the filth and dirt...

Macdonald was a TV journalist in Australia. She leaves the comforts of home for true love, joining her boyfriend, also a reporter, in India. This book recounts her experiences and observations there as she attempts to sample the many forms of religion that India has to offer, including Christianity and Judaism. She is a young woman, without a strong background in religious study, so functions as an everyman, or in this case, an everywoman. She describes her experiences in an engaging manner, noting lessons to be learned from her experience of the sundry belief systems.

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I have very mixed feelings about HOLY COW. On the one hand, it's a memoir about a place I am unlikely to go and it was interesting to see a journalist's take on the people and the culture, since if I can't travel somewhere, it's fun to enjoy it vicariously. But on the other hand, this memoir is very dated (published in 2002) with some very outmoded views towards people of color and she takes a decidedly Western slant when talking about said people and culture that oscillates wildly between ignorant and insensitive. (I would probably vote for ignorant-- in the beginning of the book, she talks about her "dreadlocks" phrase in college.)



Sarah Macdonald is an Australian who ended up going to India because of her boyfriend's work (I think he's an Australian news reporter). As a journalist herself who was fond of travel and backpacking, she had mixed feelings. She went to India as a young woman and had a bad experience, and then, literally and metaphorically flipped it off, vowing never to return. But she ends up tempting fate and going back anyway because she wants to make her relationship work and also because she's curious and the journalist in her hungers for new experiences and stories.



As I said in my opening paragraph, I really liked the travel parts of the book. She met some incredibly cool people in India who had really interesting stories, like the Zoroastrians and their commune, the woman who got married without permission and was cursed by her mother(!), and the people who did incredible physical feats for religious reasons (I forget why and what they were called, but one guy apparently stood up for two years and one guy lifted his hand in the air for one year-- so it was stuff like that). But as other reviewers have pointed out, there's also a LOT of complaining. And she does it in a way that definitely can come across as bitchy and condescending. To be fair, this was the style for comedic travel memoirs of the time. J. Maarten Troost does this in his memoirs too, which were being sold around the same time as this one, and his books in the South Pacific/Micronesia/Melanesia have titles like GETTING STONED WITH SAVAGES and THE SEX LIVES OF CANNIBALS. I'm not making apologies, just giving some historical context. These probably wouldn't be published today-- at least not with these titles and not without a proper editing scrub.



Maybe the author realized she was getting annoying because she seemed to tone down her attitude in the second half of the book. She did whine a little about not being allowed in with her camera to spy on the Zoroastrian rituals (*eye roll*) but after that, it was more about her recovering health and how she was getting on as she became more acclimated to the culture. And I do get culture shock and compensating with humor, which is what I think the author was doing here. It just comes across badly now because the humor doesn't age well (and looking at the Goodreads reviews, it seems to have offended a number of Indian people, too). The last quarter of the book or so talks about 9/11 and her fear for her husband as he did his reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a horrific moment in which she thought he'd been captured and killed. It's an odd tonal shift, especially when she tries to end on an almost spiritual note after making light of religions and treating them like they're funny party hats she saw in a shop window for most of the book. It made me miss the poorly-aged humor.



I'm rereading this book as part of this project where I revisit books I liked and disliked when I was younger. Some of my past status updates for this book were actually preserved, however, and it appears that I did not enjoy this book when I read it. I vaguely remember giving it a two. I'm giving it a three now because at times it could be funny and the writing could be very vivid and sensory, but I would probably not recommend this book to anyone who wasn't (still) a fan of Maarten Troost.



3 stars

this book makes you really want to go to india and really question if you want to go to india! Her stories are amazing and make you so envious ...she got a serious inside look for sure....I want to go to India!!!!!!!

I was really angry with this author. While she portrays India semi-accurate she writes it in such a bad lighting. I did find things amusing but mostly just because what she writes is something that i can look out my window and see. But her writing style is actually very boring and plodding. Her use of words and descriptions are either so minimal or so fluffed out I don't know what she is comparing.