(Written Dec. 22)
I don’t know how it got to be this way, but it’s already Day Five of my trip to India with Saumya and Dave, good friends and former neighbors. Well, it’s gotten to be Day Five because we’ve been busy running from place to place, fending off jet lag with a quiet desperation (and many power naps and cups of coffee), etc. Also, a silence due to a lack of internet connection. I should start typing things out offline and then posting them in a mad rush when I can get wi-fi access. Expect: silence, silence, silence – TORRENT.
India! It’s still hard to believe I’m in India. There is a lot to write about. Too much. I’ll try to send out periodic updates and keep my posts to a measurable and sane size. No promises though.
Initial impressions, maybe? Start there? I could walk you through Days One Through Five, but the narrative slog seems a bit daunting right now. Maybe I can close with Highlights of The Trip Thus Far.
Initial Impressions. Wow. I was not ready for this. Well, in a sense I sort of was. Two years living in Panama with Peace Corps got me ready for a lot of this “developing world” stuff. And I see a lot of similarities between the two countries. I’m making a list of some of those things (future post - yes, sure, I’ll promise it). But India is also clearly its own thing.
The first thing I noticed about India after leaving baggage claim in Delhi was the air. Walking out of the terminal, we could see the cloudy, murky fog. Or smog. It was hard to tell which. I was told both. The air had a kind of thickness and mass to it; it would cling. What did TS Eliot say about the fog in Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, as a cat rubbing its back against a window-pane? The air burned with a smoky acridity. It smelled like smoldering campfire. And indeed, as we drove out of the airport with bags loaded on top of the car, I saw several small fires with heavy black plumes of smoke. The memory of the smell came back, from Panama. Burning plastic. Dioxin. Oh how I love the smell of carcinogens in the morning!
Traffic. My God. I will have to do an entire post on this. But imagine the chariot race scene from Ben Hur with a billion people on mopeds honking all the time. I think this is the one-sentence way to get you there to what this is like. I’ve never experienced anything like this driving. Please-Don’t-Watch-These-Mom videos coming soon…
Food. Wondrous. Everywhere everything all the time wondrous. There is some terribly tragic irony that the culture with some of the best food in the world had to submit for many decades to the culture with some of the worst food in the world. You would think with all the buckets of money the Brits were hauling out of India through the spice trade they would have at least actually used some of the spices in their food. Oh well. But I digress. We have eaten like kings and queens. I expect this trend to continue onward ever upward. Once we go to Patna, Saumya’s home town, I am told to expect an endless train of food that will leave me horribly, horribly inept at returning to the US and my routine of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch everyday.
People. Millions. Literally. Tons of people. Everywhere. For a sense of scale: take everyone in the United States. Multiply them by four. Now put them in a space about the size of the land east of the Mississippi. That’s India. Crowded. Loud. Honking. My God, the honking (see traffic, above).
Not as “developed” as I thought it would be. I had expectations that since India is part of the BRIC bloc of developing nations (along with Brazil, Russia and China) that there would be a sense of sophistication and ease that you’d anticipate with a middle-income country. Clearly India is way down the road to getting there, but is not there yet. No one talks about Panama, since it’s so off the radar and they simply don’t have tens of millions of people to raise out of poverty. But the rich-poor, development-index scale in my head was skewed toward “India wealthier than Panama” so far has not panned out in an appreciable way. I am sure that if I had seen India ten years ago, before they were clocking a 9% GDP growth rate for a decade, I would be floored by the improvement. And surely there is a very strong and strengthening middle class here that will be a strong civic foundation for the world’s largest democracy.
Highlights, thus far. Definitely yesterday and last night, which we spent on a houseboat lazily drifting through the “backwaters” of the state of Kerala, in southern India. Clear blue skies, warm weather, the gentle smacking of the water against the side of the boat, the rustle of the coconut palms, epic feasting on fresh seafood, including several tiger prawn, which are the Shaquille O’Neals of shrimp, at about a pound each and the length of your forearm. Another, odd highlight may be the fourteen hour overnight train ride to Alleppey, for our houseboat experience. Probably deserves its own post. A fascinating travel experience. In addition, a long, long list of little details that have been accumulating that may be of some interest. I’ll try to get those down in a semi-thorough way.
I think I’ve just promised about a half dozen posts. I better get on this.
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