Several years from now, when we remince about our 6 month trip, I think that many of our most vivid and persistant memories will be the ones that we made these past two week in India. If we were at all getting tired of traveling, India changed all of that. Of all the places we have been, India by far seems the most untouched and in many ways, the most “real.” India has simply amazed us. I think that few people can travel to India and feel indifferent towards it.
India has also been full of many surprises. For one, we have been surprised at how poor most people’s English is. On the whole, we would say that it might actually be the worst of all the countries we have visited, despite the innumerable call centers located here. Also, whenever we have hit some kind of roadblock in the past two week, whether it be a canceled bus, an overcharged bill, or a taxi driver refusing to take us, and we have asked “why,” we have been met with blank stares. Originally, we simply figured that their English was weaker than we had presumed but as we spent more and more time here, we began to seriously wonder if the word “why” even exists in the Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, etc. languages. In all seriousness, we don’t think a single person has actually given us an answer when we have asked “why;” they have only stared at us with blank faces and repeated our problem. To put it most buntly, not only have I ever seen so much bullshit and bureacracy before, I have also never seen so much complacency with a system that is infinitly inefficient by sheer design. Questioning authority or simply the status quo (or as many have suggested, the caste system) just does not happen. All of this has made for a wonderfully memorable time.
I can’t really call India backwards. It is so amazingly contradictory and dysfunctional that I can’t even find the words to describe it. In some ways, I think everyone should come to India once in their life to just experience how phenomenal this country is. It is one of only 9 countries to have nuclear weapons. Its pharmaceutical companies are responsible for producing close to 60% of the vaccines and drugs used in the developing world. It produces 8 times more engineering graduates per year than the United States. At 1.2 billion people, it is the world’s largest democracy. And yet, despite this impressive technological CV, it is mind blowing at how the most basic services and infrastructure are missing. Everything in this country is so inefficient we are seriously wondering whether the country was purposefully made this way, or just evolved in this manner. Frankly, it runs so deep that the latter is beginning to seem more unlikely by the day. And don’t even get me started on bodily excretions. Snot, spit, poo, and piss…India is not for the faint of heart.
Our first taste of India came to us at 4:00 in the morning, in the taxi from the Mumbai airport to our hotel. I have seen a lot of poverty traveling, but it has been more acute in Mumbai than anywhere else I’ve ever been. What is most interesting about it, I think, is the almost complacency of the city’s population with it. In most cities that have significant poverty, there often is a gentrified area where the city’s middle class live and then a few miles away, across some invisible barrier, is where the city’s poor live. Not so in Mumbai. As we drove to the hostel, we would pass by not homeless persons, but entire families sleeping on sidewalks. But they sleep outside ordinary shops, or as we later saw in the afternoon, even outside places like Louis Vutton. It is almost as if the middle class, sidestepping the emaciated bodies of the poor, perceive them to be permanent fixtures to the city’s demography and landscape.
We spent most of the first day’s morning recovering from our middle of the night flight. Since we had been drinking so much water to cope with the daily >115 Omani heat, I had to make a few bathroom trips in the night. Each time I would turn on the light, countless numbers of bugs would scatter down into drains or cracks in the wall. Unfotunately, Mumbai receives relatively few backpackers, so clean and cheap hostels are a bit scarse.
When we first looked at a map of India when planning our trip, we decided to land in Mumbai and travel by train to Varanasi. Unfortunately, at the time, two details terribly escaped us: the scale of the map and just how slow the nation’s trains move. So, rather than try to brave a three day rail journey, we opted to fly on one of India’s budget airlines, Spicejet. So, to make the best use of the 24 hours we had to explore Mumbai, as soon as we woke up and ate a small breakfast, we caught a taxi to the heart of downtown. There aren’t really too many sights per se in Mumbai so we spent most of our afternoon just walking around the central downtown area. The descriptions we read about Mumbai, about it being the heart of Bollywood, fashion, and commerce, made it sound like New York. We really found these descriptions to be a bit off, but we still can say that Mumbai has a definitive energy about it that is hard to explain.
When we were in Tanzania, we hesitatingly must admit that when we walked around, we were shocked by how many people we saw just sitting around. You would almost think that no one worked or something. Here in India, almost everyone seems to be rushing somewhere. But that doesn’t distract you from the poverty that you see. We’ve passed by individuals laying on the ground with so many flies swarming over their bodies we seriously wondered if they were alive or dead. And I can’t even count the number of people I have seen that more than likely have leprosy.
Though it has few sights, we enjoyed getting to rub shoulders with locals and just experience everything. For dinner that night, we found a wonderful restaurant where we got to order heapings of some of our most favorite Indian dishes, all for only about $4. Around 9:00 that evening, we took a taxi ride back to our part of town late at night and got ready for our flight the next day to Varanasi.
We had breakfast the next day at a very fashionable bistro called Le Cafe (once again, please appreciate the contradictions). After a slow and hot ride to the airport, we managed to work our way through the maze of checkpoints and checkins till we finally got on our SpiceJet plane that after a short stopover in Delhi, finally got us to Varanasi, one of the world’s holy cities.
A friend from LSU with whom I worked in the Cormier lab has been traveling in Southeast Asia for the past two months. Back in April, we realized that we’d be able to meet up and we planned to do so in Varanasi. As soon as we arrived at our hostel, the Maruti Guesthouse and Yoga Research Foundation, we found him waiting for us. It would prove to be a lot of fun to spend the next 24 hours with someone from back home.
The hostel, which was nothing more than a few spare rooms of a family’s apartment, was nice. They were really great at telling us where to go and what to see while we were in town. One of the first things we did was go down to the Desaswamedh Ghat where we saw the nightly ritual of Hindi holy men banging cymbals and burning incense in a celebration of thanksgiving to the Ganges River, which Hindus consider a goddess. Afterwards, Katie and I floated a candle on the river for Katie’s Aunt Jan. In the Hindi tradition, it is common to do this as a symbol of your loved one passing away.
The next day we went on a 5:00 AM river cruise on the Ganges. We got a fascinating look at how India looks early in the morning. Three images will remain burned in our minds- one of men milking cows in the middle of the street and another of a woman gathering cow dung and kneading it with her bare hands, like it was dough for baking. Despite being considered holy, the pollution in the Ganges is mind blowing. 400 million people live along the Ganges in India. And though I am unsure how much sewage and chemical runoff that the 400M dump in the river, the waste from Varanasi alone is appalling. The third image that we will keep from Varanasi was the scene of a boy openly defecating in the water, an elderly men bathing, children swimming with their mouths open, and a floating, rotting human corpse all within a few yards of each other. The river was something to behold.
Mark Twain wrote that “Varanasi is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” You can certainly feel this when you are here. In addition to the city’s importance for Hinduism, the nearby town of Sarnath is where Buddha arrived shortly after achieving enlightenment and remains one the four most important pilgrimage sites for Buddhists. We did a short 3 hour trip there in the afternoon.
During the day, the hostel arranged tickets for us to take a night train to Agra. Unfortunately, this also meant that we were unable to have a yoga session with the hostel’s owner/Yoga Research Foundation director, Dr. Maruti. The hostel warned us to arrive at the station two hours early. We were surprised by how full the train station was. We could barely walk through the central hall because nearly the entire floor was covered with people sleeping; individuals we presume were waiting for their train. We had an adventure getting on our train: We left the central hall 5 minutes before our train’s departure. When we arrived, the train wasn’t at the track it was supposed to be. Keep in mind, there are no boards at track level indicating what is supposed to be departing from there. Well, three minutes before departure time, I ran back to the central lobby to see that the track had been changed at literally the last minute. Sprinting down to the new track, the huge train had just started to move. Leaping on, we made it. Barely.
Overall, the night wasn’t too bad. Except for a few uncomfortabe stares we got, we slept fairly well, though the train had no sealed windows so we would get a bit covered in insects whenever the train would stop. 12 hours later, we arrived in Agra. Fortunately, someone from the homestay we had arranged was waiting to pick us up. We arrived on a Friday which proved to be a bit unforunate because the Taj Mahal, an Islamic building, is closed then. After long, hot showers, we went into Agra. If one looks at a map of India, Agra rarely makes it, despite having a population of well over 1.5 million peple. Just something to keep in mind when evaluating just how many people live in India.
We spent the afternoon exploring some city parks and discussing what we wanted to get out of India over the next 10 days. We realized that when we planned our trip 6 months ago, we didn’t really know where we wanted to go and just picked a few well-known touristy places. Well, we began to slowly realize that it was going to take us nearly 16 hours on a slow, lumbering train to get to Amristrar, our next planned destination. A holy city for the world’s Sikhs, we were interested in going but the ardous train ride that we would have to endure was making it seem really unpleasant. Instead, we spent a few hours on the internet and found two things that really appealled to us both- Corbett National Park and Nainital, a mountain town in the Himalayas close to the Nepali border. We reserved some train tickets and felt quite satisfied with ourselves.
On our second day in Agra, we caught a two-hour bus to Bharatpur, home to Keoladeo National Park. Upon arrival, however, we were really disappointed to discover that the park was closed for the month due to some sort of repairs the park administration was doing. Though no warning of the park’s closure was listed on the park’s website and despite our best attempts at pleading and subtle bribery, they refused to let us in (although dozens of locals, including children, were riding their bikes through the gates). We ended up birding along the edges of the park’s brick wall and snuck through the crumbling sections of it as much as we could. It was still a bit of a disappoinment because most of the outlying land had been cleared for development and not wanting to risk going too far into the park illegally, we finally agreed to give up and return to Agra. Upon arriving, we realized that we still had enough time to go see the Taj Mahal before dark and that is exactly what we did. Many people warned us that Agra’s touts are amongst the worst in India and we didn’t really find this to be true, until we arrived at the Taj Mahal complex. One of our favorites was the numerous men that approached us and promised to get us in the complex without having to wait in line, for a few hundred rupees fee. Observing other foreigners that took him up on the offer, I finally realized how he got people in without having to wait in line– two lines exist to enter the Taj Mahal, one for men, one for women. He merely goes to the front of the woman’s line, shoves the front few women out of the way with one hand, and with the other ushers the foreigners in. I’m sure some cash is exchanged between the police officer guarding the entrance and him. To say the least, we didn’t take him up on his offer. The Taj Mahal was everything we thought it would be, despite the huge masses of people and the trash. I should also add that the ratio of Indians to foreigners was likely close to 100:1.
Finally, at night we caught some dinner and went to bed early in preperation for our trip to Corbett.
Hi,
I loved the way you look at India. You have seen all its negatives and yet appreciated it for its sweet positives. We call it Mother India and needless to say, however ugly a mother is her child will always find her face to be beautiful than anyone else.
I hope you visit my nation again and allow me to help you around with facts rather than you scavenging online and getting disappointed with contradictions.
Regarding the English, well my language is not up to the mark. And I am among the thousands of engineering graduates the country generates every year.
cheers
Dnyanesh (And if the name twists your tongue, Dino would be just fine:-))