Beginning in India
Hello from Delhi!
I’ve been here a few days now, enough to get my bearings; came to sort of talk at a conference on technology & international development, but to be honest it was mainly just an excuse to go to India for the first time. Woo-hoo!
Delhi and Seattle aren’t quite on opposite sides on the planet, but they’re close enough that the shortest route is not to go east, nor is it to go west--going straight north is the shortest, changing planes in Moscow. It’s also the cheapest way, since Aeroflot is a ghetto airline. ...but now I wonder if the money saved was worth it. My flight was delayed six hours, and it was impossible to check from home--the only phone info was a week old, and the airport’s online flight-tracking service said the flight had taken off as scheduled. ...Once in flight, the bulkhead started dripping this yellowish oil onto the seat next to me; when I called a flight attendant over, she dabbed it away with a napkin and looked at me like I was a whiner. After about twenty minutes it stopped dripping, and we didn’t crash, so I guess it couldn’tve been anything too important. Welcome to Aeroflot. Since the delay made me miss the flight to Delhi, Aeroflot put me up in a hotel for 24 hours to wait for the next one, which I thought was very nice of them. ...until I found I couldn’t leave the hotel. In fact, I couldn’t even leave the _corridor_, there was a security guard at the end of the hall to ensure that. (They sent meals up to the room--stuff that managed to make airplane food look good.) I talked with Aeroflot for about two hours trying to get permission to pop down into Moscow to see a little of the city, but no. Hey, folks, news flash--the cold war is over! And you’ll get more tourist money if you actually let people in! Oh, and for the US’s part, while boarding, I was selected (“randomly”) for extra security check; but no biggie. You know what they should really do: have combination security-check and massage services. That way you would actually _pay_ them to frisk you; it goes from tax drain to profit center, and they do a more thorough job! That’s the future, baby. But enough about the stopover, on to India...
India is vast. Not in the sense of land area, but in the sense of containing multitudes, having radical extremes. It’s an intense place, even pushing my limits. The third-worldness was what smacked me in the face first, and caused me to put it into an existing box in my head, but now that I’ve been here a few days it’s chewing through some of those walls. On the one hand there’s worse squalor in the city than I’ve seen anywhere; but on the other hand there’s a cafe with wireless a block away from my hotel, which most cities in Europe don’t even have. (dedicated cyber-spots, yes, but social cafes that also happen to be wired, no.) On the one hand their streets have some of the most insane traffic I’ve ever seen (my first day, a rickshaw I was in got smacked by a car, though we were both going to slowly no harm was done, not even to my nerves), and the pollution is so bad we’ve got an L.A. sun and the grime cannot be scraped away from outdoor furniture; but on the other hand almost all the buses and rickshaws around here run on natural gas, I’ve seen half a dozen electric taxi-carts, and in a city park there was a sign saying “Be Eco-Friendelhi!”
One standard third-world thing they do here, that I hate, is playing Let’s Hustle Whitey. EVERYBODY here wants a piece of you. Every minute, some street kid or shoe-shiner or rickshaw driver or vender is trying to work you--if you even acknowledge their existence, they’ll pester you for five minutes; with the street kids, they’ll follow you for blocks, even with no acknowledgement, unless you actively scrape them off. If I were a big shopper, this would be paradise on earth. Everything’s cheap, and everybody’s willing to deal. But I’m not, and I hate being treated like a wallet instead of a soul. This is what we get for colonialism, I guess--whitey treats them like expendable cheap labor, they treat whitey like walking dollar sign. It poisons my relationship to the place and the people, throws a veil of suspicion over everything. With that plus the constant blasting cacophony of horns and roaring engines, the bedlam here forces you to throw up massive walls around yourself. (And I don’t mean the little paper walls American city-dwellers put up between them and strangers, not even New Yorker steel bars; I mean battlements of reinforced heart-of-stone.) It seems ironic that India is such a mecca for seekers of enlightenment, but perhaps it makes sense--if you can find serenity here, you can find it anywhere. If you can open yourself up to this, you can open to anything. Now that the conference has started, though, it’s a lot better, because none of these people want a piece of me; or rather, they want ideas or stories or stuff that actually means something, and we’re sharing, not just taking.
So far I’ve visited the Taj Mahal in Agra, and various temples here in Delhi. I have to say, though, the coolest thing I’ve seen was Jantar Mantar, a whole park-sized observatory complex with walk-in sundials, zodiac-trackers, and fifty-foot-wide coliseum calendars. Built in the 1700’s, it supposedly took the best astronomical knowledge of the Islamic world, Asian world, and European world, with its main sundial accurate to half a second. There was only minimal information on-site, and I was only able to piece together a little more of what the stuff did on my own, but it’s worth reading up on. Even if you’ve no idea what the things do, they still look enticingly cryptical and horoscopic. The Taj Mahal was indeed grand and impressive. Not so embellished as the Alhambra, it’s more maturely subtle, and much larger in scale. (Jantar Mantar is shoddy & decrepit in comparison, but I still like it because it Does Cool Stuff.) Seen from the outer buildings, the monument looks entirely pure white; but once you come closer, inlay flowers bloom and writing scrolls up the edges. The sanctity of the tomb-chamber was a bit compromised by the din of people talking over each other multiply reflected by the marble walls; but it was interesting--being so ricocheted, there were no words in it, just a featureless animate roar that could have been a whole nation of ghosts. You also have to hand it to the Taj because it’s the only great monument I can think of that was built for love of another person rather than self-aggrandizement or abstracted love (i.e. religion). (and yes, it’s fairly clear that there was no other motive because emperor Shah Jahan was apparently planning a second, larger, building for himself in black marble, but it was never started because his son imprisoned him & stole the crown.) So the Taj Mahal, as a quote on the plaque said, is simply “a tear-drop frozen on the cheek of eternity.” Oh, and one thing that I enjoy about all the temples here, plus the Taj--you have to take your shoes off before entering. It’s clearly done to show reverence, but I think it actually shows intimacy, which is better.
Of the temples I’ve visited so far, the Baha’i one was the only island of peace in the sea of hustlers, but I hate to say it, by far the most interesting temple was the Hare Krishna one. It isn’t in the guidebook, probably because they couldn’t think of anything nice to say about it; I just saw it in the distance from the Baha’i temple, and asked a couple people “what’s that?”, then got a rickshaw driver to take me there. It is hand-down the CHEEZIEST church I’ve ever seen. Nice building, but the sculptures and paintings inside were plastic high-cheez, they had a scrolling LED ticker inside the temple saying “beware of pickpockets”, and had multiple gift shops & snack bars in the place. But just wait--the best part was that they had a cinematic Sound & Light Show worthy of the church in Stranger in a Strange Land. The half-hour long show was divided into different rooms so they could start one every five minutes, and each part was a full-room sculpture/diorama that would get spotlit, chasing-colored-disco-lit, blacklit, strobe flashed, or otherwise sexed up and manipulated to go along with the audio track storytelling of the Bhagavad-Gita (at least the Hare Krishna interpretation of it). It was Vegas on a budget; the House on the Rock would eat its heart out. They even had an animatronic robot show, but I’d seen enough by that point. WOW. If the religious wackos in the US would do stuff like that, I might not laugh at them any less, but at least I might show up to their parties.
Okay, too much other stuff to talk about.. the people, mostly.. have to wait ‘til next email. Until then, namaste!