India: Chillin with a Billion

India: land of the Mahatma, Mother Theresa, the Upanishads and Galub Jamon. Oh, and the Taj Mahal, the greatest monument to love ever built. So upset was the Shah (one of the Muslim Mughal kings of India) at the death of his wife Mumtaz that he built her the greatest tomb on the continent, resplendent in translucent white marble and semiprecious stones. More pics of the spectacular sights of Delhi and points beyond are coming soon.

There are a billion people here, and no one has ever asked "Wow. Where do they put them all?" Because the answer is (excuse me) they're right (pardon me, if you could move just ... thanks) over here by (excusemecouldIgetthrough.. thankyou. Namaste) you right now. Cheek to jowl. Everything is crowded and people take up every nook and cranny that they can, and then some. I'm told China is more crowded but I'm having a hard time imagining it. I'm glad I was raised a herd animal, or the crowds here would be intimidating.

First, a brief word about the food, and that word is "Awesome". Even better than I could have hoped. The crappy dinner on the train when I rode overnight from Delhi to Varanasi was very, very good, and yet I could tell that the businessmen I was sitting with were holding their noses to get it down. They're spoiled by this country. Last night I had a thali at a restaurant here in Delhi that cost about two dollars and I wanted to compose poetry to it. Not about it, friends, to it. Crisp little samosas with savory potato filling, mulligatawny soup you'd joyfully commit a felony for, suculent small parathas with some unidentified sweet paste, half a dozen different vegetable curries, and at least five dishes that I still don't know what they were, aloo gobi, rotis, papadum, tamarind sauce, and finished with petite galub jamons drowned in saffron syrup. The waiter came over at one point and asked me if I wanted anything else, and I said "an extra stomach". The manager overheard this and, laughing heartily, came over to point out different dishes and suggest condiment combinations.

One of my favorite phenomena of India has to be "Hinglish" or the seamlessness of English in this society. Hindi is just one of the fifteen official languages of India, but it's the dominant one, especially here in the North. The other northern languages (like Rajisthani) are very very similar to Hindi, so Hindi is the "mother tongue" of the country, as the southern languages are diverse and dissimilar. Yet English is the common denominator of business and wealth. Then, to make the linguistic environment more interesting, Hindi and English blend together, sometimes similar to the ways Spanish and English would run together in Texas (and especially San Antonio, whose official language should be Spanglish), but in different ways as well.

TV ads will run in Hindi for twenty nine seconds, but the corporate slogan at the end is English. Interviewers will question cultural figures in English, and nod at answers in Hindi. The aforementioned businessmen with whom I shared a train compartment would drop into English mid sentence for a particular phrase while complaining about the train food "rajiv chowk karol bagh it took forever to get here and anjoo hani paneep". My favorite example of all was a billboard for a morning radio show. Exactly like the boards for morning pop shows at home- handsome young men with manic expressions, wild coloring, "93.7 FM" in big letters, but Hindi printing right up until the slogan at the end: "Wake Up and Smell the Madness!!!!"

Okay, so, this is where I'm severely tempted to stop the entry, but I won't. See, although I might return briefly in a couple weeks, I've actually decided to leave India tomorrow for Nepal. My original plan had me staying here for one to two months, but after a week, I'm pretty much done, and with much sorrow I now depart. I have a ticket for Katmandu, Nepal for tomorrow morning. I thought about it a lot and decided that I had to be frank and tell the bad as well as the good as I see it, and although the food is beyond amazing, and the culture and languages are very cool, and the sights themselves are superlative (photos coming soon), I really have not enjoyed my time here.

Thing is, I can't think of anyone more predisposed to like India than myself. From the youngest of ages until the present, I've had many close friends, teachers, girlfriends either from here or of close Indian ancestry, and I've had a near-lifelong obsession with Indian art, philosophy, cuisine, everything. Maybe this is part of the problem: I had the highest of hopes for the place. Almost every traveler I came across in Asia either loved or despised their time in India without ambiguity, so I automatically assumed I'd be the former. The negatives that I heard cited by the latter group are very much present, but none of them bother me that much. Yes, there's intense poverty, but I saw that in Cambodia and it's no worse here; yes there are unsanitary conditions in the cities, but that doesn't really affect me as long as I watch where I eat; and yes things tend to run late, but if you anticipate that going in, it's not an issue.

The problem with India is money, or more accurately the pursuit of it. In every country I've visited there's enthusiastic folk keen on creating a little distance between you and your dollar. But nowhere has the omnipresence of capitalist yearning crushed the joy out of me as it has here, to the point where I couldn't enjoy the magnificent sights or the society. I'm at a loss to exaggerate this phenomenon. It's as if through the eyes of folk on the street I'm an ATM with legs. You can't take ten steps out the door without being solicited for everything and anything, and it continues nonstop until the next door closes behind you, and sometimes not even then. I have had people sit down next to me at restaurants while I'm eating, wanting to sell me taxi service, sarees, postcards, everything. I've had to bat away arms from rival vendors while trying to cross the street to buy a bottle of water. I've jogged down the street with my 20-kilo luggage on my back to avoid the crush of touts.

When I think about how constant and intense it is, it's comic, like a Bugs Bunny cartoon when Elmer Fudd is walking down the street trying to ignore Bugs, but Bugs pops out from behind every tree, building and rock as Elmer walks by at a steady pace, grimacing. I would not have been at all surprised if a manhole cover jumped out of the street, balanced on the top of a turban whose owner had a lovely selection of Ganesh statues to offer me at a very low price. But when it's happening to you its not funny at all. You want to run.

Every driver wants to take you to his friend's bazaar and refuses to take no for an answer. Every guide has a shop you must go to before the tour begins, every sightseeing expedition has detours to shops, factories, and knicknackeries which you can evade only by emoting sheer fury. All this is while dodging the crowds of children begging for pens, money and sweets (and these are children in private school uniforms, not starving urchins on the street). Every so often, someone would strike up conversation with me in what would seem a neutral setting- the waiter in the hotel restaurant, the high school kid walking alongside the road. I would be cautious and terse for ten, twenty minutes or more, then conclude that this was a real person who just wanted to practice English or get to know the foreigner, open up to them... and then regret it. Every time the sales pitch came at the end. Maybe the problem is me, and I should just enjoy the talk that comes before the sales pitch... but it just feels so... rotten when the advertisement comes at the end, like I've been buying into something false and now I can't get that taste out of my mouth.

(That's an exaggeration- exactly once there was a young man in a train station who just wanted to talk. He was cool, and he actually bought me a cup of chai. His English was spotty but it was the best interaction I had here. His name was Papu, and he was a soldier, having just come back from six months wearing a blue helmet for the UN in the Congo. He said he was very impressed by the American soldiers he met in the Congo, because in particular of one incident: a ditch needed to be dug, and the first of the American detatchment on the scene was a lieutenant, who, after surveying the situation, got out a shovel and actually started digging, and didn't stop when the enlisted men got there. This blew his mind.)

And then, when you actually see the hotel room, its smaller than you were told, or the AC doesn't work, or the power goes out every twenty minutes, or you're miles from the sights instead of the steps you were promised, and then the price is more, the quality is less, the deal has changed, there are hidden fees, taxes are not included despite being promised the contrary... so after a while you can take no one's word on anything, until your very mistrust and vigilance exhausts you. Each night I find myself retreating to my hotel room much earlier than I'd like just so I can close the door, and then I'm angry because I came all this way to see the place, and here I am reduced to shutting it out.

I've been largely to touristy places, and that's a mitigating factor. I know that not all of Indian society is this way. And all of these phenomena appeared in lesser degree in all the other places I've been (the transport touts when we stepped off the bus in Seim Reap were particularly bad). But everywhere else there was relief from the hucksterism, there was a break in the commercial where you got to see a country. And to travel in a country means being in the touristy environment, at least to me. I don't know the language and I want to see the great sights, so that puts me in the maw of the huckster.

When I look into the eyes of each individual, I understand why he's putting on the hard sell. He's poor, and the cash in my pocket is a fortune to him. The individual would be easy to forgive, to sympathize with, if I only had the time, which I don't because of the twenty other dudes right behind him with the same problem and the same sales pitch.

I think I'd come back here for business, or to visit a friend, or to come see a specific event. But for now I'm done. And I may feel better able to handle more India after a week or two off in a different country. I'd still like to see Rajasthan and the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, among other things.

I have many good photos of monuments, temples and rivers, but I will begin uploading those in Nepal. Now it's off to a repeat thali of last night's feast, and then to bed. I'm excited about Nepal- it's supposed to be amazing, right, Ryan?