My Rickshaw Ran Into a Cow, And Other Stories From the Indian Subcontinent

A report on my trip to India, for those interested in such things:

[I spent Nov. 20-Dec. 2 on a trip to India, mostly paid for by a generous donor to our school who is looking to expand our Asian Studies program beyond East Asia. The plan was for myself and two of my collegaues (Brad Nicholson and Alison Hogarth of the history department) to scout some potential sites for a student trip planned for June 2009 and visit some private schools in Delhi in hopes of establishing a sister-school/exchange relationship similar to the one we currently have with the EFZ School in Shanghai, China.]

We arrived in Delhi late at night and went straight to our hotel. But even at night, you could tell there was a lot of smoke in the air. And the chaos at the airport was everything you would expect from India. And the traffic was as mildly terrifying as you could hope for. Delhi is enormous, but is not full of tall buildings. It's really interesting how different my opinion of Delhi was over the first few days compared to the last few days (after returning from some smaller cities). Initially, I was surprised at how dirty it was - the air pollution was pretty high, although I don't know if it was any worse than Beijing. But the aspect that was surprising was the trash. There is garbage everywhere in India (especially in the smaller cities we were in). People seem uninterested in properly disposing of garbage, and at this point, why would they? Malcolm Gladwell's "broken windows" tipping point theory is playing out fairly well here, it would seem. So at first I thought Delhi was kind of run down...but then after seeing other places in India and returning to Delhi, it seemed like a thoroughly modern, cosmopolitan city!

Like seemingly every country outside of North America, the traffic was disorderly to the point of amusement (especially outside of Delhi). Part of the issue is you've got 5 or 6 different modes of transportation all sharing the road, and they're all moving at different speeds. Cycle-rickshaws, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, cars, buses, (with people walking along the side of the road almost everywhere) and none of them are paying any attention to things like lane markers. Being a former British colony, they've got tons of traffic circles. And if you're like me, traffic circles aren't exactly a model of safe, efficient traffic movement, let alone when tiny auto-rickshaws are merging with big trucks and motorcycles are weaving in and out of every opening. But you get used to it, and after a few days I was pretty comfortable with it.

The two places we spent time outside of Delhi were Haridwar (in the foothills of the Himilayas, where the Ganges emerges from the mountains) and Varanasi (orginally called Banares). Both of these cities are important pilgrimage sites for Hindus, due to their location on the holy Ganges River.

In Haridwar, the whole Ganges experience is much smaller than in Varanasi, with people doing their bathing rituals during the day and an intimate Ganga Aarti ceremony at sundown. Due to the connections of one of the Indian-born parents of a student at our school, we got to spend an hour or two in an ashram here, too, which was quite interesting - and even got to sit down with the guru for a few minutes and talk about Barack Obama. (He brought it up, not us! He was very interested in our opinion of him and the challenges he faces going foward.)

Varanasi is pretty overwhelming, and is probably the most prototypical Indian place we visited (in my mind). This is the place for Hindus to visit, and many are cremated along the banks of the Ganges here. The riverbank is lined with dozens of ghats (bathing steps) where many Indians come to wash themselves in one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world. The Ganges experience is much more developed here, and very much geared towards tourists. We took a sunset boat tour on the river to check out one of the cremation ghats and watched with a bunch of other westerners as bodies were burned on the banks of the river. Truly a fascinating scene. The Ganga aarti ceremony in Varanasi is much more of a spectacle, more like the Vegas version of what happens in Haridwar. Varanasi is also (due to it being much more touristy) full of people trying to sell you things, be your "guide" to the next temple, or generally rip you off any way they can. (It was dealing with one of these touts that I had my "Fuck India" moment and needed a bit of a break. The fact that I was stressed out about being there in general at this time due to the terrorist attacks probably shortened my patience.)

So yeah, the terrorist attacks. We were on an overnight train between Haridwar and Varanasi when it happened, so didn't find out about it till about 20 hours after it occured (leading to some definite stresses being put on some of those back home who hadn't heard from us after news of the attacks went worldwide). The part of it that freaked me out the most was that we checked into the Taj Ganges in Varanasi... part of the same chain of hotels as the Taj Mahal in Mumbai that was targeted by the terrorists. If we had gone to Mumbai, we probably would have been staying in that hotel - and that thought definitely put me in an interesting psychological position. We decided to just continue on as is (although we talked about trying to get out of the country early), but it was on my mind quite a bit the rest of the trip. I carried my passport and cash with my all the time, and was keeping my eyes open for escape routes if I started to hear gunfire. Probably a completely irrational overreaction, but you can't help how your mind reacts to a situation like that when you're in a very foreign country.

There's really so much more I could write, about visiting mosques, a bunch of Hindu temples, the site of Buddha's first sermon, and tracking tigers in a National Park (we didn't find any, although we did see a leopard). But just like in China, one of my favorite activies was walking some narrow streets and seeing the markets in action. I would have loved to have tried more food from the little stalls in these places, but there are a lot of concerns about quality (I only had one fairly minor day of stomach problems, on our last day in the country). Something that always makes me laugh is the way people criticize western culture for being so "commercial". Every country I've ever been is incredibly commercial, and India is especially so. Maybe it's just that people are pretty commercial.

To sum up, I was pretty surprised at how poor India is, especially outside of Delhi. Some of the rural areas I saw from the train looked like they would be much more at home in sub-Saharan Africa than in one of the (supposedly) rising world powers. I guess I expected India to be like China, since we associate the two as the big growing world economies. But from my perspective, India is a long way behind China in terms of development. India is an incredibly fascinating country - but I wouldn't say I loved it. It's crowded and dirty. There isn't (at least where we were) a huge amount of natural scenic beauty (or, you can't see it because of the haze). On the other hand, the food was outstanding. Most of the people were great. And the whole place kind of got under your skin, and looking back I feel pretty nostalgic about it, for reasons I can't quite explain. It cetainly does overwhelm the senses. I think the terrorist attack kind of clouded my opinion of the whole country, because to a certain degree it made me just want to be home and safe. For this reason, this trip wasn't quite a "normal" visit to India. It's not an easy place to visit at the best of times. But it is truly one of the most genuinely interesting places I've ever been.