Reflections on India

I wanted to write one last post on India, including some reflections, ways in which my opinions have changed, and stories that didn't fit in my previous posts. I could go on and on and on about India, and there are many topics I still can't find a way to fit in here. But here are a few things I couldn't leave unwritten.

First and foremost, I've already mentioned a bit the humility that India imposes on its visitors, and the ways in which my perspective on my place in the world changed when faced with India's poverty, crowdedness, culture, and social conditions. I feel lucky to be born where I was and to have lived most of my life in the United States. I'm also more aware than ever that I am the product of my circumstances.

My view on American declinism has also shifted. Everyone in the States hyperventilates about whether America is declining; how fast we're declining; and who's sneaking up from behind us to take our hegemony away. India, along with China, is a usual culprit, but having been there I don't feel remotely threatened. First, there's the obvious point, that hundreds of millions more doctors, scientists, and innovators can only benefit mankind on a scale far outweighing the effects of potential economic redistribution. If India and China become true knowledge and innovation economies on a level rivaling the United States, all of us will reap the benefits. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be challenges if the world travels down that path, but that the good would far outweigh the bad.

But second, I just don't truly see that as India's likely path. The challenges they face are staggering, and while according to the blunt metric of GDP they may one day catch up with or pass us, it will be centuries, if ever, before India looks anything like the United States in the important ways. They could move 300 million people to the American standard of living, and still have a billion left in destitution. Their subcontinent is one third the size of our country and already crowded to the gills. They have relatively few natural resources. They have barely any basic infrastructure like roads, and even less a basic educational or health care system. Their society has rifts and backwardness far outscaling in severity and longevity the social challenges that America has faced over the last 200 years, or faces today. They will continue to make great strides, I have no doubt, but I'm more confident than before that declinism says more about the state of mind of the West than the realities of the East.

Perhaps more difficult than building roads or an educational system will be changing Indian culture, which could present certain major obstacles to the creation of an advanced economy in the subcontinent. At university my classes referred every now and then to a "trust-based economy," as opposed to economies in countries where basic trust between people doesn't exist. In India, though, I saw the difference between a trust-based economy and one rife with so much cheating, corruption, haggling and deception that even many of the Indians I met professed not to trust their fellow countrymen. (Much less their leaders: the first time I picked up an Indian newspaper, every article on the front page was dedicated to perceived or actual government corruption accounting for alleged billions of dollars stolen.) Trust is a critical economic lubricant. India's current reality is an understandable outcome of the state in which most people live, and will take generations to change. In the meantime, it strongly undermines India's competitiveness, in my opinion. And while the situation is undoubtedly worse for tourists, my conversations with the locals make it clear that it's not just a tourist thing.

One minor example familiar to tourists, though, is dealing with cabbies in India. Almost every cab driver will try to rip you off, either by hiding the meter and keeping it running from a previous trip (when they use the meter at all), or lying about and inventing new costs. A prepared rider can call them on this, in which case they apologize profusely, but cheating is just the norm. Cabbies will also try to take you to a different place than you asked in order to make commission. If you ask for a hotel, they will insist that it has closed down or is full, and will take you to one where they'll get paid a bribe. I had one cabbie in Goa refuse to take me to the airport before I visited a shop where he gets paid to take his passengers. He even tried to bring me in on the deal to cheat the store owner: "You don't have to buy anything, just look around and I get paid. But don't tell him I told you that." The man who was cheating me was trying to get me to help cheat the guy on whose behalf he was cheating me! I could go on with example after example. After a few weeks in India I found myself in a siege mentality, expecting (accurately) that almost everybody was trying to weasel money out of me. As a result I got more tight-fisted than ever -- not the result the con men were looking for. Now imagine that tight-fistedness and distrust on a billion-plus person scale.

There were a few other interesting things I noticed. First, race is a big issue in India and manifests itself in some obvious ways. Light-skinned Indians are considered more upper class. Partly this is because of ancient history (or legend), when the Aryans are said to have invaded India from Iran and conquered the Dravidians. The Indian population is defined in the popular imagination somewhat as a clash of the northern Aryans and southern Dravidians, and the lighter-skinned Aryans were seen as the higher class. Additionally, skin color is associated with caste, as the higher castes generally had no need to spend time outdoors doing manual labor and so were likely for genetic and environmental reasons to have lighter skin. Lower castes spent their time outdoors, and became genetically darker and circumstantially more tan. One of my drivers in Goa, as he drove me from the airport to my hostel, told me that "Nobody from here goes to the beach. You don't want to get any darker, because then the girls won't like you." Watching Indian TV is also shocking, because everybody on it is light-skinned -- almost white -- to appeal to their cultural sense of beauty. Meanwhile among the most common commercials I saw were for "fairness cream," which bleaches the skin to "lighten" it. And to think, so many people in the West are concerned with getting tan.

Attitudes towards sex remain an issue, too, as dramatized comically for me in a pair of newspaper articles I saw in Delhi. In the first, a man made a scene when, sitting on an airplane, a woman's voice came on the line for the traditional captain's greeting. He stood up and refused to let the plane depart, screaming, "I'm not going to fly on a plane flown by a woman! I don't want to die! I'm not insane!" The next day, in the very same spot in the very same newspaper, an article appeared titled something like "Woman Pilot Suspended for Dangerous Landings." It was like an unintentional rebuttal for the article the day before. Of course it wasn't necessary to identify the pilot as a "woman pilot," who had been landing her planes front wheels first rather than the safer back wheels first, but there it was, unintentional(?) sexism. The same paper reporting on sexism one day was abetting it the next. One wonders which paper the man from the first article reads.

The last of the major shifts in my worldview that India caused (so far) concerns climate change. Pollution is an enormous problem in India, and it's only going to get much, much worse before it gets better. I can't help but come to the conclusion, already reached by people like Dr. James Lovelock, proposer of the Gaia Hypothesis, and my dad, that we're past the point where we can reverse course and stop climate change from happening. Not only are the positive feedback mechanisms quickly taking things like GHG emissions out of our hands, but even if we in the first world dramatically curtailed our use of fossil fuels, rising demand and use in the third world will continue to drive GHG levels upwards. Consider that scientists believe that the processes causing climate change began more than 100 years ago. Our governments are talking about leveling off sometime in the next 10 to 20 years, followed by a reduction to 2008, or at most 1990 levels. Even if we went back to 1930 levels, climate change would continue apace. And consider that despite the huge pollution problems in India and the third world, they're still relatively small contributors to the problem on a per capita basis. They're going to grow, and it's almost inconceivable that they won't continue to tip the scales no matter what we in the West do to reduce our own consumption. Given that the next few decades may be make-or-break for affecting the course of climate change, we're running out of time for a game-changing technology, and even if we had it the challenge of rolling it out in a place that can't even adopt basic technology to keep its water potable is daunting.

In short, I'm not sure the solution to climate change is to reduce our emissions in the States, though I still think we have many other reasons to do so including reducing pollution in our local atmosphere. I just am not convinced that doing so will have an impact on the global scale. Lovelock puts forward the idea of replacing "sustainable development" with "sustainable retreat" -- we have to start thinking about how to adapt to a changing climate, rather than trying to reverse it. Perhaps that's the way forward. Or, perhaps it's climate engineering, like the proposal of increasing the reflectivity of the atmosphere by shooting aluminum particles over the Antarctic. Arguably we could take that route, pollute to our heart's content, and maintain global temperatures by effectively installing a planetwide thermostat. (This idea has its own obvious flaws, like potential secondary effects and the fact that intervention, once started, cannot be stopped with predictable consequences.) I'm not sure what the right way forward is, but I'm less confident than ever that any of our politicians' solutions have any chance of making an impact on the broader problem, even if they were implemented, which they probably won't be. Without solving the issue of the emerging world, we are backpedaling into a tsunami.

As you can tell, this trip has given me much to think about, for which I'm grateful. India was an incredible experience -- beautiful, fascinating, the most interesting trip of my life. I left India optimistic about the United States, impressed by the scale of change in India, and concerned by the many challenges I see ahead for the subcontinent. At many times throughout the trip I thought to myself (or to M. W., or A. D., or P. D., or anybody who would listen), What will India be like when my kids visit decades from now? Will it have transformed? Or will it be surprisingly the same? I don't know, but my best guess is, probably both. Zooming into the future, and stuck in the past.

The Eight Cities of Delhi

Delhi is India's show capital, a frankly weird place that feels more like a collection of unrelated towns than an organic whole. Mostly, this is a result of Delhi's varied history, making it one of few places I can think of that is both ancient and brand new at the same time -- not intermixed like Mumbai, but more like a patchwork quilt of pieces of modernity stitched together, but not blending with the ancient. Unsurprisingly, many people refer to the "eight cities" of Delhi, a term that's as accurate in describing modern Delhi as it is in describing Delhi's historical development.

Occupied for thousands of years, the first "city" to be founded in Delhi was Lal Kot in the 8th Century. For the next thousand years, the city was invaded, sacked, left in ruins, forgotten, rediscovered, rebuilt, abandoned, and rebuilt again. Eventually, before Delhi entered its final incarnation as the British capital of "New Delhi," it had been the site of seven cities, each of which -- Lal Kot, Siri, Tughlaqabad, Shahjahanabad, etc -- was effectively its own separate city and part of a separate civilization. When the British moved the capital of India from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Delhi, they effectively created another new city, excavated many of the past ones, and unified the whole thing into a calico metrozone.

M. W. and I arrived pretty late at night, due to the hours-long delay of our train from Agra to Delhi. We caught a cab to take us to our hotel, located in the Shahjahanabad "city" of Old Delhi, near the famous Red Fort and off of Chandni Chowk, a major market street. The reviews of the hotel were all fantastic, with the caveat that finding it could be tough and that in the wrong light, the location looked like a hovel. Sure enough, we found ourselves struggling to find our way through a patch of "Old Delhi," with tiny little crowded sidestreets, empty at this hour except for dozens of trucks inexplicably wandering the roads but seemingly accomplishing nothing but making it difficult for our taxi to get through. In the morning the area would prove quite interesting and fun, but out of context and late at night we approached it with raised eyebrows. Our hotel was located on what one could generously call an alley. In short, we were thrown right into the ancient and crazy part of what can also be a very modern and placid city.

We arrived and crashed. The next morning, we decided to explore New Delhi, the part of the city planned and built entirely by the British and therefore resembling more a grand European city of massive squares and broad boulevards than anything we had yet seen in India. New Delhi's hub is Connaught Place, a giant circle with a park, named Central Park, in its middle, and block after block of concentric colonnaded storefronts radiating outwards. Officially known as Rajiv Chowk, it's New Delhi's commercial and financial center, with shops, hotels, and businesses' headquarters thick on the ground. It is to New Delhi what Chandni Chowk, the crazy and messy market street, is to Shahjahanabad. M and I wandered about for much of the day, checking out shops, wandering Central Park, and having custom dress shirts ordered.



Day 2 we dedicated to more thoroughly exploring our own neighborhood of Shahjahanabad, built by and named for Shah Jahan, the same Mughal emperor who had built the Taj Mahal in Agra. We started at India's famous Red Fort, a symbol of intense national pride. Like the Agra Fort, this is a massive complex and essentially an entire walled city. Unlike many of the other forts we visited in India, there was so much space inside that the buildings had much green space between them and the atmosphere was more like a park than the stone spaceships that Agra, Amber and Udaipur had been.













From there we visited the Digambara Jain Temple opposite the fort. Technically it was closed, but the guardian was willing to show us around for a tip. This made M uncomfortable (see pic below), but it was still nice to look around. I think by then I'd gotten used to the fact that bribing people is standard behavior in India, but M found it less funny when we were bribing people to visit an active religious site than when we did so to see a dead queen's lavish bathroom (see post on Agra).



Next, further down Chandni Chowk, was Gurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib, a Sikh prayer site built on the site where the ninth Sikh Guru was beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam by Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb, who had deposed him.




From there we took Delhi's metro system to New Delhi, where we wanted to walk around the Rajpath, the British Raj's answer to the National Mall in Washington. Like the Rajpath before it, the Delhi metro, an incredibly clean, modern, and efficient system, was built to make a statement: this, as India's show capital, is a modern city. Taking the escalator from the crazed Chandni Chowk to the "serene" (as our guidebook had it) metro was another of those calico moments. The view of Delhi that I got from Indians in the rest of the country was that Delhi is where the disconnected political classes of India live, spending tons of tax money on the metro system, banning cows from the streets, trying to regulate street food, and chasing prestige by doing things like hosting the Commonwealth Games. On the one hand I see their point, and I'm not sure it's a great thing that the political classes are ensconced in such a bubble (New Delhi is practically the only place in India where I didn't see obvious signs of poverty poking around even the nicest of facades). On the other hand, I see its value as an aspirational statement for what India is trying to become, though a less authentic one than Mumbai.

Anyway, the Rajpath is an enormous boulevard that looks strikingly like the National Mall, running through New Delhi from the National Stadium, through the India Gate monument, past government ministries and the Parliament House, to Rashtrapati Bhavan -- the President of India's official residence. Practically all of New Delhi was designed by Edwin Lutyens to serve as a capital befitting the crown jewel of the British Empire. To some degree, though, he went overboard: the President's residence, originally the residence of the Viceroy / Governor General of India, is absurdly large -- 340 rooms and more than 200,000 sq ft of floor space, still the largest official residence of a chief of state. Legend has it that at one point it employed 60 staff for the sole purpose of chasing away the birds.







After walking from the Parliament to the President's house, we grabbed a rickshaw and zoomed down to India Gate, an Arc de Triomphe-style monument envisioned by Lutyens to honor all the Indian subjects of the crown who fought and died in the wars on behalf of the Commonwealth.





We struck a deal with the rickshaw driver to take us to a few other sites around Delhi, starting with the Lodi Gardens, a park featuring the tombs and other buildings of the Lodi Dynasty, which ruled the fifth of Delhi's eight cities from 1451-1526. Now the park just seems to be a nice place to walk around in the midst of an upscale residential neighborhood. These tombs and other buildings are practically all that remain of the Lodi dynasty's Delhi (called Firozabad)...







Next up and last for the day was the Raj Ghat (meaning King's Bank) , a memorial marking the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated and honoring his memory. In addition to Gandhi's memorial the park has a few others, such as those of Indira Gandhi (no relation), Rajiv Gandhi (her son), and Jawaharlal Nehru -- in short, the founders and key leaders of the country.





The next day we went even further back in time to Qutub Minar, a set of monuments from Delhi's "second city," Mehrauli. The destruction of Lal Kot and the founding of Mehrauli marked a transition from Hindu to Muslim rule in Delhi that would hold until the exile of the Mughals by the British. Qutub Minar itself is an enormous tower, the tallest brick minaret in the world. It's so tall that taking a good picture of it was pretty hard. In another example of dashed architectural ambitions (think the Black Taj Mahal), one of the Mehrauli rulers wanted to build a tower several times taller than Qutub Minar, but was defeated before he could finish it. Still, the massive stump of it remains.





The rest of the Qutub Minar complex contains a variety of other monuments -- tombs, mosques, etc -- from the same era. The relatively well-preserved structures are among the finest examples of early Indo-Islamic architecture and yet another of Delhi's strange neighborhoods standing entirely out of context of the whole.






From there we wandered back to New Delhi and the Rashtrapati Bhavan area, because our guidebook had informed us that the President's Residence has an incredible Mughal garden that is open to the public only for a few weeks in the month of Febuary -- how lucky. We kept getting bad directions from the various palace guards and ended up walking quite a few kilometers entirely around the residence before finding the entrance. [Sidebar: Our guidebook had told us to be careful when asking Indians a question, because an Indian will rarely acknowledge that he doesn't know something. If you ask a yes or no question, the answer will always be yes. For that reason it suggests you avoid such questions; rather than "Is this the way to the Mughal Garden?" one should ask "Which way is the Mughal Garden?". In any case, though, if they don't know they will make something up rather than be shamed by admitting they don't know the answer. Even with this advice, though, we got pretty poor directions.] After a few hours of walking, including passing some pretty parks and another Gandhi memorial, we made it to the entrance of the gardens.



Unfortunately, cameras were strictly forbidden in the Mughal Gardens. If you ever find yourself in Delhi in February, however, definitely visit them -- by far the most impressive gardens I've seen this side of Versailles. First you walk through a variety of themed gardens: scented herbs and flowers, medicinal herbs, bonsai, and a "sacred garden" with trees and shrubs possessing mystical importance in a variety of religions. [To our amusement, Christmas Trees were among them -- perhaps they were thinking of their Druid origins.] Finally you arrive at the main Mughal Garden, right in the backyard of the President's Palace itself and full of the traditional Mughal elements of color, water, and geometrical arrangement. I wish I had been able to take pictures.

That's more or less it for our stint in Delhi. Though we left a good number of sites for a later trip, I think we saw most of the main things. Throughout this time we ate at a bunch of great restaurants, picked up our custom shirts, and wandered the city aimlessly. We learned the rules of cricket and watched a few matches of the locally-played Cricket World Cup. (M and I are now in the top 1%ile of Americans in terms of cricket knowledge, which is to say we have any at all.) We also met up with P. D., a friend from college who is in India on a Fulbright, and had drinks and traded stories at the Imperial Hotel. Delhi was a great place to unwind a bit and dip in and out of ancient and modern India, as well as to say goodbye to the country that had hosted me for the entire month of February. On the 28th, the final day of the month, M and I hauled ourselves to the Indira Gandhi International Airport and flew to Kathmandu, Nepal. As the Pythons used to say, "And now for something completely different."

Agra and the Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal: What can I say, it lives up to the hype.


As one of my friends put it when she saw the above picture, it looks like I'm standing in front of a painting of the Taj Mahal. But that's just what the Taj Mahal looks like: painting perfect.

You could say that Agra has a Taj-based economy; there's not really all that much to see or do in the city other than its famous tomb. M and I arrived late at night on a train from Jaipur and checked into the hotel, getting a room with a view of the Taj. Since night had already fallen, we got to wait for the morning for our first glimpse of India's most well-known site. Anticipation.

We got up in the morning, and there it was outside our window. We had breakfast on the roof of the hotel and snapped our first of many, many pictures.


The walk to the Taj Mahal takes you into the No Vehicle Zone, set up within several thousand meters of the Taj to keep away pollution that could cloud the translucent marble's glow. (I was reminded of Zermatt.) We walked through the first gate, the courtyard, the second gate. We hired a government-authorized tour guide to show us around and tell us the history. The main gate has 22 small domes for the 22 years it took to construct the Taj, and it has the morning prayer verse of the Koran inset around the door. Many verses of the Koran can be found in inlaid calligraphy on the Taj or its outlying buildings, especially prayers marking the time of day and those dealing with the Day of Judgment. Then we entered the Taj gardens.







The Taj is set in a perfectly manicured and symmetrical garden. In fact, the entire complex is perfectly symmetrical: Shah Jahan, who ordered the Taj built for his third and favorite wife, also built an enormous mosque to the left of it for use during construction. To keep the symmetry, he built an identical but empty building on the other side, too. He also ordered the towers surrounding the Taj Mahal to be built with a slight lean away from the building, so if it were ever attacked the towers would fall away from and not onto the tomb of his beloved wife.




One of the remarkable things about the Taj Mahal is how its appearance seems to change both throughout the day, with the changing light, as well as when you approach it. In the early mornings and during full moons, it seems to glow. From afar it looks like a fairly plain white building, but as you get closer you notice more and more details. In fact the entire building is covered from top to bottom in inlaid precious stones and marble carving. From simple patterns, to jeweled flowers, to Arabic calligraphy, many of the details are inlaid jewels. On a building of the scale of the Taj Mahal (which is extremely enormous), it's truly remarkable.







Once you approach the Taj itself, you have to either take off your shoes or else put on scrub-like covers to keep your shoes from physically touching the mausoleum. We wandered through the building. The actual tombs of Shah Jahan and his third wife are inaccessible in a room below the Taj, but we saw marble replicas on display. The Taj was originally meant only to serve as Mumtaz's tomb (n.b. "Mumtaz" was the wife's nickname; it means "jewel", as she was "The jewel of the court"), and so her grave sits in the middle, perfectly lined up with the symmetry of the entire many-acre grounds. Her husband's grave is off to the side. Shah Jahan intended to build a second Taj for himself across the river from the Taj Mahal, to be constructed out of black onyx. Unfortunately while the foundation was being put in, he was deposed by his son, who didn't want the remainder of his inheritance spent on a second "black Taj". You can still see the remains of the foundation, but we are left to wonder how awesome a sight a black Taj Mahal would have been sitting next to the white one.


I took a few hundred more pictures of the Taj, but I think you get the point. I was surprised when I met another backpacker of Indian origin who told me that many of her friends and family in India told her not to bother seeing the Taj, that it was overhyped. I have to say, if this isn't worth seeing then you might as well skip the entire country.

From there we grabbed some lunch and went off to see Agra's other main attraction, the Agra Fort. India's "most important" fort, it was also expanded significantly by Shah Jahan, who used it as the seat of his government before moving it to Delhi, and who was later imprisoned there after his son deposed him. From many places on its walls you can see the Taj Mahal, less than 3 km away, and a legend says that Shah Jahan died in one of the towers with a view of the Taj.





The fort is a massive complex, only 25% of which is open to the public, as 75% of it remains an active military base. In addition to its history as a capital of the Mughals, it was also the site of a battle during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the British East India Company, after which the British established direct control of the subcontinent. Our guide of this building took us through many of the palace's incredible spaces -- the diwan-i am, the diwan-i khas, several mosques, the throne (which M and I are sitting on below, and which had been cracked by a cannonball).









The absolute highlight of the Fort, however, was one we shouldn't have been able to see at all. Our guide told us (and we later confirmed in our guidebook and online), that Shah Jahan had built an insanely decorated bathroom for his favorite wife, Mumtaz, that is not open to the public since many people used to pry bits out of its walls. He offered to intercede on our behalf with a maintenance guy, who, for a price, would sneak us in. We said sure, and it was worth it. The room, which was almost pitch black except for some candles the guide brought, a flashlight I happened to be carrying, and the flash of our cameras, is decorated in what he claimed were "four million" (number impossible to verify) tiny mirrors covering every surface, creating a glowing and glittering effect that I haven't seen anywhere else. I have some incredible video of it, but until I figure out how YouTube works I'll just have to post some pictures, which came out very well but still don't do it justice. If you're ever at Agra Fort, do try to bribe your way in if the opportunity presents itself. The walls are also built to serve as drums and other musical instruments, and there's more of the inlaid marble that covers the Taj Mahal, and glows in faint light. At least according to our guide, this part of the palace is, after the Taj Mahal itself, Agra's greatest treasure -- it's a real pity that it remains closed to the public (except for the many tourists who, like us, are willing to be extorted).





Agra in a day -- it needs no more. On to Delhi, our last stop in India.