India: Sunday, July 10, 2005 - Thursday, July 21, 2005
Country Background
Population: 1.065 billion.
Per capita GDP: $2,900 in purchasing power parity; $530 in absolute terms. This absolute figure is one of the lowest of any country we will visit this year. Mongolia is lower at $480, but to the eye, poverty levels in India seem far higher.
India's population is second in the world to China's, but it is projected to overtake China in two to three decades. While India's rate of population growth is not that much higher than the US, it would likely benefit from a slower rate. For one thing, it's pretty crowded already (more than 10 times the population density of the US); for another, its economy is growing quite fast without any population growth kicker. Living standards would probably rise more quickly if the population grew more slowly. But Indians love the fact they are going to be number one at something, especially when it means passing up China. Indians tend to be embarrassed that China, a communist country that once lagged behind them economically, has zoomed ahead of them in terms of prosperity and economic accomplishment over the past decade. (China's per-capita GDP figures are $5,000 PPP, $1,100 absolute--roughly double that of India.) India's real GDP growth is around 7%, a fast rate of growth that allows their economy to double every ten years. Nearly every country would be happy with this kind of growth, but India is frustrated because China is growing at an even faster 10%, allowing China to double every seven years.
India's complex relative to China is quite amusing to observe. All of our guides have talked repeatedly about China and the newspapers in India are full of stories comparing the two countries. The comparisons are dubious at times. One article we saw, trumpeted in the headline how India now has more kilometers of paved roads than China. Anyone who has traveled in both countries would find this absurd--China's highway infrastructure is far better than India's. It is like the US road network in the 1950s (China, rapidly building an interstate system) versus the US road network in the 1920s (India). Buried well below the lead paragraph come the details that total counts all roads, including the ridiculously crowded two-lane roads that comprise over 90% of India's paved kilometers. The article acknowledged that in terms of expressways, China possesses 15 times the kilometers of India, and in terms of annual spending, China tops India 10-fold.
This complex is one way. The Chinese tend to compare themselves to developed countries, such as the US, the EU countries, and Japan.
China's overtaking India is due to their earlier conversion to capitalism. This is further support for our contention that capitalism is more important than democracy in raising living standards (India became a democracy in 1947, before China even turned communist). China began liberalizing its economy in 1978 while India remained largely a command economy shut off to foreign investment until 1991. For example, you could not buy a Coke in democratic India prior to this, something you probably could do in some communist countries at that time.
Size: slightly more than one-third the size of the US
Currency: rupee, 43 per US dollar
Language: Hindi, English, and 14 other official languages. 24 languages spoken by a million or more persons each. Hindi is the national language and the native language for 30% of the people; English is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, and serves as the unifying language of the country.
Independence: 1947 from the United Kingdom
Trip Itinerary:
July 9: Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Delhi, arriving 2AM July 10
Three nights (including July 9) at the Oberoi Hotel
July 12: Train to Agra, 2.5 hours
Two nights at the Taj View Hotel
July 14: Car from Agra to Jaipur, 5.5 hours
Two nights at Taj Jai Mahal Palace
July 16: Indian Airlines flight from Jaipur to Aurangabad via Mumbai
Two nights at Taj Residency
July 18: Jet Airways flight to Goa via Mumbai
Three nights at Fort Aguada Beach Resort
July 21: Indian Airlines flight from Goa to Mumbai to fly out of the country
Notable Activities:
Unlike most other places we have visited, all of the places we visited in India are old, well documented in guide books, and have one or more pictures in the image gallery. So rather than go into detail here, we refer you to the image gallery for pictures of the Humayun's Mausoleum, the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, Ajanta and Ellora Caves, and so on.
City Background:
Delhi
Sunday, July 10, 2005 - Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Temperature high/low during our stay: 100/80
Population: the metropolitan area was 12.4 million and growing as of 2000, according to the UN. At that time, the UN said it was the ninth largest metro area in the world. Lonely Planet puts the population at 13.8 million.
Delhi as a city has existed for centuries. In 1911, Britain announced it was moving the seat of government from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to New Delhi, where it would build a new capital. New Delhi is built in the modern capital style with wide boulevards and open spaces, in contrast to the crowded conditions of old Delhi. Technically, Delhi and New Delhi are two separate, but adjacent, cities. In practice, though, most people just use the name Delhi to refer to the entire area. If someone is referencing the older section, he or she will usually say "Old Delhi."
Agra
Tuesday, July 12, 2005 - Thursday, July 14, 2005
Temperature high/low during our stay: 85/75. It rained most of the time we were in Agra, which we welcomed after the 100-degree heat of Delhi.
Population: 1.1 million according to Lonely Planet
Agra is best known for the Taj Mahal, which has a legitimate claim to be the most beautiful building in the world. The Agra Fort is also worth seeing, and Fatehpur Sikri, about a 75-minute drive away, is spectacular. All are in the image gallery. Fatehpur Sikri was the capital of India for only 14 years, from 1571-1585, which makes its architectural splendor all the more impressive.
Jaipur
Thursday, July 14, 2005 - Saturday, July 16, 2005
Temperature high/low during our stay: 90/75
Population: 1.86 million according to Lonely Planet
Our drive from Agra to Jaipur was eventful. When Sunil Gupta, our driver, quipped, "The roads in India are like a zoo!" he meant that literally not figuratively. As we sat in the back seat, he dodged sheep, people, bikes, peacocks, camels, ox, cows, buses, dogs, goods carriers, auto rickshaws, manual rickshaws, and other cars. The journey was about 150 miles, so being India it took six hours. It is monsoon season, so flooding is rampant, and at one point, the road was submerged under water. Then we stopped to change a flat tire--that is, we watched our driver change the tire.
Jaipur has numerous, centuries-old buildings that you can see in the image gallery.
Mumbai (formerly Bombay)
Just passing through: Saturday, July 16, 2005, Tuesday, July 18, 2005 and Thursday, July 21, 2005
Population: The UN's figure is 16.1 million for the metropolitan area as of 2000, making it the fifth biggest in the UN's world rankings. They project it will be 22.6 million by 2015, second only to Tokyo.
Mumbai is the largest Indian urban area. Nick spent a few days here in 2003 on a business trip, and considers it the most impoverished city he has ever seen. Homeless people and beggars were everywhere--even by Indian standards, it was depressing. So we skipped it this trip. Nevertheless, its size demands you can't avoid it completely--our flights to Aurangabad and Goa pass through Mumbai and our flight out of the country departs from Mumbai. Going to Aurangabad, we had a six-hour layover, so we took a quick city tour of Mumbai. Actually, the omnipresent signs of poverty seemed less visible to Nick this trip. Or maybe we were just desensitized to it. Whatever the explanation, it was encouraging to see some progress in Mumbai.
Aurangabad
Saturday, July 16, 2005 - Monday, July 18, 2005
Temperature high/low during our stay: 90/75
Population: 682,000 according to Lonely Planet
Aurangabad is a base from which to visit the Ellora and Ajanta Caves, sites with cave paintings and rock-cut shrines that date from around 200 BC to the 9th century AD. We had not heard of the caves until they were recommended to us by Michael and Denise Moys of South Africa, who sat next to us on the train from Machu Picchu to Cusco, in Peru. Their impassioned recommendation spurred us to make Aurangabad part of our Indian itinerary. We spent a day visiting these sites. To visualize just one part of the Ellora site, think of a single block of stone about the size of a football field, and 100 feet high. Then imagine over 150 years, carving intricate temples, rooms, and sculptures from this single block of stone, using only a hammer and chisel. No stones or carvings from off site were brought in; everything you see in one of the pictures in the image gallery is from one stone block. Part of Ellora is billed as the largest single-stone monolith in the world. On this trip, we have learned that most claims to be the world's biggest or tallest are erroneous, either deliberately or in ignorance, so we can't validate the Ellora claim. Mt. Rushmore may be bigger, for example, we don't know. Nevertheless, Ellora and Ajanta are impressive, especially when you consider the primitive methods available for construction.
Goa
Monday, July 18, 2005 - Thursday, July 21, 2005
Temperature high/low during our stay: 90/75. Being monsoon season, it rained frequently. This was not all bad, however, because off-season tourist crowds are correspondingly lower, without being so low as to make the place seem dead.
Population: 1.3 million according to Lonely Planet
The state of Goa is a former Portuguese colony on the western central coast of India. Goa returned to Indian control in 1961, 14 years after Indian independence from Britain. Goa is quite different from the rest of the country, making it a very pleasant way to end a stay in India. Located on India's west coast, Goa has beautiful beaches along the Arabian Sea. Moviegoers may recall that the opening beach scenes in last summer's The Bourne Supremacy were shot here. With palm trees, beaches, less crowdedness and less poverty than the rest of India and with a southern European colonial history, Goa strikes American visitors as a cross between India and a Caribbean island.
India: An All-Out Sensory Assault
India is a land of contrasts. As Spock would say, it's "fascinating." That is true in every sense of the word--both good and bad. The poverty is extreme--overwhelming at times. The country can be disgusting. Basic sanitation is often lacking. It's crowded, dirty, and smelly, more often than not. Beggars and touts swarm on you like flies. The sights are outstanding, but often marred by the people surrounding them. Just when you can't take anymore, though, it's time to go back to your hotel. There you can cocoon yourself in an oasis that shelters you from everything bad. Your sanity returns and by morning you are ready to face another day in India. How backpackers--unable to afford the rejuvenating benefits of a luxury hotel--ever make it through India astounds us. We wouldn't want to try.
Throughout our visit, a punch line from the Seinfeld episode "The Betrayal" kept running through our mind like a tune you can't get out of your head. This is the episode broadcast in reverse order, with the story told from end to beginning. In it, the cast travels to India for the wedding of Sue Ellen Mischkes to Pinter. Pinter's parents, immigrants from India now relocated in New York City, advise Elaine repeatedly not to travel to India. Just buy a gift instead, they tell her. We're not even going back for the wedding, they add, because "India is a dreadful place."
The enjoyable part of visiting India comes after you leave. Once away, you can look at your pictures of impressive sites, astound your friends who have not been there with stories about what it's like, and commiserate with your friends who have been there about what it's like. Being there is not something really to be enjoyed, but rather endured. There are other places on Earth that have the poverty and overcrowdedness present in India. But there is no place on Earth that has India's bad qualities, while simultaneously offering so many interesting historical sites, such good food, numerous luxury hotels, and an extremely promising, dynamic business environment. These contrasts are what make India so fascinating.
The best example of the country's contrasts we can think of is in Bangalore. We did not go there on this trip, but Nick had visited there in 2003 on a business trip. The hotel there, the Oberoi, may provide the best hotel experience Nick has had anywhere in the world. The two information technology giants, Infosys and Wipro, are headquartered there, and they are transforming the city into the Silicon Valley of India. Their corporate campuses, especially that of Infosys, are as advanced as any in the world, more impressive than Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, in the opinion of Steve Mack, who accompanied Nick. Yet just outside of the Infosys compound, you return to India. A two-lane road where nine different forms of transportation compete to creep along at a few miles per hour. It's a noisy, dirty, smelly, and sweaty journey of chaos back to the Oberoi. Once there, you are again sequestered from everything bad in India, and your sanity returns.
The roads infrastructure seems on par with the US in the 1920s, while at the same time the country is becoming a global technology leader. The technology companies have video conferencing and meeting facilities that rival the UN in terms of the ability to link up dozens of people from all over the globe simultaneously. These companies also, though, have their own power generation capabilities because the electrical grid is too unstable. Welcome to India. It is a dreadful place, but a fascinating one!
English Usage in an Indian Context
Native English speakers will be reassured by the widespread usage of English in India. But be advised that many phrases have a different meaning on the subcontinent. Below are common situations that travelers will encounter.
Indian speaker: As you prefer.
Translation: I will do as I prefer and you will be none the wiser.
Indian speaker: No problem.
Translation: I have no idea of what you are talking about and I want to change the subject.
Indian speaker: Do you have any questions?
Translation: Please provide me with the opportunity to speak for five to ten minutes on a topic of my choosing, unrelated to your question. During my monologue, I will be oblivious to any non-verbal clues that you have no interest in what I am saying.
Indian speaker: May I help you sir?
Translation: I am going to annoy you with unnecessary questions and I am going to try to perform unnecessary tasks for you. For this, I will expect a tip.
Indian speaker: Hello sir!
Translation: I offer worthless crap for sale.
Indian speaker: Excuse me, sir.
Translation: The merchandise that I sell is of a lower quality than the "Hello sir" man. Because of this, I will be much more persistent.
Indian speaker: Is there anything more I can do for you?
Translation: I sense you wish me to leave. For a gratuity, this is possible.
A task not possible in India is to order a meal without the waiter suggesting you try something different than what you order. Here is a simple example:
Deanna: We would like two orders of plain naan, no butter.
Waiter: One order is enough for both of you I think.
Deanna: No, we want two orders.
Waiter: Of course. You want to try garlic naan.
Deanna: No, plain naan.
Waiter: Garlic naan goes well with your main course.
Nick: We want plain naan.
Waiter: No problem. Plain buttered naan.
Nick: No butter. Two orders of plain naan, no butter.
Waiter: As you prefer. You want to try garlic naan also?
Chronic Overhelping Syndrome
With so many people, every business in India is overstaffed. Companies have large numbers of people, affectionately called office peons, whose main purpose is to fetch tea. Hotels and restaurants have far more people than they really need. All of these people must do something, of course, to demonstrate their value, so extra tasks are invented to justify their position. When boarding an airplane, one person checks your boarding pass to ensure it was stamped during your security screening, and another person five feet beyond the first, checks your boarding pass to ensure it is for the correct flight. Certainly one person could do both, but that would mean one less job. Actually, the security stamp process creates two extra jobs: one at security to stamp your boarding pass and another at the gate to verify that you have the stamp. Despite all this, your bag will be searched a second time just before you board the airplane. While this provides some degree of added security, more importantly, it employs five extra people.
Our friend Steve Mack was so amused by the ridiculous bureaucracy of India during his first visit in 1990 that he had a stamp custom made while he was there. Whenever someone would stamp a document of his, Steve would whip out his stamp and immediately add his seal, which read "Official Important Stamp" next to the bureaucrat's mark. No one ever questioned why he was stamping his own paperwork. Instead, he received approving looks from the bureaucrats, impressed that he took paperwork seriously enough to carry his own official seal.
India is full of make work, and of course all of these extra workers don't speed things up, they slow everything down. This is in contrast to China, where extra staff seems actually to increase efficiency at times. If you check out of a hotel in China, for example, you can be sure that no less than three people will be involved in settling paperwork and payment, but no extra time, and perhaps less, is required. We came to call this Chinese triple processing--and we admired how the Chinese seemed to have an innate Borg-like sense of the exact microtask that each co-worker would process. Indians do not work together like this. Each person does one discrete, most likely unnecessary thing, and then hands it off to the next, who performs his or her unnecessary task. Meanwhile, you wait.
In service situations, all of the extra people who presumably exist for providing you with extra service, actually serve to degrade the service experience. Spend a night in your hotel room and you will be interrupted three to six times by phone or in person by various people from the hotel and from the local rep of your travel agent checking to see if there is anything you need. Of course, what you need most is just for everyone to go away. Even in your luxury cocoon to insulate you from India, you never completely can get away. In fairness, some companies seem to recognize that overhelping is an irritant not a help, and their staff are trained to be helpful but not be intrusive. More often though, you have to shoo away the staff just as you have to shoo away touts at tourist sites.
The level of overhelping is absurd at times. During the day we traveled from Jaipur to Aurangabad, we had no less than eight handlers from the local travel company assisting us with various parts of our journey. Behind the scenes, there were numerous others, constantly ringing the cell phones of our guide and driver to check up on them, to ensure that everything was okay, and to offer suggestions. When flying from Aurangabad to Goa, a mere five people assisted us--we felt a little abandoned--including one person to meet us at the airport in Mumbai and walk us fifty feet to the transfer area. There is no doubt we would have been unable to figure this out by ourselves during our two-hour layover.
The worst at Chronic Overhelping Syndrome are the Indian men, who are forever trying to demonstrate usefulness. Indian women seem to have retained some degree of the superior listening and empathy skills that females worldwide possess. So we began to seek out women wherever we could and avoid the men. We tired quickly of the ritual arguments with male waiters over what we should eat, or of convincing male porters that we were actually were capable of transporting our wheeled luggage without assistance.
You Got a Long Way to Go, Baby!
Travel allows you not only to learn about other countries and cultures, but also to learn about your own. Only once you spend time outside of your country do you experience that many things you assumed are normal, are if fact peculiar to your country. Elsewhere things may be quite different from what you have known and assumed. Further, sometimes you may inherently know of a difference, but you have never experienced the difference. It is one thing to know something is true, but often it is quite another to actually feel the difference firsthand and to appreciate the magnitude of the difference.
Relative equality between men and women is one example of the latter. While more progress is possible in the US, the US is far ahead of most of the world. We are not alone completely; other Anglo areas such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK are also relatively advanced, as is northern Europe. Beyond those areas, however, with a few exceptions, extreme male chauvinism still rules the day. This is true not just in places like the Middle East where women are second-class citizens, but also throughout Latin and South America, Asia, India, and elsewhere, where more subtlety beneath the surface old-fashioned attitudes remain the norm. That this is the case is probably not that much of a surprise even to those who have never traveled outside of the US. However, through travel you begin to appreciate the conditions that women endure elsewhere in the world.
India is not a particularly progressive place for women. Many, many places are worse, of course, but those places are not free-market democracies. India has had a female prime minister (albeit the daughter of Nehru, himself a prime minister), so it's not that women can't be successful here. They just have to overcome many obstacles. Moreover, of course, like most places, attitudes are slowly changing, especially in the cities. For now, though, Indian males dominate society, and Indian society is probably held back because of this.
Indian society does have some deplorable practices. Decades after Gandhi preached against it, the caste system lingers on, weakened, but not extinguished. Female feticide (aborting female babies because of a societal preference for boys) is widely practiced here, despite being illegal. This practice is common in Korea, China, and other Asian countries, also. Here's a statistic that will stun you. Indian families with two girls who decide to have a third child, produce 219 girls for every 1000 boys. Hmmm. India, China, and Korea all suffer from a gender imbalance that may lead to future social unrest as male babies become horny male teenagers and twenty-somethings and realize there are not enough women for mating and marriage.
Dowry--paying the groom's family to marry off your daughter--also flourishes despite being outlawed, with occasional violent consequences to the bride if the in-laws are not satisfied with the magnitude of their payoff. (At this point, I must interrupt my writing to relate that Deanna has just returned from the pool, complaining that she was being ogled and chatted up by so many Indian men that she could not read her book and will not return without me as her chaperone.) While we are reluctant to report anecdotal stories in the press as fact in the absence of hard statistics, domestic violence appears rampant based on the local media's reporting. Familial rape of women who have not conceived with their husband seems an everyday occurrence. And about once a year, somewhere in the country, there's a story of a widow burning herself to death on her deceased husband's funeral pyre. Typically, thousand of pilgrims then travel to the site of this self-immolation to honor the widow for her observance of this ancient custom. Widows who restrain themselves from sympathy suicide are expected never to remarry. A dreadful place, indeed.
It is possible, an economist might even say likely, that all of these practices will die off due to the current gender imbalance. Far from being viewed as a burden, women could become more highly valued in coming decades due to their relative scarcity.
Having said all this, one in six people on this planet live in India. With its economy freed--for the most part--of state control and with its excellent technology firms, India is on the ascent and cannot be ignored. India is on a path to become one of the future world leaders. By the middle of this century, the odds-on favorites list of the world's most influential countries are presently the US, China, and India. Their destiny is not ordained--events or mismanagement could derail India from this outcome. Until some alternate outcome becomes likely, however, US business and political leaders would be wise to cultivate ties to India. Thus, the US providing all of the pomp and ceremony of a full state visit for Indian Prime Minister Singh's current trip to the US is a wise move. This trip is seen as a historic meeting in India--the US should view it the same.
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