Day 268 - First impressions of India

Truth time; I´m struggling. I truly am.

India scared me from the start. Nonetheless, when we made the decision to alter our itinerary (sayonara wintry, budget-busting Turkey), we jumped into the idea of spending an additional ten days in the sub-continent. After all, everyone loves India. Right?

Well, so far it seems: everyone but us.

Mumbai came first. It was so stressful I wrote a haiku. It goes a little like this:

Mumbai, old Bombay
So big, scary, smelly too.
Don't poo on my head!

Craziness, that´s what Mumbai is. Traffic! Noise! Pollution! Scud taxis! Like You Have Never Seen Before. A seething human soup, bubbling away like botulism. It´s like it was designed by a kid with ADHD, a pack crayons and a serious grudge against little cartoon houses with picket fences. The curry was good though, obviously.

We went shopping. It only made matters worse. Two days later the missus and I agreed. It was time to get away. We´d been told to head up north by train. We packed up, bid goodbye to our room/cell and did as suggested.

You know how crowded it can get at rush hour in Wynyard? You know how you can sometimes have to line-up for as long as ten minutes to get a ticket? Well, buying train tickets in Mumbai makes rush hour in Wynyard look like a bloke in a field swinging a cat. 100 different windows. More options than a BMW brochure. No queuing system in sight. This is what the phrase ¨organised chaos¨ was invented for.

Onto the train we boarded. 16 hours north to Delhi. And, in all fairness, a rather enjoyable journey it was too. If there is one thing that cannot be faulted, ´tis India Rail (no. of commuters: 1.15 billion). It really does put City Rail (population; 4 million) to shame.

How was Delhi? Well, pretty much the same, only colder and even more full-on. Even more poverty everywhere. More scams than the http://www.snopes.com/ database (for non-internet geeks, the metaphor; ¨an episode of Only Fools and Horses¨ may work better). Seemingly little, if any, concept of personal space or a desire for privacy.

It was not going well. I spent my days deliberately ignoring people as they chased me along streets trying to sell me goods and services I neither needed nor wanted, dodging rogue traffic, being stared at and generally wishing people would stop treating me like a stupid, walking wallet. Then, everything got even worse.

We booked tickets to travel to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. We got up at 5:30am to get to the station. The train got canceled due to fog. We went to another station to get a later train, only to be told all trains were full for two days. We changed our plans and decided to head for Jaipur. We bought our ticket then went downtown to kill time. We bought a sim card for my mobile. We discovered the ticket guy had booked us the wrong day. We made our way back through the seething masses, peddlers, beggars and scam artists to the train station, where I then discovered the sim and credit for my phone had not been activated as promised.

To recap, at this point we were stuck in a seething mass of a city, with no place to sleep, a phone that wasn´t working, a ticket for a train leaving next day, an empty belly, no beer in sight and a rapidly declining sense of patience.

But then, something odd started to happen. The ticket guy managed to squeeze us onto the right train. A guy selling scarves in the bazaar didn´t try and rip us off, but instead proceeded to sort out my phone problems. We even managed to make the train just before it pulled out of the station, even when we thought we´d missed it. Outside the window, the sun began to show through the perpetual fog that had masked the city for two days.

I still don´t get it. All around me I see poverty, struggle, filth and the crumbling heritage of an enduring culture. I see chaos and, like surely so many before me, find myself asking how such chaos can function. ¨It has been this way for thousands of years¨, comes back the rather vaccuous response, ¨it just works¨

Yes, I understand that. I understand that India´s social system has endured for far longer than my own. However, it still doesn´t work for me as an explanation. Is the fact that it has been this way for that so long and produced this, justification for it ¨working¨?

I write this now en route to Jaipur. Rachel is sitting opposite me, mouth akimbo as she sleeps and the Indian countryside drifts gently past. We both need to get away from the madness of Indian cities. People, people everywhere, simply no space to think.

Maybe in a weeks´ time, away from the cities and into the towns, I´ll be able to write and tell you how I finally get it. How it all just clicked and I saw India for the amazingly spiritual country it really is. How I´m coming around to being a more rounded, patient and deeply grounded person who really understands what life is all about (man).

Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps I will still look out of the window and see a developing country whose economic miracle seems built upon the exploitation of people by morally-culpable corporations using low wages to achieve 15% year on year-on-year profit. Meanwhile, children eat from garbage bins metres from where the same corporates´ call centres answer our calls and wish us a good day.

I don´t know which it will be. But, hey, I guess that´s why I´m here. Right?

All the photos from picturesque Mumbai and Delhi.