I have crash-landed in Sweden after about two weeks in India.
I must say Delhi is fantastic! It is enormous, incredibly acoustic, impossibly crowded, intolerably polluted, inconsequently equally beautiful and ugly and utterly alive. The Delhiites are at the same time charmingly friendly and funny and extremely infuriating, the way some of them try to cheat you. As you cannot hide, you are not an Indian, you always must be prepared for a scam. Although we tried to be vary careful rickshaw drivers tried to trick us a couple of times. One took us out to the outskirts of Delhi and refused to drive us back without payment, a quarrel started and in the end we went out and took another rickshaw back. Another driver tried to persuade us to go in to a “shopping centre”, which was no more than a tiny store, and by a present to his baby daughter. 10 minutes earlier he had told us he did not have baby daughter. They do like that because they get a commission of what the store earn from the tourists. Also we nearly bought tickets to Agra from a fake government tourist office, only one block away from the real one. The sells assistant was very anxious to tell us that “if someone tells you this is the wrong price do not believe them they are just trying to cheat you” which made us suspicious. In the Old Delhi slum, however, the people where much less inclined to beg or get you to by something than in the wealthy parts of Delhi, which was a nice surprise to us.
The way the Indians handle a situation is also unlike the way most Europeans would. To me it seems as if they only occasionally plan things ahead but more often solves a problem when they face it. This demands a great flexibility and ability to improvise but it also often means 3 hours in a queue only to be told today (as opposed to yesterday) you should have chosen the right queue and not the left. What I really envy the Indians is there relaxed attitude to life. It is probably partly due to their religion Hinduism, according to which this life is only one of several lives, partly due to the heat. People nap everywhere at every time. You might have to wake your buss driver up when it is time to go or step over someone sleeping on the pavement.
In Delhi the animals and the humans live together. We saw wild monkeys playing with bags and climbing walls, holy cows munching garbage with street kids playing at their side. Working Elephants, water buffalos, and camels. We saw green parrots, stripy squirrels, rats, cockroaches and eagles.
There can not possibly be a greater difference between two countries than between religious India and secular Sweden. Warm, sunlit, and dirty Delhi and cold, dark and clean (at least in comparison) Stockholm. It was +34 degrees C in Delhi and it is now – 2 degrees C in Stockholm. The worst about changing between Sweden and India in November is the darkness in Sweden. Normally you gradually get used to the increasing darkness of the Swedish winters but this winter, without a chance to get used to it gradually, I hade the impression when coming back from India I was walking in my sleep the first week after coming back.
The traffic jam in Delhi is amazing. My guess is that more than 50% of the drivers do not have a driver license and about 90% of the vehicles would almost certain have a driving ban in Sweden. In Delhi you drive by honking. Most of the cars have signs on their back saying: “Horn please” and the loudest horn wins! The next time we go there I am going to carry a bicycle horn with me, maybe I then will be able to walk cross the streets. We went with a rickshaw driver going in the wrong direction in a huge roundabout in the middle of Delhi “it is quicker this way” he commented. We also went with uncountable drivers driving against red-light, however when they occasionally stopped for red-light huge black letters painted on the lights told you to RELAX. Luckily due to the incredibly amount of vehicles on the streets; rickshaws, cars, busses, trucks, cows, bicycle rickshaws, diplomat cars with flags on top etc it is not possible to drive fast and thus is the amount of accidents reduced.
I could go on and on about Delhi and its 60 000 000 inhabitants, the inhuman pollution that partly blocks the sun out and the incredibly beautiful women that looks like clean colourful flowers in the midst of all dirt. I could rave for hours about beautiful Taj Mahal and the countryside on the way to Agra, with teamed bears (which is illegal) and small reed huts for people to live in. And our driver that had a wife called Hemma and had been on a visit to Amsterdam. When asked about his impression of Holland he said that they had great discos and very nice cows. I could tempt you with mouth-watering descriptions of food that we ate (not hot at all only spicy) or tell you about the Bollywood movie that we saw at one of Delhis oldest cinemas. I could easily also get you to cry, as I did, for the poor street children and the homeless and disabled, begging on the streets in the midst of expensive shops guarded by gunmen. However I would like to finish with telling you about our meeting with the president of India DR. A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM, 22/10 and 25/10 2005. Webpage. We overheard a lecture given for the conference delegates by the President: “Electronic Connectivity of a Billion People” . In the lecture the president presents his model for Electronic Connectivity in India. In the model the inter-connectivity between the three sectors, the agriculture, manufacturing and services sector, of the economy is brought about by four grids, namely the Knowledge Grid, the Rural (Seven thousand PURA) Grid, the Health Grid and the Governance Grid. As essential parts in the model Dr Abdul Kalam mentions Virtual Universities where “the three phases of learning are the lectures, library and laboratories” and Village Knowledge Centres. He concludes: “Connectivity is the key to the conversion of billion people in to members of knowledge society. Connectivity for the billion people is the connectivity of the planet; it means we are connecting 600,000 villages in a single country. This experience will become the foundation for other continents. The major effort should be towards making the bandwidth free and unlimited and available on demand for a billion people. Bandwidth will determine the prosperity level of our country”. The presidents speech gave us hope for a brighter future for this fascinating country and now I have to finish and go and take my malaria medication.